The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  “Are you OK back there?” Luna asks, feeling awkward. Silence.

  “How about we get some ice cream? Yeah?”

  A glance at Clover’s reflection in the rearview mirror shows her face turned to the window, glancing back as though she’s trying to find her way back to the hospital. Her jaw is tight and her eyes are hard.

  Luna always knew it would take time to build the relationship she had with her sisters, if she ever found them. Actually, this had only been a passing thought—what she believed was somehow they’d click right back into place, as sisters did, and the sudden shift in gears throws her. She draws upon her professional training. Clover’s a traumatized child, after all. Her trauma has frozen her in time. She has to speak to her just as she’d speak to any of the kids she works with.

  “Clover, I know this is difficult. It’s very hard for you, being with a stranger like this.”

  She speaks slowly and gently, watching Clover’s reaction. Nothing. She must be patient.

  “I know you’re scared. But I can promise you, you’re safe now. From this moment on, you’re safe. We’re together again.”

  Clover’s face reveals nothing, no hint of having heard or considered anything. Luna bites her lip. So much harder when the traumatized child is a blood relative. Entirely different applying her training to this situation, with so much skin in the game. It’s only been ten minutes and already she feels completely out of her depth.

  She watches the profile of Clover’s face, the curve of her jaw, her small ears at a slight tilt from her head. Yes, there is something different about her. There’s the glaring fact that she’s about twenty years younger than she should be. But also something else.

  Something that’s harder to place.

  IV

  The Airbnb is a small cottage in Drumnadrochit, a village on the shores of Loch Ness. As they pull up outside heavy rain starts to swallow up the horizon, smudging the outline of hills to obscurity.

  The two-story cottage is cramped and glum, the walls busy with dusty mounted plates. There’s a well-used sofa, a frayed rug, an ancient woodburner, and a TV. It’ll do. “We’re just staying here for a while, until the storm passes,” Luna tells Clover as they look over the room. Silence follows. It strikes her that she’s forgotten how to entertain a child. Despite wanting one for as long as she can remember, she has never babysat. She was only two when Clover was born. None of her friends have had children yet. She works with children, but usually they’re in their teens. The presence of this little girl—my sister, she reminds herself—is daunting.

  “Shall I put the TV on?” she says.

  Clover seems nervous, backing into the corner of the room. Luna throws her a wide smile, which only serves to make her stiffen like a frightened animal. She hugs Gianni protectively to her chest. The silence in the cottage is heavy, and Luna mentally kicks herself for not finding a park or play area to visit before returning to such an enclosed and foreign space as this. She moves to the small kitchen and finds two glasses, which she fills with water. When she turns to give one to Clover, the room is already empty. The sound of feet upstairs tells Luna that Clover’s exploring the space.

  Give her time, Luna thinks. This is completely strange for both of us.

  A moment later, she hears Clover’s voice. “Not like that, Gianni. Like this.”

  She sighs with relief. Playing is a good sign. It’s an excellent sign. She finds fresh eggs and homemade bread in the welcome package, which she cooks and eats with a pot of tea at the old dining table with barley-twist legs.

  With Clover occupied, Luna turns to Google for information about aging disorders. She learns about Werner syndrome, which causes accelerated aging. She reads about chromosomes, amino acid proteins, DNA stability and exonuclease domains, hard-to-pronounce phrases that mean nothing to her but seem to mean everything to those children whose bodies hurtle into old age.

  She finds little about regressive aging. Information on cognitive and mental regression is abundant, and there are some news articles about gene experiments to reverse aging.

  Perhaps Clover has been used as a lab rat, she thinks. Her mind turns to the digits carved into Clover’s hip. They had to have been made by a human. Those were the doctor’s chilling words, confirmation that Clover has experienced some kind of branding. She types “numbers carved in skin” into the search bar. Google brings up fifty thousand pages on cults, devil worship, human trafficking—and gene experimentation.

  Her stomach roils. The reasons for the numbers on Clover’s hip are too terrifying to think about.

  The storm has reached Drumnadrochit. It drums the roof of the cottage and taps at the windows, and every so often distant thunder groans above the clapping of the rain. The sky blackens. There is wood for the fire; she stacks it as high as she can, then gives in to the urge to curl up on the sofa and pull a blanket around her. Upstairs, she hears Clover’s voice, still talking to Gianni. She’s laughing, but it sounds odd. Hysterical, cackling laughter. It doesn’t sound like the Clover she remembers.

  She catches the contradiction of her thoughts: she doubts that this is Clover. It’s a small doubt, but it’s there, a ball bouncing around the surfaces of her mind. There is one explanation, but it makes no more sense than her theory of age regression. The word has been cartwheeling across the floor of her mind since she laid eyes on Clover, brightening when she saw the mark on Clover’s hip.

  Wildling.

  She pushes the thought away. She came across the word when she looked into the coverage from the time she lived on Lòn Haven. On her phone, she brings up the digitized article from The Black Isle Bugle.

