by Gemma Amor
As I did so, I noticed a large old lantern frame bolted to the wall outside. The glass in it had smashed years ago, but I could guess its intended use. I had made comparisons to a lighthouse when I’d first seen pictures of Taigh-Faire, and it seemed I was right. There was no lighthouse nearby that I knew of, the closest one I remembered being at Rhue, which was forty miles away. So maybe this lantern was designed to warn boats coming into the bay at night that they were close to shore. I had a sudden vision of it lit and glowing brightly, and wondered how I could go about repairing the glass, wiring the lamp up to the mains somehow. It seemed a shame to leave it broken like this, tarnished and unused.
I noticed something else as I stood there with the door key in my hand. Next to the lantern, engraved into a large grey stone lintel set over my front door, was a curious, if worn symbol: a triangle, with a circular dot set dead in the middle. Each of the triangle’s points were capped with another round dot, about the size of my index fingertip.
Three sides, three corners, four dots. There was something numerically pleasing about that.
I studied the shape for a moment, feeling a tickle somewhere in the back of my mind. A memory, perhaps. I must have seen this mark as a child, because a nagging feeling of...something made itself known. I couldn’t place it, but it was there. Something.
I unlocked the front door.
The brief euphoria I’d felt for that single moment outside Taigh-Faire vanished when I set foot inside. The house was every bit as depressing as my state of mind. It was damp, smelly and old-fashioned, each room decorated with nicotine-stained, yellowing floral wallpaper or woodchip that had bubbled and peeled as the sea air had crept in underneath. Dead flies lay in heaps on all the windowsills, and the window panes themselves were choked with cobwebs. Bracken, ferns, thistles and nettles crowded around the building, blocking out light from the lower floor. Little smatterings of soot dropped into the hearths of the fireplaces as I walked around, a sign that the chimneys hadn’t been swept in years. The kitchen, which was just beyond the hallway, was dirty, and grim, antiquated in all the wrong ways.
And everything was quiet, hushed, as if the walls were clenched somehow. As if the house were holding its breath, balling its fists, wondering what I would do next.
What I did was set my word processor down on the stained old table in the kitchen and then collapse onto a wobbly chair. Then I stared at my new surroundings. An overwhelming sense of sadness descended upon me as I thought about the rest of my belongings, crammed into cardboard boxes in the back of the van. My old life lived in those boxes. The life of a married woman, a successful journalist, an objectively, on-paper, convincingly-in-public happy person. I didn’t want to lift the lids of those boxes and peer into her smiling face, not right now. My recent loss was too fresh, too sharp. I couldn’t cut myself on the edges of it. Not again. Not right now.
What I wanted to do, suddenly, unreasonably, absurdly, was write. Write it all out. Get everything I was feeling down, somehow, in a manageable, digestible format. Despite the fact that I hadn’t slept a wink for over twenty-four hours. Despite the fact that my body was screaming at me, telling me to climb up the stairs and find a bed, lay my head down, get some rest. My body may have been tired, but my brain was crying out for release, and its call felt more urgent. It needed me to write. To make sense of it all. To make it real. Things weren’t real until they were written down, not in my world. It had always been that way, as if documented proof of my own undesirability were necessary for me to be able to fully move on: I present to the court Exhibit A, the defendant's dignity, Your Honour. The destruction of which has been meticulously documented, and written down, for your consideration.
I unboxed the word processor, set it up so that I could see the bay through a gap in the ferns outside the kitchen window. The beautiful bay, and the Island beyond. I plugged the machine into an ancient socket mounted too close to the sink to be reasonably thought of as safe, gingerly switched it on, cracked my knuckles, and waited for the small screen to light up, fingers hovering above the keyboard, ready to go.
Nothing happened.
I frowned, and checked the cable, but everything was plugged in as it should be. A faulty socket? I looked around, and found another. I transferred the plug, flicked the switch, and waited.
Nothing.
I jabbed at the keys in frustration.
