‘So what did happen to her?’ Alan demanded, intent on trying to clear up the confusion that he felt. ‘Where did she go and how does it have anything to do with what happened to Vanessa?
Nobody offered an explanation, but a picture of Lee’s shocked face on the boat yelling about Bell’s Point rose in front of him.
Maguire finally answered him.
‘We don’t know. She was found like Vanessa on the bank, wet but not cold, unconscious but unharmed.’
‘But surely she told you what happened, Maggie?’
‘No, not really. She wouldn’t talk about it at first and would only say that she hadn’t been frightened and that nobody had hurt her. In fact, she later claimed she wasn’t with anyone else, that she had an adventure like Alice in Wonderland and had fallen asleep on the bank. All I know is that it has something to do with the magic of the loch.’
Alan stared at Maggie in disbelief. The magic of the loch! Had Maggie lost the plot entirely?
‘Where had she been?’ Alan insisted loudly, deeply frustrated by the conversation.
‘In Loch Ness,’ Maggie answered calmly.
‘Well, I know that. You said she was wet.’
‘Alan, we searched every inch of the bank that day and the next and she wasn’t there. But that was where we found her in the end, on the bank at Bell’s Point, exactly where you found Vanessa.’
‘But …’ Alan stopped and looked at Maggie.
‘We had lots of questions too, Alan, but we never really got many answers, so we came to accept it in the end. She didn’t seem to remember much of what had happened. And from that time on, Lee settled where she had been restless before. She made friends and learned to love it here after a very rocky start. But above all, she started to accept her mother’s death.’
‘I thought her mother and father died in the same accident?’ Alan said.
‘Aye, so they did. But her father was a more distant figure to her. He had travelled with his job most of her young life, so it was her mother’s death she took hardest.’
Alan felt in a state of surreal exhaustion. He had no idea what was going on. He looked up when Dr Morris opened the door to the kitchen and stuck his head around it.
‘Not interrupting, am I? Just thought I’d let you know that she’s fine. A sturdy wee lass, I can tell.’
He had a cheerful, professional face and the sight of it made Alan’s heart lurch. There had been so many composed, good-natured doctors’ faces in the years of Marie’s illness and even at the end, not one had prepared him adequately for her death.
‘Yes, but did you examine her?’ Alan almost shouted.
The doctor, undisturbed by Alan’s manner, answered mildly. ‘Aye, a wee bruise on her forehead, but apart from that she’s fine, just exhausted really. I’ve never seen such white skin, it’s almost as if it’s see-through. But she’s good and healthy, and she’ll get back her colour in no time. She’s in a deep sleep now, but will need one of your hearty breakfasts tomorrow, Maggie.’
Alan didn’t have time to listen to any more chat. He took the stairs two at a time.
He opened the door of Vanessa’s room, carefully, so as not to make any noise. A small bedside lamp glowed softly beside her. She did look pale, a strange colour, but he was distracted by how young and peaceful she looked and tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. He held her wrist gently to feel the pulse for himself. It was as strong as his own. Kneeling down beside her, he brushed her mop of damp black curls off her face and pressed his lips to her forehead tenderly. He turned off the lamp and closed the door quietly. They would talk in the morning.
It was dark in the room. Dark except for the glow. Nobody was there to see the fading green luminescence of Vanessa’s skin on the snow white sheets.
CHAPTER 29
On 28 September 1966, Count Emmanuel de Lichtervelde from Belgium and his driver, former naval officer Mr Guy Senior, saw a large, dark object with two distinct humps moving in the loch. Mr Senior believed that it was an animal rather than a moving boat. The count is reported to have said that it was the most wonderful thing that could ever have happened to him.
The next morning, Vanessa woke early. Her eyes fell on the small green table at the window. Window? What had happened? She wasn’t in the water; she wasn’t in the cave. How come she was back in her bedroom? And Nessie? Where was she?
She jumped out of bed and ran to the window, scanning the loch. Was Nessie still down there? Had she seen the map? Would she be able to read it?
