by Gemma Amor
‘That’s my house,’ I answered, slipping a hand in his. I felt at peace, suddenly, but couldn’t explain why. The effects of the horrible dream began to fade. It was as if I had arrived at a place I was supposed to be.
He swallowed, caught off-guard, and then squeezed my fingers in response.
I let my eyes scan along the coastline of the mainland. A large building I had not noticed before took my attention. It faced the Island directly, but was heavily screened from the rest of the mainland by thick fir trees and vegetation. It was festooned in bright security lights, and I could just make out a tall barbed-wire fence topped with curling razor-wire snaking all around it.
I frowned.
‘I didn’t know that was there,’ I said. ‘You can’t see it from the road at all. What is it?’
‘Military, probably,’ Matthew replied, following my gaze. ‘NATO and the Ministry of Defence are fairly active around here, or used to be. There are small bases like that scattered all along the coastline, have been for many years. During the Second World War, they did a lot of testing in these parts. Bioweapons and the like.’
I didn’t like that idea. I didn’t like the thought of a large, faceless organisation burrowing into the shore, abusing the ecosystem, playing war games. There was something so wild and unspoiled about the Highlands. A military presence here felt like a violation, a betrayal of the land.
So much for getting to know the neighbours, I thought.
I leaned out a little more to see what else I could spy, and Matthew put a warning arm out to bring me up short. I looked down. Water lay directly below: the cave opened straight out onto the sea. I craned my head and neck out further. I could see we were bracketed on both sides by sheer, craggy grey stone. Easy enough to climb up, if we were careful. I shone the torch across and angled it upwards, trying to spot a clear route for feet and hands. As I did so, I noticed iron hoops hammered into the cliff edge, forming a short, rudimentary step ladder up the rock face.
Seeing this made me wonder about the giant stag. Because it became glaringly obvious, on seeing those small metal rungs, that the animal hadn’t climbed down this ladder to get into the tunnel. Which meant it hadn’t come from the Island.
So where had it come from? Did the tunnel branch off somewhere, connect to the mainland from a different location? I imagined a network of underground passages, sprawling across the shoreline and under the bay like a system of arteries and veins beneath the skin, all of them leading to one place: the Island.
I chewed my lip. The sound of drumming surged around us again, mirroring my heart beat. The music was hard to ignore, just as the Island had proven hard to ignore. Multiple threads, pulling at me. Multiple hooks in my soft, willing flesh.
I let out a deep breath. I found that I was nervous, and excited, and terrified and compelled all in the same instance. I didn’t let go of Matthew’s hand, and he didn’t let go of mine.
‘What do we do now?’ He asked, and the music died down a little, as the wind took it elsewhere. ‘Turn back?’
I took a moment to reply.
‘I suppose we should find out where that party is,’ I said, eventually. There was no way in hell that I was turning back, not now. I was here for a reason. It was time to find out what that reason was.
Matthew balked. ‘Why? This has to be private property, Megs. We’d be trespassing, surely.’
‘Why not?’ I asked, in an uncharacteristic display of bolshiness. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? We’ve come this far, why turn back now?’
Matthew blinked, as if not recognising me for a moment. ‘Because...well, it’s the middle of the night, for one thing. And trespassing on private land in the dead of night isn’t my idea of fun, thank you very much.’ He drew breath, getting into his stride. ‘And even if it isn’t private property, that party could be anything. Anything at all! It could be a drug-fueled rave. A blood-soaked orgy, or a weird, sacrifice-oriented pagan festival presided over by ravenous, kilt-wearing cannibals. With that in mind, I vote to turn back.’
I looked at him.
‘Kilt-wearing cannibals?’ I said, deadpan, and his mouth twitched.
‘Alright, alright. I have a point, though.’
I laughed at him, and it felt good to laugh after everything that had happened.
‘Matthew...’ I said, growing serious once again. I let the sentence tail off, and gave him a steady look. His bluster collapsed in on itself.
