White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  All else is silent, apart from Granny, who whispers something softly in my ear, something meant only for me.

  ‘It’s necessary, my sweet,’ she says. ‘No matter how it looks, remember that. It’s necessary.’

  And the girl, who still had five fingers on her right hand then, watches the execution. And in the distance, behind the dying folk, an Island sits in the bay, a familiar island, the Island, only this Island has no trees on it.

  No trees, but there is something visible there, stalking across the landmass on long, terrible limbs. It is huge, and familiar, and it steps down awkwardly from the Island, feeling its way along the seabed carefully with its feet as it goes, and then it strides out across the bay, the waters barely reaching its ankles. It is vast and terrible, moving with deliberate and dreadful inevitability, and the girl is frightened, despite the numbness creeping through her system. The giant moves the same way that a cat moves when it is stalking prey. It is a predator, and even though she should be too young to know of such things, she recognises that. She squeezes her Granny’s hand so tight she feels like she might break something, but her Granny holds fast.

  The creature wades across the sea and reaches the shore of the mainland. Without pause, it steps up onto the sands of the bay and walks resolutely inland, approaching the gallows. The ground trembles and shakes under the weight of its feet. The men and the women who hung from the gallows are dead, now. They swing like grim window ornaments, ropes pulled taut like piano wire above them. It makes sudden sense to the girl, as she looks at the bodies. As she watches the beast approach. Why they are here, why they are all gathered, like this, a semi-circle of people watching, and waiting, in silence, and fear.

  And awe.

  The three lifeless corpses, gently swaying at the end of their nooses, are offerings.

  Still warm, still fresh.

  Offerings, and the giant is coming to collect. Later, three white marble stelae would be erected for them in Laide cemetery. There would be no bodies to bury, but slender, pale, tooth-like markers would be left behind instead, markers with a hanged man inscribed thereon. This is how it has always been, since the creature first came, and this is how it would continue to be, until the creature dies.

  When that will be, nobody knows. The creature has been coming for many, many years, and does not show signs of ageing, or slowing down.

  The girl knows this, the same way that all the assembled people know this. It is lore, and law. It is unlikely to change any time soon.

  It is how they live.

  The thing has reached the gallows frame, now. Up close, it is huge, it is an atrocious display of loose flesh and long limbs and foul odour, and the thing’s questing eyes, mounted on stalks, obliterate the girl’s sanity for a hot, urgent instant as she meets its gaze. She can feel her bladder give way, a small rush of warm liquid trickle down her legs, and she would feel shame if she could feel anything at all beyond the strange tingling sensation in her body.

  A large hand comes up from the floor to grasp the body dangling in the middle of the gallows, the body of a young woman. The creature begins to shudder, and shake, a disgusting contortion of flesh and bone taking place in the area of its face which the girl realises is the jaw. A pink slit opens up wide within the horrible folds of skin.

  And then the child’s Granny covers her eyes with her gnarled free hand.

  ‘Don’t look,’ she murmurs, softly. ‘Best not to look.’

  And the memory ended there, because the girl was me, and I came back into myself, kneeling before a gallows, a gallows from which a young man was about to be hung, but he would not be the first, or the last, I knew that now. I remembered.

  I gasped, struggling with the weight of this knowledge. How could I have forgotten that which I had seen as a child? How? What had happened to me to make me forget something like that? Ritual sacrifice. A giant, foul beast. Complicity from those I had grown up amongst, if only for a short time. My Granny, a part of it all.

  This is why Mother had broken free, moved us away from Scotland. She had been saving me from this bizarre, terrifying normality, where realities merged, and nightmares were real, and human sacrifices a community event.

  I craned my neck around to look at the people assembled behind me. They were standing in a half-circle around the gallows, just like they had in my memories. Just like they had in the old, faded photograph in the Post Office. Did I know any of these faces, from long ago? Clearly they knew me. Did I belong here?

  Was I one of them?

  Fiona, one step ahead of the crowd as usual, watched events unfold before her like a queen holding court. She stood rigid and proud in front of the cowering teenager who struggled beneath the gallows, one hand raised to eye-level in expectation. My breath came fast and shallow. I knew what she was about to do. I knew what the hand was about to set in motion.

