The Stone Dweller's Curse: A Story of Curses, Madness, Obsession and Love

by Jacqueline Henry

  Deidre closed her eyes, remembering that one last look into Breeta’s amazing eyes, eyes that were the colour of the clear shallow sea on a warm summer’s day, the intensity of her gaze burned into her memory, those last precious moments stolen by impatience and fear.

  ‘Aido-urren.’ I love you.

  Bruises fade, blood coagulates, broken skin stitches together, broken bones mend, but the crippling anguish of grief, the sorrow of all that is lost wound the spirit and scar the soul for eternity.

  ‘You’ve found ‘er.’

  Deidre looked up, blinked the tears from her eyes, focussing on a dishevelled man standing on the other side of the burn looking back at her, his clothes shabby and threadbare, his dark eyes shaded under heavy brows.

  ‘George,’ she said, greeting him placidly, unsurprised, accepting of his presence. Her eyes shifted to the person standing silently at his side, a few steps behind. Donald Dunbar. James McLennan stood behind him, and further back, a woman in long skirts from another time; Meggie Anderson. And more, names she knew, souls, who like her, had been called upon through the centuries to come to this moment, this point of discovery. They all looked upon her and she could feel their gratitude, and their relief. At last, at last, they could rest.

  ‘Take ‘er t’where she belongs,’ George said.

  Deidre picked the body up, wet, heavy like a rubber mannequin and turned her back on her silent audience making her way across Muddow’s Field to the Priest’s chamber.

  Deidre laid Breeta on the ground before squeezing her way through the opening into the Priest’s chamber, the small torch lighting up the passage as she made her way through to the small inner room. She placed the torch on the floor, pointing upwards, the light spilling over the vaulted ceiling, filling the space with soft light. She looked across at Taran’s bones.

  ‘I’m bringing her home, Taran,’ she said and turned, heading down the passageway again.

  She carried Breeta in her arms, the glow from the inner chamber guiding her along the dark corridor. Entering the room, she knelt down at Taran’s side, placing Breeta beside him, bringing to an end a journey that had started over a thousand years ago.

  Deidre looked down on them, Taran’s memories her memories, his pain, his love, his loss all hers.

  ‘You have to let me go now Taran,’ she said and stood up, picking up the torch and heading down the passageway, leaving them together in the darkness, in eternity.

  One Week Later

  Deidre stood looking out the window, her fingertips gliding absently across the bare surface of the desk as she gazed out to the bay, the sun glinting off the water in shards of light.

  Tears burned in her dry eyes. They’d asked her to stay, just a little bit longer, but she’d declined. It was time to go home. She’d done what she’d come here to do, had done what had to be done. Now it was time to move on, go back, pick up the stitches of the fine gossamer fabric of the life she’d left behind in Sydney and make something of it.

  Turning away from the window, she gave the room one last final look, and although she’d done so at least half a dozen times already, she moved around the room pulling drawers out, looking under the bed, checking she’d left nothing behind.

  Opening the wardrobe doors, she peered into its dark corners, feeling along its high shelf, her reflection in the mirror catching her and she regarded the face looking back. Would her friends in Sydney say she’d changed, she wondered, for although she didn’t think she looked any older, she considered herself to be a lot more worldly. Her face had thinned, her cheekbones more prominent, her hair shorter, wavier, pushed up and away allowing her eyebrows the rights to the real estate of her forehead that they demanded. She liked this face staring back at her, she decided, a face that had been caressed by love, scarred by loss and enriched by experience. A different Deidre that had unpacked her bags in this room four months ago.

  Inhaling deeply, she exhaled as she closed the wardrobe door, turned and walked out of the room.

  Vee and the twins stood waiting at the bottom of the stairs, mopish smiles on their faces, Stuart lingering near the front door. Vee held her arms out, her round head tilted to one side, her smile lopsided. Deidre descended, walked into Vee’s open arms, returning the embrace.

  ‘I’m gonna miss you. It’s been great havin’ ye here.’

