by Clive Barker
“Do you recognize anything?” he asked her.
“Not with my eyes,” she said. “But . . . I know this place.” There was a gentle bump and creak as the Claymore nudged the pier, then the sound of welcoming shouts from both land and ship.
“Time to go,” Will said, and escorted Rosa down into the hold, where Frannie was already in the car. Will got into the passenger seat beside her, and Rosa slipped into the back. There was an uncomfortable silence while they waited for the ferry’s door to be opened. They didn’t have to wait long. After a couple of minutes, sunlight flooded the hold and one of the crew played at traffic control, signaling the half-dozen vehicles alighting here out one by one. There was a second, longer delay on the pier itself, while the laden lorry moved out of the way of the exiting cars, this maneuver performed with great hullabaloo, but no sense of urgency. Finally, the congestion was cleared, and Frannie drove them down the pier into the village itself. It was no longer than it had appeared from the seaward side: just a few rows of small but well-kept houses with even smaller, well-kept walled gardens, all facing the water, and a scattering of older buildings, some in disrepair, several in ruin. There were also a few shops, among them a post office and a small supermarket, its windows bannered with news of this week’s bargains, their silent advertisements still too loud for the hush of the place.
“Do you want to go and get us a map?” Frannie suggested to Will, bringing the car to a halt outside the supermarket. “And maybe some chocolate?” she called after him, “and something to drink?”
He emerged a couple of minutes later with two bags of purchases, “For the road,” as he put it: biscuits, chocolate, bread, cheese, two large bottles of water, and a small bottle of whisky.
“What about the map?” Frannie said, as he loaded the bags onto the back seat beside Rosa.
“Voilá,” he said, pulling a small folded map from his pocket, and along with it a twelve-page tourists’ guide to the island, written by the local schoolmaster and crudely illustrated by the schoolmaster’s wife. He passed the booklet back over his shoulder to Rosa, telling her to flip through it for any names or places that rang a bell. The map he opened on his lap. There wasn’t much to study. The island was twelve miles long and at its broad-est three miles wide. It had a trio of hills: Beinn Hough, Beinn Bheag Bhaile-mhuilinn, and Ben Hynish, the summit of the latter being the highest point on the island. It had several small lochs and a handful of villages (described as townships on the map) around its coast. What few roads the island boasted simply joined these townships—the largest of which consisted of nine houses—by the most direct route, which, given the flatness of the terrain, was usually something approaching a straight line.
“Where the hell do we start?” Will wondered aloud. “I can’t even pronounce half these names.”
There was a glorious poetry in the words, however: Balephuil and Balephetrish, Baile-Mheadhonach and Cornaigmore, Vaul and Gott and Kenavara. And they lost little of their power in translation: Balephuil was the Town of the Marsh, Heylipout, the Holy Town, Bail-Udhaig, the Town of Wolf Bay.
“If nobody’s got any better ideas,” Will said, “I suggest we start here.” He pointed to Baile-Mheadhonach.
“Any particular reason?” Frannie wanted to know.
“Well, it’s almost in the middle of the island, for one thing.” In fact that was its unglamorous translation: Middle Town. “And it’s got its own cemetery, look.” There was a cross to the south of the village and beside it the words Cnoc a’ Chlaidh, translated as Christian burial ground. “If Simeon was buried here, we may as well start out by looking for his grave.” He glanced over his shoulder at Rosa. She’d put down the booklet and was staring out of the window, the fixedness of her expression such that Will looked away immediately so as not to disturb her medita-tions. “Let’s just go,” he said to Frannie. “We can follow the coast road west as far as Crossapol. Then we make a left inland.” Frannie eased the car out into what would have been the flow of traffic, if there’d been any traffic, and within perhaps a minute they had passed the outskirts of Scarinish, and were on the open road, a road so straight and empty she could have driven blindfolded and more than likely brought them to Crossapol.
V
There were among the Western Isles places of great historical and mythological significance, where battles had been fought and princes hidden, and stories made that haunted listeners still.