‘You’re going to go and explore, aren’t you,’ he replied, wearily, and it wasn’t a question.
‘Atta boy,’ I said, and let go of his hand.
We left the cave, climbing up the iron rungs in the rock face slowly, Matthew shining the torch for me until I reached the top so that I could see where I was putting my feet, then following behind. Always following behind. The deep, complex feeling of excitement and dread spread throughout my body as I hauled myself onto the Island proper, and scrambled upright. Ferns and bracken brushed up against me as if in welcome. I spread out my arms, feeling suddenly off-balance, despite being on firm ground. It was as if I were standing right on the edge of something impossibly high, and vertiginous, not a cliff edge, but the lip of a vast chasm, perhaps, or the edge of a tall tower, staring down, only the very tips of my toes in view, and a huge, faceless void beyond.
As if I was on the verge of toppling into that void, but clinging on. Barely.
And yet, it was somehow right that I should be here, it was somehow right that I should fall. The longer I stood, the more at home I felt. The tension in my shoulders and across the back of my neck- tension that I didn’t realise I’d been carrying until now- eased with every passing moment. The woman who had driven upcountry through the night from the South only a day ago seemed like a complete stranger to me suddenly. I stood, and let that feeling sink in. Was it possible that I’d been looking at this whole thing all wrong? That Tim had actually done me a service by letting me go? He had cut the rope that moored me, and now I was adrift, and there came a sudden, unexpected freedom with that.
Freedom. When was the last time I could say I had felt truly free?
This thought was so profound it rocked me to the core. I’d been thinking of my separation in all the wrong ways. Here I was, on the Island in the moonlight with music playing all around, my friend and lover by my side, and nothing and nobody to tell me what to do next.
Matthew pulled himself up to stand next to me, breathing heavily, and I was overwhelmed then, overwhelmed with the desire to act, to do something reckless, to share my newfound freedom with another.
And so I kissed him, suddenly and forcefully, in the dark. I grabbed him and kissed him as if I were a teenager once again, and, after a moment, he responded. We stood like that for some time, locked together by my need, by his longing, and I began to think back to the Christmas party. To the feelings that night had given birth to, feelings I’d repressed for years ever since.
Everything happens for a reason, my mother used to say.
We came up for air. Then, I took his hand, and led him towards the music.
A thin path took us across the roof of the cave and over piles of slabbed rock that littered the shoreline. The path then forked, one branch leading down to a small, man-made spit of boulders that stuck out from the body of the Island like a long, thin proboscis. This was illuminated by lanterns that hung from poles jabbed firmly in amongst the rocks. Later, I would learn the Gaelic name for this spit, Sròn a’ Mhoil, the word sròn translating rather literally to ‘nose’ or ‘trunk’.
There were three small row boats moored to the ‘nose’, with what looked like fishing nets and a lobster pot bundled inside the largest.
‘Boats,’ I said to Matthew, pointing. He nodded, and seemed nervous. The lanterns and boats were a reminder that we were not alone.
The other path forked away from the spit, and travelled inland. I traced its route with my eyes, found what looked like an old shepherd's hut sitting just beyond the spit, roofle
ss, long abandoned. Behind it, a dark rise of mossy, boggy land came to an abrupt stop.
I let out a small exclamation.
Looming beyond was a wall of skinny, spindly, white-trunked trees. These were the pine trees I’d seen from the mainland.
Up close, they were an arresting sight.
They rose high above the Island like giant needles, almost piercing the stars with shimmering spines that sprouted from the very tops of the trunks like porcupine quills.
‘Well, would you look at that,’ Matthew breathed, and I nodded in agreement.
‘I am,’ I said.
The trunks were unusually white, whiter even than silver birch trunks, as if each tree had been given a fresh coat of brilliant, snowy paint. They made for an eerie display in their massed uniformity, and looking at them for too long made me feel nervous. They stood so still, so straight. Trees usually swayed, moved about, branches and leaves in constant motion. These trees were different. Untouched, somehow, by the atmosphere around them.
