The Selkie Bride

by Melanie Jackson

  Mistress MacLaren clearly wanted to ask me why I was taking such a strenuous hike, and I considered being teasing and refusing to answer her curiosity. But it seemed best not to alienate one of the few people who would talk to me, however reluctantly, so I volunteered that I had heard there were still some sea-blooming orchids out that way and I was going to sketch them. This satisfied her as to my intentions and also allowed her the chance to later gossip to the others about my foolishness and eccentricities. I tried not to begrudge her this entertainment, since she would be the one, I hoped, to send a rescue party to find me if I did not return by nightfall.

  Outside of Findloss the cliffs rose almost immediately, hence the village’s preference for sea rather than land travel. There is a narrow strip of sand that one may traverse around the cliff arms for the few hours that the tide is out, but it is stony and wrack strewn. The terraced crags loomed large on either side of the pier, which had been built on the only bit of smoothish beach in the tiny harbor. The town was erected on the second low terrace of the mountain, except for my own cottage, which sits on its own out-thrusting hillock on what I am told is an igneous extrusion. There were stairs to the beach and a path of sorts that led to the cliff tops by a series of switchbacks, but one could also scramble both up and down the giant sheets of limestone that had pulled away from the cliff and fallen like dominoes. The cliffs would probably not seem formidable to anyone who had lived in the Alps, but to me they seemed quite impregnable and scary, being inhabited only by screaming birds whose shrill cries seemed mean and aggressive.

  An hour on, I stopped at a small stream that spilled out of the white cliff walls and had a drink. The water was clear but tasted peaty, so I did not drink deeply as I squatted among the small rushes in the miniature quagmire of moss and bog myrtle, which was blazing the shade of candle flame as it huddled in the tiny and cold oasis in the sand. Along the way were curved beaches where the cliffs had been carved out into a chaotic series of arches and caves. Most were shallow, but a few seemed deep. I was not tempted to explore them. I had heard too many stories of people being trapped in caves when the tide came in and drowning for their curiosity. This seemed a terrible fate to me: life choking out of you in total darkness, your body perhaps swept away at the turning of the tide. Also, I heard, or imagined I heard, a low-voiced crying. This belonged to a seal, one of the supposed emissaries from the court of King Lochlann that frequented our shores on sunny days. The seals are lovely from a distance, but knowing what I did in that moment—and not knowing a great deal more—I thought it best to stay away from a creature that might not be exactly what it appeared.

  I continued a while more and then stopped at a grassy meadow, called a machair, where I found myself a flat rock in the sun to sit on. There I had my simple lunch of bread and jam, and one rather tired apple that nevertheless tasted delicious because of my hunger. If I had had any worries about being observed in my travels, they would have been allayed. I had seen only one boat, and it was far out at sea. Other than the noisy birds and a few curious hares, I had no companions in my narrow meadow. Feeling generous, I tossed my apple core to the nearest of the doe-eyed bunnies and a small crust of bread to the sharp-eyed curlew that had stood patiently at the base of the rock, watching as I ate. My offers accepted, I rose slowly, had a stretch and then resumed my travels.

  The entire way I kept an eye on the tide. At the first sign of it turning, I was giving up and turning back for home. Fortunately, the sea continued to ebb, and I was lured onward by the rare sunshine and the increasingly smooth sand bar. I decided that if the next day were as nice, I would make a trip to the cockle beds and dig up my own dinner. Herman always enjoyed digging in the sand and I was ready for a change in diet.

  As I walked, I discovered that my brain was soon back to pondering the same two questions that had bothered me since Lachlan’s visit. Why, if my husband had in fact known that his family and mine were participating in some kind of family feud, had he married me? It is said that in Scotland it is a tradition for enemies to put rings on each other’s fingers and dirks in each other’s hearts, but he had come to America to make a fresh start and knew well that this wasn’t our custom. It made his behavior confusing and mysterious. Perhaps even sinister. Was he something more than he appeared? Certainly he had been keeping secrets.

