White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  Rhoda looked down at herself, at her body.

  ‘It’s been a fair while since I ran anywhere,’ she said, flatly.

  ‘But if you had to,’ Johnny replied, going over to her. He took Rhoda’s arm, not letting her give up. ‘If you absolutely had to, if your life depended on it. You would. I know you would. And we’ll help you. Uncle Mac and I will help you.’

  Rhoda frowned, and started patting her hair again.

  ‘Megs,’ Matthew whispered, in a tone that made me look up immediately.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Over there.’ He pointed with a shaking hand, and I fixed my eyes on the place he indicated.

  Air flickered.

  Another wave was coming.

  Johnny checked his watch. ‘Nine minutes,’ he confirmed. Just as he’d predicted.

  The air moved again. And it felt different, this time. A strong gust of wind that was not from this reality rolled suddenly up the slope towards us, carrying a flurry of ash with it.

  The door was open once more.

  ‘Luke, wake up,’ I said, then, feeling strange. I knew in my bones that something huge was about to happen, and I was breathless with its coming. The sleeping boy protested, but I hauled on him until he was off the floor, then gathered him into my arms again. He was heavy, but was the safest place I could think of.

  ‘What is that?’ The colour drained from Mac’s otherwise ruddy face.

  ‘I don’t...I can’t see, wait…’

  A great, dark shadow guttered in and out of reality, in, out, in, out…

  In.

  I gasped.

  25. Dreams made flesh

  It was the thing from my dream.

  Here, on the Island. Come out from behind the curtain.

  Dreams made flesh.

  The beach was real.

  So was the giant.

  Huge, it towered above us, the cairn and the pines trees, swaying on long, spindly legs like a reed in a stream. Bipedal, it looked as if it had once been human, a very, very long time ago, and had since forgotten what a human was supposed to look like, how one was supposed to behave, and move. It had a long torso, and a hard, flat stomach, and enormous, meaty arms. Enormous genitalia dangled between its legs, an approximation of a man’s parts, but different. The flesh of its face drooped in a cascade of shiny folds, like gathered cloth. There were few discernible features amongst the curtains of loose skin hanging there, but I could make out three eyes. Milky-white in colour, they were attached to the end of three long, thin stalks. The stalks twitched and stiffened, moving like snakes, like medusa’s hair.

  As the giant acclimatised to its new surroundings, those eyes focussed on us.

  26. Run for it

  I backed up fast, clutching Luke to my chest, retreating until I hit the cairn. Another bolt of painful energy ran through me on contact with the stones, but I hardly noticed it. All I could see was the giant who had appeared out of thin air.

  I realised I was screaming.

  The thing’s face split in two, folds of flesh parting way to reveal a mouth that was pink and wet and endless, and the monster screamed back at me, but only for a second, because then, the Island took it, and it vanished.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ I heard Matthew say. ‘What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that?!’

  Shaking uncontrollably, I clung to Luke.

  ‘It’s alright,’ I whispered, more to myself than to the child. ‘It’s alright.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ he whispered back.

  I steadied myself. Took a deep breath, then another. We didn’t have the luxury of feelings, not right now. We needed to move. Before the thing came back.

  Because I felt certain that it would.

  ‘Alright,’ I said, addressing Johnny. ‘Let’s do it. Let’s make a run for it. Before it returns.’

  He nodded, looking at his watch. ‘Eleven minutes,’ he said. Then he picked up a rock, and threw it into the triangle.

  ‘Just to make sure,’ he said.

  It flew high, then tumbled down and landed on the ashen ground, bouncing a few times. Then, it settled.

  It didn’t disappear.

  The time was ripe.

  Matthew shot me a terrified look. ‘I’m scared,’ he said.

  ‘I love you, Matthew.’ I replied, fiercely, and his chin rose up, just a little, when he heard that. ‘I love you, and we’re going to be fine, I promise.’ I hoped it was enough, just enough encouragement to see him through.

