Since early summer our house-hoard had been going missing, tool by tool. First an old pail and dipper, but after that some good rope and even a few pots and piggins went missing. Later, we lost our biggest, best blade.
I dug my fingers into the clay harder than I really needed to; the pain felt good somehow, cleaner and simpler than anything else.
I had one row cleared and was just gathering the seed into my shift, when the hedge-warblers came greedy to the furrows all around me. They were like feathered rats.
‘Bloody birds!’ I shouted and waved my arms at them. Foolish in my fury, I threw the seed right at them.
They looked at me, and ate it.
‘Go away!’ I shouted again. I ran at them. ‘Get off!’ I said. ‘Get off! Off!’
They rose in little clouds all the way down the row as I passed and then they just resettled like I was less than a passing gust. I watched our good seed disappearing down their tiny wolfish gullets. They filled the air with contented peeps and my gorge rose into my throat. Even the birds wouldn’t listen to me.
‘Stop it!’ I commanded. ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’
I flailed up and down the rows pelting their thieving bodies and loathing their very beaks and feathers. Then I sat heavily in the dirt and the world span around me somewhat. I scraped together a handful of gravel from the furrows.
‘Stop it,’ said a voice, somewhere close. I didn’t even look up. I didn’t care who it was. I threw a handful of gravel at the seed-thieves. They were so small but their bellies held so much, while poor Gilpin was eating bugs. I threw the other.
‘Stop it,’ the voice said again, clearer.
‘What?’ Just about ready to have somebody’s face off, I looked up but there was nobody in the greens, nobody behind me, nobody in the alder.
‘Hello?’ I said.
For a moment there was nothing in the plot but humming heat and picking birds and then, ‘Hello,’ it said, testing-like. I turned about in the empty yard and slowly I waxed clammy; there was nobody there. Nobody anywhere. Only me. And Mungo lying in the dust under the shadow of the stone-wall.
‘Let the birds be,’ said the voice. I stepped backward and away.
‘All right then,’ I said into the air, respectful, and then slow as sermons I stepped back until I felt the wall hot behind me. Then I turned and looked into the sky like I was thinking about weather.
Pa had told me you mustn’t let Them know you’re frighted of Them. He said that goosey skin were doors to Them; they just lift the little traps and slip in.
‘Come on, Mungo,’ I called and tried to walk careless-like back to the snug, with his warm body pressed to my side. He plainly hadn’t heard anything. He just loped gentle alongside, gazing soft-eyed up at me. As if to ask what we were going to do next. As if to tell me he would go where I went. As if to say I was somebody special.
I didn’t tell my parents. There didn’t seem to be any point.
After I shrouded him, we buried my brother in the soft ground up at Redcliff. There was just us four, with Pa hauling the Dead-rick alone. If things had been different there’d have been a line of folk, all black-clad and mournful, winding out from all the crofts and towns to bury him. But things were as they were, and we weren’t to bury Boson in the graveyard but to do with him as most would only do with a dog. Carrick’s graveyard is crammed with a picksome sort of dead folk and Scully Slevin says that if an oddling was buried next to them, they’d most likely climb right out of their graves and stalk away with what was left of their noses stuck up in the air.
We made a pitiful progress along the Waterward and I could almost see stretched-out behind us the whole blood-line of shamed and sorrowful Quirks. My mother led the way, followed by Pa and the shrouded body knocking about on the rick, and then me carrying Gilpin. Mungo walked last. That was all of my brother’s procession. Pa and Moo were dark shapes against the grey sky. The wheels clacked, the axles creaked, we turned Saltward.
The rains had come heavy the night before, softening the ground for my brother’s planting. All the buckets were filled and the plots had become dubs, and the dubs become shining pools, and the pools become streams. Now the sky was dull and a misting rain was all that remained.
All along the Saltward the blowholes and drenches sprayed rainbows. Close to the seacliff we dug his grave and laid him down in the oozy clay. Shovelled over, he was just a mound of dirt and when we put the sod back you’d hardly know he was there. We lined up over the mound but there didn’t seem anything to say.
