Samantha’s heart was beating fast, driving her lingering irritation with Damon. More brisk walking would settle her down.
Lifting herself from the rock, she pulled up her socks, forgetting how damp her toes were, hefted her rucksack onto one shoulder and set off again. The steep slopes of the hill ducked and dived, but she was unable to use the rusted barbed wire lines and posts of the fence on her left to pull her along: they were too high up, raised along a natural bank dividing the meadow she was in from the one adjacent.
Up above, she thought she could see the jack staring down at her from behind gorse, waiting for her to follow, perhaps? Peeping out as if he were the white rabbit and she Lewis Carroll’s Alice, being invited to visit curious and bizarre places.
She even felt a little odd. As if the sands of Strathavan in the west and Kilchattan bay in the east were squeezing the peninsular of Garroch Head, cutting it off from the main part of the island to the north. Cutting, squeezing, isolating her on a new island in a strange new time. She wondered if she wasn’t overdoing the hike. Walking too briskly might be making her light-headed. Yet the peculiar tenor of her thoughts was striving to make her apprehensive. Of what, she was at a loss to understand.
The hare, though, turned out to be a small stone simulacrum, its contours defined and shaped by lichen.
A kissing gate grabbed at her rucksack as she manoeuvred through it, and she heaved herself up the final steep part of the hill. In front of her, Samantha could now see the grey, dry stone of St. Blane’s perimeter wall. The ramparts were built on a high dyke, making it both impossible to see the ruins of the chapel itself, and difficult to climb over. She crossed through a stand of trees and began to follow the line of the wall until she came to a wrought iron gate blanketed by heavy shade. Nearby was a National Trust for Scotland’s information notice, where she learned that marauding Norsemen had burned the chapel in 790 when they swept across the country.
Yet the place exuded an atmosphere that reeked of a time more ancient, beyond the time of the Celtic monks and rape and pillage. Though contemplation of that bloody event alone, never mind the general and unwelcome sense of disquiet she was suffering, gave Samantha a shiver.
Inside the wall, she was impressed by the huge elm and ash trees which crowded the pathetic ruins of the chapel itself. Grey walls stood in half or full measure, a single remaining Norman arch announcing the building’s one-time restoration. Completely exposed to the elements, the blocks of the floor were worn into dips by the tread of many feet, hers soon to be part of that nameless company of lost souls.
Sitting on a block which was once part of a wall, Samantha began to think that the strenuous walk here might not, after all, have been worth it. The chapel ruins lacked interest, she decided. No doubt Damon would have been furious at the wasted effort if he had come. However, she was here now and decided to examine all the archeological features.
Crossing to the north, down the slope and back through the entrance, she came to the so-called Devil’s Cauldron. A ruin whose few remaining stones suggested a circular structure. Samantha saw that they were megalithic. Although, she recalled from the information notice, no one knew what the structure was for, it suggested that the building might have been a tower, similar to the Irish and Scottish round towers or brochs. Inside its truncated walls, shade and dampness allowed lichen to flourish.
On the floor, emerging from an undergrowth of ferns, several large mushrooms bloomed, apparently out of their normal season. They stood out against the uniformity of grey stone and dark green-grey leaves as if tempting her with their flesh. The caps were a brilliant blood-red, mottled with white flecks. Instantly she was reminded of fairy stories, for weren’t these traditionally the toadstools upon which the fairy-folk invariably sat in innumerable illustrated children’s books?
The mushrooms were unusually attractive and at the same time distinctly creepy. Samantha’s suspect and unwilling memories were attempting, unsuccessfully for the moment, to clamber forth, with all kinds of mythological half-truths to tell.
Don’t touch them. That was what common sense told her. Old Wives’ Tales or no, these toadstools looked uncommon enough to be dangerous.
A few minutes later Samantha had retraced her steps and was within the confining wall again, examining the foundations of what was thought to be the original chapel. These consisted of several large slabs almost buried and overgrown by grasses.