  And now, more urgently, I wondered who and what Lachlan was—and could I trust him? After all, my current relieved supposition that my husband may have had some compelling outside reason for disliking me came from this stranger. How did I know that he was telling the truth? My instinct was to believe him, but my instincts had been wrong before. Attraction affected judgment and I had to admit that at some level, and against all wisdom, I was attracted to Lachlan, whomever and whatever he was.

  Ponder as I did, no answers came to me and my bafflement remained, somewhat spoiling my walk. Duncan’s name had stupidly been invoked, and like a zombie he rose from where I had buried him and hurried across the sea. The mind is determined to relive certain events, and I recalled with some pain standing in the judge’s chambers with my heart, if not in my hand, then at least as open as hope in the face of parental disapproval could make it. I smiled happily while we said our vows in front of a clerk who stood as witness to our marriage, and for a while I remained emotionally undefended and expecting we would have a happy marriage, because Duncan, though a lot older and sometimes impatient in manner, was kind and affectionate in an offhand way. He was even a helpmate when my parents died and I was left feeling guilty for my unhealed breach with them. Had it all been an act? Was there never any affection in his heart?

  One day, Duncan had received a letter from Scotland. What it said I never knew, because he burned it, but he locked himself in the parlor he used as a study and when he emerged hours later, he was drunk and rude. From that day forward, I don’t think he was ever entirely sober again. He never touched me after that day either. His words and manner grew increasingly cruel and repulsive as he strove to drive me away. I offered sympathy, but my pity only infuriated him.

  He did touch whores. Many of them. And he turned to a new love: cocaine. Duncan’s sudden passing had left me with a bittersweet incense of tragic memory that smoldered in my thoughts for weeks after his death. I thought I had doused the last spark, but apparently some embers lingered.

  Had Fergus Culbin been the author of the letter that caused the change in my husband? It seemed that I might never know the answer. One thing was certain, though. My failed marriage had cast a long dark shadow over my life, deepened by the loss of my parents before we made up our quarrel, and I was tired of being lost in memory’s evil twilight. Duncan was dead and buried, and I needed to find my way out of his shade. I had to become my own woman again and put this blight from my soul once and for all.

  On this thought, I rounded a headland and came face to cliff face with the Sithean Mor. The sight immediately shook me from my unhappy reverie and caused my nerves to shrill with awed alarm and unhealthy fascination. The mound was not the green of grass or moss that I had expected, but rather a salmon pink stone shaded through with the colors of a strong sunset. It stood some two stories high and had no windows or doors—a fact for which I felt oddly grateful. Had there been an opening, self-respect would have demanded that I step inside and look around, and this was not something I wanted to do.

  The islands had never held me in thrall any more than the supposedly enchanted lowlands or highlands, but I could sense that this was an uncanny spot. Lonely, a place of spiritual desuetude and perhaps something worse. It was what the natives called “feart.” Still, at some level it called to me, a familiar voice whispering in the closed-up basement of my brain. I had never been here before, but this place knew me.

  Megan MacCodrum, come near.

  Terror is a strange beast. It can be repulsive, an urgent warning from that inner voice of sanity to stay away from something. But it can also be oddly enthralling, even addicting, and the foolish urge to
rush out into the dark when one hears a noise, or to look beneath the hood of the cloaked stranger to see perhaps a monster can be very strong. At its worst, this mixture of fear and fascination can become a parasite in the blood that takes up residence in the heart and stays with you forever, always urging dangerous confrontation when common sense says to flee. This was the way my mood trended. Angered at what I had willingly endured at Duncan’s hands, I was ready to lash out wildly, to prove that I would not be subdued by anything or anyone again.

  The whispering voice encouraged me: Come closer and we shall make you strong!

  Then, unbidden, a paragraph from Fergus’s book came to mind:

  The savior of Man, enraged with the spilling of Christian blood on this, the most Holy of Days, allowed the phantom candle to appear at the stone as a sign of disgrace, and it burned throughout the night with unnatural brightness. All who beheld it were dead within a fortnight, a judgment upon them for their impiety.

