And then there was the matter of the little everyday occurrences that Alice and Mum had started to take for granted. Coira had made the sugar bowl scoot across the table to her yesterday just by reaching for it. She’d been entirely unfazed, and Alice had had to swallow several times before her voice sounded normal enough to remind Coira that she should ask for it to be passed to her, and to use please and thank you. They had a growing band of stray cats that were collecting at the back door; they cried and yowled until Coira appeared, then the lot of them would walk the grounds together, Coira traipsing off onto the wooded path that led to the cottage. “They did that to you, you know,” Mum had said to Alice one day as they watched the little girl setting off on an excursion into the trees with two scabby ginger tabby cats at her heels. Alice had a faint memory of skipping down High Street as a child, delighted at the soft fur of the street cats as they rubbed against her legs and swirled around her feet. “She’s good with animals,” Alice had said. “That’s what we said about you,” Mum reminded her.
But today, in the rain, there were no cats, and Coira was quietly tucked away in the study, carefully drawing a scene that looked as though it came half from a nature book of landscapes and half from a nightmare. Alice had held her breath for a minute when she peeked over the girl’s shoulder, and then she moved on. The truth was it was a very good drawing, not just good for a five-year-old but good on any scale you applied it to. It was as though a fully grown and educated adult was hiding in the tiny body. If it wasn’t for the plush teddy bear sitting opposite the artist, keeping careful watch, one might forget she was a child altogether.
The bell made Alice jump. They rarely had visitors now that the work crews had finished the job, and in the rain it was an entirely foreign sound. Mum looked up, her face confused.
“Who?” she asked simply.
“No idea,” Alice said, crossing from the kitchen through the dining room and into the front parlor. The grandeur of the place still made her head swim. She jumped to see Coira standing in the archway that led from the study. The little girl stared at the door, unblinking.
“You forgot to lock it,” she said simply.
The bell rang again, insistent. Alice looked at the tidy white front door with the custom trim and realized Coira was right. She had forgotten to lock it; the bolt and the handle were entirely open, and she must have forgotten to do up the lock when she came back in earlier that morning. So few people came anywhere near the house, it wasn’t a big concern. The bell rang again. Alice stepped protectively in front of Coira even though she knew the girl was more than capable of taking care of herself. The bell again, followed by a pounding on the door. Alice felt her spine grow cold from the bottom up, spreading into her temples and across her forehead.
Suddenly she saw the path laid out in front of her. She saw the man on the other side of the door. His face was caked with grease from the factories on the other side of town. He had crossed through the Necropolis and into Cathedral Court, but not before he’d hit a few pubs. He was bleary-eyed, unsteady on his feet. He thought he was home; he thought this was the house of the girl he loved, who had kicked him to the streets days ago. He was angry. Alice saw the long knife tucked into the back of his belt. She saw the floor awash in a sea of black-red blood. She saw Mum slumped over the table, her throat slit from ear to ear. She saw herself, splayed against the newly stained dark wood staircase. She heard Coira scream, a long thin sound that seemed to last forever.
“It’s okay, Momma,” Coira said calmly. “Step back now.”
Mum appeared in the opposite archway, sensing the danger as the pounding continued.
“Open up, ya slag!” He was beating with one hand now; the entire door shook with the force. “I know why you tossed me out! I’m home now, ya maggot, and I need to talk to ya!”
“Step back now,” Coira repeated, putting her small hand on Alice’s arm. “It’s okay.”
Mum’s face was locked in confusion and fear. Alice stepped away from the child she should be protecting, everything in her body telling her to do the opposite. Coira approached the door and laid both hands on it. The pounding stopped completely. Alice steadied herself on the wall as Coira reached to the knob and opened the door. Alice tried to cry out, but she swallowed the sound. The man stood stock-still on the other side as though he had been frozen, and the image of the men in Caracas rushed into Alice’s mind. Those men had been unconscious, their eyes closed and their chests moving. This man was a stone: his eyes stared blankly ahead, and no breath escaped his lungs.
