“I warned you,” my father says.
I wipe my mouth and look again, trying not to look at Jim this time.
Instead I see the others. Three men lie sprawled, torn from where they’d leaned out of windows to shoot, holes in their throats like leering mouths, their heads almost severed. Their wounds have been blackened by the moonlight, their faces unrecognizable.
In the house beside Giles’s the lower windows have been smashed. I spot two different earasaids caught on the glass where they’ve been ripped away from their owners’ bodies. The houses themselves seem still, silent, and I try to piece together what happened.
While one was trying to get at me, the others must have attacked the shooters, pulling them down and breaking the lower windows to get inside. They must have taken some of the people. Stock for the larder, I think grimly. The survivors must have fled deeper into the house. I hope.
Please let Ren and Gavan and Maggie be all right.
“They got one,” my father says, breaking into my thoughts.
I look out again, this time at the cage, and find to my surprise that he’s right. Cowering in the corner, one of the creatures is caught, doing its best to make itself as small as it can. It’s the young one, I realize. Short and slim, hunched over so its pelt looks like clothes…
“Alva, get away from the window,” my father says again. “Don’t look.”
But his voice is different this time. The command isn’t a command; it’s not made out of annoyance, or fear for me. It takes me a second or two to place the tone.
It’s a plea.
I see it then – another young one, slinking into the square, skirting around the edges of the buildings, trying to remain in the shadows. Smaller, again with that same strange covering over its head and back. Except this one’s arms are bare, fair in the moonlight.
“Alva,” my father says. “Please.”
The creature looks up at me, and I see my mother.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Alva,” my father says.
It isn’t possible. He killed her. I heard the gun go off four times. I heard him taking her body outside to the loch.
My mother is dead.
My mother is looking at me.
She’s changed and unchanged all at once. What I took for a pelt is clothes, and hair, plastered to her body with water, or grease. Now I know what I’m looking at I can see her moon-pale skin between rents in the blouse.
The creature in the cage looks up, and a new wave of horror breaks over me when I see it’s wearing James Ballantyne’s face. I understand now why Jim Ballantyne didn’t scream, why he reached out to it. He thought it was his son.
Shots are fired somewhere opposite, and both my father and I scream for them to stop. I’m at the bars again, face pressed against them, body mashed against the wall to get as close as I can. The creature that is my mother continues to look at me, black eyes vacant, then turns and runs. Faster than a normal person, but not as fast as the others. The original ones.
“How?” I say. There is silence from next door. But now I understand why he didn’t want to tell anyone about the loch level dropping. Why he went out, alone, to hunt. Why he wanted me to stay inside.
Why he closed the book to keep Giles from seeing the òlanfhuil existed.
He knew she was one of them. That somehow, she’d stopped being us, and started being monster.
I listen as the bed in the room next door to mine creaks as weight is removed from it: my father stepping down from the window. I do the same and walk to the door, sitting against the wall between us. I have a feeling on the other side, my father is mirroring my position.
“How?” I say again.
He clears his throat. “I’ll have to go back to the beginning,” he says. “It’s a long story.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” I say, and he gives a small laugh.
“You remember that she wasn’t right, after we lost the bairn…” He pauses. “Jim Ballantyne told me it was to be expected, after such a loss – his Ada had lost a baby between two of their sons. Jim said the best thing to do was be normal, give her space and keep up the routine, and she’d rally. That had worked on his Ada. So I did. I was sad too, don’t get me wrong. Desperately so. But I didn’t have time to grieve.”
“Why?”
“Well, there was you to think of, and your mam couldn’t care for you. And it was the year Giles opened the mill,” he says. “It was a success. A huge one. But it took a toll on the loch; the sheer amount of water the wheel sucked in for steaming and pulping, and it was a hot summer. We fought daily about it; I’d finish my rounds and go down with the report, begging him to slow down, and he’d tell me to deal with it, as if I could just magic more water from the sky.” He hesitates. “He relished it. Having the power, and the control. Making it impossible for me to do my job, knowing the responsibility was mine. And then we lost the baby.”
Giles must have been jubilant – everything was falling apart for us. Maybe he thought if he could break my father, ruin him, then my mother would finally crawl to him.
“You remember she went for walks, around the loch?” he says.
“I remember.”
“I thought it was good for her. The air, and the water. Space for her to grieve. I thought it was a good sign she wanted to get out. And it was – she was coming back to herself, I could see it.
“Then that last night she came home and she was different. Angry. I thought at first that was good too; anything was better than the silence, and the nothingness. I was wrong. She was changing. One of them must have bitten her.”
“Wait.” I interrupt him as something terrible occurs to me. “Did you know about them? Did you know they were there?”
“Yes—”
“And you didn’t tell her? You didn’t tell me?” I’m sickened, shaking my head as if that might keep the knowledge away. “The loch level was falling and you didn’t warn us what might happen? You let her go out?”