  The words, feeling suddenly quite real and crying out louder than the foreign whispers in my head, caused me to shudder and I was suddenly more than ready to leave that haunted place to the whispering ghosts who owned it. Surprised from my trance, I belatedly noticed that there lingered in the air, so unnaturally still for being hard upon the shore, a trace of something foul and threatening. I did not think the troubling residue was from the mound itself but from something nearby, and it made me recall Lachlan’s contention that he could smell Fergus’s murder. This seemed something similar.

  Then I saw a most disturbing thing. As though conjured by my thoughts, a glow, rather like a small sunrise, began at the north side of the mound. Cautiously I skirted the Sithean Mor, keeping well back from the stone walls and praying that no door or window had opened while I wasn’t looking.

  The light was not from the mound itself, but rather from something outside which quickly grew from a few inches to something taller than a man, though in a man’s general shape. The phenomenon has many names, both in Scotland and in the United States—will-o-wisps, Saint Elmo’s Fire, hobby lanterns, spook lights, ball lightning and, most disturbing, corpse candles. Learned men in ivory towers would have us believe that they are caused by swamp gas escaping from the ground, but of what use is this theory when the seven-foot-tall shaft of painful, glowing light was appearing on a rocky beach where there was neither swamp nor gas?

  Some think they are evil spirits turned away by both God and the Devil and doomed to roam the earth forever. Others believe they are the guardians of buried treasure. I could not help but recall that locally, these effulgent lights supposedly appear in places where the dead have been—or will soon be. And not just any dead—only those who die in violence.

  Nerves shattered, I fled.

  Chapter Seven

  Come as the wind comes, when Forests are rended; Come as the waves come, when Navies are stranded.

  —Sir Walter Scott, “Gathering Song of Donald Dhu”

  I ran blindly, my feet guided by panic that did not in the moment seem so unreasonable, and it was some minutes before I realized I was stumbling through surf that had overrun the narrow beach. It took a moment to understand that this meant the tide had turned…and that I might not be able to return the way I had come.

  Shocked back into my senses by a larger and more tangible fear of being trapped by the ocean, I slowed my galloping feet and heart and looked about to see how far the sea had progressed inland. My heart was dismayed by the view. How long had I been at the faerie mound? It had not seemed more than a few minutes, but I saw that the sun had actually swayed far into the west and was preparing to set. On the horizon, another storm was gathering.

  I squinted into the harsh light and perceived that thirty feet of my beach was gone, already under a foot of water. The sea’s breathless murmurs had become hissed threats from which the birds fled in disorder, all species winging together in panicked flight, which only added to my alarm. I was certain that the fishermen I had seen earlier had already paid heed to the warning and had brought their boat to shore without detouring to sell their catch at the fish market in Glen Ruadh. There would be no help there.

  Could I make it along the shore, if I tied up my skirts and ran? As though to discourage me from any courageous but foolhardy thoughts, a wave washed over my knees, hitting hard enough to unbalance me, and biting my legs with icy teeth and making an effort to ensnare them with seaweed; cold wind, sharp as the flensing knives used by the fishermen, cut over my face and gouged tears from my eyes, which ran down my cheeks and then fell into the surf. Gasping with shock at the physical assault, I looked back toward the mound. The corpse candle was still burning brightly, taller and wider than ever. It might even be visible from the village. More unnerved by this sight than by the turning tide that seemed to be herding me back toward the cliffs, I shuffled carefully in a circle, looking for some option other than the flaming devil or the deep blue sea.

  There was one. I had not noticed the fissure in the cliff face as I journeyed up the beach, but with the sun now casting long fingers of fiery light into its recesses, I could see it clearly. It was some sort of upward sloping though narrow tunnel, and most happily for me, I could see from the bent marron grass that a breeze was blowing down it. That meant it opened somewhere to the air. Not hesitating, since the waves beating at me had reached my thighs and were threatening to drag me by the skirts right out to sea, I reluctantly waded for the opening.