Vanessa let her mind wander back. She remembered swimming in the deep with Nessie. She smiled at the thought of the mounds of moss she had eaten. It should make eating spinach easier now for sure.
A light knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. Vanessa froze. Should she make a dash for her bed and pretend to be still asleep? She wasn’t sure if she could face everyone yet. How could she explain where she had been?
Lee put her head around the door cautiously. She was carrying a cup and she looked extremely pale, Vanessa thought.
‘Come in, Lee.’
Lee crossed over to the window without catching Vanessa’s eye and they both sat down in silence. She looked younger and frailer than before.
‘Hot chocolate. I was pretty sure you could not face one of Maggie’s breakfasts, this morning of all mornings.’
Vanessa smiled, but Lee didn’t smile back. She was staring at Vanessa’s neck intensely and the look of shock on her face was frightening. Instinctively, Vanessa put her hand up to her throat and then beneath her fingers she felt the locket and chain. Her heart skipped a beat. So it was true! She had been in Loch Ness.
‘It’s yours?’ she asked in surprise, her voice a whisper. Lena. Lee.
Lee gave the tiniest of nods. Tears filled her eyes. Vanessa stared hard at her unsure what to say or do. She watched as Lee’s tears spilled over and ran down the side of her nose. Lee made no effort to brush them away.
‘My mother’s,’ she whispered. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘Don’t you remember?’ Vanessa replied, horrified at the thought of having to explain the cave and the grave. Lee must be the girl who had buried the bones.
‘No. At least I don’t think I do.’ Lee hesitated. ‘I lost it when I was about twelve, a year after my mother died.’
‘But where did you lose it?’ Vanessa demanded.
Lee eyed Vanessa warily.
‘In the loch.’
‘Good, ’cause that’s where I found it.’ Vanessa pulled it up over her head carefully and put it into Lee’s palm. Her hand looked tiny, as frail as a child’s, Vanessa thought. She watched as Lee opened the oval locket. The most beautiful smile transformed her face through her tears. Pity rose in Vanessa’s throat and she threw her arms around Lee’s slight frame and held her as tightly as her childish arms could manage. Eventually, Lee pulled back.
‘Where were you? Where did you go?’ she asked eventually.
‘You don’t know?’ Vanessa said.
Lee didn’t bother to answer she just stared at the faded picture of her mother.
Vanessa stood up, walked across the room and opened the cupboard with the paints and canvases. Picking up one of the paintings she turned it around to Lee. It was a picture of Nessie swimming, exactly as Vanessa remembered her. ‘You painted these?’ Vanessa asked.
‘Yes. They were dreams I had.’
Vanessa pulled out another where Nessie was glowing and in the background were outlines of some caves. Light green patches glowed on the walls.
‘Some were weirder than others,’ Lee made a half attempt at smiling.
‘They weren’t dreams,’ Vanessa said hotly, annoyed at Lee. ‘You went missing didn’t you? For days, just like me.’
‘Days? Vanessa, you were only missing for hours. As far as we know, you went out in the boat in the afternoon and we found you at about eleven o’clock.’
Now it was Vanessa’s turn to look puzzled.
‘Not even a full
day? she said faintly ‘Are you sure?’
Lee nodded.
‘Well, what happened to you then? The paper said you were missing for days. You are Lena Cook, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I was. McDonald now. I prefer that.’
‘I can’t remember what happened that day. It’s too long ago. I was concussed. I can’t remember what happened.’ She said it slower this time. ‘Except that I fell into Loch Ness.’
‘Yes, douked, just like me, and we both survived!’ Vanessa smiled triumphantly. Her voice rose with excitement. ‘We’re both witches! Do you remember what Pat Mackay said about douking? Remember, those who survive are witches and are burned at the stake? She went on, tripping over her words. ‘Think about it. You met Nessie and you swam with her and you buried her mother’s bones in a pile of stones in a cave. You must remember.’ She was sounding hysterical now she knew, but she had to make Lee remember. Vanessa grabbed Lee’s hands roughly and squeezed them tight. ‘Where did you put your mother’s locket?’