“It’s not how you think,” he says hurriedly. “I knew they used to be real, because I saw the same logs you found when I wasn’t much older than you. But I didn’t really believe they were still out there. I thought surely they must have died inside the mountain. Centuries had passed, Alva. Nothing is supposed to live that long. It was only after I saw her change before my eyes that I realized what must have happened. So, aye, I suppose it was my fault. But not like you think. Maybe if I’d paid more heed to the books, and realized what it meant that the loch was drying out… Maybe…”
He falls silent. And I find I believe him, because if he’d told me they existed before I’d seen them, I wouldn’t have believed it either, even if I had seen the logs. I would have chalked it up to folklore, or ignorance. Ancient people using monsters to explain what they couldn’t understand. Yet all the while the creatures were waiting. Biding their time.
They would have been weaker, surely, after so many years trapped. Still stronger than a grieving human woman, but she’d managed to get away. Not told us. Kept it to herself. Returned home and began to change. Over the course of minutes, or hours. That’s why they have two sets of teeth, I think. One is for eating and one is for making us like them. I was right; they are just like snakes, poison in their fangs.
Last night Cora saw one of them bite James – and tonight he’s down in the square, trapped. It’s in the bite.
“They can turn us?” I ask. “Make us like them?”
“If they don’t kill us outright.”
I think of Cora. Maybe I was wrong; maybe she isn’t supposed to be food. Maybe they want something else from her.
“Is that why you shot her, then? That night?”
“I didn’t shoot her. She came at me, teeth bared. I tried – if she’d got past me she could have got to you, but I couldn’t do it, even seeing what was happening to her. I fired four times, but I shot wild – there are holes in the wall from the bullets. I put the window out, too.”
I try to remember the
room, try to recall any marks on the walls, but they’re covered in floral paper. I expect you’d have to look closely to see them.
There was no blood. There should have been, if he’d shot her, an obscene amount, but there wasn’t. Not even a drop. I stare into the distance, astounded that I’ve never realized this before. I remember glass on the floor, and the gun, still warm when I picked it up, but no blood.
“She went out through the window. I went outside to look for her, but she was gone – to them, I suppose. Some instinct in her calling her home to them after she changed, or back to where she was attacked. And the next day the rain came, and kept coming, so the loch refilled. Stayed full. They were trapped again.”
“Until now.”
“Until now,” he agrees.
All these years he’s known. And kept it to himself. Let everyone believe what they wanted and watched the loch, wondering if they’d come back. If she’d come back.
He told me she left in the night, and she did. I asked if she’d come back, and he said he didn’t know.
It was the truth. All this time, it was the truth.
“You should have told me.” I mean he should have told me about Mam, but he misunderstands, thinking I mean the creatures.
“I would have, when you came into your majority. I would have told you everything, even about her. I would have made sure you understood. There’s a tradition, passed down Naomhfhuil to Naomhfhuil. We spend three nights out by the loch, near the mountain. It’s a rite of passage to tell the old stories and pass the knowledge on. I would have shown you the logs you found. After that, part of your job would have been to study the books. Learn the symbols.” He pauses. “That’s if you’d wanted to be the Naomhfhuil.”
I never realized that was a choice. “I think I figured out some of the symbols,” I say. “The moon represented the moon phase, didn’t it? And the flowers were what was in season at the time?”
“That’s right.” His voice is warm. Proud. “That’s exactly right.”
“What else is in there?”
“All kinds of things. I’ll show you—” He stops. He can’t show me. Not if Giles has him hanged.
“But she’s not dead. We saw her. All we have to do is show Giles, and he’ll have to let you go. She’s the proof you’re innocent.”
In his silence a voice whispers in the back of my mind that it doesn’t matter – Giles won’t ever let him go, not now that he has him.
“Is there some kind of cure?” I say. “What if we can bring her back? Then she can tell him herself. There must be something in the logs…”
He’s quiet for a long, long time. “I looked. Of course I looked.”
“And?”
“We’ll look again. Together. When this is all over.”
There’s something in his voice – the tenderness of a father trying to convince his daughter that everything will be all right. It’s too bad that he’s lying.
“I wish you wouldn’t lie to me,” I say softly. “I’m not a kid any more.”
“Oh, Alva,” my father tries to comfort me. But he can’t. There is no comfort to be found here.
The ones they don’t kill become like them, swelling their ranks. My mother. James. I think of Gavan; he was bitten, how long before he becomes one?
I was frightened before, imagining them reaching Balinkeld and beyond under cover of darkness. But now it’s worse. Because every time they reach a new place, their numbers will grow. They’ll just keep moving, and increasing, like a disease through the land. Winter will come and there will be no stopping them. No lucky horseshoes, no bullets or…
My thoughts freeze.
Silver horseshoes on the houses.
Silver bullets in the gun.
Silver.
“The gun,” I say aloud. “The gun you fired that night, with the revolving barrel. Are the bullets silver?”
“How do you – you have it?” my father says, surprised. “I thought she must have taken it somehow… Yes, they’re silver. Silver is the only thing that works against them, according to legend. I bought her the gun when we got married – it’s traditional for the Naomhfhuil to give their spouse something silver when they wed.”
“And you chose a gun that fired silver bullets?”
