The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  “Can I be of any help to you?”

  I looked up and saw a man in a long black robe and a white collar standing there. The pastor. “I was just . . . I was wondering about the memorial to the women who were burned during the witch hunts,” I said awkwardly.

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve heard about some work being done there recently,” he said. “Are you the painter?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Come this way.”

  I followed him to the back of the church, which was laid out as a cross, with three sections set up as shrines. I supposed one of them to be set up to commemorate the women, but he walked past them to the far wall, stopping at a small rock sticking up out of the ground. He knelt by it and blew some dust off one of the faces.

  “This is it?” I said. Surely he was wrong?

  He nodded. “If you look closely, you can see the dates of the burnings.”

  I knelt down and looked harder. It was faint, but I could make out a year, etched in old script. 1662.

  “You were expecting something more, I take it?”

  I nodded. “How do you even know this is the memorial to the witches?”

  “It’s in the parish history books,” he said. “I can tell you their names, if you like?”

  I straightened. “I’d love that.”

  He took me to a small reading room installed in a modern extension at the back of the church. On a microfiche viewer, he toggled the magnifier until an old, handwritten document came into view. The Lighthouse Witches. And beneath it, the names of twelve women.

  1662

  Elspeth Alexander

  Margaret Barclay

  Catherine Campbell

  Finwell Hyndman

  Marie Lamont

  Agnes Roberts

  Jean Anderson

  Helen Beatie

  Margaret Fulton

  Jenny Hyndman

  Agnes Naismith

  Jane Wishart

  “Is there information on why they were accused of witchcraft?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “To be honest, the fact that we know the names of these women is considered substantial, given the dearth of information about the witch hunts. You might find the name of the commissioner and perhaps the method by which they were put to death if you go to the National Library, but it would take some digging around.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  I think it was the fact that there was so little information about, and such a sorry memorial for, these women that I wrote down the names on a scrap of paper, clutching it tightly as I walked out of there.

  That afternoon at the Longing, I asked Finn about the wildling myth, and the boy I’d seen.

  He straightened and gave a stretch, having spent half an hour on his hands and knees to finish plastering a lower section of the Longing. “Maybe you saw a ghost.”

  “A ghost?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Aye. Lòn Haven has a bit of a track record of folk vanishing into the ether.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts, Finn.”

  “Ghosts, not exactly. Traces, yeah. Sort of.”

  “Traces?”

  “Here’s my theory. Everything is energy. We all leave something behind. Now, there’s folk who’ll swear on their granny’s last breath that they’ve seen a ghost. And I reckon some of them have. Or rather, they’ve seen traces of a past energy.”

  My face was screwed up, because after last night at Isla’s café, I was way past tolerating nonsense. And when I got back from the church, I found I’d started spotting again. I was tired of the bullshit.

  But Finn was talking with his hands now, trying to make some sense. “We think that time moves forward, in a linear fashion. Yeah? But sometimes you get déjà vu, or there’s some mad coincidence that you can’t explain. I think time doesn’t move in a linear fashion, but in a spiral, and sometimes there’s echoes from the past. And a ghost is just an echo of someone.”

  “And why would I see such an echo?”

  He shrugged. “Now, that I’ve got no clue about. Maybe he was trying to tell you something.”

  “He wasn’t a ghost, Finn. I touched him. He was a little boy.”

  He lifted another wedge of plaster and dabbed it on the stone. “I’ve experienced odd things in my time. Stuff I couldn’t explain. I’ll tell you one coincidence that’s never left me.”

  I sighed. “Go on.”

  “Well, when Cassie was ill, and the doctors said they couldn’t do anything more for her, I got a call out of the blue from an old friend of my father’s. He needed me to do a bit of plastering for him. And even though I had to be around for Cassie, I said aye, I’ll do the job. It made no sense. The job was on Skye. I’d have to leave Cassie for three whole days. But I had this feeling in my gut that I needed to do this job.” He looked up at me. “I felt guilty the whole time I was there. The man just wanted his downstairs loo redone and knew I’d give him mates’ rates. I thought, What am I doing? I’m miles away from my wee girl while she’s knocking on death’s door, and all because this guy wants to save a few pennies on a toilet.”

  “And what happened?” I asked, wondering where the story was going.

  “So I’m packing up, about to leave, and he asks about Cassie. I tell him she’s got leukemia. Doctors have washed their hands of her. The guy makes a call to someone. Next thing I know, I’m on the phone to a doctor in Los Angeles who says he can help.”

  “And he was the one who saved her life?”

  He nodded and patted his forehead with a rag. “Now, I’m not a religious guy, but that wasnae coincidence.”

  “Intuition, maybe?” I said.

  “More than that,” he said firmly. “When I said I had a gut feeling about it, it was . . . like something kept badgering me. In the end, I only gave in to make it stop. And once I was on my way to Skye, I felt like . . . something left. The thing that had been bugging me wasn’t there anymore. Like it had done its job.”

