The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  Am at Cromarty. Ferries canceled. Will try again tomorrow morning.

  Love you x

  She covers her face with her hands and cries. She would give anything, anything at all right now, for Ethan to be here.

  A hand reaches for her shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re sad,” Clover says softly. “When I’m sad, sometimes I sing a lullaby. It makes me feel better.”

  She starts to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Luna finds herself smiling at the gesture. In the stillness of the car, marooned on this godforsaken island, Clover’s voice is a small spell, casting the terror far enough away for her to think clearly.

  “See?” Clover says, smiling. “It works.”

  Hunger drives her to find a fast-food place—another pastiche, King Burger—where she buys enough food for a small tribe. She and Clover devour the meal in the car. The sky bruises with night clouds. She has no idea where to go. Brodie’s warning has sent her mind reeling. Who is watching her? Why do they want to harm her?

  Going to a B&B or hotel is out of the question. Perhaps, like her mother all those years ago, she’ll have to sleep rough.

  “Why do we always end up sleeping in the car?” Clover asks when she mentions this.

  They drive toward the visitors’ center where she hopes the trees will provide coverage from the storm. And there’s a CCTV in case someone tracks her down. She remembers the way Brodie laughed when she threatened to go to the police. Nowhere feels safe.

  She remembers how it felt that night when she came here at ten years old, her heart filled with hope that she might discover one of her sisters, or both. That one of them might leap out and say Boo! And then they’d all go home and the anguish that their mother was suffering every second of every day would be forgotten.

  It had been a dry, still night, and she’d been afraid. Any other time she wouldn’t have had the courage to be out on her own, much less venture into the Longing in the darkness. But the devastation of her sisters’ disappearances diminished every other emotion, and the world had narrowed to the sight of her mother’s gaunt, harrowed face. As though Liv’s soul had left her body and she was now shuffling around like a kind of hole with a human face. What Luna had wanted more than anything, more than a million Christmases all at once, was to see her sisters again. Even Saffy. And to see her mother smile once more.

  She remembers that she went into the Longing. It was so dark inside that she’d wished she had thought to bring a torch. She’d leaned into the darkness and called her sisters’ names.

  “Saffy? Clover?”

  She’d listened hard. The sound of the sea washing the shore, the far blare of a ship’s horn. And then, a whisper.

  She’d stiffened and listened again. This time, she’d located the source—the grille in the floor. Wind was rushing through it. Maybe that’s where Saffy had gone. She’d opened it and jumped down.

  It was a long way down, and she’d hurt her knee. But once she was there, she’d found the cave was wider than she’d expected, and much longer, too. It was scary, like the mouth of an enormous crocodile. Lots of spiky things coming down from the ceiling like teeth and bigger ones rising up from the ground, sharp as knives.

  “Saffy?” she’d called. “Are you here?”

  Her fingers had reached for the wall to help steady herself as she made her way forward. A little farther ahead there seemed to be light trickling through an opening at the end, and she could see markings on the cave wall. A pattern of some kind. It was very big and deeply carved into the rock. She remembers thinking a giant must have done it, because the rock was so very hard against her fingertips and it would have taken a lot of strength to leave so much as a scratch. As she thinks of it now, the pattern looked very like the mural her mother had been painting. Interlocking triangles forming a star, with other squiggles and circles carved into the stone.

  IV

  They park up at the visitors’ center. The wind is howling and the temperature gauge reads four degrees Celsius—much too cold for a decent night’s sleep. Shivering, she steps outside to look for a blanket, or perhaps a jacket, in the boot of her car.

  She’s about to step back inside when a woman approaches.

  “Sorry,” the woman calls over the wind. “I’m afraid we’re closed. I have to lock up the car park for the night.”

  Luna opens her mouth to explain, engulfed with shame.

  “The ferries are canceled,” she says. “I . . . we have to sleep here until the morning.”