‘They circle the whole Island, by the looks of it,’ Matthew observed, and from what I could see, he was right. The trees made a large dense ring around the Island’s interior, screening it off completely from the world outside. They had to have been planted that way deliberately, for the sole purpose of privacy.
The drum beat returned, momentarily surging up from behind the pines, and I felt a distinct tug on the threads. The hooks sank in, deeper.
I pointed my torch to the stand of pines, and squeezed Matthew’s hand. ‘That way,’ I said. ‘Look, this other path goes right in through the trees.’
He resisted, sounding tired.
‘Do we have to? Really?’
‘We do,’ I said, simply.
We took the smaller path, treading carefully. I kept a hold of Matthew’s hand, marvelling at how much stronger I felt with his fingers laced through mine.
‘Megs,’ he said, interrupting my thoughts with a hushed whisper.
‘Yeah?’
‘There’s a sign, look.’
I trained the torch to where he pointed, and saw a large, white metal sign held up by thin iron legs that were concreted into the ground. The signboard had rusted considerably, but the text was still clear and bold, printed in red capital letters.
It said:
GRUINARD ISLAND
THIS ISLAND IS GOVERNMENT PROPERTY AND UNDER EXPERIMENT
THE GROUND IS CONTAMINATED WITH ANTHRAX AND DANGEROUS. LANDING IS PROHIBITED
BY ORDER 1989
I recognised it immediately, and stared at it in confusion.
I had seen this sign, this exact same sign, in my nightmare.
I had stubbed my toe on a half-buried lump of concrete on a beach. It had been attached to a rusted metal placard, just like this one. There had been only one word visible upon it: PROHIBITED, stamped in large, red capital letters.
It was the same sign.
I worked my mouth, speechless. This sign, the crystal in my hand. What else from that awful, awful dream was going to find its way across the boundaries of reality and into the waking world?
In my memory, a great, long-legged beast strode across the beach towards me, and I felt cold.
‘Matthew,’ I whispered, but didn’t get to finish the sentence, because Matthew was having a miniature meltdown beside me.
‘Shit,’ he said, and then ‘Shit!’ Panic took hold of his voice.
‘What? What is it?’
‘What is it?! Didn’t you read the sign?’
I shook my head. I’d been so busy worrying about the dream that I’d forgotten to actually take in the words printed on the sign. I read it again.
THE GROUND IS CONTAMINATED WITH ANTHRAX AND DANGEROUS.
‘Oh,’ I said then, faintly.
‘You know what this place is, don’t you?’ Matthew scrubbed his hands over his face and through his hair, subconsciously dry washing himself like a rat as he struggled to articulate what had upset him so much.
Our earlier conversation came back to me: Military... testing... bioweapons… NATO...
I couldn’t quite fit the pieces together, but I didn’t have to. Matthew did it for me.
‘This is Anthrax fucking Island,’ he said. Then he took a hold of my arm, wheeled about, and marched us right back up the path down which we’d come, walking as fast as his legs would carry him.
13. The boy
I let myself be hustled for a minute or two, preoccupied by another memory from the dream: a cloud of brown mist drifting over an unreal ocean where roofs poked out of the surf like turtle shells. A mist that seemed to hang like a swarm of insects in the air before suddenly dispersing.
Anthrax?
Then, I came back into myself, and put the brakes on. I felt that quick, fierce anger flare at Matthew. He was doing it again. Manhandling me.
‘Where are you going?’ I snapped irritably, and wrenched my arm free of his overprotective grip.
He spun, and his own temper flared.
‘Are you serious? Away from Anthrax fucking Island, that’s where!’ He was shouting, now, the generous limits of his patience well and truly surpassed. ‘You know, where the government dropped a shit-ton of deadly anthrax spores during World War Two?’ He then clamped his sleeve over his mouth and nose in a vain attempt to block out any poisonous, microscopic spores that might still, after all this time, be floating around in the air.
Sheep bones, I thought, and the skeletal remains in the cave made sense, now. There had been an awful lot of them.