  In memory, a dog’s head exploded, leaving a red cloud in the air.

  My heart pounded impossibly loud in my ears, and I could see the Island. Now that I was back on the mainland, it pulled at me. My head throbbed with pain, and I could no longer attribute it to the blow I’d received.

  The Island wanted me back.

  My brain felt like it was sliding sideways. Is this what it was like to lose one’s mind?

  Johnny’s cries and struggles grew louder. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn't stand to look at him, at his pathetic attempts to escape what I knew to be inevitable. I turned my face, and saw Mac and Rhoda beside me. They were also bound, kneeling and helpless. Mac had been beaten badly, his face a mess of blood and bruises. Rhoda had a black, swollen eye which wouldn’t open properly. They both screeched and swore at the townsfolk of Laide, begging them to let Johnny go, trying to get to the boy, but unable to escape the mainlanders who held them back.

  Their pleas fell on closed ears.

  My eyes went back to Fiona. Her hand still raised, trembling with anticipation.

  Johnny stopped struggling against his bonds, and his face crumpled. He began to cry.

  Fiona drew the sign of a triangle in the air.

  ‘No!’ I heard myself shout.

  Then I heard the quick whip and buzz of a rope moving over wood, snapping tight as it reached capacity.

  I heard a strangled cry, cut off before it could fly properly.

  I heard the sound of a young man die, quickly but painfully.

  Mac roared in fury, tried once more to get to his feet, tried to run to Johnny, but he was held back by men who showed no emotion whatsoever as the teenager died.

  And that was that. It was over in minutes. I swallowed, raised my eyes to the gallows, and saw the boy dangling from the end of the rope, limp, hands loose by his sides. He was dead. I wanted to cry, but I had nothing left. Johnny had been a good boy, a clever boy. He had saved us.

  For what? For this?

  I was overwhelmed with guilt, then. I had this idea that my actions had started a chain of events that was killing everyone around me. No matter which direction I turned in, death followed me about, a dogged shadow on long legs.

  And the memory of Matthew hit me like a sledgehammer, and I remembered that he was gone too, and Luke, that the Island had taken them. A huge sinkhole opened up inside my chest. I leaned forward and pressed my hot face into the dirt, and remembered I’d loved him, loved Matthew for years.

  I wished they’d strung me up on that gallows frame, an offering to the beast, in place of the boy. But they hadn’t. Instead, I was here, and I was being forced to witness this, and I had a good idea of why.

  I was being educated.

  Fiona turned to me, her expression cheerful once again. She stooped, and yanked my head back so that we were face to face. She cupped my chin fiercely with her hand, pulling it up so my neck was stretched uncomfortably tight. Brusquely, she ran a finger down my nose.

  ‘You left us with no choice, dear,’ she said, eyes fixed on mine. Her voice was not unkind. Rather, it was businesslike.

  The shadow
of the dead boy swung like a pendulum behind her left shoulder. The rope that had ended him creaked like an old tree branch as it sawed over the wooden gallows frame.

  ‘This was necessary. In time, you will understand.’ She sounded like my Granny.

  Now that the show was over, the mainlanders started to leave, breaking off into smaller groups and walking the road back to Laide in dribs and drabs. None of them cast a second glance at the teenager they had murdered. None of them cast a second glance at me, or Mac, or Rhoda, as we knelt like bound slaves on the spoiled ground. It was as if they had taken part in a village fete, instead of an execution.

  Fiona lifted me to my feet, placing a steadying shoulder under my right arm when I wobbled. She continued talking, her tone light and conversational, taking out a sharp pen knife from a pocket, unfolding it, and using it to slice the bonds that tied my hands behind my back as she spoke.

  ‘You will not tell anyone about the things you have seen on the Island, or here.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I spat, wincing in pain as blood flowed back into my wrists and hands. Pins and needles stabbed at me as circulation was restored, and I bit my lip.

