The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  We took old tin trays that I’d found in a cupboard at the bothy and went sledding down the grassy slopes of Braemeith, the tall hill in the middle of the island, until we got told off—Braemeith was a fairy hill, a farmer told us crossly, and it was bad luck for any human to step on it. The girls thought this was fascinating.

  And at the Neolithic museum we learned that the Longing was built on an old broch, a fortified dry-stone tower dating back to 500 BCE. The guide at the museum gave the girls a leaflet each and flinched when I said we were staying in the bothy.

  “You’re staying at the Longing?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Quite a history, that place.”

  “I can see that,” I said, flicking through the leaflet, my eyes falling on an artist’s rendition of people being burned at the stake.

  “Why’s it called the Longing?” Luna asked him.

  “It’s named for the people who lost loved ones,” he said. “Sometimes they’d visit the site where the Longing was built and . . . pay their respects.”

  “That’s tragic,” I said, and he nodded, but said nothing more.

  LUNA, 2021

  I

  “Luna? Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” Ethan says as they get into the car.

  Her jaw is tight. “Just drive.”

  It’s almost eight p.m. They follow the directions on Google Maps to the B&B that Eilidh recommended, the air between them loud with a thousand unasked questions. She can’t be Clover, she thinks. She can’t. Except, a voice in her head says, she is.

  They check into the B&B, a four-story terrace with rooms that haven’t been updated since the seventies. Luna feels a sense of relief as Ethan closes the bedroom door, the four walls of the room giving her space to begin to lay out the tangled thoughts in her mind.

  Ethan sits down in the wicker chair by the window.

  “Who was that?” he says after a while.

  She is studying a picture hanging on the opposite wall, a sun-faded oil painting of a vase of lilies. “Who was what?”

  “The girl in the hospital.”

  “She’s my sister.”

  He coughs out a laugh. “I don’t understand. You said . . . I mean, she can’t be more than, what, six or seven? You said Clover was twenty-nine.”

  “There has to be a reason for how young she is,” she hears herself say. “It has to be genetic, or hormonal. Some kind of condition that prevents aging. Benjamin Button disease or something. Toddlers with wrinkles and brittle bones. Clover obviously has something similar in reverse.”

  “Luna . . .”

  “Age regression, or suspension.” She looks up. “We’ll get her checked out. We’ll find a specialist.”

  His expression is so full of pity that she glances down to see if she’s spilled coffee down her dress. It wouldn’t be the first time. But no, it’s not that. Her dress is fine.

  “I know how hard this is,” he says earnestly.

  “She looks exactly like Clover,” she says. “Sounds like her, smells like her. She even knew the name of the giraffe. That was Clover’s special toy that she’d had from birth.”

  He’s reaching out for her, nodding, as though she’s lost her mind. “I absolutely understand what you’ve been through . . .”

  “No,” she says firmly. “No, you don’t. You haven’t spent the last twenty-two years trying to figure out why your mother dumped you in a forest. You haven’t spent the last twenty-two years tormented by what happened to your baby sister when you were supposed to be looking after her.”

  “Luna . . .”

  She stands, unable to sit any longer, her hands reaching for her cheeks. Her throat is burning with that same fierce knot that settled there the day Clover went missing all those years ago. Her emotions are the only things that ring true—her memories about what happened before and after Clover disappeared are like pieces of a shattered mirror. She remembers going into foster care, and her first night spent in a stranger’s house. She has random memories of those years—a neighbor in St. Ives who used to smoke a purple pipe, a cat that had nine snow-white kittens in a cardboard box, long afternoons bouncing alone on a trampoline. She can remember a meal she had at a school friend’s house, a steaming pot of mussels. Her friend told her the mussels were mermaid’s lips, only to laugh hysterically when Luna believed her and bolted from the table in fright. And she recalls a Girl Guides’ camp where they were instructed on knot-making, and the girls started tying one another to a tree, and Luna grew so anxious while being tied up that she vomited over one of the leaders.

  The story of her past is not like other people’s, she thinks. Most people’s pasts can be viewed like cleaved water left in the wake of a boat. Hers? It’s a tangled weave of spiderwebs and nightmares, never to make sense.

  II

  From the window, Luna locates the flat square of the hospital roof amidst the cityscape. She thinks of what the doctor said before they left. About the injury on Clover’s hip. He wanted to know if it had happened before she went missing, or during.

  “What injury?” she’d asked. He’d turned to Clover. She was asleep, curled around the teddy bears donated by the nurses. Very gently, he’d lifted up Clover’s hospital gown and peeled aside a white dressing on her hip to reveal a small red blotch. Perhaps a rash. Measles? No. Luna was sure they’d all been vaccinated. She’d lowered herself to look at it. The mark was singular, a handful of red-raw scratches within a raised circle of skin, angry and inflamed. Like a burn.

  “Is it an insect bite?”

  “We think it’s a wound inflicted by a human.”

  She’d straightened, searching his face. “Who?”

  “Well, I was hoping you might be able to shed a bit of light on it,” the doctor had said. “Can you make out the numbers?”

  “Numbers?”

