The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  At the Longing, Finn hadn’t turned up to sort out the bats, and I couldn’t paint the upper levels until he’d moved them. Right as I was thinking of finishing for the day, I heard a car pull up outside.

  Isla came running across the rocks toward me, her face drawn.

  “The child you saw,” she said when she caught her breath. “Did he have a mark on him? A set of numbers on his skin?”

  “Numbers?” I said, astonished by her appearance. She was electrified by fear, her eyes wide and her voice loud.

  “Did he hurt you?” she said. “Did he threaten you with anything?”

  I reeled. “Hurt me?”

  She drew a hand to her mouth, and I saw she was becoming upset.

  “Isla, what’s going on?”

  “I was just so worried,” she said, gripping my arm. “When Bram told me what had happened, I had to come straight to see you.”

  “Has the boy been found?” I asked. “Did the police find his parents?”

  She shook her head. “Come over to the café tonight at seven,” Isla said. “There’ll be a group of us. We need to make sure this is dealt with, and fast.”

  “Make sure what is dealt with?”

  She lifted her gray eyes to mine. “Trust me.”

  She threw me a long look before turning to run back toward her car.

  * * *

  —

  I went to Isla’s café at seven, still baffled but determined more than ever to find out what was going on. Of all people, Isla would know who the boy was, and why he was roaming the bay on his own. She would know if he was safe.

  The café windows were dark, the blinds down. I opened the door and called “Hello?,” before spotting a dozen candles flickering in the center of a circle of women, all sitting cross-legged on cushions. It looked somewhere between a yoga class and a séance.

  Isla appeared in front of me. She’d put on makeup and pinned up her hair, and I saw she was wearing a long black dress.

  “Come in,” she said, a pleased glint in her eye. “Lock the door behind you.”

  I saw that the women in the circle were all the women I’d swam in the mareel with—Ailsa, Ruqayya, Louisa, Greer, Mirrin, and Ling. Niamh was there as well, a great-grandmother whom I’d often spotted walking her sheepdog, Ginger, along the bay. She ran a croft just outside the village and was related to Isla. The room was charged with anticipation, as though we were celebrating something. The child, I thought—maybe the boy had been found.

  “Have a seat,” Isla told me. There was an empty seat cushion on the floor between Louisa and Ling. I sat down, and Ling reached out and gently took my hand.

  “I can imagine this all looks very strange,” Isla said. “Perhaps this will help us all feel a little more . . . at ease.” She picked up a tray from a nearby table. Balanced on it were three bottles of wine and nine glasses.

  Isla poured each of us a glass and held it up in a toast. “To protecting the ones we love,” she said.

  We toasted, and I drank.

  “I’ve told the ladies about the child you saw,” Isla said, turning to me. “We’re all persuaded that this isn’t a child from the island. Not a human child, at any rate.”

  I looked from Isla to Ling, who sat next to me. Had I heard her right? “I don’t follow.”

  “We’ve each of us studied the sketch you provided of the little boy,” Greer said gently. “And he’s definitely not one of the children from the island.”

  “Perhaps he’s a tourist,” I said. “He didn’t speak English. There could be a family staying on the island. Or perhaps they sailed here.”

  “I’ve already asked,” Ruqayya said. “My neighbor Allie works at the tourist office. Nobody has reported a missing child. Not for years, now.”

  It didn’t make sense. I had seen him, touched him. He’d been inside my home.

  “Remember I told you about the history of this place?” Isla said. “About the witches who were burned near the Longing?”

  I turned to her. “Yes?”

  “I told you about how the witches put a curse on the island,” she said, tilting her head. “This child you saw—we believe he’s part of that curse.”

  A finger of ice crept up my spine. I’d read the situation wrong; this wasn’t about helping find a little boy who was lost. They were pulling back the curtain on a world I didn’t know, a world of whispers and fear, inviting me in.

  I set down my drink, my mind racing. “You remember I told you my brother went missing?” Isla said. “Right before he disappeared, my mother had an encounter exactly like yours. She heard something at the door, and when she opened it, she found a little boy looking up at her. She assumed he was lost, and she said she noticed he looked like he’d had a fall, for he was covered in dirt. She said she tried to bring him inside, but as soon as she turned around again the child was gone. Not a week later, my brother went missing.”

  I looked around at the women in the room. Did they all believe in this?

  “What are you saying?” I said lightly.

  “I told you my brother went missing,” Isla said. “But that wasn’t the whole truth. What actually happened was, he went missing, but another boy was found a year later. A child who looked exactly like my brother.”

  “Not a child,” Ruqayya added. “A wildling. One of the fae in human form.”

  “One of the fae,” I repeated, confirming I’d heard her correctly.

  “Remember, I told you about the curse,” Isla said.

  I gave a nervous laugh. “You can’t reasonably expect me to believe . . .”

  “My mother didn’t believe it, either,” Isla cut in, undeterred. “She’d been born and raised here on the island so she’d heard the tales of wildlings, and she knew what to do if she saw one. And then, when a boy appeared, in every way similar to my brother save the mark on his neck of a set of numbers, she couldn’t believe it.”