She sat nearby and took off her rucksack, intending to have lunch, using one of the slabs as her table. It was ideal. Looking up, the view over and beyond the wall from this vantage point allowed her to see the hills of the mainland streaked with low cloud like smoke, whilst she and her surroundings were bathed in clear sunlight.
As she unpacked her lunch and a bottle of cola, Samantha noticed something on one of the rocks nearby. Something left there, apparently, as if it were an offering placed on a recumbent altar stone. Scrambling across, she examined what were the brownish, desiccated remains of several of the mushrooms she’d seen in the ruined tower.
Someone must have been here recently, picked some from the broch, and left them to dry out, as if the next visitor would find them useful. Samantha searched her memories, knowing her unconscious mind could share with her some knowledge she’d forgotten. Wasn’t it that if eaten, these fairy mushrooms were supposed to cause hallucinations? She wondered if some New Age folk might have been here recently, sampling nature’s pharmacy, trying to convene with something higher. With the shamanists, perhaps, who used the Soma in ancient times and, according to legend, metamorphosed into bird and beast.
Samantha’s earlier sense of displacement returned, as if the ancient world was slipping into the present and her mind and body could perceive the transition somehow. The hare might almost have been the catalyst. A symbol of the moon, of fecundity and resurrection.
And madness.
She shivered in spite of the naked sun.
Then she remembered that she was no longer held back by Damon’s selfishness, nor his down to earth boorishness. The rustic coarseness she had once found so attractive. She was free with the wild breeze and the sun. As free as them. Her thoughts turned into a thousand feelers, resembling the crowded, entangled mass of twigs, sticking out of a nearby birch.
A witch’s broom.
A witch . . .
The mass of her thoughts uncurled as a tangle of serpents loosened from their basket, and she began to recall the importance of being here. It was one of the reasons why she wanted to visit the chapel. St. Blane’s had once been the site of a local coven. In Bute’s museum, she remembered the displays lucidly presenting the island’s history.
Old English lettering described, with woodcut type illustrations on wall-mounted boards, the seventeenth century. The baptism of a local witch. Her coven dancing in a ring around the broch. Hysteria and convulsions. The writhing and swelling of the witch’s body and changes in its height and weight.
And then there were the trials and tortures. Here on the island were preserved samples of the instruments used by the witch-finders: the witch-bridle, the capsie-claws, the thumbscrews . . .
Seeing again the rusty tools from the museum in her mind’s eye, Samantha shuddered.
Yet there was more her recessed memories had to reveal. The ointments, the substances that induced in the witch the hallucinatory experience of flying, or of changing shape.
The witch-hunters, on the other hand, were simply sadists and murderers, wallowing in their mundane depravity. But their victims? Merely unfortunate, innocent women? All of them?
Or gifted individuals?
Samantha placed her sandwich back in its wrapper uneaten. Her hands shook nervously, but there was a craving inside her, navigating her with a persistence greater than her fear of the unknown.
Quickly, she picked up a shrivelled mushroom, broke off a large piece, and placed it between her lips. The tip of her tongue picked up the flavour, touching the fungus much as she would touch Damon�
��s tongue, before making love. Her lips closed. She ate it, washing it down with cola to mask the bitter taste.
“And how was your day?” Damon asked, still nursing his resentment at Samantha’s independence. He was lying on his bed as if he had been there all day, hiding like a slug from the drying heat of the sun.
She had hardly dropped the rucksack from her shoulders before he’d pounced with his sarcastic question and immediately her hackles rose at his stupidity. The next second she allowed the vitriol she was about to unleash to dissipate. She was wide awake, healthy. The day’s walk had not tired her at all; there was no need to allow anger to spoil her euphoria.
“Fine,” she stated, her voice measured, affable. “And yours? Did you make it to Loch Fyne?” The real curiosity she displayed would sedate Damon’s skewed attitude.
“I decided not to go after all,” he stated, only mildly embarrassed by the admission.