‘I can’t leave, Matthew,’ I said, and a note of desperation made its way into my voice.
‘What?’
‘And I think it’s a bit late for that,’ I continued, pointing to his makeshift face mask.
My observation did not go down well, and Matthew erupted.
‘What is wrong with you, Megs?! What the fuck is going on with you?’
‘Come on Matthew,’ I said, trying to appeal to his sense of reason. ‘World War Two was a long time ago, now. And if there were any spores left in the atmosphere, we would have breathed them in already, so there’s not much point in covering your face. We’re dead already, by your logic.’ I tried to peel his hand away from his mouth, but he reared back, furious.
‘You’re unbelievable, Megan! I drove nearly six hundred fucking miles to come and make sure you were okay, to check on you after Tim threw you out, and this is what I get. A wild fucking goose chase in the middle of the night through a sodding, endless tunnel to an abandoned military experiment riddled with a deadly toxin that will probably kill us both in less than a week!’ His chest heaved with emotion, and triggered my own ire. I lashed out in response.
‘I didn’t ask you to come, Matthew! I didn’t ask you to come and find me! In fact, I think it would have been fairly obvious to anyone except you that I needed some privacy! That maybe, just maybe, I wanted to let the dust settle on my previous relationship before launching straight into the next one!’
That hurt him, I could tell. ‘I came because I care about you,’ he replied, sullenly.
And I found that I was mad, then, really, really mad. I had business on the Island, and this nonsense was just getting in the way.
‘I know you care about me, I know you do! And I care about you too! But driving up here, uninvited, without even asking me what I wanted...can’t you see how...how selfish that was?’
‘I would have asked, but your phone didn’t work!’
I threw my hands up, exasperated. ‘I won’t even start on how you went about finding my new phone number, that’s beside the point. We both know it wouldn’t have mattered if you had called. If I had told you to stay away. You would have come anyway.’
‘Because I love you!’ He shouted at me, finally lifting his sleeve away from his mouth. The anguished words hung in the air, and I swallowed back tears. We were both silent for a moment, giving the words the space they deserved.
Then, I spoke.
‘I love you too, Matthew.
’
He stilled. I continued.
‘I do. I love you.’
I placed a gentle hand on his face to reinforce the point.
‘But right now, I have something I have to do. Can you try and understand that? I don’t know what it is, I don't know what I’m doing here, but I do know that I have something to do, something really, really important. My house is connected to this place by a goddamned tunnel, Matthew! That has to mean something.’
The fight went out of him.
‘You love me?’ He asked, and at that moment he was so vulnerable that I regretted everything. I regretted my treatment of him over the years. I regretted the wasted time with Tim. I regretted it all. I had been an idiot.
And then a new voice came out of the tree line behind us.
A young voice. Boyish. Cheerful.
‘It’s not contaminated anymore, you know,’ it said, and Matthew and I both started, in shock.
‘Who’s there?’ Matthew cried.
‘You shouldn’t be here. It’s private land,’ the voice continued, and now it was accompanied by a shape. A small, slender shape, emerging from the dense shadows between the pines. He held an old-fashioned miner’s lantern up before him, made of polished brass. A lit wick glowed blue inside.
He must have been cloaking the light with something, I wondered, else we would have seen him before.
It was a boy, maybe six or seven years of age. Standing bold as brass on the Island in the middle of the night, unafraid, unassuming, just a small boy out for a stroll through the shadows when all small boys should be asleep.
‘Who are you?’ I said, completely flummoxed.
Matthew stared at the boy as if he were an alien. ‘And what are you doing out here in the middle of the night?! Shit, could this situation get any stranger? I feel as if I’ve been drugged!’
‘I live here,’ the boy said, speaking to Matthew as if he were an idiot.
‘You live here? On this Island?’
‘Of course. It’s my home.’ The boy smiled, his voice excited, conspiratorial. ‘We don’t get visitors a lot. Mac doesn’t like it. If he sees you, he’ll be very cross.’