  I was confused. They’d found her brother. So what if he had a mark on his neck? “OK. So what did your mother do?”

  “It wasn’t just the mark,” Isla said. “They knew he was different. A parent knows their own child, right? My father told her that she knew in her heart of hearts that the boy wasn’t Jamie. He had the mark. Beneath the disguise of blood, bone, and flesh, he was faery in disguise, sent to kill every member of our family until the bloodline was destroyed.”

  I’d heard enough. I made to get up, but Ling squeezed my hand. “Wait until you hear what happened,” she said, a little forceful.

  “My mother hesitated,” Isla said, continuing the story. “Like any decent woman, the thought of killing a child, or what she believed to be a child, her own son, was a brutality of which she wasn’t capable. But not twenty-four hours later, Lòn Haven had its worst storm in living memory. Boats sank at the port, and several homes were underwater. There were deaths. My grandfather . . .” There was a catch in her voice, and she took a moment to recover. “My grandfather’s car got pulled into the sea. He was inside it. He drowned.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was. To have lost her brother and grandfather . . . I knew intimately how devastating it was to lose someone you love, how your entire life can change—or end—in the blink of an eye. But still. What did they mean by wildlings destroying bloodlines?

  “The fae have all kinds of powers,” Greer explained. “In human form, they have fae and human power. They can get close to folk. Their curses are more potent.”

  “Perhaps this might offer another example of how wildlings have driven scourges on these isles,” Niamh said, producing a long tube of something and unrolling it in the center of the group. “Seeing how you’re an artist, I thought you’d appreciate this.”

  I watched as she delicately opened an old scroll, about six feet in length. The lights were low, but I could make out that the paper was brittle with age, the edg
es rough and the ink faded. The scroll seemed to be a story, or a medieval kind of comic strip, with scenes and close-ups of people, animals, and trees. I made out a drawing of a house on fire, another of what seemed to be a haystack but turned out to be an enormous pile of bodies.

  “What is this?” I said.

  Mirrin pointed at one of the close-ups. A demonic face, with pointed teeth, crescent moon eyes, and horns, the mouth open in a cruel laugh.

  “The fae are as old as the hills,” she said. “This scroll belonged to my great-grandfather. All of us have been disbelieving, at some point, but it’s hard to argue with history. The witches that were burned here cursed the island to have wildlings. Whole islands have been left without a single man, woman, or child due to these creatures. Scotland has just shy of eight hundred islands. At one point in history, all of them were inhabited. And then the wildlings came. You know how many of those islands are without a single human on their shores?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve no idea.”

  “More than seven hundred.”

  “You’ve heard of shape-shifting?” Ruqyya asked. “Metamorphosis?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “In Greek myth,” Louisa said, “Zeus turns himself into a shower of gold, a cloud, a swan. In Norse folklore, Loki shape-shifts into anything and anyone, even giving birth a few times when he shape-shifts as a female. The Navajo know very well about skin-walkers, and the Irish have their púca, or Puck, as Shakespeare called it. And we have our own shape-shifters in the form of faeries, pixies, and goblins, to name just a few.”

  “But those are myths,” I said. “They’re not real.” I looked at the scroll, astonished that they thought it was going to convince me. I didn’t care how old it was—were they really treating it like a serious historical record, this series of horrific portraits?

  “Stories, yes, but very real indeed,” Ling added, resting a hand on my shoulder. “People have told stories about the natural world since the beginning of time. For hundreds of years, nature held dominion over humans. It was truly wild. We’ve spent centuries creating stories about our place in that wildness. You know how much of the world’s land remains wild right now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Five percent,” she said. “That’s a huge human impact. And look at our stewardship. We’re destroying it.”

  “I agree with you,” I said, treading carefully. “But that has nothing to do with this child . . .”

  “Liv, I implore you to put aside what you think you know and listen to those of us who have suffered,” Mirrin shouted then, throwing her hands up. The room fell silent, and Mirrin fixed me with an emotional stare, her eyes wide and glassy with tears. She lifted a hand and pressed it to her chest. “I lived on an island called Mulltraive,” she said, her voice trembling. “I had four brothers and three sisters. My parents ran a farm. My mother found a child wandering along the riverbank, a wee boy. My mother took him in and set about finding his parents. I remember my brother Ian forcing us all to play with the child. Said he’d want to make sure the wee boy didn’t feel too scared while his parents were found. Not long after, I went to visit my aunt Shauneen in Fort William. By the time I returned to the island, my family was dead.” She hung her head, overcome with emotion. “All my brothers. All my sisters. Both my parents. And not a month later, we had floods. Hundreds of livestock killed, twenty crofts underwater. Crops destroyed. It took a government intervention to keep the community from starving. But no one ever claimed that boy. And he was never seen again.”

  I was reeling from what she told me. From the connections they were all drawing between terrible, gruesome events and innocent children. “I’m sorry for you, and for your family,” I said carefully. “And I’m sorry about your brother,” I said, turning to Isla. “But . . . the risk you run in telling such stories is that you persuade people to do terrible things.”

