The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  Luna was devastated. After the disappearances of her sisters, it seemed a cruelty to watch such a gentle giant die right in front of her.

  Mr. McPherson had urged her to keep away from Basil’s body. Once he was dead, toxins would come off his skin that might make people very sick. The coast guard would remove him safely, once he started to decompose.

  Luna looks up. Her headache is gone, the cold air a balm for the heat of it. Or perhaps it’s the distance she’s put between her and Clover.

  She’s at the bottom of the field in front of Cassie’s croft, where the waves can be heard crashing against the rocks below. It’s the sky that has her attention. It’s so vast, shimmering with stars. She looks up at them and wonders if it’s true that we’re all made of stardust. The baby kicks again, and she smiles. Her memories are coming back thick and fast. This is what she’s always wanted, she thinks. Every birthday, she’d blow out her candles with a wish to remember tucked closely behind the wish for her sisters to return. And now that she’s here in Lòn Haven, it’s happening. The unspooling of the past.

  But there’s one more thing she came here to do.

  She turns and heads quietly into Cassie’s kitchen, where she finds the knife block. She selects the one with a long, slim blade, perfect for slitting a throat. She’ll slip it inside her bag for tomorrow’s trip to the woods.

  Behind her, Cassie hides in the shadows. She sees Luna’s face in the thin light of the moon at the window, studying the knife, and catches her breath.

  III

  The snows lifted from Lòn Haven and the sun shone down, and while the people recovered and reeled from the visitation of a wildling to the island and the near-extinction of our community, Amy revisited her mother’s runes and book of spells.

  She woke me one night, sopping wet and shivering with cold.

  “I worked it out,” she said. “I think I know how to fix it.”

  I helped her out of her wet clothes and lit the fire while she wrapped herself in a blanket.

  “I went inside Witches Hide,” she said, shivering. This time, however, instead of climbing back up the tunnel at the entrance, she said she went out the other end that led to the sea. She had expected to step into low tide, but when she went through, she plunged into deep water, the depths almost claiming her.

  When she emerged, she swam to shore and sat shivering on the bay. There was a girl with long black hair collecting seaweed, who wrapped her arisaid across her shoulders for warmth. The girl said her name was Marion Darroch. Her father was Christopher Darroch.

  The only Christopher Darroch I knew was a child of two years old. A little chubby creature who walked everywhere behind his mother, holding on to her skirts.

  “Ask me how long I’ve been gone,” she said.

  I looked out the window. “You’ve been gone this night.”

  She smiled and shook her head, and there it was again, just for a moment—the wild glint in her eye. “I’ve been gone over two months.”

  She had hit her head, I thought, or been driven mad by fear. People would cross the road when they saw her, after what had happened to Angus’ son Blair. The curse that she’d uttered five years before was dredged up as a likely cause for the wildling.

  I rubbed her hair with a towel, and she gasped in pain, pulling at something on her shoulder.

  “What is it?” I said.

  Slowly, I moved the blanket from the spot that was evidently causing her pain, squinting until I saw the cause—a burn that had caused the skin to rise up in a livid red circle.

  “How did this happen?” I asked.

  I saw something inside the wound and looked closer—someone had used a sharp blade to carve four small numbers into her skin, all in a row.

  1

  7

  0

  7

  I knew what it meant, and what it would mean if anyone else were to see.

  And I knew how I was meant to act, now that I had seen the mark.

  I was to kill her.

  I was to burn Amy alive.

  LIV, 1998

  I

  “Isla!” I yelled, hammering on the door of her house.

  “You’ve found them?” she said, mistaking my distress for joy.

  I was hysterical. She told me to come inside and I stumbled forward, sinking to the floor. Luna was with me and I wanted to be composed for her sake, but as soon as I saw Isla, it felt as though everything I had been holding in spilled out in a tremendous rush.

  “Rowan,” Isla called. “Can you take Luna here and show her what you’ve been baking?”

  I saw Rowan appear. She took Luna by the hand and led her away. Patiently, Isla sat on the floor with me and laid a hand on my arm. “Easy now,” she said. “Whatever has happened?”

  I told her about the night before. How I had awoken to find a child had come into the house. And no, it wasn’t Clover, and it wasn’t Saffy—it was a child who looked exactly like Luna.

  She sat in complete silence as I told her, my words rambling and half-crazed. I was at the end of my rope, the end of my wits. And I was perfectly ready to accept that perhaps I was mad, and this was all a dream.

  “She was filthy and there were some cuts and bruises,” I said. “But she is Luna. Her exact double.”

  “And she had a mark on her?”

  I nodded. “On the back of her knee. Four numbers. I checked.”

  Isla gripped me by the upper arms and stared hard into my face. “Listen to me and listen well. The child with the mark is not your daughter.” She turned and nodded at the kitchen, where I could see Luna helping Rowan lay out cookie dough on a baking tray. “This is the one without the mark?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is Luna,” she said. “The other one isn’t.”

  I nodded but I was barely taking in what she was saying. My mind was racing. Isla told me to come into the living room and sit down. “Now,” Isla said, pulling up a chair close to me. “Walk me through what happened. Step-by-step.”

