As if in reply to my pessimism, my left hand drummed out the repeating beat on the steering wheel. The engine took up the beat, wheels alternately gripping then sliding on the road surface in an almost balletic bump and grind. By the time we went through Edinbane, the wipers had joined in, and I was singing at the top of my voice, a nonsense scat vocal, but one that perfectly stayed in time. The snow came in waves, on beat, against the windshield and we danced all the way home.
I was quite exhausted by the time I pulled into the barn. It was getting dim—the forty-five minutes it normally took me had stretched and elongated into almost two hours in the snow, but I had a smile on my face as I got out of the car and turned towards the house.
There was somebody waiting for me, out on the shore, obscured in the midst of a whirling funnel of snow and spray, standing right where the old crofter’s cottage used to be.
Beth?
I ran across the snow-covered yard, noticing, despite my haste, that mine were the only footprints.
Beth?
I could almost touch her. She had her back to me, and wore a long cloak that reached from neck to ankles. Her hair was up, in a tight bun pinned by a single piece of what looked like white bone, and she seemed shorter somehow, more stocky.
But who else could it be?
I reached forward, arms wide, eager for an embrace.
A wind got up off the loch, whipping spray and sleet into my face. I brushed it away with my sleeve and blinked.
I was alone on the shore, standing on the fresh rubble above the filled-in root cellar.
* * *
I spent the next hour standing at the French windows, looking out over the shore. All I saw was snow and spray, but I stood there until the light went out of the sky completely. The snow turned to sleet that washed down the windows, turning everything into a soft-focus blur. I finally turned away when rain started beating the repeating pattern on the window.
That night, I heard the pattern everywhere; in the rushing water when I ran the tap, in the hum of the microwave as I heated a pizza, in the crackle and hiss as damp logs burned in the fireplace, and in the constant drumming of sleety rain against the windows. My fingers beat against the arm of the sofa in sympathetic rhythm.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
When I realized that I was now also tapping my foot in time, I made a conscious effort to take control. I fetched a beer from the fridge and set off a movie on the laptop—a big, overblown and bombastic Hollywood mind-number.
The explosions kept time with the beat.
When the movie finished, the laptop, without any intervention on my part, started up my program, but only playing the eight repeater parts. I switched off the machine and pulled the power cord from the socket.
I went to bed with the beat thudding in my chest and ears.
I couldn’t sleep. The storm ramped up outside. Snow spattered against the bedroom window and a gale howled, strong enough to cause the hatchway in the ceiling above my bed to rattle.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
I drifted in a half-awake, half-asleep doze, scarcely aware that my fingers were drumming on the bedclothes, my legs twitching. I was lost in a dance, and this time I was not going to be able to escape for air.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
Shadows capered and swirled on the ceiling, impossible shadows, for there was no moonlight to cast them, just snow and wind and the waters of the loch that now splashed in step on the rocks of the shore. A light went on in the main living area, dim, flickering and diffuse. The laptop program started up, beeping the beats in an impossibly loud chorus far beyond the range of the machine’s speakers. The whole house shook and rattled.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
The bed bounced in time. Above the cacophony, I heard the quietest of creaks in the doorway and turned my head.
She stood there, silhouetted against the flickering from the laptop, a dim, almost smoky figure, her cape draped around her.
I stretched out my arms.
She came to me.
5
The next morning dawned crisp and clear. I woke when the sparrows started tapping on the bedroom window. I felt groggy, decidedly hungover, and confused. I could still feel her against my body, the weight and heft of reality; I smelled her hair, tasted the salt on the skin at her neck. It hadn’t been Beth—it was sex, pure, simple, fantasy sex, and I felt as if I’d just betrayed Beth’s memory.
It was only a dream.
I staggered into the living area. The laptop was switched off, the cord still unplugged from the wall—never mind that I knew for a fact I’d already erased the beeping program. Outside the French windows the snow lay, several inches thick now, the only tracks in it the small scribbling left by the sparrows’ dances. I half expected to see her standing there over the rubble of the cottage cellar, but there was just the flat, cold, calm loch, a fine mist wafting across it like a thin veil.
Over the morning, I started to build a rationalized story in my head—one that involved too little sleep, too much booze and just the right confluence of old stories and coincidences to come to a head with an appearance of the woman in my bed. By lunchtime I had convinced myself it was no more than a fugue state, a momentary lapse in my critical faculties.
I made up a sandwich and a pot of coffee, dressed warmly, and went out onto the patio to try to clear my head. I looked over to the woodpile, hoping for a sight of my little friendly stoat.
He wouldn’t ever be joining me in the mornings again. The small body lay draped over the topmost log, covered by a thin layer of snow. I went over for a closer look—the poor thing was frozen stiff to the wood, small eyes staring at me, accusingly.
