Hold Back the Tide

by Melinda Salisbury

  Not without me, this time.

  At the loch I pause for breath, leaning against a tree, hand pressed into my ribs, trying to rub the pain away. The water is a mirror, flat and grey, and I look up at the sky, surprised to see clouds thickening above me. Rain is coming. Much too late, and probably not enough. Better than nothing, though. I take it as an omen, moving onwards, travelling the miles to the north shore, where the loch meets the mountains.

  I sit at the side and unfurl the rope, tying knots every foot or so, hand and footholds to help Cora out of the pit. I’ll get her out first. Then find my father. I roll the rope up and sling it over my shoulder.

  Across the dry loch bed, the opening of the cave looks like a mouth ready to swallow me down into the earth. There’s no sign of my father, even when I get close, no prints in the hard earth, no telltale scrap of fabric caught on a sharp bit of rock. But I know he’s here. Where else would he go?

  Taking a deep breath, I drop to my stomach, and, my heart in mouth, crawl backwards into the cave, the lamp cradled against my chest like a baby.

  I don’t take my eyes off the exit, keeping that block of light at the front of my mind as I slowly wriggle my way down into their lair.

  Once the tunnel widens I turn, crawling on my hands and knees until I can stand. Then I light the lamp. The glow is a friend in the dark, and though I know it’s likely to give me away sooner, I’m grateful for it. It soothes the bird in my chest, beating against the bone cage there.

  I put my right hand on the wall and remember the path I took to escape. This time I can see where the path split, and I pause at the junction, listening. It’s silent, save for my heart. Steeling myself against my screaming nerves, I turn right, edging towards the pit and kneeling beside it.

  When I peer into it, the wide, shocked eyes of Cora Reid stare back at me, her fists raised as though she planned to fight. It makes me like her even more.

  I press my finger to my lips and wait until she nods, before setting the lantern down and pulling the rope over my head. Hattie’s body is still in the pit, face down, her hair a matted cloud. There’s no sign she’s moved, or begun to rise, or whatever they do. Maybe she wasn’t bitten, but died some other way, and she won’t come back. I’m tempted to ask Cora to check, but Cora is resolutely not looking at her, and the last thing either of us needs is her breaking down because she’s been pushed too far.

  Instead I toss one end of the rope down to Cora, holding a finger up again, telling her to wait. There’s nothing to attach the rope to, so I tie it around my waist, looping the knots just like my father taught me. I mime at her slowly, using my hands and my eyes to tell her I’m going to move away, and when she feels the rope flick, she should climb. I do it twice, so she remembers. Then I walk back a little.

  Once I’ve judged I’m far enough away to be safe, I get on my hands and knees, digging them into the ground, trying to find purchase, working to anchor myself so she can climb up. I figure if I stay low and spread my weight I’ll be a better foundation for her. I tug the rope.

  The moment she begins to climb my body slides backwards, knees, shins and palms scraping the dirt. Then there’s nothing under my feet, and the rope slackens. Cora bites off a yelp and I twist, my stomach dropping as I see how close I was to falling back down.

  This isn’t going to work.

  I untie the rope and look at Cora. Her eyes are wide, glittering, her throat bobbing, and I see the defeat written on her as she tries to accept I can’t get her out.

  Yes, I can. And I will.

  I take six steps back and wrap the rope around my arms to try keeping it from burning my hands, then shift my weight low into my hips, bending my knees. Then I flick it. When I don’t feel her weight I do it again, harder, so she gets the message.

  The second she starts to climb I stumble two of the six steps forward, and have to bite down on my lip to keep from screaming in pain as the rope scores over my wrists and palms. I lean back as far as I can, until my shoulders are parallel with the ground, keeping my knees bent, using my weight to counter hers.

  I don’t try to pull her; instead I imagine roots growing out of my feet, burrowing down into the earth, holding me fast. My shoulder threatens to pop back out of its socket, every muscle in my body screaming, but I don’t give up.

  She held me up so I could get out; I can do the same for her.