  Deidre nodded, stepping away, determined not to cry. She swallowed, gave herself a moment before she spoke. ‘Tell Gregory I’ve left the metal detector in the mud room. I know he’s had his eye on it. Just tell him to stay away from the bog. It’s dangerous and there’s nothing there to be found.’

  Vee nodded, her lips compressing. ‘Aye, so ye keep tellin’ us,’ she replied sceptically. ‘So even noo, yer walkin’ oot da door an’ yer still no gonna tell us whit happened oot der?’

  Deidre shrugged. ‘Nothing. I’ve told you, there’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Yer a lousy liar Deidre Hart,’ Vee said, shaking her head.

  Ignoring the comment, Deidre stepped up to Dot, ready to give the old woman a gentle hug, but Dot took hold of her hand instead, her rheumy eyes peering into Deidre’s.

  ‘If yer goin’ t’Lerwick, can ye get me a wee quarter pound bag of sweeties,’ she whispered, pressing a fifty pence coin into Deidre’s hand.

  ‘Deidre’s no coming back,’ Mavis intervened. ‘She’s goin’ hame.’

  Dot looked at her sister, her brows knitted in confusion. ‘Hame? Whit ur ye talkin’ aboot, Mavis?’ She looked back at Deidre in bemusement.

  ‘She’s goin’ back t’Australia,’ Mavis explained patiently.

  ‘Australia?’ Dot questioned, her old face screwed up in confusion. ‘But der’s kangaroos in Australia,’ she replied inexplicably.

  Deidre smiled at the old lady, reached out and wrapped her arms around her bony shoulders. ‘I’ll bring you some sweeties back,’ she whispered into Dot’s ear, knowing that Dot would have forgotten her very existence before she’d left the car park.

  Turning to Mavis, she wrapped her arms around her, giving her a long hard hug, Mavis holding her for just as long, just as hard.

  ‘Thank you Mavis,’ Deidre said, releasing her from her embrace. ‘Thank you for everything.’

  Nodding, Mavis turned her eyes downwards, looking at the floorboards, a hand furtively wiping at her cheeks. She looked up, and Deidre could see her cheeks glisten in the late morning light streaming in through the open front door. ‘Jist don’t forget aboot us,’ Mavis said, a tremulous smile twitching on her lips, her chin quivering just slightly. She reached out, taking Deidre’s hand. ‘Yer no jist a tourist, yer family remember, so mind ye keep in touch. Der’s always a room here fur ye. Jist come back afore dey put me in da grun.’

  ‘I will, I promise,’ Deidre replied, returning the old woman’s tight grip on her hand. Mavis didn’t let go, continuing to look up at Deidre, holding her gaze.

  ‘Get in contact wi’ Dylan, lass. Don’t let dat pass.’

  Deidre nodded, easier than arguing the point. It had been over three months since Dylan had turned his back and walked away from her out there on that desolate headland. There’d been no word from him since, not even an sms, so she had a fair idea of where their relationship stood – on two opposite sides of the world.

  Regardless, he’d come into her thought’s often over the past week, the way flashes of memory come at random moments the day after a drunken night before. That was how she’d felt for the past week, as though she was still waking up, coming to after months of being anesthetised, memories prickling in her mind like blood flowing back into a numb limb.

  That was all she had, memories, and the shell he’d given her on the beach so long ago, packed carefully into her hand luggage, treasured, a keepsake of a sweet, brief, intense holiday romance that had happened so fast, she hadn’t even stopped to take a picture of him. She thought it would have lasted longer.

  ‘Ok, well I’d better get going, or I’ll miss that ferry,’ she said, steppin
g towards the door.

  They followed her to the doorstep, stopped, Stuart escorting her to the car.

  ‘So ye’ve got everyting den? Ye hivnae left anyting behind dat yer gonna need?’

  Deidre shook her head.

  ‘Cause if ye hiv, yer gonna hiv t’come back n’pick it up,’ he added, his periwinkle blue eyes smiling at her, his woolly hair moving like dandelion fronds in the slight wind.