“Coira… ” Alice began. “Honey… ”
Coira turned to look at her, her raven hair with a touch of fire swirling around her face in the wind that escaped into the house, her honey eyes burning with a fire-red tint.
“He killed before he came here, a woman he met in a pub.” Coira spoke slowly, as if in a trance. “He took her to a room and slashed her throat. She’s there now, no one knows yet. He’ll kill after he leaves here, a man who says a harsh word to him. He’ll stab him in the gut, and then he will run. The rain will give rise to a fever, and he will die in an alley. His time is over; there’s no good left for him to do.” Her voice was an intonation, no hint of little girl. She was channeling a far more ancient hag, and she spoke with certainty and with an authority over life and death that was only found in the most ancient of magic.
The little girl turned to face the man who stood still as death in their doorway, his hand raised for the next attack on the door. Coira raised one finger toward his face as though to stroke his cheek; too little to reach his face, she stood on her toes and lightly tapped his chin with her arm fully extended.
The man cracked and shrank, his features becoming something that was not skin, not stone, not bone or wood. It shrank inward and sucked the moisture from the flesh, the cheeks folding in creating a horrid grimace. The eye sockets were two cavernous holes in what had been his face. Mum stood firmly in the archway, her face impassive. Alice felt the mark of Ingwaz on her wrist pulse and throb. The wind whipped madly outside the door, and the rain fell straight down in sheets. The elm and willow trees lining the front of the manor house bent near to breaking. In the midst of the din, the many-greats granddaughter of Cailleach blew a soft breath at the man’s face and the form collapsed to ash. The wind swept under the grey matter and spun it into the sky, scattering it in the storm.
The wind calmed, and the rain fell back to a typical Scottish pelt. Coira closed the door and patted down her sodden hair. With a glance at Alice and her grandmum, she trotted back to the study to finish her drawing.
In the black and silent underground lake, a ripple ran slowly and systematically across the still water. The Cailleach lurched to the shore, rubbing her molting skin on the rock as she shuffled along. She ran a single, claw-like finger across the surface of the icy water and lifted it to her face, smelling the sulfur and iron, the certainty of completion that was the promise of Ingwaz. It would come soon.
THE MORNING AFTER THE man had come to their doorstep, the news broke about a young woman found with her throat slashed in Saltmarket. It was said that she’d left a pub with a factory worker, but no one had been able to identify the man. Alice paced the floor while Coira splashed in puddles left by the rain on the land stretching out from the back of the manor.
“There’s nothing to report,” Mum said firmly. “And who would you tell? You’ll end up in the asylum, you will, and that’s if they don’t laugh you off and ignore it entirely.”
Alice knew she was right; there was nothing to be done. They didn’t know who the man was, and if Coira was right, and she most definitely was, he would have died that night anyhow but not before taking another life. The little girl had not spoken of the incident since and had slept a full night’s sleep. Today she was behaving in an obstinately five-year-old manner, running and jumping into the deepest puddles and then sloshing around. Alice could see the water seeping over into her galoshes; her feet would be soaked to the bo
ne by now.
Alice rocked against the kitchen counter, her heart pounding in her chest. Behind her, the breakfast dishes rattled and shook in their places, bits of toast and droplets of water dancing out of their containers and onto the table.
“Stop it!” Mum snapped. “Whatever it is you’re fretting over is making everything bounce about. You’re making a mess.”
“A mess?” Alice half laughed, half growled. “A mess? My daughter killed a man yesterday and you’re concerned about a mess.”
The kitchen cupboards flew open and then slammed shut; a teacup on the edge of the counter fell and shattered on the floor. Alice stood still and looked at the bits of porcelain scattered over dark wood.
“Sit down,” Mum ordered.
Alice paused for a moment and then obeyed.
“Do you want to know why I left?” Mum asked, her voice forceful and strict, the tone Alice remembered from her childhood.
“Left here? Glasgow?” Alice asked numbly. “The war. You left because of the war.”