I was breaking up like new-dug clods. I was lopsided without him. My loneliness flapped around me like some oversized garment. Without Boson there was only the chores, and the turf, and these brooding parents.
I crouched down by him.
I laid myself down in the dirt.
‘What will we do about Pa?’ I whispered into the earth.
‘What can we do?’ said the voice from the plots.
A frost fell on my skin and my belly turned over.
‘He’s frighted of her,’ it said. I sidled a look, but my parents hadn’t heard anything. They were still faraway inside themselves.
I wondered if other folk ever had voices plaguing at them from places other than the mouths of people.
‘Shut up,’ I said, testy, and Mungo shot me a surprised face.
‘Well, he is,’ the voice said, and it was inside my head.
Now I had a voice inside me that wasn’t mine. I had a bad feeling about it.
Maybe this was how it started for my brother.
‘Who are you?’ I whispered and Mungo grumbled beside me.
‘Well, more to the point, who are you?’ it said clearly.
It might be some sort of haunting or body-theft, I thought, though I’d never heard of the Dead-ones moving into a body that was already tenanted. I would’ve thought that Boson was a more likely shell for such things, and his body was going begging. What had I done to deserve this?
‘Who are you?’ I thought again, hard into my head. I wasn’t going to let any old voice utter at me from inside my very own head without trying to find out who it was, or what it was up to.
‘I’m nobody,’ said the inside-voice. ‘You’re the one.’
‘The one what?’
‘You’re the one who can still do things,’ it said.
I waited for more but that was all it had to say, for the time being.
I closed my eyes. What could I do?
On that first night, the night I found him in the boghole, Moo said she didn’t think Boson would be welcome anywhere but on an old Dead-isle. After the things he’d said and done in his short life, she said he’d probably be for some purgatory of beaks and claws in his death. She said God was a loving god but the first thing you had to know was not to ask questions. She said God gave you things and He took them away again and she said, like any loving pa, he was always right.
She must’ve meant heavenly pas, not those who were right here. Ours wasn’t always right even when we’d all been together and happy. Now we were blasted anyhow in the sorrow about Boson, he didn’t seem to be right about anything at all.
Poor Pa. He’d gone from the grave to stand alone at the cliff-edge, and I went and stood by him. His body rocked in salty gusts off the sea. He just staggered under the wallops, a few steps back and a few steps forth each time, and any of them could have tipped him off the cliff. I took his hand in both of mine, and pulled him back from the edge.
We watched the whale-mam out in the channel as she fluked and spouted and circled the island.
‘Pa?’ I said. He didn’t stir. ‘What are we going to do?’ He shrugged and petted my head like I was some strange cat.
I shook him off.
‘Pa! What will we do about Moo?’ His eyes flicked to my mother and I saw he’d settled in himself there was nothing to be done.
‘Well, then, what are we going to do about the thieving?’ I thought to needle him with notions of property and righ
tfulness and so forth, but he only sighed.
‘Fermion,’ he said. ‘Missing things only need finding.’ It was what he always said when something was lost.
Moo says to look with your eyes and not your mouth.
‘Your mother’s right,’ said the inside-voice.
Chapter Six
Wideawake
THE DAY AFTER THE BURYING me and Pa went back up the cut. He said the ground would soon be too wet and cold to work. We needed to lay up as much turf as we could before winter. Not just for us, he said. There were old ones such as Lily Fell depending on us. We took our sheep-bags so we could sleep out.
So, in the long twilight of the following day we swayed along the bodgeways into willow country where moonworts glow in the sod and every step bothers some small creature into showing itself. You can’t really call it ground, what the bodgeways pass over. It’s really just a skim of water over black mud. Up there the trees stretch out of the slime on reaching footings. Their bark folds like skin, they huddle together and they sound like a whispering choir. That’s where the speckle-moths live.
Speckle-moths are a pet lesson of my mother’s.
Or they used to be, before Boson.
