by C. J. Cooke
When she’d opened her eyes, she was alone. The other Luna was gone.
No, not gone, she’d thought. Inside her memories. Her memories, she thinks, have combined both versions of her.
One and the same.
III
Ethan is waiting for her at Cromarty. Cassie says her good-byes at the port.
“I don’t think I can let you go,” Cassie says. “You’ve only just got here.”
“Promise you and Lucia will visit us in Coventry,” Luna says.
Cassie nods. “I’ll do my best to find out where Saffy is. I’ll ask around.”
“No, don’t do that,” Luna says, remembering the night she encountered Brodie. “I don’t want to put you in danger. Promise you won’t.”
Cassie cups a hand to her face. “As long as you promise me, dear friend, that you will tell Ethan the truth.”
“That I wasn’t rejecting him,” Luna says.
“Exactly.”
She smiles. “I promise.”
Cassie waves her off as Luna gets into the car and pulls away, ready to drive onto the ferry. Foot passengers are queuing to board, the engines roaring.
As the car in front moves forward, Luna spies a figure among the foot passengers walking beside her. There’s a girl there, a teenager, tall and skinny. Her blonde hair is piled up in a messy topknot and spiked with a pen. She’s wearing nine-hole Doc Marten boots and a lumberjack shirt underneath a denim coat. She has a familiar walk.
Before she knows what she’s doing, Luna’s stepping out of the car and shouting, “Saffy! Saffy!”
The girl turns. She removes her sunglasses and squints at Luna. Then she breaks into a run toward her.
IV
I have done a lot of wrong things in my time, and I’m sorry for most of them.
But doing what I needed to do in order to find Amy? No, I’m not sorry for that.
And as I said, I was a skilled butcher. I had learned anatomy, both animal and human. The woman I had mistaken for Amy would live.
Her bones completed the spell, and for that, I wish her a long and happy life.
After I took her ribs, I placed tall branches all around the sides of the Longing and set them alight. As the flames climbed to the windows, I rushed through to the end of Witches Hide, diving deep into the water and coming to shore.
I tore off my clothes from 1998 and began to race toward the forest. I recognized Lòn Haven as it had been, that raw, wild landscape dotted with white crofts, the forests thick and lush again.
But a scream stopped me in my tracks.
I turned back and saw smoke rising from the bay. The broch squatted there, bleak and ominous as it had once been. I ran toward the broch and was astonished by what I found: Stevens and his men tying Amy to the stakes, her head bloodied and shorn, just as I had left her.
Amy was already dead, I thought, her body limp. My knees buckled and I sank to the ground, the horror that I had arrived too late to save her thudding in my bones.
“Bring her down,” a voice called out. It was Father Ross, newly installed at the kirk after the death of Father Skuddie. “She has not stood trial.”
I lifted my head from the cold rock and watched as the men laid Amy’s body on the stone. A moment later she coughed, and relief flooded through me. She was yet alive. I inched forward toward her. Stevens spied me and raised a baton to knock me down, but Father Ross prevented him.
“Douse the flames,” Father Ross said, and though the men grumbled, they did as he asked.
“This woman bears the markings of a wildling,” Angus said, lifting the blanket that I’d placed upon her to reveal the livid numbers there. “You know the mandate as well as I do, Father. No trial is needed to deal with a wildling.”
“Wildlings take the form of children,” Father Ross replied, looking over the marks. “These markings look like they were self-inflicted. I have seen such on the limbs of those who are in mourning.” He looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. I had taken the bones of an innocent woman to get here and I would lie to a priest. Anything to be with Amy.
“I think you are mistaken, Angus,” Father Ross said. “This woman is not a wildling, and you are to return her to her home. May God forgive your soul.”
He was visibly angry, but Angus did as Father Ross instructed. Buckets of water were swept over the stakes to put out the flames, and the man who would be our executioner rode Amy and me back on his horses to our croft, where Mrs. Wilson, a healer, attended to our wounds.
The violence meted by Stevens and his men caused Amy to lose the child she was carrying. “I’m sorry, wee lamb,” Mrs. Wilson said as she attended to her. “There may be a chance of another.”
We mourned our loss. But I told her where I had traveled, and for how long.
We learned from that day.
We swore we would not meddle with history. We lived in dangerous times, but we had glimpsed danger in every time, past and future. We could face the danger, so long as we were together.
At first, we decided to block the entrance to the tunnel. It seemed a simple and effective way to spare more children’s lives, and so I commissioned a blacksmith to make a grate—or a gate, I told him—that we would put across it. However, we quickly found that the presence of the grate only served to heighten curiosity, with older children devising stories about the origin of the grate, and then methods to get around it. We put wood over it to conceal it. But it wasn’t enough.
We lived quietly. We planted and reaped and watched bitterly as wildlings were found and killed, knowing them to be the children of the very people who killed them. What could we say that would stop them?
I made a stone to commemorate our mothers and Amy’s sister, and the nine others who had been killed. Father Ross spotted me at work and invited me to place the stone within the kirk.
“I’d rather not,” I told him. “There’ll be an outcry.”
“An outcry?” he said. “They’ve paid for their sins, and it is up to God to judge them now. Their memory is no stain, but a warning.”
