White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  I studied it, thinking that the triangle wasn’t the important part, not really. It was the dots that mattered, the circular dots at the end of each point, and the one in the middle. Four dots. I looked at my right hand. Four fingers, if you counted the thumb. The stump of my little finger seemed to not look so ugly, all of a sudden. I’d been ashamed of it my whole life, but now, it seemed fortuitous, this missing finger.

  Intentional. My mind played with the word.

  And I wondered something, then. I wondered about the dots, and how there were four of them, and how I had only four fingers on my right hand, and how those two facts seemed to be so intertwined.

  I gently placed the tip of each finger on my right hand into the holes around the triangle. It felt awkward at first, I had to drop my index finger down so that it would fit into the central dot, and my thumb wasn’t as long as my other digits so I had to try and push it out further to compensate for this, but once I figured out how to arrange my hand, I found that some of the dots were deeper than others, so everything slotted into place neatly and felt right, really right, and natural, as if I had remembered how to do this from a long, long time ago. As if I were slipping on an old glove, one moulded to my shape.

  And was it me, or did the symbol start to glow faintly? Matthew swore, and a light green shimmer gathered around the edges of my hand. And, as we stared at it, the capstone moved.

  Ever so slightly, at first, with a shifting, grinding, grating noise. The wind that whistled around the stone’s edge shrieked louder. The capstone sank, depressed inwards by an inch. Matthew hissed in surprise.

  The stone shifted again.

  Impatient, I pushed. Gently at first, and then harder, and harder, putting my shoulder into it, bearing down, as if pushing open an old, stubborn door.

  Which, it turned out, was exactly what I was doing.

  ‘Megs, be careful!’ Matthew warned, and I redoubled my efforts.

  The stone gave way.

  PART TWO: TRUNK

  11. The Tunnel

  ​It rolled inwards and then sideways out of view as if on a mechanism, revealing a large, long dark passage beneath.

  And the wind stopped. As suddenly as if it had been choked off at the source.

  An eerie silence filled up the cellar.

  ​‘Christ,’ said Matthew, agog. ‘Did you know that was there?’

  ​‘No,’ I said, shaking my head, which was still throbbed, but I wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. A part of me must have known, all along, or why else would I have slotted my fingers into what was obviously a hand-operated lock, or seal? How else would I have known how to do that?

  ​‘Where does it go?’ Matthew went on, peering in, letting the torch beam slide ahead of him. I saw rock, shadows, and nothing else. The space beyond the reach of his light was deep, impenetrable black.

  ​Where did it go?

  ​I had a good idea.

  ​I took the torch from him, and guided the beam around the passageway. It wasn’t a man-made tunnel, that much was quickly obvious. It seemed like a large natural crevice in the stone, with a sandy path worn along the bottom. It was wider at the top than it was at the base, and had it been light enough, it would have been more than obvious that the aperture in the bedrock made a ‘V’ shaped cross-section.

  Or, if you were looking at it from the perspective of a woman who had been living at Taigh-Faire for too long already, a triangle.

  I crouched, threaded one leg through the entrance to the tunnel, preparing to lower myself down. Matthew grabbed my hand as I did so.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ he said, gripping me tight.

  ‘Matthew,’ I replied, now thoroughly at the end of my tether with him. ‘If you don’t stop putting your hands on me, I’m going to chew them off, understand? Of course I’m serious. Why else do you think I’m here?’

  He let go of me, and had the wherewithal to look chagrined. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m just...I mean, this is just a lot, Megs! Not what I was expecting at all.’ He swallowed, and looked into the tunnel again, and I could see it made him nervous.

  ‘I know,’ I said, more kindly this time. ‘I know, but I still want to look. I want to see where it goes. There is something...something I have to do.’

  ‘But you aren’t even wearing any trousers!’ Matthew pointed out, and we both looked down at my bare leg dangling through the newly exposed hole. I hesitated.

  He had a point.

