The Monster's Wife(55)

When the light was strong, she turned to look at Victor’s sleeping face, wondering whether she should simply abandon him here. He had brought so much pain to the island. His face was softened by sleep, the fair hair falling back against the bedding, the full lips parted and innocent as a boy’s. For all his cleverness, he did not know right from wrong. In some ways, he knew less than her. He was at his weakest now. She couldn’t leave him alone.

By noon he was able to walk without shaking too much. Oona broke apart her makeshift barricade and they struck out, her arm around his waist, her eyes scouring the rocks and grass around them for any sign of Stuart and Andrew. Or the monster. When they reached the big house, her arm dropped from him and she took out her key. The kitchen door opened and they staggered in and sat down wearily.

“Thank you,” he smiled weakly. “You may have saved my life.”

She nodded, shrugged, with an exhausted sense that whatever she had hoped for from him, he could not give it to her. He could neither love her nor help her find May.

She stood, her knees and back creaking. She wanted to crawl somewhere and sleep for a hundred years, sleep and wake up and have all be well again. When she went to the door, he came to her and put his arms around her and held her tight. He pressed his lips to hers. They were dry and hot.

She flinched away. “You still do not see.”

Still holding her tight, he stroked her face, brushed his lips against hers again. “See what?” His pupils were dark, his voice soft, seductive, as if he’d forgotten the terror of their night together already.

She held herself rigid. “When you said you brought Death here, I believe you spoke the truth. What you’ve done, what you’re doing, is wrong.”

He let her go, nodding. His face was sad and he turned from her. “Ah well, you are right, but you will only be able to see when you are truly put to the test what mad things you are willing to do to protect those you love.”

She opened the door and went out.





48


The woman named Eve did not stir when the man walked in. She kept her eyes closed when he sat down next to her and stroked the tangles from her hair. Something in his voice when he said her name was familiar. It made her afraid. He was murmuring now, gentle words, the sea is blue. She saw the sea from the cliff tops, the way it changed colours with the light and sometimes when the clouds swelled overhead, the colour drained away.

He grazed the back of his hand across her cheek. Sometimes in the sea, there were monsters – seals that split down their spine and sloughed their skins like plums. In one story, the Finman rowed from the underwater realm in seven strokes of the oar to catch a human girl. In his sea cave, the girl became a selkie wife. But how did the story end?

Beyond the new room he’d carried her to, it rained. A storm was gathering. She could hear it creeping under the roof, rattling the windows. The fire spat and sizzled where raindrops hit the peat. The man got up and walked over to the smoking fire. She opened her eyes, watching the way he moved, careful, precise. Her arms ached and she felt as if the wound in her chest was venomous and that the venom was seeping through her body and killing her. The man knelt by the fire and stoked it. He picked up bricks of peat and piled them onto the embers and stoked again, then he straightened and turned back towards her.

“What do you want of me?”

He said nothing, staring. His eyes were burnt moons in his blurred face.

“Please let me go.”

“You wish to go?” He picked something up and walked across the room. When he came close, she saw the curved blade of a knife. Eve flattened herself against the pallet. She couldn’t cower any further from him. The lower half of his face split in a smile. She cried out. The sound was no more than a whimper clawing its way from her charred throat.

The knife came closer, the tip taunting her. She squeezed her eyes closed, felt a cool flick against one wrist, then the next, then her ankles. Her skin screamed with new pain. She kept her eyes tight shut, waiting for the next swipe of the blade. When she opened them, the man was gone, although she hadn’t heard him leave. She turned her head to look at her left wrist, although she couldn’t see much of anything in the darkness. She turned it to make sure that he hadn’t cut it off. Her arm flopped off the pallet. Her wrist was loose.

She was free, every morsel of her. She had asked to go and he had cut her bonds. She must run. Her hands and feet were still numb, so she shifted herself down the pallet on her back until she reached the end. She tumbled down in a broken heap, the cold floor hard on her knees and palms. She lay for a while, just breathing, feeling pain in each bruised part. Her limbs were floppy. She had to creep across the floor, bit by bit to the door.

It was locked.

It was a long night in the cold room. She could almost hear his hollow laughter at her for thinking she was free. Each time she tried to get up, her legs shook and crumpled beneath her. So she lay on the cold floor by the fire listening to the rain crashing down on the ground outside, rubbing the numbness from her wrists, feeling the swollen flesh sting with new pain. The storm came straight over the room and the wind howled fit to break the house. She wished it would. But it just rattled until it was spent and the wind died down. Threads of light spooled through cracks in the heavy shutters. Eve slept.

When she woke, the rain had stopped and the light was cloudy. She looked around and saw her pallet, the dark shapes of shelves, the glitter of bottles propped against the walls. She looked down at her lap and saw her white smock smeared with dried blood, the bracelets of scabs on her wrists. There were bandages wound around her chest.