  He said this self-consciously, earnestly, and I bit my tongue. He was talking about his daughter and how her life was saved. I thought about my mother’s false narrative. For every birth, a death. We form stories about our lives to create meaning out of them—without meaning, they feel shapeless and without purpose. When something lies beyond the realm of meaning, it’s terrifying.

  “But surely the police don’t believe in that?” I said. I’d told him about my visit to the police station and how Bram dismissed me. “They have a duty to investigate a reported missing child, surely.”

  Finn’s face darkened. “Ah well, that’s a whole other level of batshit crazy, that is.”

  “What is?”

  He stepped closer, wary of his words carrying to other ears. “The problem with an island like this is that everyone knows everyone else. And that causes problems when, say, the chief inspector is married to someone who does believe in wildlings.”

  I frowned. “But surely his wife’s belief systems don’t override his professional obligations.”

  “Ah, now you sound like a townie,” he said ruefully. “Did you know we’re the only island in the small isles to have our own police department?”

  I shook my head, unsure of his meaning.

  “Bram was stationed in Inverness, apparently made a big fuss until he got stationed out here and made chief inspector. And you know all Isla’s crew are shamans and witches and what have you?”

  “And?”

  “Professional obligation is one thing. But when you have a small community, especially one that’s cut off from everywhere else, you have another set of obligations. And I’m telling you now, law and order works differently when everyone’s related to each other. And speaking of Isla . . .”

  I wondered whether I should tell him what Isla had revealed about
her brother. “What about her?”

  He pulled a face. “You must have worked out for yourself what Isla’s about.”

  “Which is?”

  “Self-appointed queen of the island. Knows everything about everyone, stretching back centuries. I’m not kidding. It’s the only reason she runs the café, and her cleaning business. Has to keep tabs on everything. Knowledge is power, as they say.”

  “Plenty of people are nosy,” I said carefully. “Is that the only thing she’s about?”

  He grabbed a cloth from the wallpaper table and wiped his trowel. “She’s a spin doctor.”

  I looked up. “What?”

  “Whatever info she has on folk, she uses for her own agenda.”

  “You mean, she spreads lies?” This made sense. I hoped that the story of her brother wasn’t true. Just a lie she’d told to scare me.

  “More like, she suppresses information,” Finn said. “There’s an unofficial wildling committee on the island. Did you know that?”

  “Shut up,” I said, aghast.

  He chuckled. “Serious. Not kidding. I’m pretty sure Isla is the chairperson, or vice-chairperson of said committee. What I do know is that over the last ten years, there have been sightings of at least two wildlings.” He pointed his trowel at me. “And you’ll know by now what you’re meant to do to a wildling.”

  I took a deep breath. “If I tell you something, you promise not to tell anyone?”

  He nodded. “I promise.”

  “Isla said her mother killed her baby brother. That he turned up a year after he went missing and her parents believed he was a wildling. So they killed him.”

  “Fucking hell.” He stared, appalled. “That’s a new one.”

  “You didn’t hear about it?”

  He shook his head grimly. “I’m not part of the insider group when it comes to those things. My family never got involved with that stuff. And I’ve lived here long enough to avoid it being too much of an issue.”

  He filled his bucket with fresh water from a barrel and scrubbed it out. “There’s this guy I worked with, Malcolm—he was having an affair. Not an easy thing to do in a place like this. Definitely not a smart move, either. He swore he saw Isla and her crew taking a child to the woods. Says he heard screaming.” He lifted his eyes to mine in a meaningful glance, and I pressed a hand to my mouth, horrified. I wanted so badly to believe that Isla would never do that. Maybe she believed her mother was right, but to think she was capable of doing the same thing . . .

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Malc went to the police about it. Next thing, Isla’s on his doorstep, all friendly neighbor, your average smiling assassin. Basically she told him if he wasn’t careful, his wife would hear all about his affair.”

  I wondered what would happen if the boy I’d seen turned up. Would she kill him, too?

  “Anyway, that’s me done now,” Finn said after a while, stretching his arms.

  “I think I’m done for the day, too.” I said, winding up the cable for the cherry picker. “You here again tomorrow?”

  “No. I mean, the job’s done.” He grinned, then looked over the place. “All the plasterwork, finito. Looks good, doesn’t it?”

  I stepped off the platform and hit the “off” switch. “You’re finished?”

  I couldn’t conceal how sad I was about this. I’d grown to enjoy Finn’s company, even look forward to it, and I felt he enjoyed mine. I watched him pack up his gear, floundering for a way to maintain a connection. It seemed wrong, somehow, that this should be the end of us spending time together.

  “Actually, how about you and Cassie come over for a celebratory dinner?”

  He closed the lid on his toolbox and lifted it by the handle. “Celebratory? What exactly is it that we’re celebrating?”

  I felt myself blush. Maybe I’d read our dynamic wrong. Maybe I was forcing a friendship that didn’t exist. “Well, you’re done, I’m almost done . . . and we’ve been to your house so often it’s only fair that we have you round to ours.” It struck me that the bothy we were staying in had been his house, and I faltered. “I mean, unless it’s too uncomfortable . . .”