  The woman’s face drops. Her eyes slide to Clover in the car. “You can’t stay in a hotel?”

  “It’s a long story,” Luna says.

  The woman fixes her with a searching stare. It makes Luna flinch with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, but I don’t suppose I know you?” she asks. “I think I recognize you. Your mum was painting the Longing?”

  Luna stares, her eyes widening. The woman is faintly recognizable, with short blonde hair teased into a quiff and a septum piercing. She recognizes her eyes. The same laughing eyes.

  “Cassie?”

  V

  Amy and I were married on a Tuesday, in the same church where our mothers were condemned to their deaths. Never did I believe that I could ever laugh and smile in that place to which I had returned in my nightmares many times over the years, but that day, I did.

  Her father had remarried, and his new wife, Aileen, had softened him. Therefore, the marriage went unopposed. Such was the loss of community to the plague that had killed Duncan, and a blight the year after that, that I was largely unrecognized; our old neighbors had moved away, and the island community looked very different to the one I had known. I was hopeful that day, but not a day thereafter.

  That winter was the toughest the island had ever faced. Deep snows wrapped the fields and crofts. And as the farmers struggled to keep the livestock alive, the elders sounded the alarm—a child had gone missing.

  Little Blair Reid, all of seven years old, was known to play near Witches Hide, and now he was gone. The savage weather made searching difficult, but I joined the men who scoured the fields for fresh tracks. One evening, the church bells sounded—the lad had been found on the bay close to the broch. He was returned home, his parents overjoyed.

  They bathed and fed him, but that night, his mother took ill. Her cheeks burned though she said she was cold, and the next day, she passed. That was when Angus Reid noticed the mark on his son. A mark on his hip, with numbers.

  Folk said Angus had tried to conceal the mark, but eventually it had got out, and folk were scared. This was not a child, not Blair Reid at all, but a wildling, and if Angus didn’t act quickly, the whole family would be wiped out. Maybe the whole bloodline, which stretched far across the island and into the south. The winter deepened, storms beating down on the houses and tearing apart fishing boats. We were faced with starvation. Angus had only just buried his wife. Now he was tasked with taking his oldest son, or the wildling that mimicked his oldest son, to a tree in the valley to be killed, as the elders had instructed.

  We heard the cries. Angus was taking the boy to be killed in the valley, and the boy’s grandmother was distraught, pleading for him to stop. As smoke drifted high across the village, rumors abounded that Angus had drugged the boy beforehand.

  This time, I prayed the rumors were true.

  I imagine that Angus’ grief sharpened his memory of Finwell’s curse. And he remembered Amy’s screams alongside her mother, proclaiming that the islanders would burn their own children just as the witches had been burned. As soon as Blair was killed, the winter storms lifted, as though the weather had been turned by the actions taken upon the wildling. Gossip began to be spread about Amy, how she was to blame for the curse, how I was the son of a witch, and now our wicked powers were conjoined in holy matrimony. And so the cycle went, story after story being passed around the island like the changing of the moon.
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br />   LIV, 1998

  I

  When we arrived back at the bothy, I closed the door and moved a heavy chair against the knob.

  “What’s happening?” Clover wailed.

  “Mummy, you’re scaring us,” Luna said, her voice trembling.

  I moved quickly to Saffy’s bedroom, intent on telling her to pack her things. I knew it was late, and once again I was dragging my children out at night, fleeing another home and driving them to who knows where. But the encounter on the boat with Patrick Roberts had terrified me, and that terror had leveraged a clean vision of what I needed to do—I needed to leave. I needed to see a doctor. I needed to focus on getting well; not by folklore and not by shamanism, but by science.

  But Saffy wasn’t in her bedroom. I squinted at the clock—it was after eleven o’clock. She should have been back from Machara’s house.

  I looked at the list of phone numbers scribbled in pencil on a page that was Blu-Tacked to the fridge. There was a number for Sibyl, Machara’s mother. I called it.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m sorry it’s late, but is Sapphire there?”

