Where the World Ends

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “In the name of Christ Jesus, please go away.” The words came from Euan.

  Somewhere in the wool-white world outside, a stronger wind sprang up, took the mist in its teeth and shook it to pieces. The noise of the sea returned, steady as breathing. A draught ruffled the boys’ damp hair. The apparition spun on its heel…and dissolved in the watery sunlight that was rapidly replacing the fog. Everyone turned to stare at Euan.

  “Well?” he said, surprised that no one else had thought of it. “Bible says people should cast out demons. So I did.” He made it sound as everyday-ordinary a pastime as washing his hands.

  It was not clear, afterwards, just who believed they had seen a ghost and who had simply got caught up in the panic. But no one wanted to cast doubt on Euan’s power to cast out demons. The incident of the ghost had finally persuaded him he did not lack for faith. The others might now doubt that the world had ended, but Euan was sure enough for all of them. He was a constant, a shining light, not to be snuffed out. So no one openly discussed whether or not the foggy phantom had been real. Which was a shame.

  If they had, it might have come to light earlier that Mr Farriss was a man truly haunted.

  “I am going after nests for kindling,” Farriss called back, as he moved with brisk efficiency along the cliff face. Gone was the sleepy listlessness, the bleary-eyed blankness of the man. Though his skin was still an unhealthy, porridgy yellow, and his hair a blotchy sepia, the incident with the “ghost” had imbued Mr Farriss with new energy. There was something he urgently wanted to do, and the urgency had woken him up. His seasoned skill on a rock face showed itself now, as he traversed the Stac.

  “Alone, Maister?” called Quilliam. “On your own, Maister?” It was hardly unusual for Farriss to go in search of solitude and silence: Quill might not have gone after him – but for the fact that this time Farriss had taken Murdo’s rope with him. It was looped about his body as he stepped from ledge to ledge, transferred his grasp from handhold to handhold. There was something about his hurried movements that spurred Quill to keep up: that and the fact the man had no sack with him to hold kindling.

  Every furlong or so, Farriss turned and told Quill to head back.

  He was making for the Overhang, that lime-slathered fist of rock that jutted out over deep water and was home, in the summer, to a seething gallimaufry of seabirds mating, laying, squabbling and squitting from dawn till dark. He tied off the rope round the base of a misshapen boulder and set about filling his pockets: not with old, infertile eggs, nor with sea thrift or gull feathers or dead chicks, but with stones. With intense concentration, he scoured the ledges for pebbles and shards, cracking fragile platelets of scree into sizes easier to pocket. Beneath him, the white rope hung down into empty space, its kinks and bends easing into a straight, clean line that swung like a bell rope in the wind.

  “I’ve been slitting that rope for horsehair,” Quill called. “To make wicks. It needs mending.”

  “No matter,” said Farriss.

  Quilliam wanted Domhnall Don to come, with his big, bulky, bluff good sense. He wanted Murdo to turn up demanding his rope back. He wanted his mother there to take hold of Farriss by the ears and shake him and tell him he had barley bran for brains, then hug him to her heart and promise not to tell a soul he was such a numpty.

  He wanted Euan there to remind Farriss that suicide is a sin. For he saw Farriss’s intention as plainly as if he had spoken it out loud.

  “I am going home, Quilliam,” said Farriss as he lowered himself over the edge of the Overhang. The white rope stretched. The slits Quill had cut in it, to get at the horsehair, opened like gills.

  There was some kind of reasoning at work in the man: Quill tried to put himself inside Farriss’s head to understand it. It was a frightening place to be. But yes: it made a kind of sense. To hurl himself into the sea, or from the top of the Stac’s peak, would indeed be suicide and a mortal sin. Besides, Farriss might lose courage at the last moment. But this way, the rope would bear the sin of his death.

  To string a rope over the rim of an overhang makes it impossible to climb back up without a rope-man to pull you up, bodily. And there are no handholds, no footholds: only the rope to cling to. Eventually, the rope would either break under Farriss’s weight or time would simply sap him of his last morsel of strength so that he fell to his death in the water below. The stones were meant to carry him down to the bottom (in case he survived the fall and tried, like Fearnach Mor, to swim for his life). The rest of the company would find nothing but the rope, and would put it down to an accident. Even almighty God might be fooled into thinking no sin had been committed.

