The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  “Finwell Hyndman,” the judge boomed. “You are charged with the practice of witchcraft upon the Council of Lòn Haven in the Year of Our Lord, 1662. What is your confession?”

  The crowd fell silent as the confession was to be heard. Finwell struggled to speak, but couldn’t, and so the judge called out again.

  “I have before me written evidence of your confession, which I shall present to this court. You will assign your agreement or disagreement by nodding or shaking your head. ‘I, Finwell Hyndman, confess to renouncing baptism in servitude of the Devil, and acting alongside my coven to bring about the sickness and subsequent death of Duncan McGregor.’ ”

  The crowd erupted into chatter and whispers. I saw Amy lift her head and stare at her mother, who kept her face bowed to the floor. What coven? I thought. Why isn’t she refuting this charge? Why isn’t she shaking her head?

  The judge stared at Finwell. “Speak yay or nay to these charges, woman.”

  My heart was pounding in my chest as I watched Finwell for her response. Finally, with a whimper, I saw her nod. The crowd burst into jeers.

  I felt Amy sway beside me. The sight of her mother being led away, charged with terrible crimes, had made her legs weak. It was the sight of her sister, Jenny, being brought to the court floor, that made her sharpen her focus again.

  Jenny looked stronger than her mother, though she wept openly and her head was shorn like Finwell’s had been. Elspeth Mair, a widow who Jenny had often assisted at the market, brought forth her evidence, sweeping to the stand and proclaiming to a rapt audience that she had seen Jenny speaking with the fae at Mither Stane. The fairy hill, she believed, was where the coven gathered to plot their foul doings. She had chided Jenny for this, she said, and as a result one of her cows died.

  The judge told Jenny to nod or shake or head if she agreed or disagreed with her charges. She nodded.

  “I have here your confession,” the judge said, “which I will read before the court. ‘I, Jenny Hyndman, confess to performing acts of perversion with the Devil in the forest, whereupon he did turn me into a cat, instructing me to roam upon the rooftops of those I wanted to curse.’ ” He lowered the scroll and stared at her. “Nod or shake your head.”

  The crowd gasped as Jenny nodded.

  Amy and I shared a glance. We knew this wasn’t true. Why, then, was Jenny confessing to such acts? She knew the penalty for witchcraft was death—why would she lie?

  But she wasn’t the only one to confess—every woman and girl, the youngest only two years older than Amy, claimed to have made a pact with the Devil. The confessions turned my stomach and hurt my head. I didn’t believe that any of them did these terrible things, especially not Finwell and Jenny, and yet each of them confessed readily.

  Finally, my mother was called to the court.

  She was painfully thin, the bones of her neck and cheeks visible from a distance. Her hair was shorn. She wore chains around her ankles and seemed to have trouble standing, so they brought a chair.

  I looked up at the judges, seated on the balcony above. They were chatting and pouring water into their cups, laughing about something. Someone in the crowd threw something at my mother. It hit her head and drew blood. I moved to strike the person who did it, but Amy grabbed my arm.

  “No,” she hissed. “Do you want to be charged, too?”

  “Order!” the judge shouted. An elder attended my mother to offer a cloth for her wound, but she seemed too weak to hold it to her head, or to speak.

  One by one friends and neighbors told high tales of how my mother had been seen conversing with the Devil, had planned to sink ships and fail crops, had caused cattle to drop down, dead.

  “I shall read the confession,” the judge said finally. “ ‘I, Agnes Roberts, confess to leading my coven in servitude of the Devil, who appeared to me as a black wolf in the forest, insomuch as I served as his whore. I confess to cursing Duncan McGregor to his death, and to cursing the villagers of Lòn Haven by sending a plague upon the crops hereafter.’ ”

  I watched, my heart pounding, as my mother gave a nod of her head to signal she agreed with the confession, the crowd exploding into cruel jeers.