  Then, I hit Fiona, square across the jaw with my four-fingered hand. She recoiled, and I hit her again, and again, until a man I recognised stepped forward and cuffed me hard across my own cheek. I saw stars, somehow kept my balance. It was Murdo. He carried a walking stick with a forked handle, and had a new dog with him, a young, skinny pup. This one did not have a patch over its eye. It looked nervous, jumpy as it skulked around Murdo’s feet, tripping him up as he moved. He rapped it gently across the ribs with the butt of his walking stick to move it out of his way, and the dog yelped, cowered. A pitiful creature, like myself. We were all pitiful creatures.

  ‘The people...all those people…’ I said, panting and spitting fresh blood. My hand hurt.

  ‘We can’t do anything for them, now,’ said Fiona, touching the rapidly developing red welt on her face. Her hair stuck out wildly from the neat bun on the back of her head, and I felt a small, grim satisfaction at that. It was a tiny win.

  Mac hurled abuse at her from his place on the ground, his entire face puce with rage. Murdo brought his walking stick down hard on Mac’s shoulder. I heard something crack, and Mac grunted. Murdo beat him again, hard about the head this time. I tried to stop him, but he was tall, and strong, and kept me at bay easily as he whacked the cane down onto Mac’s shoulders, neck and head. Eventually the older man stopped struggling, and slumped, panting, his head hung low. Rhoda leaned into him, resting her face on his shoulder, whispering words of comfort that he no longer seemed able to hear.

  Fiona continued as if nothing had happened, staring out to sea, watching. Waiting, and I knew for what, now.

  The creature.

  ‘You have to understand. What we do, we do for the protection of all,’ she said. ‘And if you keep messing around with things you don’t understand, you’ll upset the delicate balance we’ve worked so hard to build all these years. That your Granny worked so hard to build. And her grandmother before her. And hers before her. It’s in your blood, see. It’s not your fault you don’t understand any of this. You were taken away from us at too young an age.’

  She reached for my right hand, and gently pinched the stump of my missing little finger.

  ‘Do you remember the night we took this?’ She asked, and I stared at her, horrified. My voice came out choked, and dry.

  ‘I...my mother told me it was an accident…’

  I trailed off. Of course it wasn’t an accident. There were no accidents, I was beginning to understand. Only accidental consequences.

  ‘We took this on the eve of your eighth birthday. As is custom. Your mother was not best pleased. Despite knowing it was your fate. Your birthright.’ Fiona sighed. ‘Nothing we could say would convince her to stay, after that. And so you were removed from us. Which is why…’ She shook her head. ‘No. That isn’t fair. This is not your fault. You weren’t taught the things you should have been. No use crying over spilled milk.’

  Mac coughed up blood.

  ‘There were over a thousand of us on that Island!’ Rhoda sobbed. ‘All gone, now. Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you tell us what you knew?!’

  Murdo beat her across the back of the shoulders, too. She grunted, and fell flat on her face.

  Fiona moved over to where the fallen woman lay groggily in the soil. ‘You were told,’ she said, glaring at her as if she were a disobedient child. ‘You idiot outsiders. When you came here, you were told to leave well enough alone. We tried to tell you, but no, you would have your secret community. Your wee paradise. With your trees and your pigs and your hippy, radical nonsense. We tried. We told you not to build on that Island. And now you know why.’

  Rhoda remained uncowed, even as she lay there. ‘Your fault.’ She said. ‘This is all your fault. Those people, my people, are on you. No-one else.’

  Fiona rolled her eyes. ‘Those people are gone now. The Island does not give back what it takes, at least, not easily. The only one who can come and go as it pleases over there is the Hunter, and it leaves us alone if it is fed.’ She gestured to Johnny’s corpse.

  Mac chose then to rouse himself. He threw another choice word at Fiona. Murdo, primed and ready, lifted the cane high into the air again, but Fiona stayed his hand this time.

  ‘No,’ she said, and that infuriating smile grew upon her lips once more.

  Mac faced down the pair, eyes wide. ‘If you’re going to kill me, get on with it,’ he said, and Rhoda implored him to be quiet, to stop talking before he got himself strung up like Johnny.

  Fiona cocked her head to one side, bird-like, and tutted.

