The Lighthouse Witches

by C. J. Cooke

  And so I ran for the cave, my heart clanging wildly, my feet torn up by the stones on the ground. The men gave chase, but I outran them and headed to Witches Hide, dropping down the tunnel to the narrow chambers. Soon I could see daylight, a shaft of light bouncing off the wet black rock. I was bleeding badly from the wound Stevens had inflicted, dark blood covering my hands. I was woozy from it, but the knowledge that I had to get through that cave if I was ever to see Amy again powered me on. I moved quickly toward that light, so relieved by the sight of it that I didn’t feel the edges of the cave slicing up my legs.

  I passed the rock hewn with numbers, then pressed my palms on the outer wall of the cave and hauled myself out, falling headfirst into the black sea.

  LIV, 1998

  I

  I raced through the forest, branches tearing up my face and arms, and my heart beating in my throat. I could hear Isla and the others behind me, calling and gaining speed. I had to keep focused on my path, weaving through the trees toward the sound of the waves. I’d get Luna and we’d get in my car and drive before the others could reach us.

  If they hadn’t already taken her.

  I was drenched in sweat and gasping for breath by the time the Longing came into view. I darted across the road, my heart in my throat. Was Luna there? I reached the door to the bothy, put my hand on the door handle, and from the corner of my eye I spotted someone stepping toward me, their arms raised in the air, holding something heavy. Before I could glance at them, they brought it crashing down on my head. The pain was sickening, knocking me clean to the ground.

  And everything went black.

  II

  Colors flickered at the edges of my vision. Someone or something shuffled close to me, and in the distance, there was roaring.

  I was lying on my belly, raised up from the floor.

  Gradually, I recognized where I was—I was in the Longing, lying facedown on the wallpaper table I’d used to spread the mural out before painting it on the walls.

  My head throbbed. I could smell vomit on my T-shirt from where I’d been sick. My vision was fuzzy, but gradually it cleared enough to bring the floor of the Longing into focus. A set of feet moved toward the door, and someone locked it.

  Patrick.

  “It turns out that I have made a bit of an error,” he said. “Language is everything. Did you know that? It really is.” He shook his head. His eyes were wide and his hair askew. Terror ripped through me. He had beaten me over the head and dragged me here. He looked and sounded like he’d lost his mind.

  “All these years, I’d misinterpreted a single word,” he said, “and this misinterpretation has caused needless misery. As you might have gathered, I’ve been trying to find Amy. I can see you’re not Amy at all. No marks on your skin.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him to let me go, but just then he moved something tight across my mouth and fastened it behind my head. I shouted into the strap but it came out as a muffled whimper.

  “So it’s back to Plan A. You’ve helpfully painted the runes I need on the walls of the Longing. We’ll also need a bit of fire and one more crucial thing, which you’re also going to help me with.” He leaned close to my face. “Living bones.”

  The bone triangle in the lantern room flashed in my mind.

  “Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he continued, pulling down the waistband of my trousers.

  He’s going to rape me.

  “ ‘Why hasn’t Patrick tried bones before now?’ To that, I’ll say that I have. I’ve removed the bones from countless creatures, painstakingly putting them in the right place on a full moon and so on. And guess what? Nothing. No Amy.” He started to laugh. “And do you know what? Just the other night I was looking into my translations of old Icelandic. The word I’d interpreted as ‘living’ actually means ‘human.’ Can you believe that?”

  I felt a quick sting in my buttock. A flash of a needle in my peripheral vision told me he’d injected me with something.

  He ran a blade up the back of my T-shirt, tearing it off. The cold air settled across my arms.

  “This has to go, too,” he said, slicing the strap of my bra. I could feel my toes and legs, the blood in my hair from where he’d struck me, but not my back. He’d anesthetized me.

  He’s going to kill me.

  “The lower ribs,” he said, tapping the blade against my skin. “You don’t actually need them. But I do.”

  And then he plunged the knife into my skin.

  Crushing weight. Darkness, and a fire inside, close to my kidney. Pressure, and a wetness between my legs.

  Something began to scrape and whine against bone.

  Pulling.

  He wrenched so hard that my whole body lifted off the table.

  I could see liquid pooling on the ground beneath me and for a half second I thought it was grape juice.

  Blood. It’s my blood.

  I must have blacked out because when I came to, a threaded needle appeared in front of me, pinched between a finger and thumb.

  “I’m stitching you up now,” he said. “I’d prefer that we stick to the living part, just in case. OK?”

  And then the tug of the thread, binding my skin together. I was slipping under, the fringes of my consciousness starting to flicker and darken.

  Smelling salts ripped me back. Patrick’s face appeared at the fringe of my vision. “Stay with me, sweet Amy look-alike.” He smiled and stroked my cheek with a bloodied hand.

  “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 b
een 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.

  The spell only works with the runes, bones, and fire.

  I saw the hole in the floor, the one that had been covered by the grille. The wood had been shifted to one side, the grille removed. Slowly, painfully, I raised myself to my knees. My lower back was still numb, my left arm, too, but despite how close I was to fainting, the rest of me had feeling. Adrenaline powered through me.

  Luna was still in the bothy. I had to get to her.

  But as I moved across the floor I fell down, falling painfully to the ground below.