* * *
I spent the rest of the day catching up with friends online. They’d had a variety of festive periods—family fights, stuck in airports, big party that was still ongoing, two new best friends and one impending divorce. Just like any other Christmas. I told them about the dance in Portree, and Alan’s mum’s cooking, and they made the appropriate displays of jealousy, but no one asked about Beth, and I didn’t—I couldn’t—speak of my nocturnal visitor.
“It was just a dream,” I told the urn on the mantel. “It didn’t mean anything.”
I found that I was hungry, ravenously so. The meager fare in my fridge and cupboards couldn’t compare to what was on offer at Alan’s parents’, but I managed to get a meat stew going, the aromas filling the house most of the afternoon and early evening. I built a fire in the grate after fetching fresh wood—I had to move the log to which the stoat was frozen to one side, unsure how to dispose of the tiny body, leaving the decision for another time. By the time I served up the stew, it was getting dark again outside. I closed the curtains against the night and tried to lose myself in a book.
It wasn’t long before I noticed my left-hand fingers drumming on the book’s spine.
I put on the radio, listening to old favorites telling even older jokes on Radio 4, but whereas I usually found them amusing, tonight they sounded mocking—aging chimps chattering to other aging chimps about the follies of the young. I switched to a classical station and got something Russian, but the rhythm all too quickly synchronized with my finger-drummer. I tried a movie—rugged individual wisecracks his way through a tired old plot to save the U.S. president and get his wife back.
I wish it were that easy.
The urn on the mantel rattled in time to the gunfire, my fingers drummed the repeater beat, and the pressure in my head grew and grew until it was all I could do not to scream.
I drew back the curtains and stared out over the moonlit loch. It all looked so calm and serene, an opposite to the storm of the night before. Silver glistened on the ice-crisp snow, myriad dancing sparkles mirroring the sta
rry sky above. I went outside to revel in the dark beauty of it, ignoring the chill that immediately threatened to knife all the way down to bone, willing to endure it for some seconds of magic.
My fingers finally stilled and my head emptied of everything but the sea and stars. I stood there as long as I could, allowing silence to fill me, before the cold finally drove me inside. Not even the accusing eyes of the stoat could dent my feeling of peace in that perfect moment.
It didn’t last, of course. Nothing does. But that night I had the best night’s sleep for several months, and I woke refreshed.
I found a soot mark on the bathroom mirror the next morning.
No head, right leg missing.
* * *
The days between the resuming of the soot marks and the New Year passed in a blur. The marks appeared with increasing regularity, not confined to first thing in the morning, and turning up all over the house. It took most of my energy, and then some more, to keep pace. I started drinking heavier, trying to blot out the ever-increasing drumming that was building again, and threatening to turn me into a quivering, twitching mess. Standing outside the patio door always calmed me, for a time at least, but it never took long for my hand to twitch and drum and the repeater to start up again.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
You may ask why I stayed—in those days just after Christmas I regularly asked myself the same question. At first it was because I found I was tired of running, and that a part of me wondered whether everything that was happening was unfinished business between Beth and me.
Later, I stayed because I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
As I said, I started drinking a lot—half a bottle of Talisker and a handful of beers most days, enough to ensure my sleep would be more akin to a coma and therefore undisturbed by visitors.
I woke on the morning of the thirtieth of December to find the whole bathroom wall covered in soot marks. It had got so that I could immediately pick out the repeater among the chaos. It was there, three times.
More messages I did not know what to do with.
I logged on to the laptop, thinking of starting to catalogue this new phenomenon, maybe even start a new grid. I didn’t have to. It was there in a new e-mail—a hundred and twenty-eight lines of eight figures, the repeater clearly standing out thirteen times. I gave in to the inevitable and rewrote my program, coding it to play this latest message. I changed the beeps to a drumbeat sound I downloaded from an online source—a kettledrum, big, meaty and deep in the bass register. I hooked the laptop up to my stereo system speakers and started the program. I left the volume low, but even then I heard it anywhere I went in the house, whispering straight into my bones.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
I took the whisky bottle outside, closed the doors behind me and stood, back to the windows, staring sightlessly out across the loch as the glass vibrated in rhythm against my spine.
6
The morning of the last day of the old year brought thick mist across the loch. I’d had no real sleep to speak of for several days and existed in a mental fog that perfectly matched the weather. The laptop kept up an incessant accompaniment to my whisky-induced headache, and the urn on the mantel danced in sympathy.
At least the soot marks had stopped again, now that the long message had been delivered, but there had, as yet, been no answer to the incessant drumbeats from the stereo system, and I was unsure how much longer my frayed nerves were going to last out.