  ‘No, there is no need for that, not now.’

  Mac was not giving up.

  ‘I’ll go straight to the police! The army. I’ll speak to anyone who will listen.’

  Fiona’s smile grew, and I saw something distinctly sadistic flare in her eyes.

  ‘You can’t speak if you have no tongue,’ she said.

  Murdo was suddenly on Mac, then, crouching over him like a spider, kneeling on his legs, pinning his arms to the ground. Mac struggled but the other man was stronger, fitter. He held him down, and Fiona knelt, delicately sliding one hand inside Mac’s open mouth, wincing as he tried to bite down on her fingers.

  I tried to intervene. I tried to pull her away from him, but before I could get a proper hold of her, she’d jammed the penknife into Mac’s mouth. He howled in pain, his mouth opened wide again, and in a fluid, practiced movement, she grabbed hold of his tongue with her left hand and thrust the penknife up with her right.

  And I had another lightning bolt of memory strike from deep within the clouds in my brain. I was a child again, and I was being held down, much like this, an aniseed flavoured sweet burning in my mouth, and there was a knife, there was pain in my right hand.

  My Granny looked on solemnly as I screamed in agony.

  Blood ran hot down my wrist.

  Back in the present, Mac was choking, gargling. Fiona triumphantly pulled his severed tongue from his mouth.

  Then she threw it to the collie dog, who pounced on it, and ate it down in three swift gulps.

  29. Only two

  Mac fainted. Blood poured out of his slack mouth, and pooled under his head.

  Fiona wiped the knife blade on her cardigan sleeve. She looked down at the mess of a man beneath her.

  ‘We curse the day you moved to the Island,’ she said.

  With that, Murdo and Fiona stood up in unison, dusted their hands on their jackets, and looked to Rhoda. Neither of them seemed terribly interested in me anymore.

  I stood, rooted to the spot in disbelief.

  Had we survived the Island, only for this?

  The young dog licked its chops, and barked excitedly. It approved of the fresh meat, and wanted more.

  ​Murdo stepped over Mac’s body and went to Rhoda. He shot an enquiring look at Fiona, and it
struck me suddenly that I’d never heard the man speak, not once.

  Fiona nodded. Murdo lifted the old woman to her feet. I thought she might try to fight, but she went willingly, a shocked, vacant stare now on her lined and weathered face.

  ‘Where are you taking her?’ I wanted to intervene, I wanted to go to Rhoda, and help her, but I remained frozen in place.

  ‘Away for a while. As insurance.’ Fiona shot me a look. I had no idea what she meant by it.

  ​‘Insurance for what?’

  Fiona began to walk slowly back towards Laide.

  ‘Go home, Megan,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘Go back to Taigh-Faire. Get out of here before the Hunter comes back, for its offering. Take that stubborn, foolish man with you. There’s nothing else you can do for now. Except look after him.’ She waved dismissively at Mac. ‘We'll talk again soon.’

  The Hunter. The giant.

  She was right. It could come back at any moment.

  Rhoda shuffled away, her unlikely captors on either side of her.

  Johnny’s body creaked in the background.

  ‘You can’t keep me here!’ I shouted after them, my voice cracking. ‘You know that, don’t you? I won’t stay here!’

  Fiona stopped, but didn’t turn around.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know that. The Island has plans for you. So do we. You were taken away from us once. We won’t let that happen again.’

  ‘I’ll leave. If it kills me. I’ll leave, and I’ll talk.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Fiona said. And on she went, calmly walking along with the confidence of a woman who had just ticked an irksome task off of a long to-do list.

  A breeze picked up, riffled through the heather and bracken around me. Johnny’s corpse swayed.

  I looked down at Mac.

  And then, I thought, an unbearable sadness filling me up slowly on the inside, there were only two.

  30. Escape

  I ripped off a long strip of fabric from the bottom of my shirt, balled it up, and used it to try and stem the flow of blood from the stump of Mac’s tongue, all the while checking over my shoulder to see if the nightmarish thing from the Island would appear, would come marching across the water, ready to feast on Johnny’s body.