  “I put Luna to bed last night.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know . . . about eight o’clock.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said, pressing the balls of my palms into my eyes. “Since . . . I’ve hardly slept a night since Saffy went missing. And Clover. But I was so tired, I kept drifting off and then waking up.” I squeezed my eyes shut, the horror of it bringing me to silence. Waking was like being plunged into lava. Being torn from the bliss of sleep into the knowledge that not one but two of my daughters were missing.

  “I heard a noise at the door. It woke me up. It was still dark. I thought maybe it was Saffy or Clover. I shouted their names and ran to the door. Before I opened it, Luna had appeared behind me.”

  “ ‘Is it Clover?’ she’d asked. The noise had woken her up, too.

  “And then what happened?”

  “I opened the door. There was a girl standing on the porch. I saw it was Luna, only she was wet and covered in dirt. Like she’d had a fall. She was shivering with cold and begging me for help.”

  “And did you?”

  “My first instinct was to help her, but then I turned and saw Luna standing in her bedroom. She stepped out and saw the other girl.”

  A cold finger of ice had run down my spine. There were two of them. Two Lunas. One crying and begging for help, the other pulling at me, begging me to explain who the other girl was and why she looked like her. In a handful of seconds, both girls were crying, their voices identical in pitch, on either side of me, both of them calling “Mummy” in stereo.

  “Both of them were asking ‘Who is she?’ over and over, pointing at the other one. After all that had happened, I felt like I was going out of my mind.”

  II

  I felt like I was fall
ing down a never-ending hole of confusion. The other Luna had begged me to tell her what was happening, and she pointed at Luna and asked who she was and why she was here, and then the two of them were crying and shrieking, their voices echoing and braiding, until I shouted, “Enough!”

  “Mummy,” the other girl said in a pitiful voice. “I’m bleeding.”

  I knelt by her and glanced at the spot that she was pulling at. Her dress was filthy and smelled briny, and there was a red mark on the fabric, just at the waist. She gathered the dress up and made a noise of pain. On the back of her knee was an angry red mark. A burn, of some sort, with several raw scratches in the middle. One of them looked like a number.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “It hurts,” she moaned, too distracted by the pain to answer. I took her into the bathroom and held a clean cloth under the tap to clean the wound. I felt nauseous, my head full of noise. The girl had pulled her dress up to allow me to tend to her injury, and the sight and smell of her little body, naked save for her underwear, only served to plunge me into deeper confusion. Every millimeter of her was an echo of Luna. The color and shape of her eyes, the spread of freckles across her cheeks, the puckered mole that sat just below her collarbone on the left side, the fold of skin that sat over her belly button.

  I felt like I was losing my mind. Behind me were two sets of cries, pleading, begging. I slumped back against the bathroom wall and drew my knees up to my chest, shaking all over. The voices changed—now the girls were working out how to help me.

  “You go get her some water,” one of them said. “I’ll get her a cloth.”

  “Here you go, Mummy.”

  I opened my eyes to see a glass of water held in front of me, and behind it, two versions of my daughter. Standing side by side like twins, reflections of each other, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I must have laughed, because they shared a look and said, almost in chorus, “Are you all right, Mummy?”

  My strength had left me. I couldn’t speak. I felt pinned to the floor, the weight of all that had happened collapsing on me like mountains. Saffy’s disappearance. Clover’s.

  And now this.

  III

  I heard the girls beginning to talk to each other.

  “Are you really called Luna?”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “This is really weird.”

  “I know. Can you tell what I’m thinking?”

  “You’re thinking about dinosaurs.”

  “Actually I was thinking about trees.”

  “Cheese? Are you hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “Do you like cheese?”

  “Only in sandwiches.”

  “Me too.”

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Blue.”

  “Mine too! What about your favorite animal?”

  “A narwhal. It’s a whale with a—”

  “I know what a narwhal is. It’s my favorite animal, too.”

  And so it went on. I sipped at my water, finally gaining enough strength to crawl out of the bathroom into the hallway and then the living room. The girls followed, still chatting. My mind had dredged up the conversation I’d had with Isla and the others about wildlings. She’d said they looked identical to the children they wanted to kill, that the likeness was so incredible that parents were duped, and often grew so confused that they thrust out the wrong child, or both. The only way to tell them apart is by a small mark that the wildling often bears. A mark that the human child doesn’t have.

  One of the Lunas had such a mark. The girl that was covered in mud.

  I looked up and saw the girls begin to sit down on the floor opposite each other, Luna passing her double a clean T-shirt and leggings to change into. I was now standing behind her, and as the muddied girl straightened a leg to pull the leggings on, I saw the red mark behind her knee. Isla’s words rang in my ears. I leaned forward, telling her to hold on a moment. I needed to check something.

  I looked closer, and there it was—four digits etched into tender flesh, flaming red.

  1

  9

  9

  8

  “What’s wrong?” the girl said. “Did something bite me?”

  I couldn’t speak for shock.

