by C. J. Cooke
“Please, Mum?” Luna said. Clearly they’d been discussing this, planning to petition me as a unit. “We like it here. And I’ve been doing my homework every night.”
Finn folded his arms and raised his eyebrows in a you-should-say-yes gesture.
“This is a big conversation,” I said gently. “We’ll discuss it later.”
Cassie and Luna threw their arms around each other and I worried—where were we going to, after the commission ended? Where would we live?
In Strallaig, the streets were aglow with neep lanterns and firepits. Some of the locals had dressed up in white sheets, dragging tin cans behind and making ghoulish noises at groups of children, and the windows of all the houses and even the shops glowed with candles. The window of Isla’s café had clearly been decorated by Rowan, with a line of gemstones along the interior windowsill and an elaborate pentagram drawn in glow-in-the-dark paint on the glass of the window. Around it, in a circle, she’d drawn skulls and bats, and the words of a poem in white paint.
The veil is thin
The circle complete
We honor the dead
Who follow our feet
Luna, Clover, and Cassie recited their poems to dozens of neighbors, all of whom rewarded them with baked treats, toffee apples, and sparklers, which they lit and used to write their names in the darkness. The air was filled with the bitter tang of fireworks and flame.
In the small square in the center of the village, flames sprung from a bonfire. A woman dressed as a witch had set up a large barrel of water where children were bobbing for apples. The girls raced off. Finn and I sat down on a park bench, bracing ourselves against the sudden cold.
“You feeling any better?” he said.
I nodded, though I wasn’t. “A little.”
“Hey, remember you wanted me to take care of the bats in the Longing?”
“Yes?”
“I found some black lamps. It’s an effective way to get rid of them.”
“Black lamps?”
“UV light. It encourages them to roost elsewhere. Worked in Ian Ewart’s barn. You just plug it in and let them get on with it. Also insects. So, I got you two—one for the lantern room and one for the main building.”
“Cool.”
He kissed my head. “Meant to say—I’d one of my hunches when you said you’d booked an appointment with the GP.”
“And what did your hunch say?”
A long pause. “It said you’re going to be around for a long while yet.”
I sighed. “How long’s a long while?”
“I think you’ll see your grandkids.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. To see my girls reach womanhood. That was all I wanted.
He put his arm around me, and I laid my head against his shoulder. In the distance, someone started to play the bagpipes, a plaintive ballad that drifted through the night.
I looked over at the girls. The woman dressed as a witch was handing out woolen dolls. “Take your wildlings,” she said.
Then she instructed them to cut them up with a pair of scissors and toss them into the fire.
II
Finn drove us home a little later. He made to get out but I stopped him.
“Where are you going?” I said, glancing at Cassie in the back seat. She was fast asleep.
“I’ve got to set up the black lamps,” he said.
I looked out at the scene in front of us. The black clouds that had bubbled on the horizon all evening had finally swept in, wind and rain battering the Longing. “Leave it,” I said. “You take Cassie home.”
He tried to insist, but I made him tell me how to do it and promised I’d do it myself. Two black lights, one for the lantern room—this was to deter insects, which had started to stick against the paint—and one for the top of the staircase to slowly encourage the bats to roost elsewhere.
I wrapped myself in the old fisherman’s coat Saffy had found in the shed and lowered my head against the gale as I walked to the Longing. I was nervous about going into the lantern room again, but I told myself that I was so close to finishing the job. And now that Patrick Roberts was back in town, I didn’t want to waste any more time waiting for the bats to leave. It would be a quick job, I thought. Place one UV lamp in the lantern room and one on the stairs, and that would be that.
I set up the first one at the top of the stairs. It sent a faint purple glow throughout the dark space, not unlike the mareel. I saw some of the bats begin to stir, and two flew outside. Encouraged, I moved to the lantern room. Quickly, I set up the black light. And then I gasped.
In the vivid glow of the black light, something on the windows was revealed. Numbers. Thousands of them.
I turned around on the spot, my eyes adjusting to the light, taking in the sight of it, trying to understand what I was seeing.
It wasn’t just on the windows, either—the writing continued across the floorboards, on the walls, a frenzy of numbers and words. The numbers appeared to be grouped in four, written vertically.
1 1 1 1
6 7 8 9
8 1 9 2
2 6 9 1
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. It looked like the work of madness, all the numbers glowing in the dark. A film of grime had grown over the numbers, so it hadn’t been done recently. Why would someone do this? It couldn’t have been the little boy I’d spotted. He was far too young, and he could never have sourced the kind of paint that only showed under UV light. Tourists, I thought hopefully, playing some sort a game. Or “outsiders”—the same people Isla had blamed for the graffiti. A shiver ran all over me. First the bones, now this . . . it was terrifying. The writing was the same throughout, the same flick on the tail of the “9,” the same exaggerated cap on “7.” One, maybe two people had written all of these. And they’d gone to the trouble to use paint only visible under black light.
