Secrets of Carrick: Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  Others say Mam lost her mind from the grief after Pa died. They say she walked the island without stopping, half-dressed and skeleton-like, for an entire year and then disappeared. There are people who say they’ve seen her in the tunnels and caves of the cliffs; they say she’s white-haired now, and perfectly pale and transparent in the body, so as you can see her heart and it’s broke clean in two. Some saw her boarding a missionary-boat for the mainland, alone and pitiful.

  Each story is worse than the last.

  Scully Slevin is a different sort of fish, though. He was sixteen and lived with his mam, over the rise of Shipton-Cronk and up the moaney. They were our closest neighbours but still a good afternoon’s walk away. Of course, Ushag didn’t hold with mixing. To her, friendship brought bother so we didn’t see them much, but during the last Hunger people helped each other as they could and Ma Slevin has never forgotten the Marreys. She speaks jewels of Mam’s kindness, and of my aunt’s great heart. That Hunger was long-passed, though, and I couldn’t see signs of any great heart in Ushag, as hard as I looked.

  Anyway, I don’t remember that Hunger. It’s ancient history. It doesn’t mean anything to me.

  Scully’s blind and he plays his fiddle for money on market days, and on all the other days for free. He plays tunes that catch you. Everybody dances as they pass Scully’s jig. I once saw a man and woman stop right in the middle of a brawl and start spinning one another around. The music took the fight right out of them. Of course, he also plays tunes that drag the heart right out of your chest, but he doesn’t do that so often. I don’t think he’s sure what to do with people’s tears.

  At that last fall market, just before winter set in and we all closed ourselves in against the cold, he grabbed at my hand as I passed him. Out-of-the-blue he told me that I should be proud to be Neen Marrey. Not only did our family have the merrow-blood but the Marreys were one of the few families left on Carrick that once had our very own banshee. He told me I was truly lucky. He said he’d give his sight to see a banshee.

  I pointed out that he’d already lost his sight so it wasn’t his to give any longer.

  He tightened his old fiddle pegs and said, as if I should know better, ‘Not that sight.’

  Chapter Two

  Changeling

  IN EARLY SUMMER I TOLD Auntie Ushag what Scully had told me at the market, about the merrows and our family and that was the start of all our bother and quarrels. That first time she folded her arms across her chest and looked at me for a good while before speaking. Then she sighed.

  ‘Why are we to listen to Scully Slevin?’ she asked.

  ‘Because he’s a seer,’ I told her simply and truthfully.

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said slowly and clearly, speaking as though I were old or deaf or stupid. ‘Scully is not a seer. There are no seers. Those days, if they were ever here, are gone. Everybody knows that. And it’s a good thing too,’ she added.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because those days were a mess.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No one knew where they stood. All those sprites and half-beings and whatnots, they had too many rules. Don’t build around the barrows, don’t plant in the dancing grounds, don’t fall asleep under the alder, or pick the columbine from Strangers’ Croft. Who could remember all that? Then they had holidays every other day! With presents and special clothes, and feast food. And wine, barrels and barrels of wine. Nobody got any work done. The Little Brothers and their one god are better.’ She paused. ‘Slightly.’

  I could see I had one question left before she would stop answering me, saying that my questions were becoming a conversation and she had no time to converse like a scholar or a lady, or any other person with no real purpose.

  I asked as quietly as I could. ‘Why?’

  My aunt put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. ‘Because they’re simple, Neen. Ten rules, three holidays and one god who made everything. Simple.’ She turned back to the washing. ‘Anyway, there hasn’t been a real sighting of the Others for centuries. Scully is just showing off. There are no seers anymore. No seers, no merrows, no selkies—’

  I perked up. ‘What are selkies?’

  ‘They’re nothing.’ She punched and wrung the wet wool. ‘I’ve done talking. I don’t have anymore time to waste. Take these and spread them and leave me alone.’