  But Quilliam was not fooled. Quilliam knew. He had no intention of letting Farriss damn himself by committing suicide, no intention of letting this schoolmaster desert his boys, no intention of standing by and watching a good man die.

  Quill equally knew he lacked the physical strength to pull Farriss back up.

  He wanted Murdina to tell him he was mistaken: that Farriss really was just going after bird-nests. But no soothing voice spoke inside his head, only the hornet whine of blind terror…

  …So Quill, too, lowered himself over the brink and trusted his weight to the white rope. He felt the lambskin sheath stretch. He felt it soak up the sweat from his hands.

  “Are you mad, boy?”

  “Now nothing bad can happen, Maister. Or it’ll take me down too.”

  Quill would not have put Farriss down as a swearer. It takes an educated man (Quill supposed) to know quite so many oaths. The next two minutes were certainly an education.

  Then silence, but for the creaking of the rope as it swung in the wind, chafing, chafing against the base of the boulder. The sea, too, was chafing the base of the Stac. The water beneath them was azure and crystal clear. With the sun smothered by low cloud, there was no dazzle, and they could see as deep down as daylight reached – not to the seabed itself far below, but to arches and plinths of rock under the water. They could almost be seeing a drowned city – some sunken ruin of a previous civilization – a mermaid castle, a citadel of the Amazon Queen. Or home to the blue-green men whose lungs breathe ocean brine, who are the ocean brine.

  “I can simply let go the rope,” said Farriss.

  “But then I couldna get back up top,” said Quill. “Not anyhow.”

  A seventh wave slopped extravagantly against the cliff below, and the spray rose upwards, but nowhere near as high as the tail of the white rope.

  “Fearnach Mor comes to me in my sleep,” said Farriss.

  After a moment, Quill said, “Murdina Galloway comes to me in mine.”

  “She does? She was a witch, then.” Farriss said it as if he found it sad but interesting: not scandalously wicked, just proof that their dreams were indeed made of the same hellish fabric.

  “She is not a witch. How could you think it! Your own kin! She’s a fine person. I just dream her, that’s all.”

  “I apologize. My wife…my girls…” Farriss said, but stopped. He might share his nightmares, but there were treasures too precious to speak of to anyone at all… Instead he said: “Fearnach Mor comes to me. It was me he came to in the Bothy. Says to me that being Nowhere is better than this place. To be Nothing. To be Nowhere. Better than this.”

  “He’s tempting you to do a wickedness. That’s just like him… But Maister, if his ghost is still here on the Stac, he canna tell what it’s like to be Nothing or Nowhere, because he’s stuck here for good and always, doing the haunting. So what does he know about Nothing and Nowhere? You want to spend forever, the two of you, haunting Warrior Stac?”

  “I am not a thief like him. I am not a bad…” But Farriss thought better of justifying himself to the boy whose feet were in his face. “Soon the birds we have in store will be gone – the sea too rough to fish. I willna stay and see you all starve and freeze who were put in my care.”

  The rope’s sheath shifted on its horsehair core, and turned them to face the sea rather t
han the rock. Beyond the obstacle of Stac Lee, the very rim of Hirta peeped at them: Conachair’s summit, the Isle of Soay at one end, Dun at the other. Why had no one come to fetch them home? It was such a little, little distance to have come…

  “I was weaving the cloth of a dress. Before we came here. A dress for my wife. She had spun the thread, all ready for me to weave it. But I was slow getting started. I left before I could weave all she needed.”

  Like gill slits, the splits in the rope’s lambskin wrapper gaped. Like gill slits, the clouds opened too, and let fall golden sunlight on the sea. And where it fell, to the north, a shape moved through the ocean.

  A whale.

  It was vast as a galleon – a fleet of galleons, for – yes! – there was not one but three – four – more! An Armada of whales, ploughing their way south-west. Farriss caught his breath.

  “The earth is full of they riches. So is this great wide sea…” He whispered it, as if quoting too loud might scare the whales away.