  I hold, and I hold, even as my vision turns red and my knees start to shake.

  Then I’m falling backwards, crashing to the ground, the rope slack.

  When I look up Cora is gripping the lip of the hole, one leg kicking wildly as she tries to swing it up. I rush forward to take her hands and pull her over the edge. Afterwards we both sit, panting. My limbs have turned to jelly, and I expect Cora is in a similar state.

  What I don’t expect is for her to hug me.

  My eyes, closed while I recover, fly open, terrified at first we’ve been found, that the vice-like hold around me is one of the òlanfhuil. But it’s Cora Reid, shaking gently, her head buried in my shoulder, the skin there wet from her tears. I shift so I can put an arm around her, patting awkwardly, before I push her away.

  I stand, beckoning for her to follow. We don’t have time to be sentimental.

  Rolling the rope up, I haul it over my arm and pick up the lamp. Cora is moving stiffly, but I hurry her on, taking her back to the tunnel out. I walk with her until we can see the entrance and I point at it, silently telling her to go.

  She shakes her head and grabs my arm, insistent.

  In response I pull out the gun, and tilt my head in the direction of the tunnel.

  Her expression becomes grim, her mouth a line, her eyes hard when they meet mine. She gives a single nod, as though sanctioning my actions, followed by another – brief – hug, then she leaves. I watch until she’s gone, waiting until I’m sure she’s made it out to sunlight and safety.

  Once I’m alone again, I turn to the darkness. I pull the hammer back on the gun, cocking it.

  This time I walk straight on, heading deeper under the mountain, trying to keep my focus on my surroundings, on what might be ahead of me. Even so, a worm of worry twists in my mind, because there was no one else in the pit, save poor Hattie. And that means either they weren’t brought here, or they’re already turned. More òlanfhuil I might have to kill.

  The stillness and the silence are eerie; though Cora and I were as quiet as we could be, we still made sounds. The scrapes of feet against stone, heavy breathing, barely bitten-back grunts. I’m surprised nothing heard us, surprised nothing has come to investigate. I’m also surprised they don’t have some kind of patrol, or lookout – they know I know where they are, surely they’ve assumed I’ve told others. They should be on guard, watching for me.

  Unless this is a trap.

  I gently press the trigger, feeling how ready the gun is to fire.

  The passage begins to widen, and I slow down. Then suddenly the walls are gone, vanishing from either side of me as if they’ve been whipped away, leaving me in an open space, the floor glittering strangely in the dim lamplight.

  I’ve stepped into the bed of the old loch. When I bend I can see the fossilized skeletons of fish, their bones preserved in what used to be the bottom of the underground loch. Helical stones that were once snails, now calcified and permanent, the imprints of leaves and grasses pressed into rocks, like feathers.

  I walk further in, fear replaced by wonder. My boot nudges something that shifts, and I look down to find a shell, conical and pale, its occupant long, long, long dead. I pick it up and marvel as I see the mother-of-pearl sheen still coating it. I put it in my pocket like a talisman, and then continue looking around.

  Then I see her.

  My mother, standing before me, an air of waiting about her, as if she’s been poised for this moment.

  At her feet, crumpled and still, is my father.

  My stomach turns over, as cold, bright fear lances straight through my heart. This is why I w
ouldn’t let him say goodbye. It was supposed to ward off disaster. It was supposed to make sure something like this didn’t happen.

  My mother takes a step towards me and I raise the gun, without looking away from my father. This isn’t fair. I notice my hand is shaking; it’s never shaken before. The second I notice, I become aware of my whole self, shuddering softly, fear and exhaustion and desolation and rage all wrecking me.

  As though she senses it – smells it – my mother’s mouth curves into a smile, her lips parting to reveal a single pair of long canines, bracketing her upper front teeth.

  She raises a finger to her lips and gestures for me to follow her.

  I shake my head.

  She does it again, raises her hand and urges me to go with her.

  And through my grief and anger, I realize something.