  ‘Okay. Luke?’ I peeled the boy away from me, and set him on the ground. ‘I’m going to need you to be brave now, do you understand? I need you to be brave, and run when we run. Hold onto my hand, and run, really, really fast. No stopping. If you stop, we die, is that clear?’

  The boy said nothing, so I shook him, gently.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ he said, in a tiny, weak voice. He fingered the pendant around his neck, sliding it into his mouth and chewing on it anxiously.

  Rhoda snatched up Mac’s shotgun, and cradled it like a precious baby. Then, we gathered in a line, held hands, and made a chain, a chain of people thrown together by fate, by circumstance, by events beyond our ken.

  ‘Nine minutes,’ said Johnny, and we tensed, like athletes on the block.

  ‘I love you too, Megs,’ Matthew said, squeezing my hand. I could feel him shaking beside me. On my other side, a small boy clung tightly to my fingers, his little body still, tensed. Primed.

  ​‘Ready?’

  ​Nobody replied.

  ‘Go!’

  And then we were moving, running, stumbling down the hill, going so fast I thought I might lose balance and topple over, so I leaned back, shifted my weight to compensate for the gradient. All the time, I was horribly conscious of the child next to me, trying to keep up with my adult strides. Luke’s hand gripped mine hard, but was slick with sweat. Every step I took loosened the hold I had on him, and I was grateful that Johnny was on the other side of the boy. If for some reason I let go, he would have someone else to help drag him along until I could grab him again.

  I didn’t plan on letting go.

  I heard Mac swear as he dragged Rhoda along at the end of our chain, heard him bark: ‘Drop it!’ and realised he meant the gun. There was a clank and a thud as the shotgun was discarded, and then the sound of feet on earth, the sound of heavy breathing, and I used the rows of white tree trunks beyond the triangle as a focal point. Run towards the trees, try and keep in a straight line, I thought. Don’t let go of the boy. Try not to count the minutes that have passed. Two? Six? One?

  Just run, Megs. Just run.

  And we did, flying down the slope, moving in a ragged line across the ashen ground where people once lived, and laughed, and loved.

  And then I looked down, and saw a straight, clean edge, where brown and black turned to green and grey, and I knew it to be the edge of the triangle.

  ‘Nearly there, Luke,’ I panted. ‘Nearly there!’

  A memory of a thing that hadn’t happened yet assaulted me, out of the blue. A red jacket. A tearing sound. A fence. Barbed wire. A boundary.

  A boy.

  Have I been here before?

  Have I done this before?

  Is any of this real?!

  Desperate, eyes only on the goal, I strained forward, pushing myself over the edge of the triangle. My feet hit safe, green ground.

  The chain broke.

  Luke’s hand slipped from mine.

  I spun. Matthew was just behind me. Beyond him, Mac dragged Rhoda along like a sack of potatoes.

  Luke! Where was Luke, and Johnny?

  There! He had stumbled, gone down. Johnny, his face a mask of panic, was trying to haul him up. Luke was frail, and frightened. He got to his feet and then tripped again. I swore, and ran back into the danger zone for them, grabbing at Luke, screaming at the boys to hurry, and again, that powerful sense of deja-vu knocked me near breathless, for a small boy screamed distantly in my mind. />
  Hurry! He said, and a red jacket hung motionless from a barbed wire fence.

  I hustled them the last few steps until they were safe, safe outside the triangle’s edge. Moments later, Matthew, Rhoda and Mac fell across the line too.

  We made it, I thought, in disbelief. My chest heaved with exertion, and sweat poured down my body. We made it out.

  And just in time, for I could feel the static in the air gathering, could feel we were only seconds away from a flicker, seconds away from another wave, from the door opening once again.

  And in those seconds, Luke spotted something lying in the ashen triangle. Something silver, round, and shiny.

  His mother’s pendant. The chain around his neck must have broken when he tripped.

  ‘I dropped it!’ He cried, in anguish.

  Then, he ripped free of my grasp, and ran back into the danger zone.