  It was so majestic a sight: so unhurried, so disconnected from time or the puny fragments of dry land that stuck up above water and the punier creatures who clung to them. While the whales stayed within sight, nothing else mattered but watching them cruise south-west towards the emptiness of Ever.

  “Whales are a thing I never saw before,” breathed Quill. “I heard tell, but I never saw.”

  “I wish my girls could’ve…” said Farriss.

  “Maybe they did. Maybe even now they’re on top of Oiseval, looking out.”

  “The world’s no ended, then? You think?”

  “What y’asking me for? I’m the boy. You’re the one meant to be giving out with the knowledge.” A wisp of horsehair escaping the sheath blew in Quill’s face, caught in his lashes, grazed his eyeball. With no rope under his thigh, he could not spare a hand to be rid of it. He was carrying his full bodyweight with his two fists. “Afore I weary, Maister, would you please climb over me? You can get over the rim if you stand on my shoulders. Then you can pull me up.”

  “You could stand on my shoulders,” Farriss countered. “You go ahead of me.”

  “But I couldna pull you up, once I’m on the shelf. Like I said: I’m the boy. You have to go up first… Oh, but you could empty those stones from your pockets, if you would, Maister. Lessen the weight. That would be a kindness.”

  And miraculously, without bothering to deny the stones were there, Farriss scooped shards, pebbles and lime-encrusted stones from his pockets and dropped them into the sea below, smashing the reflection of two climbers on a white rope. Then he climbed the rope – tried to climb the rope – past the boy clinging to it above him.

  To scale a rope hanging close against a rock face is one thing, but to climb a rope dangling free calls for a different kind of effort. Though his eyes were shut, Quill felt every part of the man go by him – head gasping, limbs sinewy as dried bird meat, a missed stone in one of his pockets, the arch under the man’s ribcage, hollow from hunger, the joints moving in their sockets.

  Able at last to take a turn of rope around his thigh and over one shoulder, Quill settled into a sitting position so as to bear the strain of Farriss standing on his shoulders. The last quick push that lifted the man over the lip of the Overhang must have strained the rope beyond endurance, for Quill heard and felt a loud crack.

  Every Kilda man is part bird, because he knows how it feels to plummet out of the sky towards the brightness of the sea. He has seen it in his imagination a thousand times over. He has known friends and kin who spent the last moment of their lives making that plunge. But though Quill saw, through his closed lids, the bright flash of scarlet fishes, he opened his eyes to find that the rope had not broken, after all. Farriss was hauling him up. Where he found the superhuman strength to do it, God alone knew. The guilty fear of causing the death of a boy in his care? Or perhaps the whales had lent him some of their Leviathan strength.

  Only as Farriss dragged him over the rim of the Overhang by the back of his jacket did Quill discover the source of the “crack”. It had come from within his own shoulder where the delicate epaulette of little bones spread out like the start of wings. It was a painful nuisance on the traverse back to Midway Bothy. But Quill decided to keep it to himself: his friends had troubles enough of their own.

  Their return to the Bothy went unnoticed. All attention was on Domhnall Don, who was crouching by the wall surrounded by boys lying on their faces or squatting with their knees beside their ears. They were watching him flick a knife against the wall. Lachlan was hard alongside him, holding ready a wisp of straw, a crab shell with oil in it, a clutch of feathers. It was as if the two were trying to coax puffins out of a burrow with a mixture of noise and temptation. What they were actually attempting was to strike a light.

  Now and then a spark prickled, and all the boys yelped with triumph, but then it was gone. Don’s broken arm was held awkwardly across his chest. The fingers of his good hand were scraped and nicked from catching them against the rock so many times, but he carried on slashing the blade against the wall until the tip snapped off – once, twice, and it was too small to use. Lachlan fetched his own knife. Seeing Quilliam in the doorway, Lachlan confessed to his terrible crime: “I know, I know! I’m sorry! I let it go out. I’m Keeper of the Flame and I let it go out! But we’ll get it back, Quill. Honest, we’ll get it back!”

  Another spark. Another cry of joy. Another groan of disappointment.

  Mr Farriss put his hand to his groin, where he had strained himself in hauling Quill up onto the Overhang. He had rubbed at the injury several times on the return climb to Midway. This time, though, he was simply feeling for his pocket. He brought out a single stone left from earlier. “Try this,” he said off-handedly, and shot Quill a warning glance for fear he tell the stone’s history.