  “There is a way to distinguish between perfectly innocent children and the wildlings who mimic them,” Ruqayya said. She moved forward, onto her hands and knees, staring down at the scroll. “There,” she said, pointing at an image of numbers. “A red mark, a burn, with scratches in it. If you look closely enough you’ll see they’re numbers. Always numbers.”

  I looked where she pointed. There was a large set of numbers drawn in a row.

  “My mother wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Isla said. “But the mark she found on the wildling was undeniable. It had four numbers, just like the curse said. The wildling cried for her, and her heart was broken, but she went through with it. She dragged that thing to the burning trees up by the Brae and did what was needed. She never spoke of it until many years later, and only then it was to warn me. She took no pleasure in what she did. But she’d had to bury my grandfather because she’d hesitated. And the day after, the storms stopped.”

  My stomach dropped as I realized what she’d said. Isla was telling me that her mother murdered her little brother. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Isla believed what she did was right.

  Carefully, I set down my glass and stood up, measuring my words carefully. “Ladies, I appreciate you telling me all this. But really, there is no need. If I see the boy again, I’ll call the police.”

  They all looked up at me from their circle as I stood to leave. I didn’t want to offend them. I didn’t want to lose their friendship. But I could take none of it seriously, and I needed to process what Isla had revealed to me.

  As I went to walk out, I felt someone grab my hand. It was Isla.

  “You should consider leaving the island,” she said, her eyes stern and her grip hard. “There might still be time.”

  I pulled my hand away and forced a smile on my face. “Oh, I bet we’ll be fine,” I said, and walked quickly out of the door.

  III

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt as alone as I did that night.

  Once the girls had gone to bed, I sat in the armchair of the living room in the bothy, looking out the window at the moon streaking the back of the sea with a white stripe of light. I had spent some nights here feeling increasingly at home, soothed by the waves and the vast spread of the horizon. But now I felt sick to my stomach. The thought of Isla’s mother murdering her little brother played over and over in my head. A helpless little boy, his life taken in the most brutal way because of some ridiculous superstition. No justice for him. And the superstition persisted, even now, in 1998. It made me so angry.

  No call had come from the police about the missing child, and I felt worried. I had made a nuisance of myself, calling again and again and pressing each officer who answered about whether there had been a report of a missing child from the parents. No, they said. No one had reported a missing child.

  The boy was still out there. And the women I so admired, my new group of friends . . . they’d suggested that the boy I’d seen and comforted wasn’t human. That he was some kind of creature, a fae. And that if I saw him again, I was to kill him.

  I tried to put aside my disgust at Isla’s story in order to imagine how a history like the one experienced by the community of Lòn Haven might filter down to the present day. Everyone believed in one false narrative or another, I reasoned. I remembered my mother telling me that for every child that was born, someone close to them had to die. I remembered that every time someone died, I linked it to someone who was pregnant, or who had given birth, and the narrative began to make sense to me. Even when Saffy was born, I started calling my grandparents more often, worried that her birth would cause one of them to die. And when my grandfather did die a year later, I told myself it was related to Saffy’s birth. That he’d just clung on a little longer.

  Such bullshit.

  A wild place with a Viking soul, Lòn Haven had a violent and tragic history that had clearly infected the minds of its inhabitants, creating beliefs rooted deeply in fear. And they were prepared to slaughter innocent children in order to protect th
eir community.

  I couldn’t get past what Isla had told me. I was fast learning that Lòn Haven was an island of two halves.

  I was just about to go to bed when I spotted something outside, moving toward the Longing. A figure. The boy.

  This time, I didn’t hesitate. I raced outside and ran after him, slipping on the rocks, my voice carried off by the wind. I pulled open the door of the Longing and went inside, shouting, “Hello! Hello!”

  My own voice answered, echoing again and again as it spiraled up the walls of the building. Then I took to the stairs, moving quickly to the lantern room. If he was there, I’d find him and bring him home.

  He wasn’t there. I looked down at the bones on the floor. Angrily, I scooped them up and threw them out the window.

  Whatever secrets the community of Lòn Haven was hiding were long past being brought to light, and I swore then that I’d no longer stand for anything based in fear or hearsay. No matter how much it terrified me, or left me friendless.

  IV

  I was desperate to make sense of what Isla and the others had told me that night at the café. About the history of Lòn Haven, about the curse the witches had placed on the island. About wildlings.

  I’d heard about a memorial to the witches who had been killed at the Longing. It was a plaque inside the Auld Kirk, or old church, in the south of the island.

  I drove there the next morning. The church building was small and plain, the stonework blackened over the years and the graveyard filled with indecipherable tombstones that lay wonky and haphazard among mossy lawn, their script smoothed away by time. An old clock at the apex of the church had stopped. A Latin verse was carved into the stone around it: Maleficos non patieris vivere. Later, I’d discover its English translation:

  You shall not suffer a witch to live.

  It was dark inside. Stained glass panels depicted scenes of Christ’s life along the east wall. The pews were empty, and I noticed some shrines set up along the sides, paintings of angels on wooden boards shimmering in the faint light of candles. At one of the shrines, a small black-and-white photograph of a child was propped up against the wooden board. A little boy, his hand held up as though he was waving. I squinted at it. Who was he?