Tiree was not among them. The island had not passed an entirely uneventful life, but it had been at best a footnote to events that flowered in their full splendor in other places.
There was no more obvious example of this than the exploits of St. Columba, who had in his time carried the Gospel throughout the Hebrides, founding seats of devotion and learning on a number of islands. Tiree was not thus blessed, however. The good man had lingered on the island only long enough to curse a rock in Gott’s Bay for the sin of letting his boat’s mooring rope slip. It would be henceforth barren, he declared. The rock was dubbed Mallachdaig, or Little Cursed One, and no seaweed had grown on it since. Columba’s associate, St. Brendan, had been in a more benign mood during his fleeting visit and had blessed a hill, but if the blessing conferred some inspirational power on the place nobody had noticed: There had been no revelations or spontaneous healings on the spot. The third of these visiting mystics, St. Kenneth, had caused a chapel to be built in the dunes near the township of Kilkenneth, which had been so named in the hope of persuading him to linger. The ruse had failed. Kenneth had gone on to greater things, and the dunes—more persuaded by wind than metaphysics—had subsequently buried the chapel.
There were a handful of stories through which St. Columba and his gang did not wander, all of which remained part of the anecdotal landscape, but most of them were dispiritingly domestic in scale: a well on the side of Beinn Hough, for instance, called Tobar nan naoi beo, the Well of the Nine Living, because it had miraculously supplied a widow and her eight homeless children with a lifetime’s supply of shellfish; a pool close to the shore at Vaul, where the ghost of a girl who had drowned in its depths could be seen on moonless nights, singing a lonely lullaby to lure living souls into the water with her In short, nothing out of the ordinary; islands half the size of Tiree boasted legends far more ambitious.
But there was a numinosity here none of the rest of the isles possessed and at its heart was a phenomenon that would have turned St. Columba from a gentle meditative into a wild-eyed prophet had he witnessed it. In fact, this wonderment had not yet come to pass when the saint had hopscotched through the islands, but even if it had he would most likely have been denied sight of it, for those few islanders who had glimpsed the miracle (and, presently living, they numbered eight) never mentioned the subject, not even to those they loved. This was the great secret of their lives, a thing unseen, yet more certain than the sun, and they were not about to dilute its enchantment by speaking of it. In fact, many of them limited their own contemplation of what they’d sensed, for fear of exhausting its power to enrapture them. Some, it was true, returned to the place where they’d been touched in the hope of a second revelation, and though none of them saw anything on their return visits, many were granted a certainty that kept them content for the rest of their lives: They left the place with the conviction that what they had failed to see had seen them. They were no longer frail mortals, who would live their lives and pass away. The power on the hill at Kenavara had witnessed them and, in that witnessing, had drawn them into an immortal dance.
For it lived in the island’s very being, this power; it moved in sand and pasture and sea and wind, and the souls it saw became part of these eternals, imperishable. Once witnessed, what did a man or woman have to fear? Nothing, except perhaps the discomforts that attended death. Once their corporeal selves were shed, however, they moved where the power moved and witnessed as it witnessed, glory on glory. When on summer nights the Borealis drooped its color on the stratosphere, they would be there. When the whales
came to breach in exaltation, they would rise, too. They would be with the kittiwakes and the hares and with every star that trembled on Loch an Eilein. It was in all things, this power. In the sandy pastures adjoining the dunes (or the machair as it was called in Gaelic), and in the richer, damper fields of the island. midst, where the grass was lush and the cattle grazed themselves creamy.
It did not much concern itself with the griefs and travails of those. Men and women who never saw it, but it kept a tally of their comings and goings. It knew who was buried in the churchyards at Kirkapol and Vaul; it knew how many babies were born each year. It even watched the visitors, in a casual fashion, not because they were as interesting as whales or kittiwakes, they weren’t, but because there might be among them some soul who would do it harm. This was not beyond the bounds of possibility. It had been witnessing long enough to have seen stars disappear from the heavens. It was not more permanent than they.