  Don struck knife against stone. A spark jumped: a feather caught, the oil ignited – and there was fire again.

  “Thank you, Warrior!” Davie shouted up at the Bothy roof. “Thank you!” The others thanked Domhnall Don. Lachlan, Keeper of the Flame, leaned back on his hands and purred with relief. Every boy resolved then and there to practise until he could strike a spark. Some even managed it once or twice.

  Within the space of minutes, another spark was struck so bright that it painted their eleven shadows on the back wall of the Bothy. Lightning out at sea.

  As soon as wicks had been lit, rainwater flavoured with oil and fish-livers set to warm in Davie’s ma’s cooking pot, they gathered in the mouth of the cave and watched the electric storm shift listlessly across the ocean. Dark trunks of rain, twigs of lightning: the only trees Kildans lived to see. But such trees!

  “Did you spy the whales earlier?” asked Quill, but none of them had. “‘The Keeper of the Watch’ saw them, did you not, Mr Farriss?”

  “I did,” said Farriss. “There is that Leviathan, whom thou hast made to play…” Then he winced, at the pain in his groin. Or a recent memory, possibly.

  Quill’s shoulder did not drop. His hand did not lose all its feeling – only in two fingers. His collarbone must only be cracked, rather than broken through and through, and swinging loose. It was not serious, he told himself. It would not be the thing that killed him. But the pain said it was not cheered by this good news. When Quill raised his arm to climb, or turned over in his sleep onto his left side, the pain shouted so loud that it left his ears ringing. One night, he dreamed that his dog Nettle had mistaken him for a sheep and had him by the shoulder and was intent on throwing him off Ruaival Cliff.

  The cleits were all but empty. Different boys had been sent to fetch food for the cooking pot, so no one person knew for certain which were emptied and whether any still held bird-meat. All the plucked feathers had been fetched in, in an attempt to raise their sleeping bodies up off the cold rock. They sneezed incessantly and their skin crawled with parasites. Itchy, scabby and sore, their flesh cracked open at the least cause, like crabs whose backs split as they outgrow them. It was as
though the boys were outgrowing their skin, for all there was precious little to eat.

  In the mouth of the cave, water dripped into the cooking pot incessantly – tick tick tick – as if Time itself was running out, second by unforgiving second. It was the last sound they heard at night, the first on waking. The only respite was when the water in the cave-mouth froze into ice, and then the cold was a worse torment than the tick tick tick.

  Kenneth, Keeper of Days, said it was All Saints. He said it with a look on his face that dared anyone to disagree, so that they all knew Kenneth, not the calendar, had decided today was the Feast of All Saints.

  “D’ye no mean Christmas?” said John. “All Saints is surely gone by.”

  “Who’s Keeper of Days?” blared Kenneth.

  After an initial burst of enthusiasm, he had let his calendar duties slide. On the wall of the Bothy, weeks strayed off in all directions, days were missing for want of ash to write with, whole fortnights omitted for lack of interest. But Kenneth said it was All Saints, for all there was sleet on the ledges, and icicles formed overnight along the lintel of the doorway.

  “If the Keeper of Days says it is All Saints, let’s have it,” said Murdo. “What difference does it make?”

  What difference indeed, to boys with nothing to feast on. But the Keeper of Memories annoyingly reminded them of autumn feast-days on Hirta – of dancing and pageants, story-tellings and races. In Kenneth’s mind, All Saints was associated with a village feast. Part of him expected a feast, just in return for suggesting the day.

  “We canna do feasting, but there could be races,” said Quill.

  Somewhere high above them in the flank of the Stac, a tiny fissure allowed rain to penetrate the rock and travel, like blood through the Warrior’s veins, finally oozing out through the ceiling of Midway Bothy. Each drop immediately split into two and rolled slowly down the walls. Four days after rain, the drops formed faster and more often. Puddles pooled on the floor. Now, in the depth of winter, every day was four-days-after-rain. They had grown to hate that oozing stopper in the rock roof that winked at them, catching the light from the single petrel-candle.