The Lighthouse Witches(33)

Something that’s harder to place.


IV

The Airbnb is a small cottage in Drumnadrochit, a village on the shores of Loch Ness. As they pull up outside heavy rain starts to swallow up the horizon, smudging the outline of hills to obscurity.

The two-story cottage is cramped and glum, the walls busy with dusty mounted plates. There’s a well-used sofa, a frayed rug, an ancient woodburner, and a TV. It’ll do. “We’re just staying here for a while, until the storm passes,” Luna tells Clover as they look over the room. Silence follows. It strikes her that she’s forgotten how to entertain a child. Despite wanting one for as long as she can remember, she has never babysat. She was only two when Clover was born. None of her friends have had children yet. She works with children, but usually they’re in their teens. The presence of this little girl—my sister, she reminds herself—is daunting.

“Shall I put the TV on?” she says.

Clover seems nervous, backing into the corner of the room. Luna throws her a wide smile, which only serves to make her stiffen like a frightened animal. She hugs Gianni protectively to her chest. The silence in the cottage is heavy, and Luna mentally kicks herself for not finding a park or play area to visit before returning to such an enclosed and foreign space as this. She moves to the small kitchen and finds two glasses, which she fills with water. When she turns to give one to Clover, the room is already empty. The sound of feet upstairs tells Luna that Clover’s exploring the space.

Give her time, Luna thinks. This is completely strange for both of us.

A moment later, she hears Clover’s voice. “Not like that, Gianni. Like this.”

She sighs with relief. Playing is a good sign. It’s an excellent sign. She finds fresh eggs and homemade bread in the welcome package, which she cooks and eats with a pot of tea at the old dining table with barley-twist legs.

With Clover occupied, Luna turns to Google for information about aging disorders. She learns about Werner syndrome, which causes accelerated aging. She reads about chromosomes, amino acid proteins, DNA stability and exonuclease domains, hard-to-pronounce phrases that mean nothing to her but seem to mean everything to those children whose bodies hurtle into old age.

She finds little about regressive aging. Information on cognitive and mental regression is abundant, and there are some news articles about gene experiments to reverse aging.

Perhaps Clover has been used as a lab rat, she thinks. Her mind turns to the digits carved into Clover’s hip. They had to have been made by a human. Those were the doctor’s chilling words, confirmation that Clover has experienced some kind of branding. She types “numbers carved in skin” into the search bar. Google brings up fifty thousand pages on cults, devil worship, human trafficking—and gene experimentation.

Her stomach roils. The reasons for the numbers on Clover’s hip are too terrifying to think about.

The storm has reached Drumnadrochit. It drums the roof of the cottage and taps at the windows, and every so often distant thunder groans above the clapping of the rain. The sky blackens. There is wood for the fire; she stacks it as high as she can, then gives in to the urge to curl up on the sofa and pull a blanket around her. Upstairs, she hears Clover’s voice, still talking to Gianni. She’s laughing, but it sounds odd. Hysterical, cackling laughter. It doesn’t sound like the Clover she remembers.

She catches the contradiction of her thoughts: she doubts that this is Clover. It’s a small doubt, but it’s there, a ball bouncing around the surfaces of her mind. There is one explanation, but it makes no more sense than her theory of age regression. The word has been cartwheeling across the floor of her mind since she laid eyes on Clover, brightening when she saw the mark on Clover’s hip.

Wildling.

She pushes the thought away. She came across the word when she looked into the coverage from the time she lived on Lòn Haven. On her phone, she brings up the digitized article from The Black Isle Bugle.

    14 November 1998

The small population of Lòn Haven has been plunged—yet again—into shock and terror over the recent disappearances of four females. Although not members of the local community—the Stay family was lodging temporarily on the island—the mystery surrounding the disappearances holds the residents in terror, with some claiming that the Wildling myth has come to pass.

“We’ve witnessed a lot of tragedy on Lòn Haven,” the resident—who wished to remain unnamed—said. “For such a small population we’ve had our fair share of folk going missing. Previous generations put these down to wildlings. I’m inclined to say that’s what happened here.”

The family, consisting of Olivia Stay (36), and her three daughters Sapphire (15), Luna (10), and Clover (7), only arrived on the island in September. And now it appears that three of the four females have vanished. It is understood that a widespread search has yielded few clues.

Anyone with any information should contact Chief Inspector Bram Kissick at Inverness Police Station.



Fuck, she thinks. The mention of her own name there pulls a gamut of emotions to the surface, and she suddenly feels nauseous. What if Eilidh or Shannon starts digging around the internet and comes across this? She looks at her phone, suddenly nervous that it might ring. That they might have her arrested for lying.

She slides into a deep sleep brimming with dreams soaked in memories. She dreams that she is standing on the edge of a dark hole that falls down, down to the core of the earth, its fiery heart. On the other side of the hole, there’s another woman. It’s her. She watches herself climb down into the hole.