  ‘Or shoes.’

  I glared at him, although he was perfectly within his rights to point this out.

  ‘Fine.’

  I retracted my leg, stood up.

  ‘But I’m coming straight back down here after I’ve put some clothes on.’

  Matthew folded his arms, the torch beam careening off over his shoulder as he did so.

  ‘Well you can forget going down there alone. Why don’t we do it in the morning, when it’s safer?’

  ‘No,’ I said, simply. ‘I’m going tonight. Now.’

  Matthew threw his arms up in exasperation. ‘Fine!’

  ‘Fine,’ I echoed.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good.’

  I headed for the cellar stairs. ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ I said, and mounted the steps.

  Matthew just stood there, shaking his head.

  ‘You know, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I drove all night to see you!’ He shouted after me. The cellar took his voice and threw it around the large, cavernous space beneath the house, so that it echoed back tenfold.

  I said nothing, because there was nothing to say. My going into the tunnel was as inevitable as night following day, and oh, what a day, what a day it had been.

  He would follow me, I knew he would. It was just who he was.

  Until he went to a place I couldn’t go. But that would be later.

  For now, I would walk ahead.

  The tunnel sloped downhill gradually. As we walked, I tried to shake off the terrible nightmare. The voice of the thing beneath the tree was still firmly lodged in my mind, and I felt almost breathless as I remembered the beach, and the bodies, and the giant silhouette in the distance, marching along the tideline towards me.

  But worse than that, much, much worse, was the crystal I’d held in my hand. Because it was impossible to think for even one moment that I’d brought it back with me, from a dream.

  Which meant one of two things. Either I was hallucinating, or the nightmare wasn’t a nightmare at all.

  Unable to reconcile myself with either possibility, I turned my attention to the tunnel. After a while I became sure that we were headed down through the bedrock under Taigh-Faire’s foundations, away from the house and out towards Gruinard bay. It was hard to measure distance in the dark, and the uneven path beneath our feet made it difficult to stride out, but the further we went, the more sense I had of how far we had walked. I concluded that the ground we’d covered didn’t match the distance between my house and the beach, as the two were adjacent to each other. We had travelled much, much further than that. The ground sloped more and more under us, and our ears popped in unison. The tunnel went underneath the beach. Underneath the bay.

  And the only thing of note in the bay that lay in the same direction we were headed was...

  The Island.

  We were walking beneath the sea.

  At the end, I would find myself in the place that had been calling to me all day. I knew this, because every pace forward I took eased the pain in my head, just as it had before, in Laide burial ground.

  The closer I got, the less it hurt.

  The Island wanted me to visit.

  I kept these thoughts to myself, however, unsure of how to even begin explaining all this to Matthew. He had stopped trying to reason with me, but kept close on my heels, his proximity betraying how uncomfortable he felt in the tunnel.

  I examined the stone walls as we moved along. They were jagged, and I had to be careful to keep my arms by my sides fo
r fear of scraping them against the rough rock. Occasionally, although the torch’s light was too poor to make out much detail, I glimpsed crude markings on the walls. They were geometric patterns, mostly, spirals, circles and squares connected by rough lines. A few of them weren’t. A few of them looked like ancient carvings of animals I didn’t recognise, things with teeth and claws and tails, but not much else I could identify.

  And one of them looked like the hill figure by the loch just outside of Laide. A giant figure, human by shape, but not by proportion.

  I stared at that one for a short while, thinking of my dream. Thinking of the sand beneath my feet shaking as something large and heavy approached.

  If I could come back down here again with a better light source, I would sketch these markings, study them in more detail at a later point. The mathematical shapes were as interesting to me as the picture of the giant. I had read something once about sacred geometry, for a newspaper article I’d researched. Sacred meaning attached to form, and shape. Was that what this was? Was I entering sacred ground?

  I thought again of the tree, and the strands of crystal radiating out from its base, spreading across the beach. I thought of the shapes they made.

  It was all connected.