  She’d bent quickly once more to see the mark, closer this time, but Clover had moaned and squirmed to change position.

  “I can’t make it out,” she’d said. “What numbers?”

  “It’s very small, as you can see, but on closer inspection we found four digits. The numbers two zero two one.”

  Luna had leaned forward and stared hard. There they were: four numbers etched lightly into the skin in a vertical row.

  2

  0

  2

  1

  Someone had carved numbers into Clover’s skin.

  “The police are looking into it,” she tells Ethan. “Apparently it could be anything. A gang sign. A code.”

  They both fall silent. How can this have happened? And why? Ethan rises from his chair and wraps his arms around her, holding her tight.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “But . . .”

  “She is Clover,” she snaps, pulling away. “I don’t care what you think.”

  “OK.” For a while neither of them speaks. “So . . . you think she’s still a child because of what she’s been through?”

  She covers her face with her hands. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault she went missing.”

  “You can’t say that.”

  She snaps her head up, fixing him with a glare. “It. Was. My. Fault.”

  “You were ten, Luna.”

  “You weren’t there, Ethan. You don’t know . . .”

  “How were you to blame, exactly?”

  She falters. “I just know I was. I can’t remember the details.”

  But suddenly it’s there, the memory of Sapphire coming into her room and talking to her. She knows instantly this was it, this was how it happened. Where has this been, this slice of her past? Where has it been lingering?

  “I think it started with Saffy,” she says, closing her eyes. “She went missing. But on purpose.”

  He tilts his head. “What do you mean, ‘on purpose’?”

  “I think that Saffy and my mot
her had a falling-out.”

  “What about?”

  “I’m not sure. Saffy stopped speaking to her and was sulking for ages. I think . . . she came to me and asked for a favor.”

  As she speaks, a memory crystallizes in her mind, her senses relaying micro-images and smells that cohere into something that makes sense. She remembers Saffy coming into her room after school.

  “I need a favor,” she’d asked.

  Saffy hadn’t done anything to deserve a favor but Luna had been curious. For a moment, she had glimpsed what other girls with an older sister experienced: a kind of friendship instead of constant humiliation and venom. Favors earned and requested, conversation that took place with words instead of silences.

  “OK,” she’d replied finally.

  “Can I come in?” Saffy had asked, which was odd as she was already in Luna’s bedroom, and she usually never asked to come in. Luna had nodded, and Saffy had closed the door and sat down on her bed. She’d studied her nails.

  “I’m going into hiding,” she’d said flatly. “And I need you to pretend you don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you’re going into hiding?”

  Saffy had heaved an irritated sigh. “I’m running away? From home? I’m telling you because I want you to keep it a secret.” She’d lowered her eyes. “And I want you to tell me how Mum reacts. Like, if she’s upset or if she doesn’t care. She’ll probably throw a party. Balloons and everything.”

  Luna had felt a rush of relief at the thought of her sister no longer living with her. “Where will you go?”

  Saffy had turned her face to the window. “I was thinking of that hut we found in the woods. Just for a few days, you know? Maybe a month or so.”

  “What about food? Won’t you be hungry?”

  “Maybe you could bring me food?”

  Luna had wanted to say no, why should she, but she’d found herself nodding. If she didn’t bring Saffy food, she might die. So Luna had agreed.

  “I want you to write down how Mum reacts and tell me,” Saffy had said. “Write down what she says, what she does.”

  Luna had cocked her head. “Why?”

  Saffy had given her a hard stare. “Just do it.”

  “And what happened?” Ethan asks.

  “She packed some stuff into her backpack and left that night,” Luna tells him, surprised at the sudden ease with which this information surfaces in her mind. “She went to the woods.”

  She remembers going to the hut where Saffy had said she’d be. She’d been afraid of the woods, after a boy at school had told her they were haunted.

  Saffy had been sitting on the floor of the horrible, ivy-choked hut, her headphones on, smoking, and reading an old book.

  “Well?” Saffy had said when Luna entered. “Has she organized the celebration party yet?”

  “It’s only been a day,” Luna had said. “She hasn’t noticed.”

  The words were out before she could stop them. Saffy’s face had twisted.

  “Well, you can hardly blame her,” Luna had said. “You’re always off somewhere with your friends, or sulking in your room.”

  “She hates me.”

  “Once she finds out, she’ll go mental. You know she will.”

  “No, Luna. She won’t.”

  Luna had wanted to throttle her sister then, not least because of how terrified she was going to make their mum but also because it was Luna’s birthday soon, and she could see now that the timing was deliberate. She’d thought Saffy was starting to become a proper big sister, at long last. But she’d been hoodwinked. This was all a scheme to ruin her birthday and freak out their mum in one fell swoop.

  “I hope she gets fucking arrested,” Saffy had said, taking a long drag from her cigarette. “Maybe the police will think she’s murdered me. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “You have to come home,” Luna had said. She’d wanted to stamp her foot or kick her stupid sister for being so bloody selfish. “If you don’t come home I’m going to tell everyone that you’re here, and Mum will ground you forever.”