  She hasn’t attacked me yet. She could have done it while I wasn’t looking, but she didn’t. She waited for me to see her, waited for a chance to communicate with me. She hasn’t raised an alarm, she hasn’t made a move to threaten me. Is it possible she doesn’t want to hurt me? Could it be that she just wants to talk to me, or even help me?

  Is it possible he’s not dead?

  There’s only really one way to find out.

  I point with the muzzle of the gun at my father, my eyes asking the question.

  Again she smiles, this time with her mouth closed, as though hiding her teeth will reassure me that everything is all right.

  It’s enough.

  Gun trained back on her chest, I begin to walk, slowly, towards her. She watches every step, head tilted like a bird, or lizard, her face impassively curious.

  Up close she’s monstrous: her pale skin underscored by dark veins, her eyes not fully dark like the others, but the irises shot through with brown blood. She looks papery and fragile, desiccated, dry as the loch bed outside. Her hair is thinning, I can see patches between it; it’s falling out. And I know a thousand years from now, if she lives, she won’t look like my mother at all. She’ll look like one of them, smaller, but still bald and black-eyed, all the humanity stripped from her.

  Maybe once they were something else too. Before we decided they were gods. Picts, the race of giants that walked the land long before we were here. Or maybe she’ll grow, nourished on the flesh and blood of the people she used to love, stretching and honing until she’s designed to frighten and kill, and nothing more.

  I bend, slowly, keeping my eyes on her, to feel my father’s neck for a pulse. My fingers come away wet, no drumming beneath them. I know what she’s done.

  When I stand my finger is tight on the trigger again.

  She steps back, wary now, and gestures once more for me to follow. Pointing at me, then her ear, before pressing her palms together.

  Listen. Please.

  I ought to turn and run, wait outside in the sunshine for Ren to come and blow the entrance shut.

  I ought to put a bullet in her, and then in my father, so he can’t come back and so I don’t have to see either of them like this ever again, don’t have to spend my life knowing they’re under here. Don’t ever have to worry that one day I might look outside at night and see them side by side, waiting for me.

  But another, small, stupid part of me wants to hear what she has to say. Has spent seven years wanting her back, and now here she is, begging me for a moment of my time.

  So, even though my father is lying at her feet, I look my mother in the eye, and I nod.

  Her gaze drifts to the gun in my hand. Understanding, I pull the revolver’s hammer back and press the trigger, de-cocking the gun. At the sound of the faint click, my mother repeats that uncanny tilt of her head and gives a small smile, as if she’s proud of me for being a good girl. I hate the way I feel good for pleasing her.

  The gun disarmed, I put it in my pocket, hooking the handle over the edge. Just in case.

  She leads me across the loch bed to my right, her footfalls silent, moving with a grace I don’t remember her having before. A passage appears, a dark smear in the cave wall, and a wave of panic surges through me as I look behind and find I can no longer see the one I arrived through, hidden by the dark. For all I know there are dozens of them, spidering out from banks of the old lochside, making paths deeper and deeper under the mountain. Of course there must be; where do I think the others are, even now? I curse myself for not using a stick or stone, or something to mark the right way.

  Heart fluttering, I follow her along the passageway, until we arrive in a small cavern. The walls glitter with quartz, acting as prisms and casting rainbows over us. Her skin absorbs them; they dance over mine. There’s a pile of rags in the corner, and the walls are marked.

  I crouch to look at them, stomach turning when I see the shapes, traced in something dark and brown. A woman, a man and a child. Our family. Daubed in blood.

  I realize this place is hers. That must be why there are no others in the main grotto; they must have their own spaces like this, little hidey-holes secreted away. She’s brought me to her nest.

  When I look back at her she’s blocking the exit, and I shiver, a full-bodied shudder of foreboding. I have made a terrible mistake. I have allowed her to trap me.

  We’re of a height now, I realize as she steps towards me. Whenever I remembered her she was taller, but now we’re a matched set. In seven years I’ve grown up and filled out into a woman. And she’s become a monster.

