The Monster's Wife(53)

He swallowed painfully and cleared his throat. “This beast knows the land and the sea, how to survive, to remain invisible from ordinary men who might shun him. Even if your friends were to track him down, he would destroy them before they could...” He looked at her with his one good eye. “He is a murderer, Oona, cold-blooded. Evil. May saw it too. She knew.”

“Do you think...he...that May...”

His hands slipped from hers. He looked at the wall.

She rose and ran from the shack, out into the sunshine where the flies droned and the blackbirds taunted. She flung herself against the wall of the byre, choking down sobs. The kirk bells in her head were loud and the angry pulse of her heart drove her to claw her hands on the wall and beat her head against the cold stone until it stung and blood ran into her eyes.

Second to May, she’d trusted Victor most of all and he’d lied to her, told her she was imagining things when really she’d seen the person - the monster - who could have taken May.

She pressed her hands to her face, rubbing grains of dirt into her skin and feeling the salt sting her lip where Stuart’s hand had caught it. Her breath came in ragged gasps. She scrubbed at her face, making the earth grind into her, tasting its rawness.

For the first time, she had begun to believe that May was dead.





46


A fall of pebbles.

The sound of it echoed from the valley’s looming rocks.

Oona looked up, expecting to see a scarred man with staring, blue eyes. Instead, a potbellied goat stood before her, chewing on a turnip top, gold eyes unblinking. The nanny goat of legend brayed sourly and lowered her horns. Oona dragged her hand across her nose, jolted out of her dark reflection by the oddity of the sudden appearance.

“Don’t point those things at me.”

As she spoke the words, a shrill cry rang out, echoing off the slack stones of Scollay’s outbuildings.

“Who’s there?”

No-one answered. She pulled her shawl around her, cold and conscious of the valley’s bleak lull. The air was so still it took her breath away.

She struggled up from the heap she’d slumped into, staring past the goat at the wreck of her family farm. She’d been a baby when her father went fishing for the last time. Granny said it had been a calm day, no storm except for the one in the Scollay house, the constant shouting and hurling of objects that by all accounts only paused when her parents slept. Maybe her father had left to get away from it. That was what Granny always said.

Whatever the reason he went, he wasn’t back that evening or the next. Some people whispered that he’d angered the sea spirits and they’d taken him, others that he’d been greedy, casting his nets in the far North waters where icebergs groan. Oona’s Ma left her with Granny and waited on the beach for her husband night after night, week after week, growing thinner, paler. Until one day something inside her cracked like ice falling in a cave and she came back from the beach for good. It was only a short while afterwards that Granny found her lying face down in the burn.

It was night. The fire she’d made warmed the room, but wind still whistled under the pile of old chairs and cupboards she’d used to block up the door. On the bed, Victor shivered. His face was slick with sweat and he kept kicking off his sheet, pulling at the torn strips she’d used to wrap his wounds and moaning. Half of it was a babble of German she didn’t understand, but sometimes his eyes flew open and he cried out in English about the creature being in the room with them.

Sometimes he cried for Oona and she went to him, soothing his head with water from a pail she’d found outside. As she tended to him, she thought about how he had lied to her and kept terrible secrets. May too. Strange how you never really saw what was inside someone. Perhaps the more you cared for them, the less you knew. More than anything, she wished May were here again, so they could talk. She was far too tired to blame her or even Victor for all they had kept from her.

Bone tired, and yet she could not sleep in the ruined croft where the ghosts of her parents rattled the windows and whispered from the walls. Or perhaps it was the monster who whispered and knocked and made that steady sound, like footfalls circling the cottage.

Oona paced the room, sometimes pausing to peer through the crack between the window boards. Nothing but darkness and a sliver of yellow moon slipping free of the clouds. Wind howled down the chimney. She hurried from the window, pulling her shawl around her. It was growing colder. She went to the stack of peat, so dry and neatly kept (and recent, surely) and grabbed up new sods for the fire, laying them carefully down. Tucked under the shelf beside it where her mother would have set bread to rise, was a stack of bed linens. No cobwebs on these. They were fresh. She took them out, stood and let the cloth tumble free of its folds.

She drew a sharp breath when she saw the shape that lay against her body, a little too short to fit her perfectly. No bed linens, but a crisp white nightgown, bloodied at the cuffs. A few faint drops were spattered over the breast of the gown. Someone had worked hard to scrub them out and hadn’t quite succeeded. She held the gown to her nose. It smelled cleanly of lye and lavender, of May.

Her hands shook. She dropped the gown and circled the room, peering in one dark corner, then the next, under an upturned table, up on a shelf, all the time scratching her elbows and neck that suddenly itched enough to drive her mad.

She stopped, forcing herself to be calm and see what she hadn’t yet managed to see. She had turned over everything, looked beneath each piece of rubble, all save a wicker chair that lay in the corner, its round back unravelling. She ran to it, heaved it up. Underneath was a black leather bag, worn but clean and softly shining. She undid the clasp and pulled it open.