I could not agree with him about the warning part, but I consented. Slowly, the presence of the stone stirred up more than I could have imagined—some of the older members of the community stopped after the church service on the Sabbath to lay wildflowers by the stone. Sometimes I would hear them mutter remembrances about Finwell, or my mother.
I cannot say whether the stone acted as a warning or not. But while witches continued to be burned all around us, there was never another witch trial on Lòn Haven, though the legacy of wildlings persisted.
One day I hoped that, too, would cease.
SAPPHIRE, 2021
“Lunch money?”
“Got it,” Saffy tells her foster mother. She throws her a tight smile before heading out the front door and walking briskly to school.
It’s been six months since she came out of Witches Hide. Six months since she was found on the bay, bleeding, and in shock. Six months since she sat in the police station and had been told that the year was 2020. She didn’t believe them. They’d asked for her next of kin. She gave them her mother’s name and date of birth. They couldn’t find her. She gave them her uncle’s name and address. He’d died ten years ago. She couldn’t take it in. What was going on? If it wasn’t for the wound in her shoulder—a two-inch stab wound that missed her subscapular artery by millimeters—she’d have thought she was being pranked. Payback for how horrible she’d been to her mum and sisters. But the strangeness of her surroundings didn’t lessen, the odd way people dressed and the cars and the mobile phones. Like a form of magic. And when a social worker came, it started to sink in. She was in 2020.
And she was entirely alone.
She’s been staying with a foster family, the McKennas, in St. Andrews. They have a beautiful home, a four-bedroomed chapel conversion with ocean views that
they’d hoped to fill with their own children but never could. Michael works as a lawyer and Jenn’s a full-time fosterer. They’re quite taken with Saffy, and she with them. She has an iPhone 8 and a laptop and an Instagram account. She has friends at the local school. She’s on antidepressants and sees a counselor. No one has been able to trace her family. No one and nothing has been able to fill the gaping hole in her heart.
So today, she’s running away. She’s left a note for Michael and Jenn with a bouquet of wildflowers she picked yesterday tied with some gardening yarn. She doesn’t want to hurt them, they’re lovely people, so she’s taken time to think carefully about what to say. She hopes they’re not upset.
She’s going back to Lòn Haven to find out for herself what happened. She’s already worked it out. When she went through Witches Hide, she moved forward in time. The stuff she’d read in the grimoire was all true. The witches from Lòn Haven put some kind of spell on the cave in revenge for the way they’d been treated, and rightly so. But now she’s in 2021. She’s spent time learning how to use the internet. Four weeks ago she found a Facebook page with her face on it. Find Saffy Stay!
There was a name on the “admin” section of page. Luna Stay. Luna had set it up. Luna was a grown woman, now. Saffy marveled at the thought of this—of course she was. It was 2020—Luna was thirty-two! And she was looking for her.
Saffy was astonished. At the click of a button, she had found her sister! She could go home, at long last. But Luna hadn’t responded to any of Saffy’s messages. Maybe she’d done it wrong.
She refused to be discouraged. The Facebook page proved that Luna had been looking for her, that she was out there. Perhaps, she thinks, if she retraces her steps, she’ll find her family.
In a public toilet she changes out of her school uniform into jeans and a shirt, then checks the cash she’s been squirreling away in her purse. The McKennas give her a weekly allowance on a credit card, but she’s been drawing it out. It’s taken such patience to do this instead of just bolting, but a credit card can be traced. She knows the route she has to take—a bus, then a train, then a ferry. And then she’ll be on Lòn Haven.
As she boards the bus, she checks the route on her phone, running a thumb over the image of the island. Her heart burns to find her family. How ironic, she thinks, that the whole time she was on Lòn Haven, she fantasized about running away, about leaving her mother and sisters, and now all she can think about is going back.
About throwing her arms around her mum and apologizing for being such a diva. About telling her sisters that she loves them and she’ll never, ever shout at them again.
LIV, 2021
A limpet is a creature without eyes, limbs, without so much as a brain, and yet it creates for itself a spot on the rock that is its home. It leaves its mark on that spot, wearing away the rock until its shell forms a perfect seal. The home scar.
Maybe time is like that. Maybe we always move exactly to where and when we belong, even without realizing it. It certainly feels like that for me. As though everything in my whole life has led me to where I am now.
Finn found me that day on the beach. Finn, who had left Lòn Haven for New Zealand many years before, who hadn’t so much as visited in twenty years, after being accused of having an affair with Saffy. Even after Rowan confessed to slipping the Polaroids through a gap in his car window, the rumors spread. He’d stayed in Auckland for twenty years, then decided on a whim to fly back to Lòn Haven to spend Christmas 2021 with Cassie. And that morning, he’d felt a pull to walk along the bay next to the Longing.
He saw a strange creature drag herself up the beach. He saw that she was injured, a horrific wound in her back, rough stitches holding together a hole the size of a fist. And when he bent down, he recognized me.