  Up the cove we were a house of secrets, but all I had to do was find Scully or visit down at the Slevin place to be glutted with all the stories I wanted. All through that winter Bo and I’d been sneaking down to sit among the whelk-shells, fat hens and wood-ash in Ma’s smoky snug, and listen as she blathered. In this manner I’d learnt of the flooding, trembling and burials that have rocked the island. In times past the very earth has opened up and swallowed whole villages. The sun shines for a month and the lake becomes a bog; rain falls for a month and the bog becomes a lake. You never know with earth and water what’s going to happen next, Scully says, almost cheerfully. Out in the cove there’s even an island that appears and disappears, as it will.

  At other times the sea has risen up in waves that drowned the low-lyingest, edge-most parts of the island, with the result that on clear mornings fishermen out in the calm cove can see those undersea forests of leafless elm and alder still standing. Not only that, but they see the old paths cutting through the old forest’s wavering shadows. At night, lights glint and flicker along these deep-paths and Ma Slevin says they’re the souls of the poor drowned cottagers searching for each other, and for a way back into the sun. The manner of their dying is leeching them of human warmth, she told us, and they are well on their way to becoming cold-blooded water sprites. They live an icy, lonely existence forever searching for something they dimly recall as ‘companionship’ and for a way back to a fading memory of something called ‘home’. Ma has a way of putting things that make pictures in my head.

  Sometimes the waves only wash everything away — old landforms and new monasteries and all — and then retreat with their hoard to deep water. At the bottom of the top lake on a clear, bright night you can see the steeple of a drowned church. Those who have the ears to hear, Ma Slevin whispered to us, can still hear the bells toll of a Sunday morning. God Be Praised for His Good Bells, she added crossing herself. It’s a beautiful thing, and lucky they are who hear it.

  During that long, wet winter they told me, too, of our last brownie. He still lives down at the barrows where the Old-ones used to store grain and weapons but being the only one of his kind left has shaped him into a secretive, bile-ridden creature. He no longer helps with household work or dances outside at weddings but just squats in his barrow, now sleeping, now grumbling and always stinking like a pit.

  I felt sorrowful for that lonely brownie. I think it must be hard to be the only one of something. Scully says it’s not that bad, and he should know. He walks alone except for his old fiddle and he never stumbles. His head and eyes roll as he goes but each footfall is steady. He stops often to feel the sun on his face, and takes slow high-steps like a cricket in the summer grass. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to walk like Scully. When you walk blind, arriving anywhere seems a victory of some kind. Even more than a victory; it seems like a miracle. Most of the time I just fell over.

  Ma’s place draws creatures to it. Auntie Ushag has dug out most of the flowers from our gardens to encourage the bees into the meadows behind us, closest to the hives, but Ma’s garden is full of bees feeding all anyhow. Birds come for the unswept crumbs and then nest all around the house, including one pair of stubborn eaves-warblers right over the door. They shit on the threshold but, instead of chasing them off, Ma just throws water over the mess, shouting as she does so to warn any passing ghosts to whom the wet would be worse than fire. Hedge-pigs come for the milk that she puts out in dishes for them. She says she has no choice; if she didn’t, the hedge-pigs would take it directly and that’s a terrible shock for any cow. They nearly die of shame.

  I watched Scully mo
ve around his place, steady and sure. He cooked. He tended the fire. He never spilt anything. He never burnt himself. He couldn’t see, and his mam was too old and stiff to care, so the mess of shells and fish-bones we were building around the hearth just grew taller and wider around us, as outside the winter sleet flew and the black clouds crowded in. I loved their place.

  While Ma told the stories, Scully added the detail. He knew a lot about the Others that even his mam didn’t. For instance, he knew that faery-talk is not pretty like tinkling bells at all. It’s a lumpy sort of language and everything they say in it sounds like a declaration of war. But they can, and will, take away wounds or deformities if they are asked decently.

  ‘Well, why don’t you ask for Scully’s sight?’ I asked Ma, convinced that if anyone could persuade a faery that person would be Ma herself with all her trust and good-nature. She smiled fondly on her son and said, ‘Ah, now. There’s a pert question. Will you be requiring your eyesight anytime, Scully?’

  ‘No, Ma, and thank-you very much,’ he answered. He thought for a moment and added, ‘It could be seen as mighty ungrateful.’