  All of it.

  We walked downwards, Matthew stumbling every now and then behind me, but still following, because despite his fear, he was as curious as I was, which was why we were as close as we were. And why he was the better journalist. Because he knew how to squash down his fear to chase a story. I was reminded again of how much braver that made him. I hid from things. He hunted them down.

  I could probably learn a thing or two from him, I thought.

  Down, and down, and down further still. My knees locked as the gradient increased. I leaned back to keep my balance, and Matthew did the same.

  Then, after what felt like an hour of walking, the path rose upwards again. It felt like an hour, but was in fact only twenty minutes according to Matthew’s watch, but the dark was so complete and the tunnel so long that time had become a fluid thing. Minutes stretched out like hours as we put one foot in front of the other, and then the other, and ever on, into our shared unknown.

  And I was glad, suddenly, that Matthew was here with me for this. I was glad, because whatever compelled me along the tunnel came from a place deep within that I’d never felt before. It was a compunction, a driving, almost violent appetite for momentum that threatened to tear me completely away from my moorings, untethering me from my flimsy grasp on reality. Stopping was not an option, not when the pain in my head lightened and the sensation of answering a call, an important call, grew stronger with every step.

  So yes, I found myself feeling grateful for his company. Matthew was my connection with reality, a reminder of who I had been before I’d unlocked the door at Taigh-Faire. He grounded me, a little. No matter how terrible his timing, he was loyal, and that meant something to me.

  As if sensing my thoughts, he spoke.

  ‘How far are we going to walk along this sodding tunnel before we realise it comes to a total and complete fucking dead-end?’ He said.

  I smiled, and shook my head.

  Spoke too soon, I thought.

  ‘It won’t,’ is what I said out loud.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because it won’t,’ I repeated.

  ​And because the universe provides, the tunnel suddenly angled a little to the right, and we rounded a sharp, jutting lip of rock, and came face to face with a terrifying, bone-white mask. At the same time, my foot kicked something on the path, something hard, something that clattered as I made contact. I stopped abruptly, Matthew running into the back of me with a soft curse, and we both stood there, yanking the torch beam over to illuminate the thing.

  ​It was a skeleton.

  ‘Shit,’ said Matthew.

  ​‘I think this might disprove the dead-end theory,’ I replied, a little more smugly perhaps than I should have.

  It was a deer, by the looks of it, a stag, but huge, bigger than any stag I’d ever seen. Its skull was almost the size of an elephant’s skull. It looked as if it were stuck. The antlers, which were broad and had an enormous span, were firmly wedged at our eye-level between the angled rock walls, filling the entire width of the top of the tunnel. Empty eye sockets stared balefully at us as we stood there, nose-to-nose. I saw, after a moment, that it was only the skull that was wedged in place. The rest of the skeleton lay on the ground beneath the skull, the vast ribcage completely filling the narrow space at the bottom of the crevice. I spotted hooves amongst the bones. This made me feel sad, for some reason.

  I had a vision of the animal wandering along the tunnel, not noticing how it narrowed the further it went, then finding itself stuck, unable to go forward, or back, its antlers snagged on the uneven rock walls. I imagined it struggling, bellowing mournfully with its head jammed tight in the crevice, legs and hooves pawing at the ground with ever-increasing desperation and futility, and then I saw it give up, close its eyes. It died from thirst or starvation, and decayed right there where it hung, the skin blistering and rotting, the skeleton drying out, bones whitening, becoming brittle, until the body, no longer supported by sinew and muscle, collapsed to the floor, leaving only the head behind with a small section of vertebrae sticking out, intact, underneath. It was a powerful image, and I swallowed, feeling pity for the creature.

  We would have to step over it if we wanted to move further ahead. This felt disrespectful, but there was no choice. No going back. Only forwards.

  ​Matthew whistled, taking in the size of the dead stag. ‘What the hell is it doing in here?’ He asked, reaching out to touch the antlers.