“It’s what she asked for. She wanted a gun of her own. Do you still have it?”
“It’s at the cottage.” I think. I hope.
“We’ll need it.”
“We need to get out of here first,” I reply.
Then I catch myself, and fall silent. We. He’s been my enemy for so long, I can’t imagine him as my ally now. But he is. He always has been. We’ve wasted so much time.
“You didn’t kill her,” I say aloud. It feels important to say it.
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.” That feels important too. “I thought… For so long … I thought you did. I was scared.”
“Because you thought I’d kill you too?” He sounds so sad.
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
“You did what you had to. I understand,” he says. “Come here.”
I press my face to the bars of the door and see he’s pushed his arm through, his hand extended towards me. I do the same, taking it. His hands are bigger than mine, the skin rough from years of work. His fingers feel cold, and I remember guiltily that I still have both blankets. The last time I held my father’s hand I was nine.
It doesn’t last long; I assume he’s in the same position as me, pressed flat against the wall, shoulder contorted to be able to reach, but it’s good while it does. There’s so much more I want to say: that I was planning to run away, that now I don’t think I need to. That he wasn’t far off when he thought Ren was courting me, and that I’m not against it. That Maggie Wilson is actually not a harridan.
But I don’t say any of it. I’m too superstitious. It feels like tempting fate. Like I’d be saying goodbye, when it’s hello that’s needed. We’re strangers to each other, for all that he’s my father. But there will be time to fix it. We will have chance to mend this and heal. We just have to get through the next bit.
We don’t speak for the rest of the night, but it’s all right. For the first time in a long time it’s a good, healthy silence, the fever between us broken. Maybe he sleeps, but I don’t. Instead I put a plan together in my mind.
Once Maggie lets me out, I’ll take her aside and tell her everything. My father is safe enough in gaol, but I’ll make sure someone brings him good food and better blankets. I need to get back to the cottage and get my gun and my bag.
I have eight silver bullets. That’s not enough, but if we round up every bit of silver in Ormscaula, every spoon and ring, every belt buckle and heirloom, and melt them down, I bet Iain-the-Smith can make more. Enough for every single one of those things. Enough for every gun in Ormscaula. I’ll sit outside their den for however long it takes to put one in each of them as they come out. And while they try to stop me – because I’m sure they will – a rescue party can go in and get Cora and any other survivors.
I hear shouting outside and rise stiffly, calling, “Da.”
The sky is beginning to lighten and I can see the shapes hurrying around the cage, carrying rolls of paulin, or oilcloth. As I watch, they unroll them, throwing them over the cage and covering it to keep the creature that used to be James from burning. He, or it, I suppose, is still cowering, and for a moment I feel sorry for it. I wonder how much of James Ballantyne is left in there. I wonder what it remembers – did it know who Jim was when it killed him? I wonder if it can still speak.
I wonder if she can.
Once the cage is covered, the men approach it, clearly nervous. They lift it and Iain, and three others, including beanpole Dizzy Campbell, carry the cage towards the gaol. Of course, they’re bringing it here. Where else could they take it? Where else is built to keep things in?
As they move it, I catch sight of Giles Stewart, standing back out of harm’s way, watching. Ange
r blossoms inside me, a blood-red flower of fury and vengeance, my heart screaming for it. Like he senses it, he turns towards the gaol and looks up. I know he sees me and my father by the way he smiles. It slithers over his face like a snake, there and gone in a flash. Smiling in triumph though his best friend and likely others are dead. He can’t hide his happiness that we are trapped here.
He keeps his eyes on me as he walks towards the gaol, and then he’s gone from sight, inside the building, following the men and the cage.
I return to the cell door and wait.
TWENTY-FIVE
I’m still locked in when they start to torture the thing that used to be James Ballantyne.
The sounds it – he – whatever he is now – makes are hideous. My skin crawls, chills riding my spine with every piercing shriek. It sounds as if it’s in agony, as if they’re peeling its skin away, holding flaming brands against its flesh.
He was one of us, until two nights ago, I think. It hasn’t taken the people of Ormscaula long to forget that.
I remember Gavan questioning whether the òlanfhuil were monsters and how angry I felt at the idea they might not be.
The creature gives a piteous, mewling whine, and something inside me snaps.
“Let me out!” I bellow, swinging the bucket against the bars with all the strength I have in my right arm.
There’s a lull in the noise from below, as if they’ve heard me, but the screams begin again and no one comes.
“They’re going to leave me here,” I say.
“Maggie won’t let that happen,” my father insists.
But as the cells fill with light, the sun rising over the mountain, still no one comes. They must have covered the windows below because the òlanfhuil is still making sounds, though now it’s a constant, anguished keening that’s somehow worse. There’s an emptiness to it, as if whatever was alive in it has fled and all that’s left is pain and noise. It becomes too much, and I have to cover my ears and hum, bent over myself, to keep from going mad.
It’s while I’m bent that someone comes, and it’s only when I feel a hand on my shoulder that I jerk upright, almost smashing Murren Ross’s nose.
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