  II

  Saffy feels someone coming into her room, the door creaking open and footsteps thudding across her floor. She stirs, sees it’s dark outside, and before she can shout at the intruder to get the hell out of her room, she feels the covers shifting off her, an icy cold hand reaching beneath the bedclothes.

  She finds she can’t scream. The fear is so powerful it renders her frozen and breathless. All she can do is lie there, immobilized with horror, as someone crawls in beside her, icy limbs wrapping around her. But then she realizes who it is: it’s Clover, and she starts shouting at her out of sheer relief.

  “Clover! What the hell are you doing? You scared me half to death, you little shit!”

  “Hold me,” Clover whimpers. “I’m frightened.”

  Saffy softens, her heart still pounding in her chest. She lets Clover bury herself into the warm pit of her chest, rubbing her little arms with her palms in a bid to warm them both up.

  “You’re like an icicle. Why are you so cold?” she whispers. “What time is it?”

  Clover’s teeth are chattering and she doesn’t make sense. “The . . . Longing . . .” she says.

  “You were inside the Longing?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  But it’s the middle of the night, and a glance out of the window tells her that the waves and the wind are vicious. “Clover! You could’ve been injured. You could have fallen or . . . why did you do that? Did you sleepwalk?”

  Clover makes a noise that sounds like “no.” She’s shaking so hard that the bed is creaking, and she’s so, so cold. Saffy’s mind races with worry. Did Clover try to swim out to the basking shark? It would be just like Clover to do something like that. But she’s not a great swimmer. She’d have drowned if she tried to do that. It must have been the rain. It’s pouring out there, like usual, drumming on the bothy roof and howling against the windows. Saffy reaches for her mohair jumper on the chair by the bed and wraps it around Clover’s little body beneath the blankets, then rubs her bare arms briskly to warm her up.

  “If I tell you something,” Clover says when the shivering has died down enough for her to talk. “Do you promise to keep it a secret?”

  Saffy nods, drawn in by this sudden sharing of a secret. “I promise.”

  “I saw a wildling.”

  “A wildling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Longing.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “But I did.”

  “You were sleepwalking, Clover. And anyway, they don’t exist.”

  “But they do! That’s the thing.”

  “Describe it, then.”

  At school, a boy in Clover’s class—Thomas McKee, a know-it-all who liked to one-up her at every opportunity—had told her that wildlings lived in the lighthouse right by her house. Clover had told him that this was stupid, and that wildlings didn’t even exist, but he’d insisted, blethering on about soul-sucking fae that were going to kill her whole family. Worse, the other kids had agreed with Thomas. She needed proof to convince them that it was nonsense.

  * * *

  —

  Clover waited until her mum and Luna had fallen asleep. Then she wrapped herself up in her mum’s coat, pulled on her wellies, and found a torch from the side of the front door.

  Outside, the night was still. The ocean looked different in the dark, like a black planet that she might step onto and walk until the end of forever. The sky was thick with stars, and the rocks were like shadows.

  She pushed open the door to the Longing. It hardly budged, and she had to lean all her weight against it to get it open. Inside, it was dark and smelled toilety.
She could feel her heart fluttering in her chest like a butterfly in a jar. Quickly she turned to leave, but the heavy door had already closed behind her, jammed shut. Somewhere above her a caw sounded, and there was a shuffling noise, like someone moving across the room.

  With trembling hands, she shone her torch into the gloom and called out, “Who’s there?” Her heart was jackhammering in her throat. She whimpered, stepping up against the door, praying that Luna would wake up. Luna, please! I’m in here. Come and find me.

  The shuffling sound continued. She tried so hard to be brave, but it definitely sounded like something was dragging itself across the floor to get to her. Her torchlight fell on the stairs, and when the shuffling and dragging started again, she raced up them, terrified.

  By the time she reached the second flight her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might pass out. There was a window there with a very thick stone ledge, and she climbed inside it, tucking her knees up to her chin. Then she cried, as quietly as she could.