Rosa said, “Stop the car.”
Frannie did as she was instructed.
“What is it?” Will asked, turning round to look at Rosa.
Her eyes were welling with tears as he watched, while a smile befitting a painted Virgin rose on her lips. She reached out and fumbled with the door handle, but in her present distracted state she couldn’t get it to open. Will was out of the car in a heartbeat and opening the door for her. They were on an empty stretch of road, with unfenced pasture off to the right, grazed by a few sheep, and to their left a band of flower-studded grass that became a gently sloping beach. Overhead, terns wheeled and darted. And much, much higher, a jet on its way west, reflecting earthlight off its silver underbelly. He saw all this in a moment or two, his senses quickened by something in the air. The fox moved in him, turning its snout to the sky and sensing whatever Rosa had sensed.
He didn’t ask her what it was. He simply waited while she scanned the horizon. Finally she said, “Rukenau’s here.”
“Alive?”
“Oh yes, alive. Oh my Lord, alive.” Her smile darkened.
“But I wonder what he’s become after all these years.”
“Do you know where we can find him?”
She held her breath for a moment. Frannie had gotten out of the car and started to speak. Will put his finger to his lips.
Rosa, meanwhile, had started to walk away from the car, into the pasture. There was so much sky here; a vast, empty blue, widening before Will as his eyes grew ambitious to take it in. What have I been doing all these years, he thought, putting boxes around little corners of the world? It was such a lie to do that, to stand under skies as wide as this and record instead some mote of suffering. Enough of that.
“What’s wrong?” he heard Frannie say.
“Nothing,” he said. “Why?” Before she could reply he realized that like Rosa, his eyes had filled with tears. That he was smiling and weeping in the same strange moment. “It’s okay,” he said.
“Are you all right?”
“Never better,” he said, brushing his tears away.
Rosa had finished her contemplations, it seemed, for now she turned round and walked back toward the car. As she approached she pointed off toward the southwest of the island.
“It’s waiting for us,” she said.
VI
With the map in front of him and Rosa, like a living compass, on the seat behind him, it quickly became apparent to Will where they were headed. To Ceann a’ Bharra, or Kenavara, a headland at the southwestern tip of the island, described in the over-wrought language of the guidebook as “a precipice that rises out of the ocean sheer on either flank, and sheerer still at the headland itself from the heights of which the Skerryvore Lighthouse may be spied, marking the last sign of a human presence before the mighty Atlantic rolls away to the empty horizon.” It was, the booklet warned, “the only spot on our glorious island that has been a scene of tragedy. The great profusion of bird on Kenavara’s crags and ledges has drawn the attention of ornithologists for many years, but regrettably the crags are dangerous to even the most expert of climbers, and a number of visitors have been killed in falls from the cliffs while attempting to reach inaccessible nests. The beauty of Kenavara’s best appreciated from the safety of the beaches that flank it. Venturing on the headland itself even in broad daylight and fine weather, carries with it risk of serious injury or worse.” It certainly wasn’t the easiest of places to reach. The road carried them through a tiny cluster of houses, maybe ten in all, which were marked on the map as the village of Barrapol, and then on down toward the western shore of the island, where it divided, about four hundred yards shy of the beach, the good road making a right turn toward Saundaig, while the left hand fork became a track over the bumpy grass. According to the map even this disappeared after a few hundred yards, but they took it as far as they could, as it ran parallel to the shore. Their destination was less than a half-mile ahead: an undulating peninsula, its flanks scored and gullied, so that it looked not to be one continuous spot of land, but three or four hillocks, with fissures of naked rock between, falling away into the sea.
The track had now petered out altogether, but Frannie drove on toward the headland, cautiously negotiating the increasingly uneven turf. Hares bounded ahead of the car, making preposterous leaps in their alarm; a sheep, grazing on the machair far from the flock, dashed away, bug-eyed with panic.
The ground was getting progressively sandier, the wheels turning up fans of earth behind the car.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to drive much further,” Frannie said.