I took coffee and toast out onto the patio and sat there, getting damp in the fog being preferable to being indoors with the drumming. A pair of sparrows came down and waited for me to drop some crumbs, but even they seemed somehow dull and puppet-like, almost parodies of their former excitable selves. The stoat still glared at me with a frozen, dead stare, as if I had been at fault for the vagaries of the weather that had brought its doom, and the waters of the loch lapped listlessly against the rocks.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
My phone rang while I was drinking my coffee but I didn’t answer—the caller ID said it was Alan, and he’d just want to know what I was planning for the festivities. I had no plans, beyond going slowly crazy and drinking what little booze I had left in the house, but if I told him that, he’d only try to get me to go to a party, and I was in no fit state to face polite, or even impolite, company.
I finished the coffee and, rather than go back inside, took a stroll down to the shore. I was thinking of the summer, and the glorious day out on the water fishing. It seemed like a lifetime ago, and felt like a story someone had told me rather than something I had experienced. I knew the details, but I couldn’t conjure up any of the emotions—the magic had gone, been sucked out of me by the rhythm. I came to a halt at the realization, wondering how I had got so jaded, so quickly.
The drumbeat got louder—the volume control on the stereo had just been twisted, and the house pounded out the rhythm at my back, faster now, more insistent, an imperative I could not ignore.
I felt it, throbbing even through the soles of my feet. I looked down.
I stood on the rubble, right on top of the old root cellar of the crofter’s cottage. The beat got louder still, pounding like a fist against my skull, jarring every bone in my body as it came up from below.
There was one last repeated eight, then it cut off, as if someone indoors had pulled the plug.
I looked down at my feet again. The rubble had been loosened, and I had sunk a good six inches into a new hollow over the top of the cellar.
I had just got another message.
* * *
I wasted no time in getting started, and at first it was simple enough. By kneeling at the side of the cellar I could bend, lift a stone or handful of pebbles, and toss them over my shoulder onto the shore, some of them even getting as far as the water where my digging was accompanied by infrequent splashes. But after only ten minutes of that my shoulders ached, my fingers were numb and frozen, and dampness soaked my trousers from ankle to thigh. And I had barely made a dent in the rubble that choked the cellar. I was going to be of no use at all if I developed hypothermia.
Reluctantly, I stood and made for the house, casting glances over my shoulder, expecting to see her standing there, waiting for my return.
I dressed more appropriately—my painting overalls over the top of dry trousers and shirt, gloves and hat, and extra-thick socks under my walking boots. Even as I did so, I was aware it was stupid to even contemplate what I intended in the middle of an island winter—but the last message had been forceful, and my fingers already itched to be drumming. As I said before—I had little conscious choice in the matter.
When I went back out I took a skillet and a heavy-duty pan with me—I didn’t have a spade, and I couldn’t think of anything else I could use to any great effect. The skillet did indeed work very well at first. I made good progress in excavating a hole almost a foot deep, but by this time it was already obvious it was going to be a long, dirty job; rubble and gravel clogged the cellar, and was frozen solid in places, running wet damp in others. It was heavy work, and my arms ached far too quickly. I was driven inside in the early afternoon in search of food, dry clothes, heat and a period of rest.
I ate a perfunctory sandwich, changed my shirt and trousers, and got a fire going in the grate. When I sat down on the sofa, the stereo system kicked in with the drumbeats—not too loud, but enough to let me know the job wasn’t nearly done. The urn rattled on the mantel, and I imagined Beth’s voice.
Are you just going to sit there?
As I stood, my phone rang—Alan again. I ignored it and went back to my digging.
* * *
The next hours passed in a blur of digging and shoveling rubble out of the hole. Darkness fell; early dusk exacerbated by the fog. It didn’t slow me much—I drove the c
ar out of the barn to the corner of the house and dug under the unblinking gaze of the headlights.
It got harder the deeper I got—the gravel heavy and damp, the rocks icy and slippery, the skillet cold as ice against my palms even through the gloves. I got into a rhythm of dig and remove; no limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head. It seemed to make the task go more easily, so much so that I was surprised to stop some time later and see I had more than half the hole dug out.
I had to climb my way out, struggling for grip on the edge before rolling over in the snow and standing, panting, on the shore next to a cairn of rubble. Even though the hole was only half-excavated, I saw that the black stick figures had survived their burial and still danced and capered in the car headlights on the only wall that received some light.
I staggered to the vehicle, switched off the lights to preserve the battery, and limped to the house. A shower, a change of clothes and a stiff Talisker did much to revive me, but my body felt like I had been run over by a truck—every muscle ached and screamed in agony with each movement.
I flopped on the sofa, not intending to move unless absolutely necessary.
Fuck it. I’ll do the rest tomorrow.
Somebody—or something—had other ideas. The stereo started up the beat, softly at first, a gentle reminder that this was no time for slacking. I rolled off the couch and pulled the plug on both the stereo and the laptop.
The room trembled. Like a giant heart beating, the floor vibrated underfoot. I counted it out in my head—an automatic reflex now.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
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