The Lighthouse Witches(25)

“You OK?” he says, reaching for her hand. She gives him it and nods.

He flicks his eyes at Clover. “She’s been asking all sorts of questions about you. She wanted to know where you’d gone. I think she was worried you’d left.”

Luna turns and catches Clover’s gaze. Quickly Clover looks away before glancing back, shyly.

“I’m still here,” she tells Clover softly as she takes the chair next to her. “Did you think I’d gone away?”

Clover gives a small nod. “Thank you for finding Gianni,” she says.

“You’re welcome.”

Just then, Gianni topples to the floor. Luna stoops to pick it up and hand it back to Clover. As she does so, one of her fingers brushes against Clover’s. It’s just a momentary touch, and yet Luna feels a small spark, like static. A few seconds later, a pain in her head makes her gasp, and she gives a loud “Oh!” that draws the nurse’s attention.

“Are you all right?” a nurse asks.

“Yes,” Luna says, breathless, but when she opens her eyes, she finds she can’t see properly. There’s a ray of white lights around her vision, and everything looks as though it’s seen through the prism of a smashed mirror. Her fingers tingle, and a sharp tug in her groin makes her shout out.

Someone brings a chair and insists she sits down. “At least you’re in the right place if you go into labor,” a nurse jokes. Luna tries to smile but finds she can’t. Another tug makes her groan, and she tries to breathe it away. It can’t be a contraction. She’s only twenty-six weeks.

Far too early for the baby to come.





SAPPHIRE, 1998



I

Saffy can’t sleep. She sits cross-legged in the small, rock-hard bed that some idiot thought to build into the tight loft, forcing its occupants to sleep with their head jammed against the cobwebby window. Right now the sound of the waves outside would wake the dead. It’s like they’re roaring out there, howling with anger at the rocks that prevent them from climbing up onto the island to wreak havoc. She squints at the sky and the lighthouse standing darkly on the right of the island, silhouetted against the moon. A lighthouse without a light is unbearably creepy, she decides. And then there are the shapes of the rocks, slick with rain, some of them like hooded figures . . . until one of them moves.

She sits up, pressing her face against the window. The rain is lashing across the glass, and the wind picks up, lightning flashing across the sky. She’s not sure what she’s more afraid of—the weather, or the thing she’s sure she saw outside.

Her heart is thrumming. She watches for a few minutes more in case something—or someone—emerges from the Longing. But they don’t. A flicker in the glass of the lantern room catches her eye and then it’s gone.

She sits back, wondering what to do. She won’t risk telling Liv and being made to feel like a scared child for seeing shapes in the dark. Instead, she pulls out a notebook and starts to write a letter to Jack. By the time he reads it, the ax murderer currently surveying the midnight landscape from the lantern room of the Longing will probably have slit her and her family’s throats, and she mentions that, if this is indeed the case, he can have her CD collection. He’s been hankering after her Bj?rk album for forever—because it’s signed—and she knows he’ll be thrilled with this offering. Enough, perhaps, to contemplate slitting her throat himself.

She tells him how her mother dragged her and her sisters from their home in the middle of the night and drove like a madwoman to the Scottish Highlands, and now they’re marooned on an island for a month or something. She finishes the letter by telling him not to go off with Stephanie Bennett, hahaha, then worries that she comes across as too needy. But on the other hand, the thought of Jack preferring someone else over her is genuinely terrifying. Maybe she should chuck the letter in the bin and start again.

She glances at her mother’s Polaroid that she’s “borrowed” from the Longing and has left carelessly on the floor of her room. Then she takes off her top. Leaning close to the small lamp, she pulls a contemplative pose and points the lens of the camera at her face, making sure her bare shoulders are in the shot. In a moment the white rectangle slides out beneath the lens. She writes on the back.

Thinking of you. Are you thinking of me? xxx


II

The GRIMOIRE of Patrick Roberts

Despite our initial failure to integrate with the community of Lòn Haven, my father’s skills gained us favor with many of the townsfolk. Most of the year he worked at sea on a whaling ship, and when he was home he liked to work as a handyman, endowed with a knack for sniffing out both the problem and solution to virtually any constructional issue by merely setting eyes on it. He had no formal training, but hailed from a long line of similarly gifted and self-schooled laborers. Before coming to Lòn Haven we lived in the house that my great-grandfather had built with his own hands until it burned to the ground, leaving us homeless and riddled with fleas and rickets. My father couldn’t solve the problem of a house turned to ash by a blazing furnace, but he could repair rooftops and chimneys, resize doors and fashion new ones, render walls and right stonework. He was often called to neighboring villages to solve their problems, too. At night, he set about building our house as we were renting and my father didn’t believe in borrowing from anyone.