  She’d only been there a few minutes before she realized something very odd—all the sounds had stopped. Not just the shuffling sound on the ground floor, but the wind that had been banging at the window and the roaring of the sea. The chittering of the bats had stopped, too, and the creaking of the window frames. Everything was completely silent.

  She sat up a little, wondering what had happened. Had there been some secret signal that she’d missed? It felt like the lighthouse was holding its breath.

  But then, she heard it, a little ways below. Maybe the first turn of the stair.

  A clicking sound.

  She pulled back inside the window ledge sharply, terrified in case it really was a wildling. A horrible thought had slid into her brain—what if a wildling did live in the lighthouse, and it had smelled her? What if it came upstairs after her? There was nowhere for her to run.

  She looked up above her and saw only the lantern room. There was nowhere beyond there, nowhere at all to hide. She was trapped.

  Click-click.

  She had to face it. She had to see what was down there. Maybe it was Luna, looking for her.

  With her heart in her mouth, she raised the torch like a weapon, found the “on” button with her thumb, and pointed the beam downward.

  The light pooled on an empty floor, just her mum’s paints and equipment for the mural visible, covered up with dust sheets. Clover gave a huge, lung-squeezing sigh of relief. She’d been so scared. But as she did, she saw it. From beneath one of the sheets, a thin, gray arm reached from the shadows, a hand retrieving something from her mother’s paint supplies.

  Clover screamed at the top of her lungs. She dropped the torch with a loud clatter and raced blindly downstairs, pulling with all her might at the front door until a crack of moonlight appeared, letting her escape.

  * * *

  —

  “Do you think it could have been a badger?” Saffy asks, once Clover has finished telling her tale. “Or a fox?

  Clover hesitates. “I don’t know.”

  “But you didn’t see a creature. Or a . . . wildling. Just an arm of something?”

  Clover nods, shaking all over again at the thought of it.

  Saffy is struck by how convincing Clover’s tale is, and for a moment she glances out the window at the Longing and feels afraid. She feels a sudden rush of protectiveness toward her baby sister. Clover and Luna have such a tight bond that she’s been pushed to the margins. And it isn’t cool to be all cuddly. But now, in this unfamiliar bed, with the rain pelting the roof like frozen peas, she’s glad of Clover.

  “You can’t just run off like that,” she says, feeling Clover’s legs warm against hers.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you could have slipped and hit your head. And then what would we do?”

  “But I didn’t slip.”

  “If I went missing,” Saffy says, “would you miss me?”

  “No, because you’d already be missing.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You said ‘miss’ twice. That’s like a double negative.”

  “All right, smarty pants. Would you look for me if I went missing?”

  Clover thinks about it. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Clover shuffles closer to her oldest sister. “Because you’re so warm.”

  III

  It’s time. Saffy slides out of the bed, careful not to disturb Clover, who is fast asleep. She treads lightly on her feet, rolling through her heels to her toes as she takes the stairs, aware of how a creaky floorboard could bring her mother darting out of her room and discover her headed out into the night.

  She holds her breath the whole time. As she slips her coat across her shoulders. As she turns the doorknob, centimeter by centimeter, the spindle turning the old latch in the latch plate, springing the door free.

  And she’s out. Her breaths are quicker now, but still she forces herself to keep her movements slow, just as Brodie taught her: pull the door behind her, quiet as a cat, let the latch slip back. Her steps away from the bothy to the meeting point are as slow as she took the stairs, until she knows that the angle of her mother’s bedroom no longer permits sight of her.

  Outside, she feels a sudden elation at the wind on her face and the unloosed surf and the stars with their untrammeled light. She heads to the meeting point and sits down, letting her legs swing loose over the rocks. Gold houselights glitter on the other side of the bay. She knows which of them is Brodie’s house. In her bedroom she has turned all the shells and pieces of driftwood he’s gifted her toward his house, as though it’s a kind of mecca. She’s sure her heart even moves around her chest cavity these days like a rose seeking the sun.