  I heard a terrible crunch as my ankle snapped. A sharp pain shot through the bones of my foot, hot and gut-wrenching. Tears came quickly to my eyes, and I clamped a hand to my mouth to stifle a scream.

  I straightened and glanced around. The hole that I’d fallen down widened outward into a huge cave, with streams of light at the far end indicating the exit.

  And I wasn’t alone.

  The little boy I’d spotted, the little boy with straggly pale hair, was standing behind a long pillar of rock. I crawled toward him.

  “Are you a ghost?” I managed to whisper. Maybe I was dead. Maybe this was the afterlife.

  He gestured for me to follow. Somehow I raised myself to my feet, staggering after the boy.

  “Olivia?” I heard above me.

  My stomach lurched. It was Patrick.

  He’d spotted that I’d escaped, and it wouldn’t take long for him to work out where I was. Smoke billowed down the hole after me. The Longing was ablaze.

  I moved as fast as I could after the boy through the cave, toward a rocky chamber that narrowed until my shoulders rubbed against the side.

  A thin strip of daylight fell into a pool of water ahead. It marked the end of the cave, nothing but sky and ocean. The boy was a few steps ahead of me. He turned and looked back at me before closing his eyes and crossing himself. Then he jumped.

  I stood on the lip of the cave and looked down at the water below. It didn’t look terribly deep, maybe three feet. And there was no splash. No ripples to indicate where the boy had fallen. And yet I’d seen him jump. Perhaps Finn was right; maybe he was a ghost.

  I took a breath and stepped forward, the shock of the cold water knocking the air from my lungs.

  It took a long time for me to surface. It felt like the water was holding me, looking me over, deciding whether or not to give me back to the earth. And then it let go, and I surfaced.

  I broke the surface and gasped. I remember the current pulling my legs, dragging me into the bay. I felt cold sand brush against my cheek, my body shaking from shock. I remember thinking that Patrick must have done to Saffy and Clover what he’d done to me. I wanted to die then.

  Heavy boots crunched across the sand toward me. Patrick, I thought. Come to finish me off. I opened an eye to look up at him.

  “You bastard,” I whispered.

  But the man staring down at me wasn’t Patrick.

  “Liv?” he said, astonished.

  LUNA, 2021

  I

  “Luna! Stop!”

  Luna hears a shout. She turns to see a figure moving up the hill through the trees, her arms waving above her head. Cassie runs up to Clover and pulls her away from the tree.

  “What are you doing?” Cassie shouts, holding Clover behind her. She looks Luna over. No sign of a knife or a rope.

  Luna stares, her memories swamping her. She feels as though she’s underwater.

  “I . . . I wanted to remember,” she stammers. “I remembered my mother tying me to a tree, and lifting the knife . . .”

  “But doing the same to Clover won’t change things,” Cassie pleads.

  “I wasn’t,” Luna says, turning to look at Clover, who has sat cross-legged at the base of the tree, twirling a sycamore seed. “I was . . . retracing my steps. I needed to fill in the gaps. And I thought . . . if I came to the forest, the place I feared most . . . it would happen.”

  “And has it?” Cassie asks cautiously.

  “I think I understand what happened,” Luna says, a catch in her voice. “I think I know why Clover is seven years old.”

  II

  They sit in Cassie’s car, the doors locked, Clover watching a movie on Cassie’s phone with headphones.

  “You’re saying the shark somehow made it back to sea?” Cassie says, replaying Luna’s story of the basking shark in her mind. “You’re saying he came alive again?

  Luna shakes her head. “I saw him die. I think what happened was that when I went through the cave, I went back a day. A day in time.”

  Cassie presses a hand to her forehead. “But . . . if that’s the case, then all the so-called wildlings were just kids who went through the cave . . .”

  “. . . and traveled t
o another time,” Luna says. “And that’s probably what happened to Saffy and my mother. They’ve gone to another time.” Her voice catches. “And I’ll never find them.”

  “What about that girl they found?” Cassie says. “The one called Sapphire they found here last year. She could be Saffy. Couldn’t she?”

  Luna nods. It’s possible, but she’s terrified of investing too much in it. She’s still processing the truth about Clover, about her own childhood. And the girl who was found is no longer here. The police won’t divulge the information easily. It’s not like Luna can tell them the truth.

  Hey, officer. The girl you found might have time-traveled from 1998. Can I have her address in case she’s my sister?

  The ferries are back on; Cassie follows behind as Luna drives to the port. As she drives, she thinks of Isla, her hardened stare. She remembers running from the people in the woods, from her mother holding the knife. She remembers the fear and confusion that felt like a living creature, a monster with its teeth bared, snarling after her.

  And she remembers finding a grove of trees and stopping there, exhausted, sinking down behind a large trunk to catch her breath. But she wasn’t alone. In front of her was a girl. The other Luna, still wearing her nightie. She was afraid. Why was she here? Was she something to do with the reason her mother had tried to kill her?

  The other Luna had looked worried for her.

  “It’s all right,” she’d said. “They’ve gone the other way.” She’d held out her hand.

  “We have to take hands, remember? That’s how it works.”

  At that, she’d remembered what Saffy had told her the night she asked about the book of spells. If you see yourself in human form, you have to take hands. One of you is from the future, and one of you is from the past. If you take hands, you become one again—in the present.

  She’d reached out and closed her eyes, clasping hands with the other Luna.