  “No. I’ve not seen her for a few days now. Machara’s here. I can ask her . . .”

  I waited. She returned to the phone.

  “Machara says she hasn’t seen her, either. Not since yesterday.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  I set the phone down carefully, trying to think about what to do, who to try. I called Isla to see if Saffy had been with Rowan. It was a long shot, and Isla confirmed that she wasn’t. I tried other people, other school friends and acquaintances—everyone and anyone Isla could provide a number for.

  But no one had seen her.

  Finally, I called Finn. I hoped beyond imagination that maybe she’d walked to his home to see Cassie. Perhaps she’d fallen asleep, and Finn hadn’t the heart to wake her. I was clutching at straws.

  “She’s not here,” Finn said, and I started to cry. “When did you last see her?”

  I couldn’t think. My mind was a flurry of names and dates, the terrifying images in the lantern room still flashing in my brain.

  I was still on the phone to Finn when Luna stepped forward, one arm across her stomach and her face full of guilt. “I think she’s run away.”

  I grabbed her by the upper arms. “What do you mean, Luna? What did you see?”

  She broke down into tears.

  “I’m sorry!” she shouted. “I promised not to tell!”

  II

  Saffy was gone. She had been gone for two days.

  I felt like I was in a nightmare, a living, labyrinthine nightmare that I was having to drag myself through on my elbows. Saffy’s teacher told us that she hadn’t been to school on Friday; I had supposed she’d woken early and caught the bus herself, as she occasionally did. I wracked my brains; I had thought I’d heard her come in at night. I had even crept up to the loft and peeked my head around her door to see if she was in bed, and I’d seen the rumpled covers of her bed and thought she was there. Why hadn’t I made sure?

  I had been distracted by my work. So hell-bent had I been on finishing the Longing that I hadn’t even noticed my oldest child wasn’t at home.

  It was after midnight, but Finn insisted on bringing Cassie over while he searched the island in his car. Cassie proved a good distraction for Luna and Clover while I made more calls. To the police, to the coast guard. I made desperate calls to Sean’s family, my father, Saffy’s old school friends, even teachers from her old schools—anyone and everyone that Saffy might have contacted.

  At seven the next morning, a black Range Rover pulled up outside and two men got out.

  “Who are they?” Clover said warily, watching them negotiate their way to the bothy.

  “Detectives,” I told her, and I felt a fleeting sense of relief, which dissipated when Bram walked into the bothy with a junior policeman, Police Constable Thomson, a short, dark-haired man in his twenties, both in plain clothes.

  My throat was tight and my head bursting with noise. I hadn’t slept, not a wink. Saffy was impulsive, and she was bullheaded and so downright hateful that sometimes I’d had force myself to walk away from her so as not to scream in her face. But I knew my oldest daughter. She’d have contacted me by now. At the very least, she’d have wanted to know that her punishment had worked. She’d have wanted to know that I was beside myself, searching every corner and overturning every stone to find her.

  Bram and PC Thomson searched her bedroom. They found some letters to her boyfriend, Jack, and some books she’d been reading. One of them had several pages folded down at the corners. The one by Patrick Roberts.

  “Was she having a relationship with Mr. Roberts?” Bram asked.

  “A relationship?” I said, looking from him to PC Thomson. “No! And in any case, Patrick Roberts has been away for most of the time we’ve been here.”

  He flipped a Polaroid out of the back of the book. “Did she take this for him?”

  I took the Polaroid and gasped. It was a picture of Saffy, but I almost didn’t recognize her—she was naked, her red lips stretched into a seductive smile, one hand cupping her breast. My little girl.

  I looked up at Bram, unable to speak for horror.

  He flicked a grim look at PC Thomson. “Bring Roberts in for a chat.”