I used to tell myself that I regretted the choices I’d made in my life. But every choice, including the wrong ones, made me who I am. And the same applied to you, Luna, and you, Saffy, and you, Clover—both the good and bad experiences strengthened you, shaped you. We are not just made of blood and bone—we are made of stories. Some of us have our stories told for us, others write their own—you wrote yours.
Finn took me to the hospital, where they pumped me full of antibiotics and wheeled me into surgery. When they told me what year it was, I thought I was hallucinating.
2021.
I didn’t believe them until they showed me a newspaper with the date printed.
And the world had changed beyond recognition.
I drifted between consciousness and a black hole in which I was falling endlessly. When I woke, I tried to piece together the truth. The police came. They told me they’d found a burn on my shoulder, numbers painfully scored into it. I said that Patrick must have done it. He’d removed three of my ribs—what was a few small numbers carved into my skin? But they said Patrick Roberts was dead. He had been dead for years.
I remembered the numbers I’d found scratched on your leg, Luna. I’d thought they meant that you were a wildling. But I now had the same mark, numbers on my shoulder. The cave had done it.
The mark signified the year you’d been thrust into by whatever magic lingered in that cave.
Twenty-three years. I had been gone for twenty-three years.
I can’t tell you the grief that accompanied this realization. Finn told me you were all alive. The relief brought by this news spiraled quickly into sorrow. Who had raised you all these years? What had happened to you in the time I’d been absent? What must you all have thought?
I thought of the little boy I’d discovered in the cave. And all the children who’d gone missing on Lòn Haven. The wildlings. Most likely, they’d simply gone into the cave to explore. Then they’d fallen out the other side to another time. A day in the past, a century in the future.
The wildlings that people had murdered were their own children. They just didn’t understand how. The stories that had been passed down year upon year had given the people of Lòn Haven a way to make sense of what they saw: whenever a child disappeared, the stories of wildlings and witches provided a way of making connections between past and present.
But I’ve learned to be wary of easy connections. The best way to tell a false narrative, I think, is to consider how neatly cause and effect have been fastened together.
While I was in the hospital, they told me the cancer had spread to my liver and stomach. All they can do is extend my time. Is it weird that I found this ironic? I said yes to chemo, of course. I’ve been allowed to have it at Cassie’s home.
So you see, I kept my promise. I saw someone.
Finn tells me that Cassie had managed to track you down. He tells me, Luna, that you’ve just had your son, Charlie, and that Saffy and Clover are both with you. I can’t tell you how happy I was when he broke this news to me. He says you’re heading to Lòn Haven, even as I write. I know the ferries have had to be canceled on account of the winter weather; I’ve been thinking of that night the four of us had to sleep in my old Renault 5, the wind shaking the roof and the rain beating against the glass. I hated it at the time, and now I’d give anything to go back and spend one more second with you all.
Forgiveness is a kind of time travel, only better, because it sutures the wounds of the past with the wisdom of the present in the same moment as it promises a better future. I’ve traveled forward in time. I don’t know how. I’m only glad that I lived.
But I’m not sure if I’ll make it, Luna. I’m not sure I’ll be able to hang on long enough to see you one last time. I’m going to try. But if not, if I slip away before I get the chance to hold you again, I wanted to write down the story of what really happened on Lòn Haven.
As you’ll see, cause and effect in this tale do not fit easily together. The pieces are odd and misshaped because truth is messy and porous.
I want you to know that I never abandoned you. I want you to know that I’m sorry for being
deceived, even enough to take you into the woods. I think that everything I’ve done in my life has been pulling me back to you.
Right now, I’m sitting in Cassie’s living room watching cars move along the road at the bottom of the field, and every time I see someone my heart leaps. Snow has whitened the hills; already night has drawn a black curtain over the horizon. I’m wondering if you’ve chosen not to come. If you’ve decided that the years between us are too many, the trauma too great to put aside.
I’ll understand that, Luna. It will never make me stop loving you.
But now I see a woman walking up the garden path. There’s a baby strapped to her chest, and by her side is a little girl with red hair that dances in the wind. I feel a flash of recognition.
“Easy, Liv,” Finn says as I get up from my seat. “You need to rest.”
But I pull myself up, and he puts an arm around my waist to help me.
“It’s them,” I tell him, breathless. “It’s my daughters.”
LUNA, NOW
“We’re here, Charlie,” Luna tells her son, unclipping his seat belt and holding his hand as he jumps out.
“I’ll take the flowers, Mummy,” Charlie says.
She’s pregnant again, and on medication for the migraines that returned with a vengeance at the start of her second trimester. Luna only learned what they were when Ethan happened to mention them to one of his Pilates clients. She’d felt stupid, thinking that somehow Clover had been causing them. But then, she’d never had a migraine before she was pregnant, so how was she to know?
They walk through the graveyard, taking the familiar route past the huge oak tree with a twisted trunk and holes that Charlie can sometimes spy squirrels darting into. Their home is thirty minutes from here, a rustic, five-bedroomed villa on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon, with oak-beamed ceilings and views of the Malvern Hills. They moved a couple of years ago, just after she and Ethan spent a month in New Zealand instead of splashing out on a wedding. The flat was never going to be spacious enough for them all. Luckily, when Ethan set up his own Pilates studio, it took off, and they could finally buy a house.