  ‘Not much,’ I said, unnecessarily, and stooped so that I could pass beneath the skull.

  ‘Seriously though,’ he continued as we picked our way under the antlers and over the bones, trying not to pierce ourselves on the wicked bone spikes. ‘How in God’s name did it even get down here?’ His voice sounded odd in the rocky space of the tunnel, as if he were speaking inside a tin can. It added to the surreal nature of what it was that we were doing, and goosebumps travelled along my skin in a sudden rash. There was death down here in the tunnel, and that was something I hadn’t thought about, until now: that what I was doing was dangerous. If the tunnel branched out, or split, or twisted and turned, we could get lost, could fall, and break something. Our torch could run out. We could get stuck too, maybe even die.

  ​I swallowed, then shrugged it off. ‘Maybe it wandered down here from somewhere else on the mainland, I don’t know. This tunnel has to go somewhere, right? So it must have come from whatever lies at the other end.’

  Still, I kept my theories about the Island to myself.

  It was then that we came to the cave, suddenly, as if it had been waiting for us to pass the hurdle of death before revealing itself. One minute we were treading the rocky path in the dark, trying to keep our balance and sense of direction intact, and the next, the crevice widened, rounded out, our feet had more room to move along the floor, and we found ourselves standing, unexpectedly, in a small, dark cave. Beyond the mouth of the cave, I could see stars, and hear the sea. I could smell it too, that now oh-so-familiar rich, salty aroma.

  And, as we caught our breath and peered out of the cave into our new surroundings, we heard, faint in the distance but sweet as a prayer, the sound of music.

  The Island was welcoming me.

  12. Anthrax Island

  ‘So where the hell are we now?’ Matthew said, walking to the mouth of the cave and sticking his head out. He stumbled on something as he went, something that clattered and crunched underfoot, and he looked down.

  ‘Okay?’ I murmured, preoccupied by the music I could hear in the distance.

  ‘More bones,’ he muttered. ‘But I think these are just sheep bones.’

  My eyes adjusted to the different light levels, and I saw them all over the cave floor.

  ‘A hell
of a lot of sheep bones,’ I replied, and then we both shrugged. After the giant stag, it was hard to be impressed by something as mundane as sheep bones, even if there were a suspiciously high number of them.

  The music swelled, and a faint rhythmic beat could be heard underneath it. Matthew cocked his head to one side, trying to figure out where it was coming from.

  ‘Is someone having a party out there?’

  I crossed the cave floor, gingerly stepping around the sheep bones, listening as the shrill cry of a lone violin rose high into the air from somewhere over our heads, beyond the cave. I came to stand next to Matthew, and poked my own head out of the cave mouth. I saw that I’d been right. We were standing in a small, rocky hollow on one side of the Island.

  I was finally here.

  I smiled. It was a small smile, but it was something. It helped to dispel the greasy sense of discomfort that had settled on me since the nightmare.

  Since the face under the tree.

  More importantly, my headache had once again disappeared. I felt light in its aftermath. I could bear anything, once the headaches stopped.

  Despite the hour, which was late, it was not full dark outside the cave. I could see Gruinard bay all around us, bathed in the washed-out light of a strengthening moon. The sky was now a rich, deep indigo, coming down softly to meet the darkness of the horizon. I could see the lights of Laide along the shore of the mainland. I could see the large wooden frame, glowing a ghostly, strange pale grey against a star-pierced sky. I could even see the cemetery, the burial ground where Granny lay, the hulk of its collapsed chapel crouching amongst the headstones. From here, the collection of little stone markers marching down to the sea looked like chess pieces on a far-away board.

  And I could see, further along the coast, the small white fuzzy blob sitting up high that was Taigh-Faire. I realised then, quite how far we’d walked. Under the sea, across the entire depth of the bay. I pointed to the house, for Matthew.

  ‘What’s that?’ He said, squinting. His vision was not as well-adjusted to the night as mine.