  III

  For several hours, I fell into the infinite abyss of despair made by imagining what Patrick might have done to my daughter. How I’d neglected to keep as close an eye on her as I should have done. How I should have seen that she was desperate for attention, for love.

  I had failed as a mother.

  When Bram called to say they’d let him go, my despair only widened. I had so many questions, and no answers.

  Needless to say, I missed my GP appointment. I did not sleep or eat. Time passed in strange bursts.

  Bram and PC Thomson insisted on interviewing Luna several times over the next few days. Even though I could see she was suffering with guilt and devastation, I allowed it. They said the slightest detail that Luna could remember—a throwaway phrase Saffy had used, some minor action that was in some way out of the ordinary—could point the way to Saffy. Boats docked and sailed away dozens of times a day; she might have been dragged off by anyone, halfway across the ocean in any direction. Or she could have drowned. Or she might have simply decided to punish me for real and hitchhiked back to England, or farther.

  Isla and Mirrin came to the bothy with food and videotapes for Clover and Luna. It was this last touch that warmed me to them, for a few moments after they’d put on Barney & Friends, the girls were glued to the screen, their crying about Saffy temporarily halted. Finn and I went out and waded across the causeway. Rain was coming down in great ropes, the horizon bruised and thunderous.

  We walked along the beach toward Strallaig, then took the path toward the hill that Finn had said offered views of the whole island. The rain was so heavy that the hill seemed to be disintegrating into a muddy river, and several times we had to lower on all fours to stop from sliding back down. I was soaking wet, blinded by rain, but I kept going until I reached the top. I knew it was ridiculous—I had no binoculars, no way of seeing Saffy from that height, even if she’d stood in the village square—but perhaps, I thought, perhaps she might see me. Perhaps, if she spotted me on the hill from wherever she might be on the island, the sight of her small, broken mother searching desperately for her would persuade her to come home.

  But it didn’t.

  Back at the bothy, I sat at the kitchen table, shaking with cold and shock, my mind shattered into a million pieces. Finn had taken Cassie home to rest, and I had felt indescribably bereft as I watched his car pull away. It hit me in that moment how isolated I was, how alone. How sinister the sea, creeping toward the causeway and finally swallowing it.r />
  Isla made me a cup of hot tea and Mirrin set about doing the dishes and gathering laundry.

  “The whole island is searching for her,” Isla said gently. “Everyone’s out with their dogs and torches. We’ll find her.”

  When the phone rang again, I pounced on it. It was Bram.

  “As you know, we’ve spoken with a fair few people on the island. But there’s one man we’re classing as a person of interest just now.”

  “Patrick,” I said.

  He cleared his throat. “No. Not Patrick. I believe you know a man by the name of Finn McAllen?”

  IV

  I don’t really remember much about that day. I was in shock. Finn was a person of interest in the disappearance of my daughter. Rowan had said that she saw him with Saffy the night before she went missing. Another witness stated that they’d seen Finn’s car parked near the woods that night. They’d searched Finn’s car and found another three Polaroids of Saffy in sexual poses.

  I tried to retrace Finn’s movements over the last week, the times I had seen him and the times he had gone home or gone to work on the rewilding project. Saffy had left the bothy sometime between Thursday evening and Friday morning, which was when Luna had taken her food and discovered she was no longer in the hut in the woods. Brodie had seen her at around four on Thursday afternoon, then spent the evening with Rowan. He returned home at nine thirty, where he stayed all night until the following morning. His parents confirmed this. Finn was at home on Thursday night with Cassie. I had seen him that afternoon, when I picked up the girls from school. Saffy wasn’t there, but then none of the friends she’d made were—they were all still in the woods, finishing up a poetry project. I assumed she’d be home later.

  Finn had dropped me, Luna, and Clover back home at the bothy.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” I’d said to him when he left the engine running. “I’ve made lasagne. No eggs.”

  He smiled. “I promised Cassie I’d spend some time with her tonight. Didn’t I, Cass?”