“You mean, you’ve stayed in the hotel all day?” Her nearly shouted response made Damon flinch. Looking around the room, she saw a paperback carelessly tossed at the bottom of his bed, a half-open newspaper lying on the floor near the bedside table. On the window ledge a polystyrene container with the remains of a fish and chip meal stuck to it made the room smell of vinegar.
Well, he had been out, she sneered internally. For a distance of maybe a couple of hundred yards to the newsagent’s and the chippy! But that hardly counted.
“What a waste of a day.”
A thin smile appeared on his face and disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Damon appeared to be trapped, held here by more than his lethargy. Had he done this to spite her, Samantha wondered?
“Don’t concern yourself.” He shifted sluggishly on the bed, its springs quietly squeaking as though miserable with age and rust. “It was my fucking day, not yours.” Damon smiled again, apologetically this time. “Look, how about we go down to Rothesay for dinner at the Black Bull? You liked it there before.”
She was hungry. And maybe he was trying to heal the growing rift between them before it became a canyon. Or was he merely thinking about filling his fat stomach? Samantha was only half convinced.
“And,” Damon continued, “you can tell me all about Blane’s Chapel over dinner.” Conciliation softened his voice.
Rothesay was a mile’s walk from their hotel and as soon as they started out, Damon began trailing behind.
“What’s the matter?” Samantha asked, before she noticed he was limping slightly.
“Sprained my ankle, I think.”
“What? On your hike to the chip shop!” she laughed at her wisecrack. She was fresh, alert even after a full day of strenuous walking, and now the idea of Damon as an infirm old man made her giggle.
“Thanks for the sympathy!” Then, “Just walk a bit slower. I’m sure it’ll be all right in a bit.”
But she did not want to walk more slowly. Her body longed for the adrenalin rush, the blood pumping to serve eager muscles. So she had to demand that her legs take shorter steps. She imagined herself as the hare, bounding away into the fields, turning on a sixpence, ears swept back, hind legs long and lithe, thrusting backwards, leaping, leaping, the wind blowing freely across her fine silky hair . . .
In the Black Bull, Damon consumed haggis, mashed potatoes and turnips and washed it down with four pints of beer. In a short space of time he was smiling, merry from intoxication.
Samantha looked at him over her unfinished plaice and fries and wondered if she should tell him she’d eaten the mushroom and had discovered she wasn’t really hungry after all. He’d think her completely mad and lucky not to have been poisoned. Even though he poisoned himself repeatedly with alcohol. He might also become argumentative again. She could do without that two nights’ running.
Darkness had fallen by the time Damon had decided he’d drunk enough and wanted to go to bed. She resigned herself to another sexless night.
“Shall I call a taxi?” Samantha asked, assuming the short walk back to the hotel would be far too much for him, what with his ankle and the beer sloshing around in his system.
He dismissed the very idea, the drink supplying him with bravado. They headed along the path by the foreshore, the black waters to their right and below them lapping at the shingle as they walked. Just the two of them, alone under the stars.
It could have been romantic.
But it wasn’t long before Damon needed a rest. Samantha could see it coming. He was staggering from his sprain and the beer. It was unbelievable that a few days earlier he had been a fit hill-walker.
Now he behaved like an arthritic pensioner.
She wanted to leave him sitting on the sea wall, where he’d decided to rest, and dash off, use up some of the energy bursting through her. She wanted to say: “last one to the hotel’s a slug”, and race off, knowing in her heart that she was swift and tireless and unbeatable.
“Just a couple of minutes,” Damon suggested, dampening, momentarily, her wayward thoughts.
Impatiently, Samantha stamped through a gap in the wall and down concrete steps onto the beach. Underfoot, pebbles squeaked against one another and the dark water close by reflected the distant lights of the town around the bay.
A full moon bobbed out to sea, shimmering. Above, in the sky overhead, its real self gleamed as brightly as a freshly minted bronze coin.