  ‘Luke!’ I shrieked, reaching for him, on the verge of falling back into the triangle, flicker be damned, but then Matthew, my Matthew, my brave, constant Matthew, pushed past me, forcing me back.

  He went after the boy.

  In three quick strides he had caught up with him, grabbing Luke by the collar of his dirty shirt, making to turn and drag him back to safety. They were so close I could almost reach out and touch them with the very tips of my fingers, and there was a moment, a split-second, where our eyes met, where I knew it was all going to be okay, we were going to survive, and I knew that I wouldn’t hesitate anymore, I would tell Matthew I loved him every hour of every day, and that there was no such thing as a right or wrong time to admit that to anyone, to let that into your life, and I stood there with my heart in my mouth, unable to breathe, willing them back to me, and...

  And the air flickered.

  Matthew’s face went pale. He lifted Luke into his arms, opened his mouth, began to say something, and then, they both vanished.

  And I was left behind.

  A towering scream ripped itself out of me. I fell to my knees.

  Matthew had gone, and so had Luke.

  The Other Place had taken them.

  And that, as my mother used to say, was that.

  27. Don’t watch

  Except it wasn’t.

  Because the door was still open.

  Air buffered.

  Ash floated down before my reddened, raw eyes.

  The monster didn’t return.

  Something else did, though, something mutated, tormented, like the pigs. A struggling mass of limbs and bodies, fused together.

  And the screams that came from it, when it arrived, were human.

  ‘Don’t watch,’ Mac roared, when he realised what he was looking at. ‘Don’t watch!’

  But we couldn’t help it.

  Because there was a woman, a woman who was no longer a person in her own right, but part of a monstrous dance, an abominable waltz, her body mixed up with that of another person. Her face peered out in frantic terror from his abdomen. He looked down at the head poking out of his body, and opened his mouth wide in a noiseless cry of absolute terror and agony. Her torso appeared to have fused to his pelvis. One of her arms stuck out at a right angle from his chest, stiffly mimicking the arm of a cross, or a monument, and I could see a tattoo on that arm, a flower of some sort. Maybe a peony, I couldn’t tell. Her legs came out awkwardly from behind the man’s lower body, as if she’d rugby tackled him and run right through him instead of meeting resistance, creating the effect of a surrealist horse, a terrible centaur, with legs where legs shouldn’t be. And the other body, the host body, tried to fight off its unwelcome parasite, limbs flailing about, hands tearing at the woman’s hair and face in vain while she screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

  We had no choice but to watch as the man died in front of us, then, his lungs squashed and ruptured by the catastrophic intrusion of another human form trying to occupy the exact same space that he was. He spat blood, burbled, and went limp. The pair of bodies crashed to the ground. The woman, who was still somehow alive, screamed, her legs working feebly in the blackened soil, her one mobile arm clutching and grasping for relief, and I looked away, because I couldn’t watch this macabre shit-show any more.

  And I wished with all my heart then that I was dead. I didn’t want to live in a world where these sorts of things happened.

  I didn’t want to live in a world where Matthew was gone.

  A hand dropped onto my shoulder. It was Rhoda.

  ‘It’s over,’ she said, and she was right. The bodies had been swept away by the retreating tide, sucked back in through the open door.

  I wept.

  ‘We have to leave, Megan.’ Mac’s voice broke through my grief with a gentle firmness that commanded my attention, despite the state I was in.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I said, gripped by the memory of the first time Matthew and I had kissed. ‘Just leave me alone.’

  ‘No.’ He was insistent, a leader once again. ‘We’ve made it this far. We need to keep going. Someone...we need to tell someone about all this. Raise the alarm. Come back, with help. We’ll get them back, Megan. We will.’

  ‘Tell who?’ I replied, bitterly. ‘Who is going to believe us?’

  ‘Nobody, until we bring them here, show them what this place is.’

  I swallowed, and broke down again, a fresh bout of tears coursing down my cheeks.

  ‘It won’t make a difference,’ I sobbed, feeling hollowed out and empty. ‘What can we do? What can anyone do against...that?’