  “Why am I here?” I ask, though I know. “What do you want?”

  She opens and closes her mouth, as if trying to remember how to use it. I expect before tonight she hasn’t spoken in seven years. Hasn’t needed to. So when she does, it’s the sound of graves and earth. Her voice is an abyss.

  “My daughter.” Both answer and endearment.

  Against my will, longing fills me. “Did it hurt?” I ask her.

  I watch in horror as a clump of hair works free, scalp still attached, falling on to her arm. She brushes it aside like an insect, not caring. I get a sudden burst of memory: her at her dressing table, brushing her hair, telling me she had to do it a hundred times in the morning and a hundred times at night.

  “Oh, yes.” She smiles, her teeth gleaming.

  I put my right hand in my pocket, finding the gun, curling my fingers around the handle until it fits just so. My index finger seeks the trigger, my thumb on the hammer. Even if I get it out in time, even if I manage to shoot her, I still have to get out of here. Have to find my way out, past the others that will surely pour out of their own dens to hunt me down.

  It’s too late, I understand. Now I die. For a while, at least.

  “Close your eyes,” she says. Her breath smells of meat and marrow.

  Her teeth are all I see.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Alice?”

  She’s gone. I blink, and then I see Giles Stewart pinned against the cavern wall, his feet dangling uselessly, my mother’s spidery white fingers around his throat.

  He doesn’t fight her, though. Instead he smiles, a fat, soft smile, as though she’s the best thing he’s ever seen.

  She bares her teeth at him, leaning up to smell him.

  It is only when her tongue snakes over his pulse that he looks frightened.

  “Alice,” he says again, a tremor to his voice. “It’s me. It’s Giles.”

  In response she growls, a guttural sound that rumbles from deep in her abdomen.

  “Alice?” Giles shoots a look of desperation at me.

  I hate the man. I hate him so much I can hardly breathe for it; there’s not enough room in my chest for air and my loathing of him. But I don’t want to see my mother tear his throat out.

  “Mam,” I say.

  She turns, her teeth bared, and now she doesn’t know me at all.

  But I have to try. “Don’t.” I step forward, pulling the gun out.

  Giles whimpers as her grip on him tightens, and her lips peel back, her mouth opening wide, impossibly wide.

  “I love you,”
he pleads.

  She doesn’t care about love. She doesn’t know what love is any more, but he’s never going to understand that. All he sees is the thing he wanted most in the world, the thing he thought he could never have, restored to him and there for the taking.

  “We can be together,” he chokes out. The front of his trews are stained dark; despite his words, he’s wet himself.

  And though I hate him, I pull back the hammer on the gun and raise it, pointing it at her.

  She lets Giles go, turning towards me.

  He slumps to the ground, his eyes wide, as she flies at me, hitting me so hard I see stars. I lose the gun, hearing it clatter against the rocks as I crash down too, landing in her rags. They smell foul, and I gag, trying to fight my way out. Then her weight is on me, crushing my chest, one cold hand pressing over my face, covering my mouth as she twists my head to the side. The other scrabbles to pin my arm while I flip like a fish beneath her, trying to keep her from gaining a final hold.

  I will not die like this. I will not die in a pile of rags, beneath the ground, killed by a thing wearing my mother’s face.

  A burst of strength has me shoving her away with my knees. She snarls like an animal, slamming me back against the ground, saliva dripping from her fangs as she tries to bite me.

  Then her eyes go blank, and she slumps on to me, a dead weight.

  Over her shoulder I see a glint of silver.

  And the frozen expression of Giles Stewart, his fingers still curled as though he’s holding the knife that’s now lodged in my mother’s back, right to the hilt.

  I allow myself three seconds – three rapid heartbeats – to recover, then shove her off me. Already she’s beginning to crumble, her flimsy skin flaking as she turns to dust. I take the knife from her back as her skin disintegrates around it. Within seconds she’s gone, nothing more than a thin coating of ash on the earth.