Still nothing.
Then, it dawned on me. There wasn't anything wrong with the machine.
There was just no electricity.
I groaned, and sank my head into my hands. Of course there was no electricity. The house had been empty for years, why would there be? I would need to telephone the company, get an account set up, bills in place.
Fuck.
I felt tears threatening, and swallowed them down angrily. No, I was not going to cry. This was but a small hiccup in the grander scheme of things. Where there is a will, there is a way. Another saying from Mother. I had a collection of them, for times like these. And, thinking about it rationally, the power might not be disconnected. Perhaps it was just a blown fuse. Maybe I just needed to find the fuse box, fiddle with that.
Worth a shot.
Having buoyed myself up with my desperate, lonely logic, I started looking for the fuse box. After fifteen minutes of swearing and searching around the house, I found what I needed: a cupboard space under the stairs in the hallway, filled with old boxes and an ancient red vacuum cleaner that, judging by the thick layer of dust coating it, hadn’t seen the light of day in years.
Behind that, set into the back wall like a tiny portal that Alice might have encountered in Wonderland, was a small, squat wooden access door. It looked as if it were hiding, like a guilty secret. Beyond it, I suspected, was a cellar, or at the very least a recess where the utility units lived.
I dragged the boxes and vacuum out from under the stairs, sneezing violently as dust crept into my nostrils. Then I lowered myself to the ground and crawled into the cupboard space for a closer look.
The wooden access door at the back of the cupboard was tightly closed, seemingly unopened for many years. It had the same air of purpose that a prison door might have, containment being the order of the day. It was cold to the touch, and extremely solid, like rock. The latch was made of cast-iron, painted and re-painted many times over with black gloss paint, so that the metal was thick and rippled. The bolt-screws set into the latch were triangular in shape, reminding me of the geometric symbol over my front door. I put an ear to the wood, tried to get a sense of what might be beyond the door, but could hear nothing. I pulled away and felt a cold, clammy patch on my cheek. I shuddered, held my fingers to the small, dark gap that ran along the bottom of the door, wondering if I would be able to feel a draft at all. Nothing. All was sealed tight, and mysterious.
All in all, the door was a foreboding prospect, but if what I needed lay behind it, I had no choice. I could live for a while without gas and heating, but I couldn’t live without power. I couldn’t function without my word processor, not in my current state. If I didn’t write soon, I would run mad, I was sure of it. Besides that, I didn’t fancy spending my first night alone in the strange, dirty old house that my strange, unfriendly old Granny had once lived in without the lights on.
With effort, I unlatched the door.
Taigh-Faire, it turned out, was equipped with a cellar, and as the door reluctantly yawned open, hinges creaky from lack of use, I saw stairs that led down into it. Beyond the stairs, there was only black. It occurred to me that the space down there might be a natural pocket in the bedrock of the stone shelf on which Taigh-Faire stood. The original house builders had discovered, then exploited this pocket, and turned it into a cellar. A ready-made natural refrigeration system, the perfect place for keeping food fresh, storing goods and so on. Why the entrance door was hidden inside the bloody cupboard under the stairs was a mystery to me, however. I assumed it was for the same reason that everything else in the house was the way it
was, to be as inconvenient and awkward as possible for whomever lived there.
Practicalities and the nuances of building design aside, the cellar gave me the willies. It was audibly a huge space, I could tell that immediately. Huge, maybe even running the entire length of the house. I couldn’t see a thing beyond the gloom, but the sound of my own feet shuffling on the top of the stairs echoed back up to me, magnified, like a giant’s footsteps. A stiff, cool breeze drove up into my face from down below, which was strange in and of itself, because I had felt no breeze when I’d run my hand along the bottom of the cellar door. I could smell damp and mildew, rock and stone, and I shuddered, grabbing a torch that hung from a nail nearby, hoping against vain hope that the batteries weren’t flat. I pressed the switch, and amazingly, it worked. Light flared. I laughed out loud in relief. Small mercies.