  Ma nodded. ‘That’s right, my Birdie,’ she said. ‘Would you rather see the world, or see beyond it?’ Scully blew his nose. I looked at my feet. I felt a long story coming on and I stoked the fire then settled into Bo’s warm hide to hear it. She lowed to me in a friendly manner, and Scully shushed her.

  ‘It’s said that it’s a wise father who knows his own child,’ Ma began, ‘But there’s times when the same may be said about a mother.

  ‘When I was young I was married to a peat-man and sent out here to the moaney to live with him. The bog was drier then, and less stenching. He was a good man and we were happy for many, many years before it all went wrong. It took years before I conceived of a child, and when it finally happened I went about singing for weeks on the strength of it. (It always seems a shining miracle in spite of it being the most ordinary thing in the world.) There was still a rash of sickness about after the last Hunger, but I was well and the baby kicked me strong enough so I had no bother or worries.

  ‘I remember that spring well.’ She sighed and her nose ran.

  ‘The babe arrived and he was a big, bonny boy. He already had a full head of hair, and his father nearly busted his jaw smiling as he held his son for the first time and he said, “Look at that arm, Mary, he’s already mighty…mighty like a Christian!” We were about as pride-puffed as two new parents can be, feeling as how we were the only ones to ever do this thing, and how our boy was the beautifulest baby ever born, and other such sinful thinking.

  ‘Well, we were punished for it. One morning I go to his cradle to feed him and he’s gone. In his place is this shrivelled, wailing thing looking more like a stick than a babe. Its arms and legs are twigs and its face withered and covered in bark rings. As soon as it sees me it starts up shrieking, and it doesn’t stop. I knew at once what it was.

  ‘It was a changeling. Having heard of the birth of a fat, healthy mortal baby the Others had come in the night and taken our boy. It’s a simple truth and well-known fact that their babies are thin and ugly and they’re jealous of us human mothers.

  ‘It being generally agreed that the old days were gone and the Other Ones vanished, if they’d ever been at all, we couldn’t find any help. The charmers all remain silent these days. You can’t find a body to remove a curse or eat a sin anymore, not even for real coins. I searched and asked all about the markets and public houses, but nobody listened. I went to the Little Brothers; they were kind and told me to pray to Jesus, but I could tell they didn’t believe me.

  ‘At last, a so-called friend told me that in the villages pity for my loss was running thin and I’d best stop spreading stories and hunting charmers before folk ran out of patience completely. She looked at the unnatural lump in the cradle and declared it human, but sickly. A mother knows, though. A mother knows.

  ‘That awful offspring I found in the cradle that morning didn’t live. I stopped feeding it and it soon perished. We had to bury it in the churchyard despite knowing its Otherwise origins. It was terrible to hear the poor Father praying over that ungodly lump and see the waste of the holy water and suchlike. Everyone thought it was grief made me so white and jumpy, but it was fear. I expected their Christian grave to spit the body back up at every moment of that service.’

  Ma stopped to blow her nose, and to spit. She lit her pipe and stared into the flames for a long while. I waited. I didn’t want to talk in case she stopped. I’d never been so happy. Ushag and I were warm and safe at home; we were content in our company as animals in their den are, we were soothed by the breath and body of each other, cosy in the smells and the sounds of home, and content in our work but, however comfortable I was at home, I missed something. It was something I couldn’t grasp, something nameless and shapeless but so real I could feel the hole inside me where it would fit. Here, by Ma’s messy fireplace I could feel that place filling a little.

  ‘Well, that was that,’ Ma went on, ‘and Pherick and I gave up our quest to find that first boy. I won’t say we got over it but folk have ever lost children and there’s nothing to be done about it, though I envied mothers and fathers whose children had simply died. As is its habit, life went on and within a month of the burial I was expecting again and we poured our hope into this coming child.

  ‘Our second was again a beautiful child. This time a daughter with ears like pink shells and a good, strong shout on her! We enjoyed her for a month, hidden in our home and giving the news to no one. I slept her next to my bed to make sure.

  ‘But there was no escaping it. One night I went to bed and when I woke she had followed her brother. The Others had come and silently taken her from my very side. This time the impostor seemed more human, but it didn’t fool me. This red-faced monster with its rolling eyes wasn’t my daughter. As I said, a mother knows her child.