  ‘I’m coming back Stuart. I don’t know when just yet, but I will be back. This place means a lot to me,’ she said, her eyes taking in the façade of Stayne House and the small group of inhabitants standing on its stoop. ‘It has a very special place in my heart, and my psyche. This is where my roots are.’

  A short silence fell between them before Deidre stepped forward, wrapping her arms around his broad shoulders. ‘I’m gonna miss you Stuart. Thank you for sticking by me,’ she said into his ear.

  Stuart held her, his embrace tightening. ‘Och, lass, I’m gonna miss you,’ he said, an emotional throatiness thickening his words.

  They parted and Deidre got into the car and turned on the ignition, sliding the window down. She reversed out, sticking her hand out the window, waving goodbye as she rolled away from Stayne House.

  Driving slowly around the bay, she pulled the car to the side of the road outside the walls of Haardale kirk, switched off the ignition, stepped out and headed into the graveyard, stopping at George Hart’s headstone.

  She crouched down beside it, her hand reaching out, resting on the cold earth.

  ‘Goodbye George,’ she said, ‘I’m glad I met you.’ She stood, pushing her hands into her pockets and headed back to the car.

  Two Summers Later

  Flying into a late Shetland summer, the journey across the Atlantic from Aberdeen had been fodder for undreamt nightmares. Treacherous weather besieged the archipelago, high winds halting the ferries, stranding Deidre on the mainland for a further two days with nothing to do other than watch bad tv and stare irritably out the hotel window as the rain lashed against the pane like hundreds of tiny whip ends.

  Using her pseudonym email address of Bree Taran, the name she’d booked her four week stay under, she advised Stayne House of her delay. She hadn’t told them she was coming, her plan being to just arrive there and surprise them.

  The two day delay had been frustrating but now, at last, she was travelling, the weather still miserable, the rain still falling but the winds had eased, the ferries transporting again. Driving to the top of the mainland, she ferried across to Yell, upwards, northwards.

  Unst.

  The tight ball of anticipation contracted in her stomach as the car rolled off the ferry, the rain greying out the landscape before her, this landscape she’d walked over hundreds of nights in her sleep.

  In her waking hours, in her daily life, her mind would wander off at the most unexpected and inappropriate times, in meetings, driving, in social situations; her thoughts taking excursions along the Coffin Road, or resting contemplatively on Muddow’s Table looking out past The Peg to the unending sea beyond. Her attention would teeter on the precipice of Erdiness, her memory chiselling away at the marks she’d carved into the monolith. Frequently, she found herself absorbed deep in the bog, waking from dreams where she was still out there in the cold, the rain, the wind, surrounded by the smell and the sound of the sea, the infinite sky, waking to the sound of the metal detector beep beeping in her mind to find it was only her alarm clock.

  She’d returned to her father’s house, the air dusty and stale, familiar and strange. Her friends were much the same and she realised very soon that she was the one who’d changed, not them. They were living the same lives, the same dramas she wasn’t much interested in anymore, the rapport she'd once had with them rusty and stiff, like an old bike she’d left out in the rain, forgotten. And again, she found herself lost, adrift, in the same place she was in before she’d left for Unst.

  She missed the cold little isle, she longed for the company of Stuart and Mavis and Dot and Vee. Dylan. In those first months back in Sydney she thought often of returning, ached for the shelter of Stayne House, the bond and support, the warmth of those people she now considered her family.

  But she knew she couldn’t return, not yet. Shetland was in the grip of its cold dark winter, alien to her. Her life was here in Sydney, summertime of hot days and warm balmy evenings, the place where she’d grown up and now felt severed from, the connection lost. Seeking normality she continued on, persevered, her life becoming a little bit more familiar to her each day. She found herself a job, admin at a small packaging company in Parramatta. Spoiling herself, she bought a new car, an Audi A3, changed the colour of her hair to a lighter shade of dark and had her eyebrows professionally sculpted.

  But it did not work. She remembered still the tingling effervescence of joy she had once felt which only highlighted the flat, uninspired drudge of her current day to day existence.