Lee gasped and jerked her hands away from Vanessa’s hold.
‘How could you know that? That was my dream.’ She sounded hurt.
‘It wasn’t a dream. That’s what I’m telling you.’
Lee’s tears had stopped with the turn in the conversation. Now she put her head between her hands to keep out Vanessa’s words.
‘Who found me? It was you, wasn’t it?’ Vanessa demanded. ‘How?’
‘They found me on the bank, at Bell’s Point, just like you,’ Lee said faintly. ‘I put Mom’s locket in the grave with the bones. I was angry with her for dying. And then when I came home, I felt so guilty for leaving it. It became easier as the memories faded, I suppose, to believe that it was all a dream. Well, who would believe it anyway? I don’t believe it myself, even now.’
‘I do,’ Vanessa said quietly.
Lee took her hand and held it.
‘Thanks for bringing it back to me.’
They sat without talking, each lost in their own thoughts.
‘You did all those things too? The green moss stuff and swimming without breathing?’
Vanessa smiled. ‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’
‘All these years, I’ve convinced myself that it was a dream but if you did it all too … ’
‘And it changed your life,’ Vanessa said.
‘Yes, meeting Nessie changed everything.’
‘Me too.’ Vanessa smiled at the woman she once hated.
She suddenly remembered drawing the map for Nessie. Had she found it? Had she understood it? Had she got home too?
She started to say something about it all to Lee, but Lee had stood up. There was a determined look on her face as she made a beeline for the cupboard. After much rummaging, she produced a battered looking copybook. She put it on the table between them. There was spindly writing in blue pen on the front, ‘Lena Cook’s Diary 1986’.
Vanessa opened the first page while Lee stared out of the window:
I don’t want to forget a second of it. Maggie told me that I was gone for forty-eight hours, but it felt like weeks to me. She didn’t let the policeman ask me questions, thank goodness. She says tomorrow will do, when I’ve slept, but it will be a different story by tomorrow. The true story will be locked away for good when I finish writing this.
I’m sitting by my window which looks over the loch. After every sentence, I stop and look for her. A ripple on the water makes my heart jump, but I haven’t seen her. I can hardly breathe for missing her.
I must write it down even if no one believes me. I can see it all if I close my eyes: the colours, her smooth skin, her face. I can see the moss under my nails as I scrape it off the cave walls. I feel it soft and wet as it balls in my mouth and coats my tongue. It tingles. My skin begins to change. It turns a weird green at first and the more I eat, the more it glows. The water is different too. It should be cold and muddy, but it’s not. It’s so soft on my skin. I feel safe and happy. I know I should have drowned, but she saved me.
She let me talk about my parents, she knew exactly how it felt. People often say that ‘life goes on’, but it didn’t for me. For me, it stopped in its tracks. It didn’t teeter and fall, or wobble and slow, it just stopped dead. The days went on, sure, but not my life. How did I get from California to Inverness? I must have come by plane, Maggie must have met me, but I don’t remember. I don’t know what happened in the months after Mom and Dad died, but I can remember the phone call when I heard the news. Even now, I remember picking up the phone in the hall. It was like a dead weight in my hand and I felt the hard plastic jammed into my ear.
‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’
The echo on the line didn’t help. Perhaps the echo was in my head.
‘Accident ... Both missing ... Rescue teams ... Not looking good ...’
He tried to say it kindly. I hate telephones.
I’ve never written about that day before. What was there to write about? Nothingness? Nobody could explain what happened to them. Now I can’t explain what has happened to me. Perhaps I am mad. Perhaps I am a witch and I make these things happen. I don’t know. But what I do know is that she saved my life. She gave it back to me and now I’ve got a second chance.
Vanessa closed the copybook.
