The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  “You were yelling,” she says. “About someone trying to kill you.”

  Luna rises, takes Clover back to her bed. She sits beside her until she falls asleep, running a finger across the small white scar on her own arm.

  The scar caused by the blade.

  She shivers, her stomach dropping. Liv did this.

  Liv tried to kill her.

  SAPPHIRE, 1998

  I

  “What are you reading?”

  Saffy jumps at the sound of Luna’s voice. She looks up angrily and sees her younger sister standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

  “What do you want?” she says, turning the page in her book.

  “Nothing,” Luna says, shrugging, but it’s obvious she wants something. Saffy sets down her book and signals reluctantly for Luna to come in.

  “I can’t sleep,” Luna explains. “What are you reading?”

  “What does it fucking look like I’m reading?”

  Luna shrugs. “A book?”

  “Whoop de bloody doo.”

  “It looks like a very old book.”

  Saffy sighs. Why does her younger sister have to be such a moron?

  “Look, just sit on the floor and shut up.”

  Luna obeys. Their mum is busy in the Longing and she hates going in there.

  “What’s the book about?”

  “Witches.”

  “Like The Worst Witch?”

  Saffy sneers. “It’s not a stupid kids’ book. This is a history book about all the witches that they burned on Lòn Haven.”

  Luna looks up at her as though she’s not sure whether Saffy’s pulling her leg or not. “Why did they burn witches?”

  Saffy shrugs. “Lots of reasons. Misogyny. King James VI’s massive ego. Probably overcompensating for something. Also, religion—King Jamie wanted everyone to conform to his belief system and there were still a lot of pagans knocking around. They still kill people for practicing witchcraft in some countries. Did you know that?”

  “There are witches still?” Luna says, wide-eyed.

  “They aren’t witches, silly.” She holds her younger sister in a long stare. “Or at least, not all of them. Do you know what a grimoire is?”

  Luna shakes her head.

  “It’s a book of spells. Look.”

  She shows Luna, who looks puzzled.

  “What’s this one?” she says, pointing at a set of triangles. “It looks like the one Mummy painted in the Longing.”

  “It is,” Saffy says. “ ‘Rune to call a loved one home from afar.’ But it only works if you cast the spell.”

  “What’s the spell?”

  “Living bones,” it says. “Look.” She points at the archaic handwriting.

  “Bones that live?” Luna says, screwing up her face.

  “No, you dimwit. Bones taken from a living creature. As in, one that’s still alive.”

  “Gross.”

  “You’re gross.”

  “Is there a spell for Mummy?”

  Saffy gives her a puzzled look.

  “What, to make her disappear?”

  “To give her money and make her happy.”

  “Money wouldn’t make Mummy happy,” Saffy says sourly. “Getting rid of me would, though.”

  “Money would make her happy. And getting Daddy back.”

  “There are spells here to bring people back. But they won’t work on Daddy.”

  “Why not?”

  She lifts her eyes to Luna’s and looks gut-punched. “Because he’s dead.”

  II

  Saffy takes one last look behind her before tugging the door of the Longing and stepping inside.

  It is freezing cold, and already she’s starting to regret this. Why is she doing this again?

  It’s about one in the morning. She can hear the sea exhaling against the rocks, and she’s pretty sure there’s a seal or a dolphin or something at the bottom of the cliffs, a low, guttural sound marking its presence within the tapestry of this wild place. She fingers the skeleton key that she’s tied around her neck with a leather shoelace, sitting low between her breasts so that her mother doesn’t spot it. It’s cold against her skin and she wants to take it off.

  But first, she thinks. But first.

  She has it planned. She borrowed her school friend Machara’s makeup and has spent a long time putting it on, coating her eyelashes with mascara, drawing in her pale brows, shading her eyes in dark brown and copper. Inside the Longing the darkness is thick as soup, but she clocked her mum’s work lamps the other days and figured the lighting would be perfect. The lamps come with a remote control that lets you dim the light, which is perfect as she doesn’t want anything too bright. She’d draw attention to herself if the light is too bright.

  For one, she’s naked beneath her coat, and she can well imagine her mum’s face if she barged into the place and found her oldest child lolling against the staircase of the Longing in her birthday suit. Saffy hates her body. She thinks she’s too tall, her hips too big, and she hates that her left boob is slightly bigger than the right. She hates her arms, and her ankles, and her feet, and her knees. Her bum is long and square, not pert and round, as it should be. That said, she’s well aware that her body seems to exert a particular effect on men. And if Brodie wants sexy photos, he’ll get them.

  She closes the door behind her and looks fearfully around. It smells of paint and dead fish, and a quick flick of her torch shows where her mum has already started the mural. The plasterwork helps it look a little less like a ruin and more like a work in progress. She finds the round light, plugs it in, dims it down low, then searches for her mum’s Polaroid camera. There it is, on top of the wallpaper table.

  She removes her coat and wellies. She wears only the old heavy skeleton key that she found in the bothy, tied around her neck with a shoelace. It looks like something you’d find on a pirate ship, which she thinks is appropriate for the tone of the pics.