Well, then. Here we go, I thought, and climbed down into the cellar.
3. Below
For a moment, despite the flashlight, the darkness engulfed me. The cellar was, indeed, enormous, and my torch beam so very little, and weak. I stood at the foot of the stairs, and waited for my eyes to adjust.
Gradually, I got a sense of scale, and height, and I could see that I’d been right. The house was built directly onto bedrock, and beneath the surface level, a large, natural stone cavity sat, far enough below ground that it didn’t threaten the structural integrity of the house, but close enough that the cavity had been knocked through and married to the guest house above by a set of rough-hewn stone steps. I could see enormous old whisky barrels stacked up on one side of me, and cardboard boxes, old tins of paint, a ladder, some gardening tools, shelves loaded with bottles half-filled with a strange, amber liquid, and lengths of rope and electrical cables slung over crude hooks that protruded from the stone.
Then, I saw what I needed. There was a panel off to the left, and on that panel, a long series of boxes. Bingo. I moved away from the stairs and across the cellar, that cold breeze still prickling against my skin, the damp settling on me like a chill hand upon my shoulder. I stopped in front of the panel, and found the fuse box nestled amongst a tangle of ancient wires and cables. I pried open the lid, and checked each switch as best I could in the poor light. There were ancient labels above each switch, but the writing had faded too much to make out. I flipped a few experimentally, with no real idea of what it was that I was doing, but at least I was doing something, which was far better than the only viable alternative: sitting on the end of my Granny’s bed and staring off dismally into space.
Flick-flick, flick-flick. I made sure all the switches faced the same direction. As far as I could tell, everything seemed in order, but I was no expert. I bit my lip and angrily swallowed the thought that then popped into my mind: that this would be a lot easier if I had a man about the house.
No, I chastised myself, vehemently. You don’t think like that, Megs, never again.
It was after I replaced the lid that I saw the meter.
A bulky, dust-encrusted, coin-operated electricity meter. I hadn’t seen one of these for a long, long time, not since I had been a student in London. Straight out of the seventies, if not earlier, these were. The idea was simple: you fed the meter with coins, and your electricity ran for as long as you had paid for it. Then, it shut off. There was a dial that clicked round once you loaded the meter with pound coins. The unit dial’s needle now pointed to ‘0’.
Relief sunk in.
The meter had run out of money, that was all.
I breathed a sigh of relief, then sneezed again as I inadvertently inhaled more dust. Eyes streaming, I counted my blessings, such as they were. All I needed was money, and then I would be back in business. I could write, I could dump this big tangled mess of feelings onto my word processor and the world would make sense again and then, finally, I could sleep.
And oh, how I needed to sleep.
I rummaged through my pockets, hands cold and uncooperative. Surely I had some change lurking somewhere on my person, a single solitary pound coin at the very least, surely. Just one coin, that’s all I needed. Enough to get me through until tomorrow, when I could start my life afresh having slept.
Just one coin, was that so much to ask?
My hands found only lint, and an old tissue.
I rummaged some more. Surely.
I found nothing.
Then it dawned on me.
I’d left, in a hurry. Scooped up my belongings, flung them into the van, and driven off, without a care for practical things like maps, or money. I’d remembered my purse, at least, but it was as empty as my heart felt at that wretched moment in time.
And I didn’t have a single coin to hand.
I banged the side of the meter box in frustration, half-hoping it would help kick-start something, but of course, it didn’t. The meter was out of coins, and so I was out of power.
My fragile confidence evaporated, and my mood sank.
This meant I’d have to go outside, and get money from somewhere. And I was not ready for that. Not by a long shot. I was exhausted, I didn’t want to interact with the world, I just wanted to lock the front door and write, and then sleep for a thousand years after I’d done so. I was so unbearably fatigued I could hardly stand, held upright now only by the grace of adrenaline, and that was fast running out.
Shit.
Shit.