  14 November 1998

  The small population of Lòn Haven has been plunged—yet again—into shock and terror over the recent disappearances of four females. Although not members of the local community—the Stay family was lodging temporarily on the island—the mystery surrounding the disappearances holds the residents in terror, with some claiming that the Wildling myth has come to pass.

  “We’ve witnessed a lot of tragedy on Lòn Haven,” the resident—who wished to remain unnamed—said. “For such a small population we’ve had our fair share of folk going missing. Previous generations put these down to wildlings. I’m inclined to say that’s what happened here.”

  The family, consisting of Olivia Stay (36), and her three daughters Sapphire (15), Luna (10), and Clover (7), only arrived on the island in September. And now it appears that three of the four females have vanished. It is understood that a widespread search has yielded few clues.

  Anyone with any information should contact Chief Inspector Bram Kissick at Inverness Police Station.

  Fuck, she thinks. The mention of her own name there pulls a gamut of emotions to the surface, and she suddenly feels nauseous. What if Eilidh or Shannon starts digging around the internet and comes across this? She looks at her phone, suddenly nervous that it might ring. That they might have her arrested for lying.

  She slides into a deep sleep brimming with dreams soaked in memories. She dreams that she is standing on the edge of a dark hole that falls down, down to the core of the earth, its fiery heart. On the other side of the hole, there’s another woman. It’s her. She watches herself climb down into the hole.

  “Don’t,” she says, but the other version of herself goes ahead anyway, heedless, sinking into the dark.

  V

  She wakes when the storm is at its peak, the gutters gurgling and rain streaming down the windows.

  The lamp has gone off, and when she tries the switch, it doesn’t work—the storm has knocked off the electricity. Using the torch on her phone, she moves to the sink to get another glass of water, and as she drinks from it, a splash of water hits her head. She glances up; there’s a small skylight overhead. It must be leaking. The water drips again. It doesn’t seem to be coming from the skylight.

 
Luna sets down the glass and heads upstairs to check on Clover. The bedclothes in the smaller bedroom are ruffled, and she sees a foot hanging off the end of the bed. Clover must be fast asleep. She heads into the other bedroom.

  Her torchlight falls on a shape on the bed. It’s Gianni, Clover’s fluffy toy. Only, his head has been cut off and set neatly beside his body. As she moves the torch across the body, she sees his belly has been slit, all the stuffing pulled out and thrown across the room.

  A creak from the doorway makes her start. She turns her torch toward the sound—the light falls on Clover, who stands there silently, arms by her sides.

  “Did you do this?” Luna says. She’s trying to stay calm, but her emotions are getting the better of her. She picks up Gianni to show Clover, more stuffing spilling out to the floor. All these years she’s kept him like treasure, the one link back to her sister, and she can’t help but gasp at the damage. Why would Clover do this?

  Clover merely stares at her, her face completely blank. It’s then that Luna hears it: she’d thought the rushing sound was rain, but it’s louder up here. It sounds like it’s inside the house.

  “What is that?” she says.

  A second passes before she locates the whereabouts of the sound, then races to the bathroom and pulls open the door. Both taps have been turned on in the bathtub, and it’s brimming with water. It slops over the side, pouring onto the floor. She’s standing in about an inch of water that now seeps out into the hallway and down the stairs.

  There’s a moment where she can barely think of what to do. Without the lights on, the scene is revealed only in the small pools of light afforded by her phone. She has to set it on the windowsill and fumble for the taps. Finally, they’re off, but the floor feels soggy underfoot—it isn’t tiled. Just cheap lino rolled unevenly over ancient floorboards that are now giving way under the weight of water, pouring into the kitchen.

  VI

  Luna hates the rain, and this fucking cottage, and it’s dark and why the fuck did she send Ethan home again?

  Enough self-pity—right now she needs to find buckets to catch the water that’s gushing into the kitchen. She finds a couple of pots—barely big enough to boil an egg—and positions them under the drips before turning back to the cupboard with her phone light and rummaging for something else to catch the water with. The water damage is going to cost her a kidney, she knows it. But she has no money.

  There is one small mercy, however—Clover has curled up on the sofa, right on the spot warmed by Luna, and fallen asleep.

  It’s a good thing, too, Luna thinks. Otherwise she’d be tempted to throttle her.

  Of course, this is bravado. Deep in her belly is a knot of confusion, which the baby must sense because he kicks and squirms wildly now. It doesn’t help that she’s in a strange house in the pitch black of night with a child who is meant to be a grown woman, a grown woman with whom she otherwise should have been having a weepy reunion over pizza and mocktails. It doesn’t help that she seems to have forgotten all her training in the face of this emotional and deeply strange situation.

  Finally, the flooding is stanched. The bathtub gurgles loudly upstairs, and once the water level has dropped, she uses a large beer glass to scoop up the remaining puddle from the floor, to pour it back into the tub and into the sink. Downstairs, the pots are full—she pours out the contents and returns them to their places on the floor to catch the remaining drips from the bathroom above.

  It is after midnight by the time she’s able to sit down. Her back aches and she’s ravenous. Her phone is almost dead, too, the battery having been drained by the torchlight. She considers using the last of her battery to phone Ethan, but it’s too late—and also, she has no idea how to explain what has just happened. Hey, so Clover dissected Gianni and tried to drown us both. How are you?