  She sets the camera timer and poses, rolling her shoulders back, looking over her shoulder, pouting her red lips, opening her mouth and showing her tongue. She unties her hair and lets it hang long and loose, trying much more overt pictures in case the ones she’s taken are too tame for someone like Brodie. She opens her legs wider, lets her hands roam across her skin.

  She tugs on her coat and looks over the prints that are coming into view on the small white squares. The prints are startling—she doesn’t look like herself.

  She looks like a porn star.

  Hopefully Brodie will like her now.

  As she tugs the zip on her coat, the shoelace from which the skeleton key hangs comes loose, sending the key to the floor with a sharp clang. She tenses, worried in case someone outside will hear. The noise sends bats flittering above, and she’s about to grab the key and race outside when she notices something. On the floor by the stairs there’s an old lock peeking out from beneath a slab of wood.

  Quickly she pulls the wood slab aside and fingers the lock. It has a similar insignia on the side of it to the one on the skeleton key; a snake eating its own tail, so it looks like a circle. An ouroboros.

  She slips the key inside the lock and is amazed when it clicks open, smooth and unhesitant. She pushes the wood slab farther and finds that it was covering a strange metal grille that is now unlocked. She opens it to find nothing but a deep, dark hole. No treasure chest or room full of secrets. Just a weird old hole. A deep one, by the looks of it.

  She locks it and ties the key around her neck. It will be her secret.

  III

  My mother was dead. There was no burial, no grave for me to visit and pay my respects. I could not speak of her to anyone. She was not missed, or remembered with fondness. The site where they burned her body was a black stain on the cliffside, the ashes of the bodies and the stakes swept away by sea
and wind, but somehow the stone that had stood there since the beginnings of the earth retains the mark of the flame, scorched into it like grief.

  I understand now that this was the beginning of my current mental state. Missing someone you love for an extended period of time can and will lead to madness, every bit as much as a wound that is not cleaned will lead to a festering sore, and thence an illness that spreads throughout the body. The only boundary between desire and obsession is time; if you crave someone long enough, it becomes a need.

  It becomes your ever-waking thought. The only thing you live for.

  Not long after my mother was burned, my uncle fetched away my brother, and I was alone, orphaned and unwanted. Amy persuaded her father to take me in, and so I kept myself scarce, trying to earn every scrap of bread he fed me by tending to the fields and caring for the animals. This helpfulness earned me both her father’s admiration and her brothers’ jealousy. They beat the living tar out of me almost daily, and while her father stopped it at first, I think he grew tired of having to defend me. It was extra work, and perhaps he questioned whether I didn’t deserve it.

  Tavish was the strongest of the two and driven mad by his mother’s and sister’s deaths, for he liked to make a little stage play out of my beatings. He’d pretend I was a heretic, or accused of witchcraft, and he’d pull out a bag of stones and have me kneel while he cited scripture and stoned me.

  Amy never spoke a word about her mother and sister, but she didn’t have to; I knew her thoughts as intimately as I knew my own. She barely spoke, never smiled, and I knew she blamed herself for what had happened. Had she never cursed Duncan, there would have been no trial. Twelve women had been burned to death. And in the weeks thereafter, three more women and their babies died in childbirth. Had Finwell been alive, it is likely they would have lived. And Amy knew it.

  The curse that her mother had uttered was not forgotten. People were wary of everyone associated with the accused, but none more than Amy. She was yet a child, only twelve years old and small enough to pass for nine, but I saw people avoid her like a pox. I waited for the Privy Council to come and take her away for what she’d shouted at the execution, but it didn’t happen, and Amy threw herself into practicing her magic.

  She was determined to bring her mother back.

  One night, I saw her creep out over the fields. I followed her, careful to keep a distance. I wanted to see where she was going, yes, but above all I wanted to protect her.

  I saw her move toward the bay, and my heart ached for her—she was going to the site of the executions.

  I thought she might be going to pray where the stone was scorched, but as I drew near she was nowhere to be seen. The lip of the broch shone silver in the moonlight, the stones washed smooth by the ocean over centuries. I climbed over the smallest section of the ruin and looked around, and it was there that I saw the iron grate that led to where they’d held my mother, and where a woman had died in chains. A dungeon deep in the earth.

  I knelt down to inspect it, running my hand over the grate. I felt tears creeping to my eyes. My mother had been thrown down there, and tortured into making a false confession. And if it wasn’t bad enough that she was murdered, they’d ensured that she was forever remembered not for her goodness but as a witch who had fornicated with Satan and cursed an elder to his death.

  As I was looking, an outstretched hand reached up through the bars of the grate. I screamed and fell back, convinced it was a ghost or a demon. But then I heard a voice.

  “Patrick? Get down here!”

  It was Amy’s voice. Slowly, I crawled toward the grate and looked down. Her face was angled up at me, her eyes wide.

  “I saw you following me,” she hissed. “Come and see what I’m doing.”

  For no other person, alive or dead, would I have removed the grate and entered that terrifying place where only death and the horrors of Hell lingered. But Amy was down there, and I was concerned for her well-being. Truth of the matter was, even at that young age, I was prepared to die with her or for her—whichever came first.