  He threw me a reassuring grin. “I would be delighted. And I know Cassie would as well.”

  V

  They came over the following evening, Cassie in a green velvet dress and Finn in a shirt, a tartan waistcoat with a thistle brooch, his beard oiled and his hair slicked back. It felt good to do something normal, to distract myself from the thick web of myth and murder that I seemed to have fallen into.

  “Look at you, all spiffed up,” he said. He’d only ever seen me in paint-splattered protective clothes, or in sopping-wet jeans covered in kelp, but I’d found a pretty floral dress among Saffy’s things and borrowed it for the occasion. I’d also borrowed her lipstick and some mascara, and blow-dried my hair.

  “You look pretty,” Cassie said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “And look at you in your lovely dress.”

  She gave a little twirl. “I can almost put my hair in a ponytail now. See?”

  She pulled a blonde strand out to the side.

  “It’s beautiful,” I told her, and she bounced off to find Luna and Clover.

  Finn handed me a bottle of wine and a bouquet of pink flowers wrapped in brown paper.

  “These are machair orchids,” he told me. “I grow them on my land. They’re native to the Scottish isles.”

  I rinsed out an empty milk bottle and arranged the orchids inside. “They’re beautiful. Thank you.”

  He glanced around the bothy. “You’ve made this place very homey, haven’t you?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Did you . . . live here in the bothy?”

  “No, but my grandfather did.” He nodded at the old armchair by the fire. “That’s his chair.”

  He glanced at the armchair I’d been sitting in, and at the book of Scottish fairy tales on the side table. I wondered if I should ask him about the old sketchpad I’d found among its pages, with its drawings of runes.

  “Can we play in the Longing?” Clover ran in and was bouncing on the balls of her feet.

  “No, sweetheart,” I said. “It’s too dangerous for you girls.”

  “Outside on the rocks, then?”

  “You can play in your bedroom until dinner’s on the table, OK?”

  She rolled her eyes and slouched off. I turned back to Finn, who’d picked up the book of fairy tales. “Studying up on your folklore, I see.”

  “The girls did a project at school and wanted to know more about selkies and suchlike. And I was trying to work out how to make the mural for the Longing a little less . . .”

  “Weird?” he offered.

  “Well, yes. But I was trying to figure out what all the drawings meant. I asked around in case they were from Scottish folklore but nobody appears to recognize them.”

  “If I know Patrick Roberts, it’ll either be some kind of corporate logo or a satanic symbol.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  He grinned. “Touché.”

  “You don’t like him very much, do you?”

  “Oh, you picked that up, did you? I thought I’d done a fine job of hiding it.”

  “Why don’t you like him?”

  He screwed up his face. “It’s nothing personal. He’s just a bit of a bawbag.”

  In the kitchen, I set about opening the bottle of wine and poured us both a short glass each.

  “Smells nice,” he said, nodding at the oven, taking a glass from me. “I’m surprised it works. Patrick didn’t exactly bother to upgrade the amenities in the place, did he?”

  “I suppose he doesn’t live here, so why bother?”

  Finn grimaced. “I think it’s fair to assume that he holds that attitude for everything he buys.”

&nbs
p; “What do you mean?”

  He sipped at his wine. “Well, just look at the Longing. Doesnae even fix the place up. Hires you to paint some weird graffiti on it. He owns most of the island. Did you know that?”

  “Most of Lòn Haven? Isla said he owned some properties . . .”

  “About twelve houses, I believe. Also land. Twelve thousand acres and counting.”

  “What on earth does he need all that land for?” I asked.

  “That’s what me and the team have been asking ourselves for months now.”

  “ ‘Team’?” I said, folding my arms.

  “Oh, it’s just a side project,” he said. “Me and a few of the boys from the village got together a few years ago, decided we’d like to rewild a bit of the island. Replant some native trees, that kind of thing.”

  “Is this another ‘on-the-side’ job?” I said with a wink.

  He smiled. “Aye. Something like that.”

  He told me that the ancient forests that once spread across the island and the rest of Scotland had been wiped out by timber companies, and that many plant and animal species had been obliterated as a result. “So it’s not just about the trees,” he said. “Though it’s no secret I’m quite a fan of them.”

  “I don’t think anyone can be neutral about trees, can they?” I said.

  “Aye, you’d think that was the case, given how they provide, oh, oxygen, wood, paper, and a few other things. But folk like Patrick Roberts aren’t so keen. One of the first things he did when he bought Haven Forest was raze half of it to the ground and sell the timber to a merchant.”

  “I bet the islanders had a thing or two to say about that.”

  “Yup, they did. But it made him money. The fella has more money than all the rest of us put together.”

  “Is that why he keeps buying so much land? To sell it off for profit?”

  Finn shut the kitchen door quietly, then stepped closer to me. “The archaeologists are all but digging the whole place up. They’re always rooting about the place, finding Neolithic tools and bracelets and what have you.”