‘Wow, you could really write when you were young. Maybe you should write our story some day.’
‘You missed a bit,’ Lee said. ‘Look at the last page.’
Vanessa opened it to the last page.
Perhaps monsters like Nessie are too strange to be true or maybe people can only describe what they know and what they’ve seen before.
I read a story once about explorers in Australia hundreds of years ago who wrote about creatures that had heads like deer, stood upright like men and leapt like frogs. Sometimes, they even had two heads, one on top and another on the stomach. Monsters to them, but we know now that these monsters are just kangaroos. Maybe in the future, we’ll be talking about Nessie in the same way.
CHAPTER 30
The idea of a Loch Ness monster may indeed sound strange. But is it any stranger than other animals we have only recently discovered? The colossal squid is even larger than the giant squid. It was first identified from remnants in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1925 and the first mature specimen was only found in 2007. Or the coelacanth, a living fossil thought to be extinct for 65 million years, which was rediscovered by scientists in 1938.
The next two hours were something that Lee could never have imagined happening. They both took turns to tell each other their stories. Lee had heard a little of Marie’s illness and death from Alan, but told with the honesty of a child, she felt the raw pain of the whole family. Then Lee told Vanessa all about her childhood and her parents’ death, or at least what little she knew. Poor Lee. Her parents’ bodies had never been recovered, and she still didn’t know the details of their accident thirty-four years later.
In the months after their disappearance, she had been sent away from everything she knew in America to a strange country. Alone. An only child. Worst of all, she had no irritating brothers to help her forget. No one to share her unhappiness or to share new happiness when it eventually came.
‘Of course, I had Maggie,’ Lee said lovingly. ‘And it was her strength that got me through.’
‘With a bit of help from Nessie of course,’ Vanessa said with a grin.
When they had exhausted themselves talking and Vanessa felt she could face the family, the two of them went downstairs side by side. Alan looked up from the table as they came in. They stood close to each other, their arms touching. He had been thinking through all the questions he would ask Vanessa, but now the relief at seeing them both look so happy made him stop and think again. Maggie had suggested leaving them to ‘work things out’, but he hadn’t imagined that they would talk for hours, or that they would actually end up friends. At least that was the way it looked from where he was sitting. What exactly were they working out anyway? Would he ever get
an explanation for yesterday? He was beginning to doubt it.
‘You want an omelette, Vanessa? Maggie has just taught me how to cook one.’
Alan wondered if Ronan would even mention her near drowning or would he just take up from where they had left off.
‘Thanks, Ronan. I’m starving. I could eat a horse, but an omelette will have to do.’ Vanessa went over to look at the pan.
‘That’s it?’ she said in a disgusted voice.
God, things were certainly back to normal. Alan sighed.
Lee sat down at the table beside him and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
‘She’s fine,’ she murmured in his ear.
‘Only joking, Ronan. It looks great, really. I love lots of cheese.’ Vanessa made a semi-gracious effort to backtrack.
‘Perhaps.’ Alan smiled back at Lee.
It was Luke who brought it up.
‘So what happened, Vanessa?’ Luke asked abruptly. All eyes turned on Vanessa, including Lee’s, and they waited.
‘Well,’ she paused. She had rehearsed this part. ‘I decided to take the boat out just a tiny distance from the bank. I’m really not the appalling rower that you think I am, Luke.’ She stopped, her flow halted by his scathing look.
‘I’m not sure you can say that after nearly drowning, Vanessa.’ Luke was not letting her off that easily. She had given them all a serious scare.
‘OK, I know I shouldn’t have, sorry.’ She sounded apologetic this time. ‘Then the wind blew up and my oar slipped out of the oarlock. When I tried to get it back I fell over the edge and I must have hit my head.’
‘But how did you get to the bank?’ Luke persisted.
‘I don’t know, really. I suppose that before I blacked out, I must have swum back to the bank. I don’t remember, though. I suppose I was concussed.’
Alan kept his mouth firmly shut.
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