  Once inside, the air grew quite sultry, as though heated by some geyser. Quite oddly I began to feel sleepy, and to have gluttonous fantasies about eating toast with jam as I sat by the fire at the cottage and had a doze. So real was this vision that I almost stopped then and there to sit in the rough shells that had gathered in one of the depressions in the tunnel floor. Only the cries of the terrified birds and the hissing tide kept me moving.

  Megan MacCodrum—come back!

  The eerie voice had me moving again. The sunlight faded with every step, but I had no trouble seeing, because of a strange phosphorescence that covered the walls. I did not touch the luminance, for it smelled of ammonia and sulfur though it was rather pretty and conveniently bright. The floor of the cave rose gradually, promising eventual safety, but I had to walk quickly to outpace the water that rushed in behind me. It was difficult because my limbs were growing wooden and graceless.

  Though feeling increasingly sleepy, I began to notice that there was an odd kind of sterility to the tunnel now that it had passed inland. No crustaceans or barnacles had taken up residence here, perhaps because of the strange green slime, or perhaps because of the unpleasantly warm temperature that made my skin bead with sweat, which I knew would feel disagreeably chilly when I finally reached open air again. Or maybe it was because the water at high tide ran too fast through the tunnel to permit anything to lodge there. Urged to greater effort by this thought, I moved faster, fighting sleepiness and cursing the wet skirts that hampered and chafed my clumsy legs.

  Fast as I trotted, the water was closing in faster—and the dark with it. And I found the gullies, both large and small, which increasingly laced the tunnel floor and walls, to be treacherously corniced with crumbling stone that gave easily, foot traps hidden by rotting sea wrack and loose scree and strangely shaped shells that waited just to turn my ankles. Haste was foolish, but dallying was not an option, and the inevitable finally occurred when I stumbled into a hidden hole, twisting my left ankle. The pain was sharp enough to make me feel sick. I leaned against the slimy rock wall, using blasphemous language as I reached for my pained joint and suddenly feared that even if Mistress MacLaren allowed herself to be inconvenienced enough to notice I was missing and send out a search party, help would come too late. Looking upward, I could see that the tunnel’s walls were wet all the way to the ceiling at this point. If I did not find another way out, I would drown in this narrow tunnel.

  I looked back the way I had come and was not encouraged. I could see no sign of daylight, only white water that thrashe
d about as if there were creatures in it. My ankle would have to hold my weight, or I would have to crawl. Hissing every bad word I knew, I forced myself to hobble around the sharp bend in the tunnel—

  I ran straight into Lachlan. I couldn’t help noticing that he was shirtless and his kilt had been hastily donned. The bottoms of the uneven pleats were damp and smutted with sand.

  “C’aite am bheil thu dol?” Where are you going? he demanded, catching me by the shoulders. I had the impression that he was not entirely happy to see me, and startled enough by my presence to use Gaelic rather than Scots.

  “Out of here,” I answered, feeling immediate relief at not being alone in that terrible place, even if my companion was also rather frightening.

  “Aye. That would be best. The white horses are running hard,” he said, looking past me; and when I turned I could see the cold green water was topped with white foam, which suggested great turbulence. “A storm is coming on. An unnatural one. Follow me noo—and make haste. We havenae much time tae spare.” He let go of me and started off.

  The water roared behind me, sounding angry that I might escape after all. I made haste as best I could but fell behind almost immediately, and Lachlan looked back with annoyance and perhaps a bit of concern. He had a general damn-your-eyes attitude that afternoon, which left me confounded. I couldn’t imagine why my presence was bothering him. Surely he didn’t live in these caves or think that I was spying on him…?

  “My ankle is sprained,” I snarled defensively. “I can’t go any faster.”

  Frowning, he doubled back. Lachlan leaned in uncomfortably close, and before I could ask what he was doing, he pulled back his lips in a snarl of his own and scraped his rather long and sharp teeth along my earlobe and jaw.