Speckle-moths only live in dappled thickets. Their speckling is like light falling through trees, falling on the thicket floor in a mess of gold and black. As you walk through, the moths flutter up and beat in your hair and crawl down your neck. If you stand still long enough they will try to settle in the folds of your body.
When they do settle you can’t see them. They are speckled like the thicket and they disappear into it. Then the birds can’t find them to eat.
Sometimes, though, there’s a moth born who is speckled otherwise. Maybe it has red wing-spots, or a blue head, or maybe no specks at all. Those otherwise moths can’t find a hide in the thicket and so the birds eat them.
Moo says God made it this way. He made it so every good, true creature was fitted to its home-place. When I first heard about them I wondered why God let the otherwise moths be born at all. It seemed a cruel sort of thing to me. Moo said they were born to be lessons for the rest of us. It’s not for us to stand out in the world, and to learn from the monstrous unspeckled speckle-moths what happens to those who do.
Pa and me reached the end of the home-thicket and queached out into the twilight bog. As we stepped into the late light, we were whelmed in waves of bog-bean, sweet and strong. We stopped and stood like Mungo scenting the hare.
There was a heavy stream in the air; a stream of figs and pears, a stream of honey, a stream of hopefulness. It smelt of a good night coming on. Me and Pa both felt it at the same time. Pa only stopped to take the hedge-pig from our snare set at the thicket edge, then he took off into the rolling bog. I followed him.
We ran like hounds, panting over all the red and green and blue spreading before us. We went lightfooted across the fancy-work bog-moss with the mountains pinking up nicely just beyond. Pa was soon far ahead. I watched him running like he was a boy, like he wasn’t worried about falling. Like he would keep right on running.
I felt of a sudden to be a frightful small thing beetling about in the huge moaney.
‘Wait for me,’ I called to him. He didn’t. Maybe he wanted to get away awhile.
‘What are you going to do about it?’ said the inside-voice in a small sulky tone.
‘Leave me alone,’ I told it and took off again, running harder, closing in on my father. I wanted to leave that voice far behind.
Pa leapt back onto the bodgeway. He looked over his shoulder, his face lightclad. There was a shiny forgetfulness about him that frighted me. He looked like he was happy.
And there was another thing. We weren’t alone. That lost crane was there too.
It was right out of the thicket this time; the only thing to be holding its own colours in the changeable twilight. It was black and white.
I wondered if it was following me.
The crane was standing on one leg just as Boson used to. I saw him in my mind-eye doing just that. He was standing with his manky hair like feathers down his back, knobbled knees like that bird’s, one leg tucked up under his arse.
‘Don’t say arse anymore,’ said the inside-voice.
‘I didn’t say it,’ I thought back at it straight-up. ‘I only thought it. Anyway, what’s it to you?’
‘Moo doesn’t like the language,’ it said.
‘Well, that’s true. She doesn’t like any of it anymore,’ I said under my breath. It was hard to talk with somebody inside your own head and keep it quiet from those outside it. Thinking my talk gave me a head-ague. I had to speak my words into the world. But the trouble with that was then other folk could hear.
‘Stop being so smart,’ it went on. ‘You didn’t used to be like this.’
‘How do you know what I was like?’ I asked, somewhat stung. I’m not soft to folks and their teases, but what do you do if all the bile-talk is coming from inside your own head? ‘Who are you anyway?’
‘I know you, Fermion Quirk,’ said the voice. ‘You and me have business. Do you still have the book?’
Only us Quirks knew about the book of beasts. My heart filled to its core. I felt myself drift into stormy fogs.
‘Boson?’ I whispered.
‘Well, what are you going to do?’ the voice said again.
‘Fermion?’ Pa’s voice cut through the storm in my head, and the light dwindled to regular.
The crane picked its way back into the dappled thickets.
I turned to see my father’s eyes hidden in folds of questions.
‘All right there?’ is the only one he asked.
I nodded.
‘Faraway,’ I said. Pa sighed. He was relieved I wasn’t talking to the crane. I could tell.
