Because You Love to Hate Me(34)
His smile was luminescent. “Yes. That’s it exactly.”
Sigrid tripped on one of the books piled at Thomas’s feet and stopped in her tracks. Gingerly, as though handling an ancient artifact, she picked up the navy hardcover. She held a gasp in her throat.
The book was so familiar to Sigrid, she could have drawn its cover from memory: a gold foil outline of Scotland’s northern coast, with a giant X floating in the far northeastern sea, just past the last island.
“Where did you get this?” Sigrid asked.
“Which?” Thomas looked up. “Ah. Rummage sale. Felt old in all the right ways. Why? What is it?”
“It’s Unnatural Troubles,” Sigrid said. “A biography of Alice Gray. I had this exact book as a kid—read it so many times I about had it memorized . . .”
“Alice Gray?”
She raised an eyebrow at Thomas’s confused look. “Of the Hether Blether expedition?”
He shook his head.
“Seriously?” Sigrid removed a stack of volumes from the other chair and sat on the edge, clutching the book in her lap. “Oh, but you’ll love this story,” she said. “I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it. That’s what you get for being born a Yank.” She cleared her throat, relishing the moment.
“It was about twenty years ago, right after McClatchkey introduced his theory of magical scarcity,” Sigrid began. “Alice was attending Pendle Hill at the time. She was an incredible witch, top of her class, had a position with the International Chamber lined up—the works. When the McClatchkey study proved that magic was a static resource being stretched disproportionately over a bloating population, everything was chaos. It was the end times—countries were hoarding magic, charlatans claimed they could create more.”
“This part I know,” Thomas said.
“Oh, you’ve decided to start listening in modern magical history?” Sigrid said drily. “Bully for you. Anyway, Alice started researching a legend from Orkney, near the northernmost bit of Scotland, about an all-knowing and reclusive sorcerer. Supposedly he lives on a mystical island called Hether Blether, which disappears most of the year. If any witch sets foot on the island, they can claim it, along with all the sorcerer’s wisdom.
“Omnipotence might come with some answers to the magical scarcity problem, or at least that’s what Alice thought. And she wasn’t alone. She got a group of eight other witches together, and they formed an expedition to go north in search of Hether Blether and its sorcerer. But something happened.”
Thomas leaned forward, listening. Sigrid’s cheeks flushed with the thrill of telling the story that had entranced her as a child.
“They ferried to Eynhallow, an abandoned island off the Orkney coast. According to legend, if you want to find Hether Blether, you launch from there. That was the last time anyone saw them alive.” She paused. “Weeks later, investigators found Alice and two others among monastic ruins on Eynhallow, laid out in an occult formation and covered in black markings. They hadn’t been killed; they died of exposure.”
Thomas’s eyes widened.
“Another three were found on the shore. They had internal wounds, but no soft tissue damage. It was almost like they’d been taken under the sea, crushed”—Sigrid pressed her hands together in the air—“and washed up on the sand.”
Thomas’s smile was gone, but his eyes glistened. Sigrid had his full attention. As she went on with the story, her vision darkened at the corners. A mist clouded her eyes. Thomas was so focused on her story he was imagining it in his—and now her—mind.
“The final three weren’t found for ages,” Sigrid continued. “Investigators thought maybe their boat had been taken up by tides, or that they’d gotten lost in the Orkney fog and were dashed on the rocks of another island.”
Thomas envisioned a steely grey haze over choppy whitecapped waves. Sigrid had read every account of Alice Gray and the Hether Blether expedition in her father’s expansive library, and she’d pictured Eynhallow’s shore much as Thomas did now: dreary with mist, a dark shadow hinting at a rowboat through the menacing fog.
She went on: “Eventually, they found the wreckage, at the bottom of the North Atlantic.”
Thomas’s vision shifted, dreamlike, under the waves into a murky netherworld. Sigrid’s skin bristled with goose bumps as Thomas imagined the brackish dim. His ocean floor held dark dunes of sand interrupted by crags thrusting upward like carnivore teeth. The boat lay on its side, nestled between two bloody-knuckled outcrops.
“A hole had been drilled into it,” Sigrid said, her voice eerily distant. “From beneath.”
Thomas imagined a hole on the boat’s damaged bottom, pristine and circular.
“The final three witches were found nearby.”
They appeared, vivid as Thomas’s smile had been to Sigrid just moments ago: skin grey and bloated, wispy hair floating up from lifeless heads. Their feet were buried in the ocean bed’s ashy sand, bodies twisting in the current like tangled seaweed.
“So much worse.” Sigrid pushed back against the pull of Thomas’s vision. “They’d been there for ages.”
Under her influence, the witches’ skin lifted away, peeling off their necks and arms. Their faces came into sharper focus, eyes open to reveal milky-white irises. Vaguely, Sigrid registered Thomas grabbing her hand.