  ‘This time I didn’t try to find help. There was no point. I just had to let her go, and that time was the worst of my life. Pherick didn’t speak for weeks and spent most of his time out in the cove. I only went to the village for the market and didn’t stay to chat. I was changed by it all, and entirely done-in. That was when I stopped visiting down there, and met your mam and Ushag. Ven used to come up and sit with me.’ Ma stopped and looked at me with her bleary eyes. ‘She could sit like nobody I’ve known. Quiet and calm as a warm bath.

  ‘It was her as told me what people used to do about changelings in the old days. It was of no interest to me anymore as I’d decided never to have another child, but it was a comfort to have someone even pretend to believe me. As it turned out, she was right and I have every good reason to be thankful to her.

  ‘In spite of deciding to remain childless, I was expecting again within the year. I spent my time fretting and picking at my food, and Pherick spent his fixing locks and bolts, and sharpening his blades. I told him that if the Others wanted to come in, locks and bolts wouldn’t stop them, and he told me that’s all I knew for the Other Ones were done-in by iron. His preparations put the heart back into him and I couldn’t bring myself to take that away from him, but I knew we were as doomed in this next babe as in the other two. Flying in the face of nature, I grew thinner as I neared my time.

  ‘And then Scully was born. He wasn’t a fat, healthy baby like the others but he was quiet and sweet, and he fed well so I had my hopes. I thought maybe the Others wouldn’t want this one, as he wasn’t their usual type, but I was wrong. They came in the second month.

  ‘I woke one day and there he was. Gone.’

  I looked at Scully. He had his face turned to the fire and the shadows playing there hid his expression. His fingers moved on his knees like pale spiders.

  ‘They’d come through the rat holes and left a white twig in Scully’s place, like it wasn’t even worth cutting a proper log for him. This time I sat by the twig as it wailed, and for days I prayed. I prayed to the Little Brothers’ God (who was likely to know w
hat it is to have a son in trouble), in spite of knowing the Others to be godless and therefore unlikely to be under Christian orders. I prayed to the saints, them having more freedom of movement, as it were, than Himself who plainly can’t be seen to be mixing with the Other sort. I prayed to Breeshey and the Good Mother Mary and to the Nameless One Herself, and all the rest. In the middle of all the praying I fell asleep.

  ‘I must have dreamed a memory of Ven’s stories because I was all at once awake in the night and I knew what to do. I picked up that wailing twig. It looked at me with knowing, watchful eyes and it said to me, “What art thou doing, mammy?” and then I threw it in the fire. There was one terrible cry, the fire blazed out of the hearth and I fell senseless.

  ‘When I woke in the morning Scully was back and hungry. We never saw the Others again. But there was one thing I hadn’t considered.

  ‘It’s a simple fact that Other-time is different to ours. In the three days he’d been gone from our world, in the Otherworld he’d lived seven years and was almost a grown-up. He’d lived with his Other-mother and learnt their Other-ways for all that time, but he returned to us as he’d been when they took him; he came back a baby. And we were strangers to him! It took time for him to settle. Having to repeat his first seven years over made him bad-tempered for a while and he’ll always be a bit Otherwise — but praise be to God, it’s a beautiful thing, and comes in useful too.

  ‘Of course, he did come back to us blinded; the great blaze of the Otherworld Halls being too much for his poor eyes. The Others never take something without leaving something else in its stead, though, and they gave him the Othersight to make up for it. He looks upon a different world to us, and sees us in ways we can never see ourselves.’ Ma stood, stretching her stiff back and placing her spotted hand on his head. She moved to the corner of the darkening cottage and lit a taper. By its light, among a heap of stones and shells, I saw the Christian’s cross and a fresh green alder branch, a set of antlers, a stone spiral and a bowl of milk, all set in the niche behind her bed. She gave each one a touch or a kiss, whispering and blowing and moving her hands in spirals. She drew a woman-sized circle in the air and stepped through it. ‘All that talking’s thirsty work. Who’s for a brew, then?’ she asked briskly. Then she bent to me and whispered, ‘By the way, never trust a salamander. Nasty feverish things!’