  What Amy showed me in the cave, the place that villagers were beginning to call Witches Hide, were carvings, elaborate runes etched into the rock.

  “I recognize them,” Amy told me, excited. “My mother did these while she was down here.”

  I felt sick at the thought of it—twelve starving, tortured, and terrified women, my mother among them, clawing at the rock with their bare hands. But Amy knew something I didn’t.

  “Is it magic?” I asked her, and she nodded.

  “The curse my mother shouted before she died. This is part of it.” She frowned. “But I don’t understand how to use it. Not yet, anyway.” She turned to me, her jaw set. “But I will.”

  LIV, 1998

  I

  After the child turned up at the bothy and ran out, I went looking for him. I searched the Longing, then walked up and down the bay with a torch, searching the caves and the road. I worried that he’d drowned in the sea or died of hypothermia. I couldn’t stop thinking about his little cold hands and his terrified eyes. I felt responsible. I should have kept an eye on him, stopped him from running outside.

  When I couldn’t find him, I lifted the handset of the old rotary-dial telephone in the hallway of the bothy and rang the police to report a missing child.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” the officer said. “That doesn’t match the description of any children on the island.”

  I held back from asking whether he personally knew every single child on the island. He probably did.

  “We’ve had no calls from any parents, no missing persons reports filed. But we’ll send a dispatch unit out to the bay within the hour. OK?”

  “Will you let me know when he’s returned home?”

  “Of course.”

  I’d waited by the phone. But they hadn’t called to let me know they’d found him and he was all right.

  I’d made three sketches until I was satisfied that I’d captured the child’s likeness. I recalled that he had a heart-shaped face with a high forehead, fine white-blond strands of hair falling silkily down either side of his face. His eyes were large, the color of the mareel, and there were deep shadows underneath, though I conceded this could have been an effect of the porch light. I had touched his arms, felt the goose bumps there from the cold. And I’d seen his feet, and his toenails—long and filthy, like he hadn’t been cared for.

  The morning after, I went to the police station in person. Located inside a small shop in the village, close to Isla’s café, the station was tiny. An officer at the front desk took my details and didn’t seem to know anything about the call I’d made, or the child. He told me to take a seat on one of the plastic chairs while he located the sergeant.

  “Chief Inspector Kissick at your service,” a voice boomed. “What can I do for you today?”

  I stood and saw Bram, Isla’s husband.

  “Oh, hello again,” I said, but he met me with a cold, flat stare. I couldn’t tell if he recognized me. “I called yesterday to report a missing child,” I said. “I was wondering if he’d been reunited with his family.”

  Bram thumbed through a notebook on the front desk, then turned to the computer. “I have a note of your call here,” he said, squinting at the screen. “Nothing about a child being found. And no reports from any families on the island about a missing child.”

  “No reports?” I said. Surely someone was missing their baby boy this morning. I’d envisaged a mother finding her son’s bed empty, her frantic calls to the police for help.

  “This was the boy,” I said, spreading my sketch across the desk. He made a big show of digging a pair of spectacles from his shirt pocket and squinted crossly at the drawing.

  “Don’t recognize him. What was his name?”

  “He didn’t tell me his name.”

  He raised his
eyes to mine. “Did he give details about his parents? His address?”

  “He was so cold he could barely speak,” I said. “He didn’t appear to speak English, actually. He ran outside. I’m worried he might have hypothermia.”

  Bram turned back to the notebook and tapped the page with a finger. “You said he ran out. A child with hypothermia wouldn’t be able to do that.”

  “I meant that he might have developed hypothermia when he ran back outside,” I said.

  “Well, as I said,” Bram said, with an infuriating smile, “you’re the only one to have seen this boy. Until we get a report from the parents, there’s nothing more can be done.”

  “There’s a hole in the ground floor of the Longing,” I said. “Last time I checked, the grid had been opened. What if he’s fallen down there?”

  “The matter’s closed,” he said, turning away from the desk and gesturing to a colleague. He wouldn’t make eye contact.

  “Can’t you at least send a few officers down there to check?”

  Bram turned his back on me and walked away. I gritted my teeth. I’m not normally an outspoken person, but this was too important, and I wasn’t going to be ignored.

  “I think I’ll file a complaint,” I said loudly. “I’m sure your boss would be pretty outraged to hear that you didn’t act on a report about a missing child.”

  He turned then, his eyes blazing. “You think I’m going to send my officers down that cave?”

  I stepped back, wiping my face. He was so angry he’d spat on me, and his choice of words—the emphasis on “that”—was telling.

  “You’re a fucking detective!” I shouted back. “I saw this child with my own eyes! It’s your job to find him!”

  Another two uniformed police officers entered the reception area. They stood behind Bram, eyeing me coldly. I could see they agreed with him, not me.

  “I think I’ll be the one to decide what my job is, thank you,” Bram hissed. “Now get out of my station before I have you arrested for disorderly conduct.”

  II

  I spent the rest of the day in a daze, completely confused. And furious.