The Monster's Wife(39)

The fear she always felt was high and fierce like the sharp scream of a gull before it dives, sharper than the blood-flecked bill, tighter than the agile, angry wings that spread wide, swooped for the kill.

Her teeth rattled in her head the same way the wind rattled the stones around her. She screeched and clawed her own skin, a hare biting off its foot to free itself of the snare.

She wanted to remember people, places, her own name and the days before this one, but all she knew was that she had been free once. She knew it like the sound of blood beating in her ears. She had been free, had run and laughed and held someone she loved. She had loved them so fiercely!

She didn’t know their name, though, or their face. In the blackness, all she could see was a red sheet of spreading blood and her own cut skin, red cherries smashed in milk, spilled curds, a tub of blood pudding sucking her down and swallowing her and a pale face, the mouth frowning.

She’d angered it. Her teeth had sunk in. Then she’d been thrown in here and damned to Hell, to here, crushed down and smothered. Now the wires bit her and there was no room to breathe. Her bones were piled in on her like bones in a charnel house, layers of dead fighting for space in the kirkyard, her own bones, crushed and bloody, falling under the hill.

There was nothing but her own sharp stink and the pulse of her blood in the darkness, the thirsty darkness, the furious darkness.

The darkness that went on forever.





35


It was more than a week since the wedding, long days of drudgery keeping the fires lit and sweeping and listlessly watching while Victor laboured over his works of alchemy.

He was always kind. Alone of her acquaintance, he seemed to understand her sadness and do what he could to help her. Together, they had searched every hallway and staircase, the cobwebbed attics of the big house and the byre, even the famous oubliette (seen by lamplight, it was little more than a blackened trough for emptying chamber pots).

May was nowhere.

The men of Quoy formed a kind of hunting party from which women were barred in case a body was found. Led by Stuart and Dod, they combed every cave and pool and crossed the valley to the far coast only to return silently each night and drink themselves senseless in the Smokehouse.

Oona never slept any more. Instead, she kept a vigil by the window. It drove Granny mad to see her hunched over her candle. Like a dead soul caught in some limbo, she drifted down to the burn to pound laundry or up to the doctor’s study to scrub the muck from his floor. She haunted the kirk Sunday morning only so she could hear May’s name whispered between hymns and feel a hair’s breadth closer to her.

Oona closed the door of the servant’s entrance and dragged her tired body to the beach where they’d laughed like fools that last time. The sea – it was the last place left to look for May and the only place that could not be searched, though sometimes the tide brought sailors back... She pushed the bitter thought from her mind.

Night was drawing in. In the dying light, she stood on the cusp of the sea watching the waves carry a boat to shore. It was in calling distance and she thought she saw the shadow of a man at the tiller. He was neither reeling up lobsters nor moving to bring them in. He was just staring.

She thought of the man with the blue eyes. She was surer than ever now that he was real and that he had watched her through the window, through the fire, had killed hens, pigs, ripped out their throats. People on the island spoke of him in hushed tones, not as a him, just a presence, an evil, lurking. Only Oona seemed to have seen him, really seen him, the look of hate in his eyes. If he’d done something to May, if he was on that boat now, drifting ashore, would she take him on?

She bit her lip. Yes, she would do it.

And she would lose - weak Oona, too feeble to help her friend when she needed it most. Her vision blurred and she dragged her sleeve angrily over her eyes. The boat was so close to the shoreline now that she could see the wicker creel she’d taken for a man. The boat had a red line painted around it. Elver was licked over it in white and a strange selkie-girl was carved into the prow. It was Cormick’s boat, the one they’d stolen that night to sink Victor’s stinking crates.

The crunch of feet behind her made her turn. Andrew had come up softly. He set down his baskets. Rolling up his sleeves, he showed arms peppered with small cuts from gutting fish.

He pointed at the Elver. “Must have slipped someone’s grasp.”

“Maybe.” She turned away. He was the last person she wanted to clap eyes on and yet she seemed to see him all too often these days.

“We should go out to her.”

“I’ll do it.” She started to run through the icy breakers, anything to put distance between them, to do something, instead of merely waiting for May’s body to drift in like flotsam as the dead girl’s hand had.

“Oona! Come back. Don’t run.”

He’d heard she was delicate. Everyone had. He probably thought he could save her by marrying her and keeping her like some costly piece of crockery. Looking over her shoulder, she saw him grow small enough to crush between her thumb and forefinger. She squashed him like a fly with her mind’s eye, smiled to herself and flung her face back into the gritty wind.

He began to run and soon caught up to her, panting, “Why don’t you do what you’re told?”

“In charge of me, are you?” she said wryly. “The thing is, I don’t need any help with anything.” The wind whirled her words around her. He must have seen her lips move, though, because he shook his head dumbly and pointed to his ears.