We reached the cut after dark and before moonrise. Pa said we could have planned that better and set himself to kindle a flame, but I wasn’t bothered. I’m not frighted of the dark like some folk. By the end of some of the days we’ve had this summer, I was aching for the dark.
Moo always says it’s wilful and unwomanly for me not to be frighted, but Pa says that’s because she comes from Merton. Those townfolk are able to hold to all that rigmarole due to being crammed in together with lights and warmth and other folk just a few steps from their own thresholds. How would it be, he says, if the Quirks had been frighted of things that can’t be helped, like night?
Pa and me lit the fire. The moon rose soon after and the night came bright and still. We rolled our hedge-pig in the flames, and threw handfuls of nuts into the embers to get them good and smoky. The sky was dabbled with stars, and my belly full of hedge-pig. My teeth cracked the smoky hazels, and my mouth filled with a kind of content.
Then we laid ourselves back under the deep spread of night sky. The stars looked to be lamps, flickering faraway and all around. Up here there’s more sky than anything else.
‘They’re like little suns,’ I said, holding up my hands in a circle and squinting to look up through it. One bright star gleamed in the black circle of my hands. It made me sad.
‘They’re too small to be like the sun,’ said Pa. He built up the turf up over the embers and coughed. ‘Actually, they’re holes in the floor of Heaven.’
This was what Moo had told us when Boson and I had been children.
‘I thought Heaven was perfect,’ I said, smirky-like.
Pa was baffled. I often baffled him lately. I liked it.
‘If the floor of Heaven has holes, see,’ I pointed out slowly and clearly, like he was an Ancient-one or a baby. ‘It can hardly be perfect, can it?’
I threw the last hazels into my mouth and crunched at them loud and lip-smacking.
‘Heishan!’ said Pa but he was smiling. ‘Maybe that is what’s perfect in Heaven, brain-ague! If you didn’t have the holes, you wouldn’t have the stars. See.’
Plainly, a bit of the humour from the twilight bog still hung about us. I watched the glow off the turf, the glow off the
stars. I watched the glow off the moon.
‘Where do you think he’s gone?’ I asked Pa at last.
My father pretended to be sleeping. His chest rose and fell, and he made that noise like a bellows. We commonly let him be when he did that.
‘Do you think he went out there?’
‘Where?’ said Pa.
‘That Dead-isle,’ I said.
He sighed and rolled onto his back. ‘Do you think he was the sort to go there?’ he asked me. Like I might really know.
I shrugged. ‘What is it, that island?’ I sat up, wideawake of a sudden. ‘Why doesn’t it just stay put? What’s it for? Do folk live out there? Why doesn’t anybody go out to see? What is it?’
‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Pa with a big sigh. ‘But I know what it isn’t. It isn’t safe, it isn’t natural, and it isn’t somewhere I’d want to go. Those who have gone and come back, say when you get out there, there’s nothing.’
‘But there must be something,’ I insisted.
‘Look, I’ll tell you what’s really something,’ he said. ‘And that’s the sea-journey you’d need to take to get out there. That island is nothing to the waters that lie between us and it. The sea is not tame, Fermion, and it’s brimful with wild things that’d have you in one easy gobful.’
He seemed to think that would do it, and he yawned and snugged himself down into his sheep-bag. I just folded my arms and looked at him quiet-like until he started shifting and itching. He can’t bide being stared at.
‘That sea is full of tricks and various deaths,’ he went on from inside the sheep-bag. ‘If the kelp doesn’t strangle you, the merrow-men will have the skin off you. They say some of the younger ones have taken to filing their teeth to razors, the more personally to do the flaying, and that their maids have armed themselves with sea-squirts that can blind a man with the horrible stuff they carry in them.
‘If you manage the merrows, you’ll have to sail through the drag-waters of the kraken. His whirlpool can open at any moment, and then down you’ll fall into his crouch-pit. He is a master of patience and will wait as long as you like for a meal. And he is compassed by his followers, sea-things of such monstrousness that one look can kill you.’
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