On the floor, where the triangle of bones had been, I spotted a rune. A star inside a circle, or a pentagram. The bones had been placed in the center of it.
So they hadn’t been left at random. The frenzied numbers and words and runes looked satanic, or the work of someone who needed help.
I raced down to the bottom floor, where I’d left my Polaroid camera. My heart was racing and I was shaking with fright, but I knew I had to go back up. I had to will myself, count to three in my head before forcing my legs to move. I went back up and took a handful of photos before hurrying back down again and into the night.
In the bothy, I started to dial Finn’s number, but I stopped halfway and hung up. Why was I calling him? No—I needed to call Patrick Roberts. It was his property, and we needed to go to the police together. He answered after two rings.
“Hello?”
“Patrick? It’s Liv.”
A silence. “Hello, Liv.”
“Sorry to call you so late. It’s just . . . there’s something in the lantern room that I’m concerned about.” I told him about what I’d spotted. The numbers. The writing.
“I . . . I spotted a little boy in the Longing,” I said, tripping over my words. “I told the police but they didn’t believe me. I’m not sure he was the one who did all the writing but maybe this proves someone was with him?”
“Stay calm,” he said. “I’ll come straightaway.”
“I took photographs. I thought we could take them to the police. As proof.”
“Don’t do anything just yet,” he said hastily. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I hung up, filled with a strange relief. Maybe this would force the police to search for the boy I’d found.
I spread the Polaroids I’d taken over the dining table, studying them in the light of the table lamp. I could make out words, too, but they were nonsensical, a kind of delirious poetry, written in a scrawl.
AMY.
WHERE ARE YOU?
AMY. AMY. AMY.
A knock sounded at the front door. It was Patrick.
I turned back to the photograph, my heart racing. The words stirred something in my memory.
The night I’d met him, we’d had a weird moment when I heard him call me by another name. What was it?
Amy, that was what he’d said. He’d asked if I was Amy.
Patrick had written the frenzied numbers in the lantern room.
III
We stood together in the lantern room, and I kept my arms across me protectively. Despite the cold I could feel sweat gathering under my shoulder blades, my heart banging in my chest. I could tell he was trying to work out if I knew or not, a darkness in his stare that wasn’t there before. It made my unease even worse.
“I see,” he said, bending to look over the numbers on the walls. We were in darkness, save the purple light of the UV lamp. He ran a hand over the word “Amy,” and I flinched.
He looked up. Had he seen me jump? I watched him carefully, turning every so often to look out over the bay for car lights. I hadn’t called Finn. I should have, but I’d felt foolish. What was I going to say? That I’d found some writing in the lantern room? That I thought Patrick Roberts was out of his mind?
You should have called him.
“I’ll change the locks on the door,” he said, straightening. “And the door to the bothy. Perhaps look into some security system.” He stood, looked me in the eye. The nervy, awkward boy I’d met before was gone—he was sour, now, and the curl of his lips when he smiled contained a malice I’d not seen. “Will that make you feel safer?”
I turned off the UV lamp, flooding the room quickly with the white glare of my torch. “Yes,” I said, with the biggest smile I could muster. “Thank you.”
He smiled back. But the air between us was charged with a shared knowledge—he knew I knew.
We took to the stairs in silence. I walked quickly, chatting animatedly about the mural, about the paint quality and the weather—anything I could think of to spin the conversation toward the realm of normality and fill the terrifying space that had cracked open between us. Once I hit the ground floor I strode quickly to the door and yanked it open, never more relieved by the fierce winds outside that met me.
“Thanks for coming over,” I said, when he came outside. Big smile. “I didn’t mean to cause alarm.”
He swept my apology away with his hand. “Think nothing of it.” He held my gaze. There was suspicion in his eyes. “It’s a beautiful night. Why don’t I take you on a cruise of the island? You wanted to learn more about the history of this place, if I remember correctly.”
“I’ve no one to watch my girls,” I said, explaining that Saffy was at her friend Machara’s house and Luna and Clover were too young to be left alone.
“Bring them along,” he said. There was no denying his tone—it was insistent.
Say no.
“Think of it as part of your commission,” he added, and I swallowed hard.
“I’d love to.”
Outside, the wind was picking up, and once we’d collected the girls we headed quickly to my car parked at the roadside. From there it was a short drive to the port along the bay to a large white boat. Clover and Luna had long forgotten their board games and were now enthralled by the prospect of going out on a boat. This will be good for them, I told myself, but inside my instincts were shouting at me, telling me to make an excuse and back away. But too late—he led us on board and pulled up the gangplank.
Clover took the opportunity to tell Patrick all about Basil the basking shark, who Patrick surely must have known about but pretended he didn’t.
“He must be very lonely,” she said. “All the other basking sharks have gone home for the winter, but Basil just stays around because he likes it here so much.”
“He’ll be heading on his way soon enough, I’m sure,” Patrick told her. “If we see him while we’re out, you can always give his back a good scratch.”