  But where is he? She turns her head from side to side, taking in the velvet expanse of the ocean on her left and the rocks and beach on her right. Ahead, surf furls into the bay. Something there catches her eye, and she wonders if it’s the basking shark, Basil, with his weird two fins. Something bobbing in the water. Seals, probably. Except it’s the wrong color. It’s pale.

  She squints at the object. It’s about thirty feet away, moving on the waves. A cloud shifts from the moon and for a moment the light finds the object. It’s a face. A human face, its mouth open in a howl, someone in the water and oh God she opens her mouth to scream but suddenly there are arms around her and a warm mouth on her cheek and she turns to find Brodie there, and when she turns back to the person in the water they’re gone.

  “Miss me?” he says, careful to keep his voice low.

  She finds she can’t speak, she’s breathless and dizzy with confusion. She points wildly in the direction of the head she saw just a moment before, she saw it, someone was in the water, she saw their face and their hair, it was a man, but Brodie isn’t paying attention and within a moment he’s pulling her across the rocks to the beach.

  IV

  They sit holding hands in a cave that’s situated farther along the bay. Like an optical illusion, it’s hard to see on account of the striations of rock. The first time Brodie showed her the cave she thought he’d vanished.

  “Perfect smoking spot,” he says, lighting a cigarette. She lights hers, and they watch the tide push forward and drag back just a few feet away. She loves how safe she feels with him. Just minutes ago she was terrified, wrung out with fear. And now he is here, and she is shielded from all the monsters in the world, emboldened by his desire for her.

  He’s a couple of years older than her and has the body of a footballer, she thinks. The body of a man. He’s over six foot tall, has dark black hairs on his belly, and has to shave his face every day. She loves his voice, his hands, the planes of his face, the back of his neck. His smell.

  They sit on a ledge in the rock, smoking and kissing. She tells him about the human head she saw bobbing in the waves and he laughs so hard that she laughs, too,
and suddenly the whole thing is hilarious. The fear leaves her, and they talk about music (Marilyn Manson, Massive Attack, and Rage Against the Machine are mutual favorites), films (both liked Reservoir Dogs and Reality Bites), and their families.

  “My mum’s last boyfriend was a pig,” she says. “But she’s left him now and is flirting with this new guy. Finn.”

  “He’s a good guy, Finn.”

  She frowns. “Really? My mum always goes for assholes, so I figured he was part of the club.”

  “He’s got this rewilding project going on, it’s pretty major.”

  “Rewilding? Is that something to do with those evil fairies that people apparently tied to the sycamore trees and cut their hearts out?”

  She says it in a dry tone, and he grins. “He’s restoring the old forests that used to grow on these islands.”

  “What do you mean, ‘restore old forests’? A forest can hardly disappear, can it?”

  “Anyway, we were talking about something else.”

  “Assholes?”

  “Ah, yes. Parents. Mine argue all the time. Think they’ll split soon.”

  “Who would you live with?” she asks. She’s guessing he’ll say his mum. She’s met her. Overweight, always tired.

  “Dad,” he says without hesitation.

  “Really?”

  He nods, stares into the darkness. She senses emotion gripping him.

  “What about you?” he says. “How come you chose to live with your mum?”

  “Oh,” she says, not realizing he isn’t aware of this whole chapter of her life. “My dad’s dead.”

  “Sorry.”

  She tells him about Sean, how nobody seemed to recognize that his death might affect her, like, at all, because he wasn’t her biological father. “But he was my dad,” she says, her throat burning with anger and tears pricking her eyes. “I called him Dad. He was going to adopt me. But nobody gets it. They were all so terribly sorry for Mum, Clover, and Luna. But not me.”

  He shifts closer to her until his hip is touching hers, wraps his arm around her.