  A twig snapped behind us.

  ‘She’s right,’ a new voice said, a voice I recognised.

  I turned. Saw a group of people assembled at the tree line.

  Mainlanders.

  Fiona stood front and centre.

  ‘I told you not to go,’ she said, her mouth a grim line. She was angry.

  ‘Help us,’ I pleaded. She had answers. I knew she had answers. She could tell me what this place was. Where all the people had gone.

  She stared at me with dark, glittering eyes.

  ‘The Island deceives. I told you that. I warned you. You should have known better. Now, you’ve woken her up.’

  I don’t understand,’ I said, but it didn’t matter if I understood, or not, because the Mainlanders surrounded us, and moments later I heard the swift, sharp sound of something heavy moving through the air, something that struck me on the back of my head, and I fell into darkness, and the ground came up to kiss me.

  28. Consequences

  When I came to, I was curled in a foetal position in the dirt, my head bowed as if before a great god. It took a moment for me to realise my hands were bound behind my back. My eyes were covered, blindfolded with a rough cloth. I could see a tiny strip of soil and heather beneath the blindfold, nothing more. My head throbbed. There was a ringing sound in my ears. I’d been hit hard across the back of my skull, and it hurt. A lot. Blood filled my mouth. I coughed, and spat, red phlegm spattering onto the strip of earth I could see.

  The sound of feet shuffling came from behind me. I had a sense of someone leaning over. My blindfold was removed, and I was hauled to my knees. Blinking, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the sudden burst of light that came in after the blindfold was peeled off.

  And the more I came to, the more I could hear.

  And what I could hear was Johnny, crying.

  My vision cleared at last, and I saw him. My mouth dropped open. We were back on the mainland. I knelt on the ground before the great wooden frame that I had first seen on my walk into Laide. The tall, inverted u-shaped frame with the strange carvings upon it. I’d paused, wondered briefly what it was for, and moved on. My shoes had been wet with dog-piss, and not long after, the dog had been shot.

  I had forgotten about this frame.

  But now, here I was, and I saw Johnny beneath it, arms and legs bound like mine were, and there was a noose around his neck, a noose made of rope, and he was shouting and sobbing, and trying to break free of his bonds, only he couldn’t.
>
  And I finally understood what the strange wooden u-frame was. What it was for.

  It was a gallows frame.

  Like something from centuries gone by. A gallows, proudly set here on the side of a quiet country road in the Highlands for all to see. An unashamed instrument of death. Of murder.

  Then I knew, through a blinding flash of memory, that I had been here before. As a child.

  I had been here with my Granny.

  And there she is, that young-girl version of me, standing in a semi-circle of people that surrounds this hideous structure, onlookers all, watching as three silhouettes struggle like maggots on a fishhook at the end of three ropes, ropes which are slung across the top of the gallows frame, and come down sharply to one side. The ropes are anchored at the other end by people from the town, three of the largest, strongest men who grit their teeth in determination, neck muscles corded tight with exertion, while the counterweights giving them so much trouble jerk about, dying slowly.

  My Granny is next to me, thin, yet solid. And I am not afraid, although I should be. Granny’s presence is oddly comforting. As a child, I must have liked my Granny, I realised. As an adult all I could remember was her coldness, her bony frame, her quiet, strange manner. But here, in memory, she shows tenderness. Her hand is on my hair, stroking it, softly, a soothing gesture, and she is talking to me as I watch two men and one woman choke to death at the end of three ropes.

  ‘Here,’ she says, never taking her eyes from the frame. ‘Eat this.’

  And she pushes a paper-wrapped candy into my hand. I take it, peel off the paper, and pop it into my mouth, which instantly goes numb. The flavour is bitter, unpleasant, with overwhelming tones of aniseed, but the numbness is welcome. It spreads through my body, and I am calm.

  And three people die in front of me.

  The sun is behind them, slowly setting, meaning I cannot see their faces, which must be black and blue by now, but I can hear the sounds they make. And those are enough.