“Then we’ll go by foot,” Will said. “Are you all right with that, Rosa?”
She murmured that yes, she’d be fine, but once she got out of the car it was clear that her physical state had deteriorated in the last quarter hour. Her skin had lost all its gleam; the whites of her eyes become faintly jaundiced. Her hands were trembling.
“Are you sick?” Will said.
“I’ll get over it,” she said. “It’s just . . . coming here again,” she let her gaze stray towards Kenavara, reluctantly, Will thought. The bright, smiling woman who’d strode back toward the car on the Crossapol road had been cowed; he didn’t exactly know why. Nor was Rosa going to tell him. Despite her sudden frailty she set off toward the cliffs, striding ahead of Will and Frannie.
“Let her lead,” Will whispered.
So they wove their way through the machair toward Kenavara, the reason for the headland’s fatal reputation becoming more apparent as they approached. The waves were beating hard against the shore to their right, but their violence was nothing compared to the fury with which they came against the cliffs.
And rising out of the spume as though born from the waves and given wings, tens of hundreds of birds, their din a raucous counterpoint to the boom of the water.
Not all of them claimed the cliffs as their home. A solitary tern appeared overhead, sniping in a bitter voice at these intruders and, when they didn’t retreat, swooped down as though to peck at them, veering off a few inches short of their scalps.
Frannie sniped back, waving her arms to shoo the tern away.
“Bloody bird!” she yelled up at it. “Leave us alone!”
“It’s just protecting its territory,” Will said.
“Well I’m protecting my scalp!” Frannie snapped. “Go on! Bugger off! Damn thing!”
It continued its attacks for another five minutes, until they were almost at the slope of the headland itself. Rosa was still leading the way, not even glancing behind to confirm that Will and Frannie were still following.
“I wonder where she’s going,” Frannie said.
There was no sign of any human presence on the headland whatsoever—not a fence, not a cairn, not even a sign to warn people from straying where they could come to harm. And yet Will didn’t doubt that this was Rukenau’s home (and, most likely, Thomas Simeon’s resting place). He didn’t need Rosa to confirm it; he could feel it in his own body. His skin was tingling, his teeth and tongue and eyebal
ls ached, his blood thumped in his ears, its rhythms audible through the din of sea and birds.
Now that they’d emerged from the protective troughs of the machair the wind came at them off the ocean, gusting so strong-ly that all three were staggering, heads down.
“You want to hang on to me?” Will yelled to Frannie over the bluster. She shook her head. “Just be careful,” he shouted.
“The ground’s not very safe.”
That was an understatement. The whole headland was a mass of traps, the lush, springy turf suddenly dropping away, sheer, into a darkness filled with the booming of the sea. The grass itself was slick with the mist that rose from these gullies, squeaking beneath their heels as they went in pursuit of Rosa.
She seemed to move more surefootedly than her companions, for all her frailty, the gap between the two parties steadily widening as they proceeded. Sometimes Will and Frannie lost sight of her altogether, when the route brought either they or she to a dip in the ground. The sides of some were extremely steep, and Frannie preferred to negotiate them on her butt, clinging to fistfuls of slippery grass for purchase. All the while, the birds wheeled overhead. Gulls and guillemots, fulmar petrels and kittiwakes, even a hoodie-crow, up to see what the hoopla was all about.
None of them made any attempt to attack, as the tern had done.
This was so assuredly their terrain, what did they have to fear?
These pitiful people clinging white-knuckled to rock and clod were no threat to their sovereignty.
At last Frannie caught hold of Will’s arms and, pulling him close enough that she could be heard over the din of the birds, said, “Where the hell’s Rosa gone? We haven’t lost her, have we?”
Will scanned the land ahead. There was indeed no sign of Rosa. They were no more than five hundred yards from the end of the headland, but there were still dozens of places she could have disappeared, spots where the ground sloped away into marshy hollows, rocky outcrops marking fissures and crevices.