The Lighthouse Witches(90)

“We’re not done yet.”


III

It was night when I came to. I felt weak and light-headed from loss of blood, forgetful for a moment of all that gone before. Above me, the stars told their stories as they had done for centuries before. The sea nudged at me to get up, and slowly the memory of what had happened before crystallized in my mind. Amy. The flame. The cave.

I pulled myself upright. It was dark, but the moonlight fell on the broch, white restless waves dancing all around it. I was freezing cold and the desire to curl up and sleep was insistent, but somehow I managed to half crawl, half stagger my way to the broch.

It was empty. No sign of Amy or Angus and his men, but also no sign of the stakes. No smell of flame on the air, no scorch marks on the stone.

I used the last of my strength to make for the woods, where I made a small shelter to protect against the rain and a fire to ward off the cold and the wolves. Then I took a stone, set it in the flame to cook it, and when it was hot enough, I used two sticks to pick it up and hold it to the wound in my chest, suturing it.

There was a fresh wound on my arm, the skin raw as though I’d been burned, and a small row of digits confirmed the year:

1

7

4

2



The next day I explored my surroundings, frantic, terrified. The island looked almost the same, wild and wind-combed, the sea beating thick clods of creamy foam up the beach. A man and a child were standing there, watching me. I wanted to ask them where Amy was, but there was no use—it was almost a century since she had been born.

I went through Witches Hide again. But when I fell out the other side, I did not arrive in 1667. I arrived in 1801. I went back again and again, and each time I emerged, coughing and spluttering on the shore and branded with fresh digits.

I had to change my approach. Amy had discovered the secret to the cave’s magic. I had seen her write down the runes in her book of spells, had learned a small amount of Icelandic. I would have to take time to remember, to get it right. Otherwise, I risked losing her forever.

When I emerged for the last time, the broch seemed to have sprouted into a white tower. A lighthouse, I later learned, designed to guide ships. I was branded with a year I’d never imagined. 1994. Three hundred and thirty-two years after Amy’s birth.

I built a shack on the small piece of rock that seemed to have been spewed from the larynx of Lòn Haven by the bay, forming a smaller island where some old dwellings had been left to ruin. I covered one of them with branches, then leaves, fashioning a roof. I stole clothing, visited the village. Much had changed, and it daunted me. I spent those first weeks in a perpetual state of dizziness, like a small child. I turned nocturnal, sleeping during the day and exploring the new world at night. It seemed easier, somehow, to sniff out the corners of this new version of the island like a fox when no one was around. I had to relearn much of what I knew.

I remembered my father’s box of treasure that I had mocked as a boy, buried in the hill. I did not dare trust that I would find it, but I did, and even then I did not trust that the objects therein might earn me more than a week’s food: my great-grandmother’s rings and a bag of old coins. But an antiques dealer found them extremely valuable, and overnight I went from owning just the shirt on my back to becoming the wealthiest man on the island.

I bought a house, and the Longing. I bought land. And I bought a boat. Somehow traveling the ocean soothed me. It felt as though I was getting somewhere, that I was traveling back to her. I ventured to Iceland, where her ancestors had hailed from, and where her mother’s knowledge of spells had originated.

I wrote, in the back of this book, all that I remembered. Amy’s runes came back to me, little by little, in dreams, and sometimes at unexpected moments.

I had vowed to her: I would never rest until we were together.

And I would do anything, absolutely anything, to make it so.





LIV, 1998


“There we are,” Patrick said.

I was falling in and out of consciousness, but the lightness of his tone—chatty, convivial—dragged me back into the present. He was speaking to me as though we were on a coffee date or he’d just mended a hole in my T-shirt instead of slicing up my back. I felt spit filling up my mouth, trapped by the strap he’d tied across it. Images of my father filleting a fish flashed in my mind; the jab of the knife, the spine ripped out, then the heart. The metallic smell of blood reached my nostrils. My blood.

My lower back was still cold, numb, but the thought of what he had just done to me in this filthy, disgusting place, rife with insects and bat droppings . . .

My vision started to blacken again, the world around me collapsing to an atom.

Luna will find me here. She’ll be completely alone.

Or Patrick will do to her what he’s just done to me.

I came to as he started to head up the staircase. On the floor beneath me I could make out a pair of discarded vinyl gloves smeared with blood. Something clicked in his hands as he moved up the stairs.

My ribs.

He had my ribs.

As soon as I heard him reach the lantern room, I lifted my head as high as I could and looked around. Patrick had a phone. Where was it? I had to call someone. Finn. The police.

But just then, a new smell reached me, the dense, earthy scent of an open flame, teasing out my primal instincts, a new alarm bell shrieking in my head. He was shouting in the lantern room, and the taste of smoke on my tongue was unmistakable.