She turned to face her partner. “If we use the beach it’ll be quicker.” Pointing to the diverging of the road ahead, which would take them out of their way, she displayed with her other arm the sharper curve of the beach, leading to Port Bannatyne and the hotel on the front. “It’s more direct.”
“And we’ll probably get our feet soaking wet into the bargain,” Damon replied morosely. “Besides, do you really think walking on a pebble beach is going to be any good for my ankle?”
He never used to be like that!
“My god, Damon, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you complain about wet feet. And that coming from Mr Mountainer himself!” Samantha’s words were freeing themselves, criticism a sharp instrument, inflicting the necessary irony.
Deciding not to allow him to challenge her decision, Samantha began to walk along the shingle without a backward glance.
The moon bathed her, baptizing her with cool radiance, its borrowed light penetrating her soul. So good, she felt so good.
Damon stood up and began to follow her. She sighed with a sense of satisfaction as she heard him clambering down the steps, and she stomped ahead. After several minutes walking, enjoying the pressure of pebbles under her feet and the interactive play of muscles in her legs, Samantha turned to see how far behind Damon had lagged.
He was way back, stumbling along. He appeared to be a black blob. A hunched, fat shape staggering under the weight of booze.
He really looked as if he’d put on weight. Perhaps he had, Samantha thought, and she’d failed to notice.
“Come on!” she shouted, amused, yet puzzled at his gait, which was more awkward and lopsided than a sprained ankle might suggest. She was willing to wait exactly thirty seconds for him to catch her up and then she would be gone, swiftly to the hotel.
Laughing. She would laugh all the way . . .
Instead of speeding up, however, Damon slowed even more, as if the surface of the beach was adhering to the soles of his boots with each step he took.
An expletive was on her lips, ready to explode, when Damon stopped moving completely. Another damn rest, she mouthed silently.
He sat heavily on a rock.
There was nothing for it, she had two options. To let him stay there until the tide came in and forced him to sink or swim, while she carried on. Or go back and help the invalid.
Just like dealing with a naughty child, Samantha decided. There was little sympathy in her heart as she began to trot resignedly along the strand towards the crumpled figure.
He appeared to be mumbling something as she approached and it sounded as if he were rubbing two pebbles
together in the palm of his hand. A cloud drifted clear of the moon’s bright face as she neared him and the dark hump took form.
Yes . . .
No, he was formless . . .
Damon had become so listless that he appeared to have transformed into a rock, a rounded, sea-washed piece of basalt that the gulls would use as a perch and shit on for a thousand generations.
Moonlight gilded the beach with wheat-coloured light. Even with the illumination, Samantha could not distinguish between Damon and the rock on which he was sitting, as if her eyes were no longer focusing the way they should.
When the scraping pebble noise came again, she realized, with exasperation, that he had fallen asleep.
In her heart Samantha knew that Damon no longer wanted to move, asleep or not. He was contented with his new lifestyle. And if that was what he wanted, so be it. His decision freed her completely. She could allow the lurking chemical in her brain its liberty at last.
She turned her eyes up to face the sky and as her head swept back, arching her neck, bangs of long hair she didn’t have, like silky ears, fell about her shoulder blades. They were kissed by the soft current of air off the sea. She crouched low and twitched her upper lip, sniffing. The breeze was heavy with the smell of salt and seaweed.
Should she be here? But where if not here?
Abruptly, fear skewered her heart. Terror began to swell inside her head, squeezing her eyes until her vision became blurred. As if . . . As if her face was changing shape, forcing her eyes to bulge. Her hands and feet twitched with increasing panic and something else was happening to them, but the lustre of the moon was now veiled by cloud and she was unable to make out anything.
Damon was immobilized nearby and might drown if he didn’t wake up. Samantha reached out towards the black shape with the pebbly voice of its snores, thinking that if she could only touch him, wake him, everything would be all right. The glamour that terrorized her would fade away and normality would return and she would cuss him good-naturedly about his injury. And bathe his foot and bandage it when they reached their hotel . . .
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 24