  She filled her time on the internet, started a course in archaeology and studied the history of the Shetland Islands, reading long, dull, scholarly dissertations on the Pictish people who had once inhabited the isles, her conclusion being that these scholars knew very little of the lives of the Picts, not the way she did. She had lived, experienced that life in minute detail through Taran’s eyes, giving her a billionaire’s wealth of information and come Shetland’s next summer, she decided, she would return to the valley and unearth Betarra and bring to light the lives of the people who’d been obliterated from the memory of history. She would make them known. She would tell their story.

  Then Peter Hamm came into her life on the Australia Day long weekend at a barbeque held by her new boss. It had been an expectation that she make an appearance at this social gathering, so she did, her plan being to stay for an hour or two, eat a sausage and leave. Instead, she’d been one of the last to depart after exchanging phone numbers with Peter Hamm, a friend of the brother of her new boss’s wife.

  She’d been sitting on the edge of a lounge chair by the pool gazing into the water wondering how much longer she should stay when Peter Hamm had approached her and stood in front of her, blocking out the sun.

  ‘Did you get that call?’ he’d asked. She’d squinted up at his silhouette, her hand shading her eyes, questioning what he meant. ‘All you’ve done all afternoon is check your phone,’ he’d continued before boldly sitting down beside her with no regard to personal space. ‘I thought you were waiting for an important call.’ He wore a crushed white linen shirt, cargo shorts and tan suede loafers, his light brown hair short and messy on top, thick with product, his eyes hidden behind dark wraparound sunglasses.

  She'd noticed him earlier in the day, had noticed the way he’d walked across the patio with the slow, swaggering, heel-shuffling gait of a cowboy. She’d liked it, had a brief notion of his attractiveness and hadn’t thought about him after that. Now he was sitting beside her and she wondered why he was talking to her?

  They’d chatted for the rest of the afternoon, nothing deeper than the general social chit chat at first before delving into more personal, getting to know you subjects. He was a logistics manager for a large supermarket chain, divorced and the father of a five year old girl, Jemma, his ex-wife having custody. Deidre offered only basic information about herself, single, in the middle of readying her late father’s house for sale with the view to finding a two-room apartment – somewhere. Skimming over her time on Unst, she stated merely that she had been travelling for a few months, spending some time with ‘family’ in the north of Scotland. Peter Hamm didn’t enquire too much into her private life, didn’t probe. Peter Hamm liked to talk about himself, what he did, what he liked, what he knew. But he was amusing, he made her laugh, he occupied her mind and he filled her time.

  Five months later, she’d sold Douglas Hart’s house, bought a three bedroom townhouse in Thornleigh and was sleeping on an almost nightly basis beside Peter Hamm, who’d almost, but not quite, moved in.

 
; She’d moved on. She was in love. Lust. Love. Lust. Was there a difference?

  Keeping in touch with Vee and Mavis, she exchanged regular emails, spouting lyrical of how happy she was with her new life, sending pictures of herself and Peter, the happy, loved up couple. They asked when she was coming back to visit. Soon, she’d replied. Soon. But not this year. The Shetland summer had been and gone and another Christmas was fast approaching.

  But every night she returned to the valleys behind Ayres Kame, weeping and whimpering in her sleep, crying out some nights until Peter shook her awake. It wasn’t normal for a person to suffer from such frequent and disturbing dreams he said, suggesting there must be some underlying issues she was refusing to acknowledge. He suggested counselling and she’d laughed, ‘they’re just dreams,’ she said, dismissing the idea, ‘I’ve already forgotten them by the time I wake up.’

  Lies. She often wondered what his response would be were she to confess what the dreams were really about. Wondered how he would react if she recounted the horrors she’d seen inflicted by barbaric marauders on the inhabitants of a tiny isle over a thousand years ago. If she described to him the sound of suffering animals and screaming mothers, or the sickening sight of a small child being tossed in the air like a stuffed toy. If she explained in detail the torture of blood wings. How could she possibly tell him that she knew minute details about the lives of a decimated ancient race of people, that she knew where their stone dwellings lay hidden under the earth, untouched and that she knew where their remains lay?