“That’s what I always told you, wasn’t it?” Mum said as she gathered the breakfast plates and stood to place them in the sink. “The war made sense; no one questioned why I would leave a city that had been bloody blasted to hell, where there were still bodies piled in a stack at the graveyard across the way, and we were living off rations of powdered eggs.” She slammed a mug of tea in front of Alice and sat back down.
“Mum… why are you telling me this now? I can’t even think straight.” Alice’s mind was racing, as it had been since the news about the girl in Saltmarket had broken. Until then, she had been pretending that what had happened at the front door had been some sort of dream or vision, not literal. Her daughter hadn’t really killed a man with the touch of her finger. But for whatever reason, the news about the Saltmarket girl had made it all real.
“You need to know, whether you want to know or not. And given what happened yesterday, there’s a serious lack of time.” Mum stared at Alice for a moment. “I never taught you about our gift like your Great-Grandmum Muriel did me and your Grandmum Rowan. I never did. I tried to raise you like a normal girl, ordinary in every way, but there were always things we couldn’t ignore. That day before we left for Colorado, you nearly drowned, but something saved you. You had spirits watching you all of the time. You walked into a room, and all the air was sucked right out. You traveled with a crowd surrounding you, watching you, telling you things, showing you paths. You were just a child, smaller than Coira even, and I couldn’t slow it down, I couldn’t stop it.” Mum paused, considering her words.
“You don’t know the truth I learned about your Great-Grandmum Muriel. And no matter how my Mum tried to explain it all away with her books and science, I know what happened during those days and nights so long ago when the consumption swept through the city.” Mum stopped and watched Alice’s face for a reaction.
“Mum, TB was everywhere back in those days. Maybe Grandmum Rowan was right and it was just science, nature, inevitable.” Alice felt her fingertips growing numb.
“Inevitable, yes. But there was nothing natural about it,” Mum said softly. “She brought the illness, spread it through the dirt and water and air. She brought it with the anger and pain that had been inflicted on her. She killed them, Alice; she killed nearly the whole city.” Mum leaned in. “I left because I saw what you were becoming capable of and I didn’t know how to stop it. I thought that a place where the old magic didn’t run so deeply, where we didn’t have a history, where you wouldn’t remember, might make it stop.”
“So what?” Alice asked as the numbness crept up her arms along her veins, heading to her heart. “You think we should leave? That this thing that Coira can do, her oddness, this would all go away if we went somewhere where we can forget?”
“No!” Mum slammed her hands down on the table, her voice filling the room. Alice jumped back and felt the ice-cold numb seek into her neck, chest, lungs.
“No.” Mum repeated. “I was wrong to leave. The only way this… ” she pulled up her sleeve and indicated the mark of Ingwaz on her wrist, “… this comes to completion is by remembering exactly where we came from and what we are capable of.” She pointed at Coira on the great expanse of mud out back. “She is the one who could do that; she could remember and bring this all home for good.”
“I don’t understand,” Alice whispered.
“Neither do I, entirely,” Mum answered, her voice gentle now. “Neither of us will ever entirely understand, I suspect. I know this, though: we are a force of nature not unlike that plague of consumption. Our line is that of the ancient hags that used to rule this land, and now we exist in shadows and whispers of our former selves. We have healed and brought life and beauty to this world, but we brought equal measures of death as well. The ancient hags lorded over mankind, guarding them at times and at others striking them down. We were never entirely in this world; even now, we both have one foot on the other side of the mist. Your daughter… ” she indicated Coira, who was kneeling in the sticky mud forming the earth into a shape of some sort. “Your daughter is barely in our world at all. Her physical form is all that keeps her here; her head belongs with the ancient line.”
Alice’s head was throbbing, the icy numbness making her breath feel like shards of ice. “What do we do?”