  She spots two candles on the mantelpiece and a box of matches. She moves slowly to light them—the thought of spending the night in total darkness with Clover is a little unnerving—and as she strikes the match against the side of the box, Clover rolls over. The light of the match falls on the dressing that covers the mark on her hip.

  Luna studies it carefully, a thousand questions rolling through her mind. She wants to reach out and peel back the dressing for a closer look, to check if it is numbers there, or perhaps just a wound that resembled numbers. But no—she remembers seeing it through the lens of the magnifying glass. The odd vertical positioning of the digits. Someone did that to her sister.

  There has to be a reason for it.

  As she stares down at the dressing, a flash of something brightens vividly in her memory. A knife. Blood flying through the air like a dark ribbon.

  Instinctively, her right hand reaches for the white line on her left forearm. She has no idea how she got this scar. But now the thought of Clover’s wound summons a memory. A girl, about ten years old, standing in front of her. A worried look on her face.

  She held out a hand.

  We have to take hands, she said.

  It only works if we hold hands.

  SAPPHIRE, 1998

  I

  Saffy is fully dressed beneath the bedclothes. Every thirty seconds she glances at her wristwatch, sighing with frustration. Why did Brodie want to meet so late? She knows why—he’s waiting until his parents are asleep so nobody asks any questions. But still. If the wait doesn’t kill her, the apprehension will.

  In the meantime, she reads. When Liv told them all to pack their gear and leave York in the middle of the night, she’d been so out of it that she’d not packed a single one of her many books. She hates that she didn’t bring any. Drew, her mum’s vile boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend, she figures—will probably chuck them all out. She was an avid reader. The small selection of books in the bothy aren’t exactly thrilling, some from the 1970s on shipping routes and seabirds, but she is intrigued by the strange handwritten book bearing the name of her mum’s commissioner, Patrick Roberts. His grimoire.

  The GRIMOIRE of Patrick Roberts

  I will never know how many women Duncan accused, and how many were accused by his wife and sons. Following this accusation, the Laird of Lòn Haven had applied to the Privy Council for a Royal Inquiry into the practice of witchcraft on the island. About twenty of the accused didn’t get charged—folk said they’d bribed their way out of it—and in the end, twelve women and girls from the village were taken from their homes and thrown in the hole beneath the broch, where they were imprisoned until the trial. Among the women were my mother, as well as Jenny, Amy’s older sister, and her mother, Finwell.

  Amy stopped speaking. I believe she stopped eating, too, because she quickly grew so thin that her green eyes seemed to bulge out of her head and her knee bones looked like they were going to explode out of her skin.

  My father was still gone, and I had to look after my little brother. My uncle lived nearby but didn’t help, and I could understand why—folk were already distancing themselves from me and my brother due to our being the children of a witch. It didn’t matter that the trial hadn’t taken place. Women couldn’t present evidence against their accusers, so to be accused was as good as being guilty.

  Still, I held fast to the thought that the judges would find my mother, as well as Jenny and Finwell, innocent. It was wrong, so very wrong—I knew Duncan deserved what he’d got, and he was still gravely ill, but he had violated my mother. The only person who belonged at the bottom of the broch was Duncan.

  And none of us, not the gifted healers nor Amy, with her stones and powers of bringing fish back to life, could do anything about it.

  But then Duncan died, and the whole of Lòn Haven was set alight with terror and intrigue. He was buried the day before the trial. It had been two months since my mother and the other women and girls were taken into the broch by the sea.

  The trial was held in the kirk. Amy and I were present, covered as best we could
with shawls so as not to draw attention from the villagers.

  Each woman and girl was presented in turn, silent and weak, as the charges against her was read before the crowd, as well as her confessions.

  “Finwell Hyndman,” the judge called out. Amy stiffened and gasped as she watched her mother brought out to the court. Finwell was strong and stout, with thick black hair like Amy’s, but she had changed so much that at first I was sure they’d brought the wrong woman. The figure before us was thin, her hair shorn and her clothes replaced with rags. She was barefoot and her face bore black marks that were either dirt or bruises.

  Duncan’s oldest son, Calan, took the stand to state the way Duncan had died. Calan was a tall, loud-voiced man with a flair for drama, which he used to regale the court with a long, drawn-out depiction of the way his father died. He said that Duncan’s death was painful and horrifying in its physical elements, which I already knew, but new to the tale were visitations from the spirits of his tormentors. He said that Finwell and the eleven others had all swept into the room on regular occasions, invisible to everyone but Duncan, who begged them to remove the curse. Kit said a black cat had appeared in the rafters of the roof and watched while Duncan writhed in pain.

  Others were called forward to give evidence against Finwell.

  Margaret McNicol, a wet nurse who had lost all four of her children in childbirth, said that she had often spied Finwell venturing out late at night, headed for Mither Stane on top of the fairy hill. We all knew Mither Stane, an ancient stone, brought good or bad luck, depending when you visited it, but Margaret charged Finwell with going there to converse with the fae.