I was imagining Patrick’s boat to be something like Mr. McPherson’s fishing boat. Instead, we were on a sleek, modern yacht, gleaming white with a shark-nosed bow. Inside were six bedrooms and a beautiful kitchen. I spotted a gym through one of the doors, too, and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with wine bottles.
“I have a games room,” he told Luna and Clover, who both immediately started pleading with me to let them go there. I relented, and Patrick took us to a room decked out with arcade games, a pool table, and an air-hockey table.
“The best views are from the cockpit,” he told me. There, two white leather seats looked over a digital console toward the front of the boat. In a moment we had pulled out of the dock and were headed back toward the bay. The sky had turned to a navy velvet glittered with stars and the boat rocked slightly against the waves that seemed to paw at us as we made our way into deep water.
“Would you like something to drink?” he asked. “Wine? Tea?”
“A tea would be lovely, thanks.”
He headed to the kitchen at the other end of the room while I stood, still feeling too out of place to sit down. I noticed some intriguing keepsakes in a wall-mounted cabinet—a huge conch shell with a raw pink center, a dried sea urchin prickly as a hedgehog, a set of moss-green skeleton keys, and some bits of wood.
“I see you’ve discovered my Viking ship,” he said, returning with two wineglasses and a bottle of expensive-looking wine under his arm.
“A Viking ship?”
“I had no tea, so I brought wine,” he said. “Shall I pour you a small one?”
I nodded. “A very small one.”
He handed me a glass and popped the cork. “I used to go deep sea diving. I did a dive in the Shetlands. Found a wreck on the seafloor.” He nodded at the splinters of wood in my hand. “I spotted the snake helm and figured it was a Viking ship,” he said, marking the curved shape of the helm in the air with his hand. “I contacted the National Library in Edinburgh and they sent some divers down to explore. Cheers.” He held up his glass, and I toasted him.
He stepped closer, slipping a hand in his trouser pocket.
“They were able to carbon date it. Have a guess how old?”
“A . . . thousand years old?”
“Close,” he said, weighing one of the fragments in his hand like gold. “700 AD.”
I watched him carefully. He was a bit of chameleon, his moods shifting so ferociously that it was like watching him perform different personalities. The shy boy in the bothy had gone, as had the sinister, brooding man I’d encountered in the Longing. Even his form seemed different—when we’d first met I’d thought him thin and finely built, but his short-sleeved T-shirt revealed strong, muscular arms riddled with scars. The air was clammy with tension, and I figured that keeping the small talk going was the best way of maintaining that mood. “What about the Viking ship?” I asked, my voice light. “Did they hoist it out of the ocean?”
“No, too dangerous,” he said. “Max, my diving partner, said we missed a trick.” He set the Viking ship remnants carefully back in place. “He said we should have dredged an oar up or something, charged tourists to come and touch it.”
I cocked my head. “You’re . . . not keen on tourists?”
He gave me a look that said definitely not keen.
From a window I could see the silhouette of the Longing shrink against a purple sky, the gold lights of houses shimmering on the other side. We were moving steadily away from the shore. A flash of the writing in the lantern room came to my mind, and my stomach twisted.
Why did I agree to this?
“So . . . the mural,” I said, guiding the conversation to safe ground, keeping my tone light. “Have you thought any more about how we could develop it?”
“Actually, it would help if you talk me through your work as an artist,” he said, turning t
he wheel to the right, shifting the long white glare of the moon across the helm. “Do you just do murals or do you do traditional art? Paintings and so on?”
I told him that when I’d gone to art school, I was in love with Degas and Balthus, and my dream was to have an exhibition of my paintings in some upscale gallery in London, or even the Tate Modern. Until I realized how naïve that idea was and radically scaled down my goals. Back then I was obsessed with wolves, mostly because I had a second cousin who was in the newspapers for her attempts to reintroduce wolves to England. I’m not a natural realist painter—I didn’t really try to paint wolves, but large abstract canvases full of color and anarchy.
He lifted an eyebrow. “You still paint wolves?”
I shook my head. “No, no. And it wasn’t so much the wolves that had my interest but the idea of . . . wildness.”
“Shame,” he said. “Scotland used to be full of wolves. Even Lòn Haven.”
“I could add them,” I said brightly. “It would be good to incorporate some of the older natural elements. Good idea.”
The lights of the island were growing steadily smaller, the line of the horizon drawing closer. “Perhaps you could show me a little of the coastline of Lòn Haven,” I said carefully. “It would be useful to see the Longing from the ocean.”
He thought about that, and for a long moment I held my breath.
“Of course,” he said.
But instead of turning the boat back to shore, he flipped a switch, and I felt the boat shudder to a stop.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
His head was bowed, and the mood had shifted again. “To be honest, I just thought you might remember,” he said.
“Remember?” I said, holding my cup tight. “Remember what?”
He looked up. His eyes were dark. “Who you are.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He moved a hand to touch me, and I flinched.
“Do you realize how long I’ve waited to find you? How far I’ve traveled to find you?”
I eyed the keys on the control panel in the cockpit, the helm between us.