Mum shook her head sadly. “That, I don’t know,” she answered simply and looked out the window at the little girl covered in mud who had a storm of golden dragonflies buzzing around her head. “Only she can answer that. Our job is to wait.” Mum paused, her brow furrowing. “Should we stop her? She’s an absolute mess.”
Alice watched her for a minute and then shook her head. “This is the most like a child she’s been in a long while.”
Mum smiled softly. “Then let’s let her be.”
THE YOUNG MAN HAD come into the shop on an errand from his mother. He wasn’t from Glasgow, he said with a broad smile, he’d grown up in Aberdeen. His family though, he said, revealing a row of perfect teeth and a dimple on his left cheek, was from these parts, and his mother had always talked of the shop on High Street. He was a carpenter by trade, come to work in the factories, and would she like to have a pint with him? Catherine turned him down the first time he asked. But the next day he returned, and the day after that, and finally she relented. He asked her about the Girls’ Academy, which was still thriving despite the classes getting smaller every year. He asked her why she hadn’t gone to university, become a doctor like her mother and father. He stared into her eyes and remembered every word she said, and by the end of the evening, Catherine felt dizzy. He walked her back down High Street and leaned in as she fumbled with the keys to the door. His lips were soft as they brushed hers; he smelled like peppermint and cinnamon.
He returned every night after his shift at the metal works factory, and she made him dinner, inviting him up to the second-floor flat. Mum and Dad came by to have supper and meet the young man. His eyes were hazel with bits of bright green dancing in them, and Mum asked him a thousand questions about his family, his work, and where he was headed. He smiled, and Catherine saw Mum’s crusty exterior melt a bit. Some months later, Mum made a chocolate cake and the neighbors all gathered to toast their nuptials. The wedding was simple, held in the garden of Queen Margaret College underneath the flowering trees as spring bloomed around them. Catherine wore her mother’s dress with the lace sleeves and high collar, and her groom borrowed a suit from his dad. They moved into the flat over the shop and led an ordinary life. Catherine took the lessons that Grandmum Muriel had taught her and locked them away. She never explained the truth behind her tiny tattoo and never gave her new husband or family any cause to believe she was anything other than a shopkeeper.
Alice was born the following year on the night of the Autumnal Equinox, the first day of fall, when the leaves grew amber and rust and the birds still sang high in the trees. Catherine lay in bed, cradling her infant daughter and staring into her great, dark eyes. H
er hair was raven with a touch of fire, and Catherine swore that she would keep her safe from the secrets she knew. Her daughter would never know the burden of knowledge, never carry the weight of those who had come before her.
The ley lines buzzed in celebration. The ancient line was once again continued, and despite Catherine’s proclamation, the Cailleach stretched an ancient hand into the void and ran it back over her matted hair. A great black clod of molt fell from her scalp, and she lifted the mass to her lips, tasting the salty coarseness of the shreds of her humanity. The hag would need to wait years, but after thousands, a few more were no matter. Each child born remembered a bit more and gained a bit more strength. Eventually, there would come a child who would grow and remember, and the line would come full circle. Farther away, in her cabin on the cliff side, the raven-haired hag looked up from her work; she felt the vibration of the ley lines as well and knew the time was coming when the line of daughters that had been lost to the world of man for so long would cross back over the Lethe and bring with them the wisdom of the ages.
“DID I EVER TELL you about my hat?” Alice asked her honey-eyed daughter as she tucked the rose-colored quilt up to her neck and slipped her ragged teddy bear to her side.
Coira shook her head and hugged her bear to her chest.
“Would you like to know?” Alice asked softly, brushing her raven hair back from her forehead. The child nodded and stared at her with eyes that had grown far too old in far too little a time.
“When I was just a girl, not too much older than you, really, we had just moved to the United States, and we didn’t live in Grandmum’s cabin in the woods yet, and I was lonely. I didn’t have any friends, and I think Grandmum worried a bit about me. She put me in a dance class. Tap dance was what it was called, and I was rather good at it, if I do say so myself.” Alice smiled at her daughter’s solemn face that soaked in everything she said with such intensity.
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