  Saffy had rolled her cigarette on the stones, then looked up at Luna, thoughtfully.

  “You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone. You know you can’t go back on a promise.”

  “I can. You tricked me! I made a promise because I thought you were being nice, and you’re not. You’re just doing this so you can spoil my birthday!”

  “And then what happened?” Ethan asks.

  Luna presses a hand to her forehead. “I think . . . I stormed out. I was going to go straight home and tell Mum where she was. But I didn’t. Even though Mum was freaking out, I kept quiet. I don’t know why.” She begins to cry. Why didn’t she say something? Why didn’t she tell someone?

  “The next morning I took a loaf of bread and some milk to Saffy in the hut. But she was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  She nods, wiping away tears. “The hut was empty. No note, no clothing. No sign of a fight. And we never saw her again. That’s all I remember.”

  He takes this in. “You were just a kid, Luna . . .”

  He says it gently, but he doesn’t get it. How could he? She hasn’t kept anything from him that she hasn’t been keeping from herself. He doesn’t get that truth and memory can be too complex, too tentacled, to boil down to a linear narrative. That sometimes, silence is a form of survival.

  “I can only recall little fragments, like dreams. And it’s all scrambled. None of it makes sense.”

  “OK. But talking through it . . . maybe something will come back to you.”

  She feels flustered, irritated. She folds her arms and pinches the skin on her forearms as she recounts the facts. She and her mother and two sisters had only been on Lòn Haven a month or so when everything turned to shit.

  “What happened before you stayed at the lighthouse?” Ethan prompts.

  Before?

  Before Lòn Haven, she was just a normal nine-year-old going to school every day, living with her mum and two sisters on a houseboat in Bristol. Well, almost a normal nine-year-old. Her and Clover’s dad died when she was four. She barely remembers anything about him. She remembers moving around a lot. Their mother worked as an artist, and sometimes as a cleaner, and often she’d rise before dawn to work at a corner shop—anything that would pay the bills. She remembers her mum’s dungarees covered in dried paint, and she remembers canvases stacked against the walls of the house, and the ducks that would sit on the windowsill, looking for scraps.

  III

  They have dinner in a family-run diner in the center of the town. She tries again to phone Grace to tell her about Clover, but finds she can’t bring herself to make the call. Grace is the only foster mother she’s stayed in touch with, more an aunt to her now than a mother. What if Grace doesn’t believe her? What if, like Ethan, Grace tries to tell her that the girl can’t possibly be Clover? What if she is forced into conflict with the other person she loves, if the discovery of her baby sister becomes a wedge in her most important relationships?

  Back at the B&B, Ethan strips to his boxer shorts and falls asleep on top of the bedclothes, snoring loudly. She lies beside him, still reeling from the events of the day. The shells, the scan, then the phone call . . . She tries to force memories to the surface of her mind, picturing them as stones on the bottom of a lake that she has to push upward.

  But it doesn’t work like that. Memories, like stones, have their own gravity.

  She thinks instead of St. Ives, of her years there with Grace. She should be grateful for that life, and she is, but it should be enough, she thinks. She attended an excellent high school, developed a strong network of good friends. Yes, she fell into drugs. Yes, she had an almost insurmountable compulsion to steal, a compulsion that still nags at her. Even now, she’s eyeing that painting of the lilies on the wall and wondering if i
t would fit in her bag. She shakes it off. The painting is gross, and she knows all too well the sinking shame that follows the thrill of slipping away undetected. Grace never gave up on her, no matter how many times Luna stole money from her. She was a devoted foster mother—dedicated, patient, capable of showering her with unlimited attention. Her other life was the one before that, with her birth mother, Liv, and her sisters, Saffy and Clover, a life that ended abruptly with her being dumped in a forest by her mother. Why?

  The “why” of her abandonment has all but pulled her apart over the years. She remembers vividly waiting for her mother, believing wholeheartedly that she’d come back for her. Weeks passed, months. She’d run up to strangers in the street, in the mall, shouting out “Mum! Mum!” Christmases spent in foster homes. She’d sit by the living room window, watching the cars pass. She always believed her mother would come back.

  But she didn’t.

  LIV, 1998

  I

  The day the girls started at school, the equipment and paint for the mural arrived. I’d planned to start setting up as soon as it came, but I had been feeling ill all day, laid up on the sofa with a hot-water bottle on my stomach. By evening I felt better, and when the girls went to bed I headed out to check out the delivery.

  It was a wild, windy night, autumn descending on the island in a fury with all her gales and rain. I hurried quickly across the wet rocks, pulling the heavy door of the Longing open and shutting it tightly behind me.

  The black sludge on the floor was gone, drained away to a film of slime. I made sure the piece of wood was put back carefully across the grille on the hole in the floor. Then I pulled back the tarp that was covering the cherry picker and the rest of the equipment. It looked good. Enough paint to cover several lighthouses, and in the exact colors I’d requested. Brand-new paintbrushes, a wallpaper table, work lamps, and extenders for the hard-to-reach parts. Protective clothing, a harness, goggles. It was top-notch equipment, and I felt relieved.