  “Maybe you scratched it,” Luna said, inspecting the burn. “I’ll get a bandage.”

  Ice-cold fear seized me as Luna applied the bandage to the other Luna’s mark. This was something much, much more than I’d ever encountered, something not of this world, and either I had plunged into insanity or I was encountering an actual wildling. And I recalled the warning Isla and the ladies gave me about the little boy who came into my house that night.

  Their aim is to wipe out bloodlines.

  Luna had brought out one of her toy dinosaurs, much to the imposter’s delight. They played on the floor for a while, exchanging facts about sauropods and theropods, and my heart was racing. What would I do? Who on earth could I turn to, and how would I explain it? Would I call the police? What if they took away the wrong Luna?

  “Did you sleep in my bed last night?” the imposter asked Luna.

  “You mean my bed,” Luna corrected. “Is your Mummy called Olivia, too?”

  “Well, yes, but mostly she gets called Liv.”

  The imposter gave a long, deep yawn into the crook of her arm. “Sorry,” she said to Luna. “I got lost last night. I’m so sleepy.”

  “Do you want to have a nap?” Luna said. “My bed’s really comfy.”

  “You mean my bed, silly,” the imposter said. She went to say something else but it was stifled by a yawn. “Maybe just a little nap. Oh! I just remembered where I put it!”

  “Put what?” Luna asked.

  The imposter jumped up and pulled one of the armchairs forward, then reached down and held something in the air. “I found it! Look, Mummy!”

  “You found T-Rex!” Luna shouted.

  “I was playing with him here yesterday,” the imposter said. Then, “Do you mind if I take him for a little nap?”

  Luna nodded, and I watched, hollowed out with horror, as the imposter went into Luna’s bedroom and climbed into bed, the T-Rex clutched to her chest.

  Luna came back into the living room and sat next to me. “Who is that girl, Mummy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Have you ever seen her before?”

  Luna shook her head. “She looks just like me. She talks like me, too.”

  * * *

  —

  “And that’s when I came here,” I now told Isla. “I took Luna, put her in the car, and drove her here.”

  Isla nodded. Then she smiled warmly at Luna in the kitchen. “Darling, why don’t you go next door and watch TV? There’ll be cartoons on now. I’ll bring you a nice hot chocolate if you hasten. Off ye go.”

  Luna looked at me for assurance and I nodded. When Isla was sure Luna was out of the room, she leaned forward.

  “Where’s the other one? The other girl?”

  “I left her at the bothy,” I said weakly. “I didn’t know what to do . . .”

  Isla looked frustrated. “You need to go back. It might already have left . . .”

  I nodded, reluctantly. I felt like I wanted to be sick.

  “You know it’s a wildling.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and clasped my hands to my head. I didn’t want to agree with her. I wanted to curl into a ball and disappear.

  Isla leaned forward and took my hands.

  “If you don’t act now, you’ll never see any of your daughters again. Luna included.”

  Her voice and eyes were hard.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You think it’s a coincidence that Saffy and Clover are missing, and now this?” She r
ose from her chair and pulled a long, thin knife off the chimney mantel, weighing it in her hands. “You have to act. If you do what I tell you, you’ll be safe.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “OK.”

  “You’ll need rope. And something to light a fire. And you’ll need this.” She handed me the knife.

  “I can’t,” I whispered, putting down the blade.

  “Mummy?” Luna called from the other room. “Rowan says she can make me hot chocolate. Am I allowed?”

  I must have visibly weakened at the sound of Luna’s voice—identical to the imposter’s voice—because just then Isla took my hand. “It’s best that you do it. Correct?”

  It felt as though the room was underwater. Nothing felt real anymore. I managed to nod.

  “I’ll come with you,” Isla said with a smile. “Now, you don’t have a moment to waste.”

  IV

  I went back to the bothy, as Isla instructed. To my relief, the other Luna—the one with the mark—was inside, puzzled and upset at my leaving her behind.

  “I’m taking you out now,” I told her, offering a thin smile. “We’re going to spend some time together. Jump in the car.”

  The imposter wiped her eyes and threw me a cross look before getting into the car. Then I told Luna to get out of the car.

  “Stay in the bothy,” I told her firmly. There was no way I could take her with us. “Do not answer the door under any circumstances. OK? It doesn’t matter who calls. Do not open the door.”

  She nodded. Her eyes drifted to the other girl in the car.

  “Where are you taking her?”

  “I’m taking her back to her parents,” I said, lowering my eyes. “She’s obviously got lost. They’ll be worried . . .”

  “Is she a wildling?” Luna asked fearfully.

  I tried not to meet her gaze.

  “She is, isn’t she?” Luna said, her eyes wide. “You don’t have to take her away, Mummy. Saffy told me what to do if I saw someone who looked like me . . .”

  I told her she was to stay inside and not answer the door, and for this she could have as many Pop-Tarts as she wanted. She pleaded with me not to take the wildling away. She wanted to take the girl’s hands, that’s what Saffy had told her, but out of the window I spotted Isla’s car parking up in front of mine, and I knew I needed to go.