The cold breeze I’d felt when I’d first entered the cellar picked up, suddenly. My hair stirred, and I felt air move across my skin, an almost welcome distraction. Frowning, I slid the torch beam around the room. Where was it coming from? I was underground, the cellar walls were solid stone and incredibly thick, so unless there was an air shaft or ventilation brick somewhere down here, it didn’t make sense.
The breeze stirred again, as if happy it had caught my attention. I fancied I could smell something in the air. Was it salt? Could I smell the sea? Down here, underground, surrounded by rock? Impossible.
And yet something tickled at my nose and triggered a rush of long-buried recollections. Seagulls cried from far back in time. Vanilla ice cream lingered on my tongue, and the memory of cold, wet sand squirting up between my toes made my feet wriggle in their shoes.
Stone or no stone, I could smell the sea.
I drifted further into the cellar, as if pulled along by a tight string. The draft intensified. I let the torch light lead the way, watching as decades’ worth of dust and grime eddied up into the air, motes and particles swirling around in the dull beam like shoals of fish underwater. Then, the dust parted, as if something unseen cleaved the air in two with a knife, and beyond the clear space, my torch hit an object lying on the ground. The draft was most powerful here. I could hear air mournfully whistling around the edges of the thing, as if it were blocking a shaft, or tunnel of some sort.
The object was round, and about six feet in circumference. Made from stone, it was perfectly smooth and circular, like a millstone, only larger, thicker, with no hole in the center. No hole, but a roughly carved symbol instead. One I recognised immediately from the front of the house.
The outline of a triangle, with dots at each corner, and one set dead in the middle.
I crouched down, let my fingers trace the shape in the stone, noticing with curiosity as I did so that no dust seemed to gather there. I felt a slight buzzing in my fingertips as I traced the lines. It was like...electricity. I snatched my hand back. What was this? A capstone of sorts, for an old well, perhaps? An ancient drain? A cover for some old power cables that ran underneath the house? There was no way I should be able to feel an electric hum through such a thick slab of stone. Maybe there was an old spring or stream down there, and it was the movement of water I could feel, vibrating the cover.
But then...what about the breeze?
I tried to slip a hand down the side of the capstone, where the draft whistled as it pushed its way through, but the round rock was set tight and flush into the cellar floor, a tiny gap of no more than a millimeter running all around it. I d
idn’t like the buzz that ran through me every time I touched the stone, so I stopped trying to find a space for my fingers, and sat back on my haunches, instead. It was a feat of craftsmanship, this stone. It obviously had a purpose, but what?
And what was the symbol for? What did it mean? A triangle, four dots. I was reminded of star constellations and hieroglyphs as I stared at it. The shape seemed purposeful, the same way that letters in an alphabet seem purposeful. The symbol was clearly tied to the house, somehow. An old Gaelic symbol of some sort? Was it writing? Or something else? Masonic? Geographic? What did it denote, exactly?
A huge yawn brought me crashing back into reality.
Priorities, Megs.
I got to my feet, sighing. It was pointless speculating. The stone wouldn’t budge, so I had very little chance of finding out what lay beneath it. It had to weigh half a ton, easily. I was never going to be able to lever it up by myself.
And it hardly mattered at this point in time, did it?
What mattered was finding a way to get the power back on, before nightfall. Which was hours away, but still. I didn’t have hours left in me. I had a small reserve of desperate, anxiety-fueled energy. Enough to solve this one last problem. Enough to keep me alive, just a little longer.
I groaned. Why had I left home without money? Why?
It was intriguing though, this stone. The symbol. It was a mystery beneath my house, and I would have a hard time relaxing at Taigh-Faire now that I knew it was there.
But time was ticking on, and I was tired, so very tired. I left the stone where it was, went back to the meter and stared mournfully at it for another long moment, then extricated myself out from under the stairs, feeling as if the capstone were watching me leave as I did so. I closed the access door and latched it, then closed the door to the cupboard firmly behind me. Then I leaned back against it, trying to think of what to do next.