I think it’s got to do with the soot marks—they’re driving Mum mad. I’m sure old man Thomas is doing it, so I’m going to sit up tonight and watch at the window. I’ll catch him, and Mum and Dad will stop shouting at each other, and everything will go back to normal.
Saturday 8th — I fell asleep. I tried to stay up, but I just got too tired. More soot marks this morning. Mum and Dad aren’t talking, and old man Thomas just laughs. I went out to the cows to get away for a bit, but the milk is spoiled again and when I told Dad he had a face like thunder. He went down to Mr. Thomas’ cottage and I heard him shouting and cursing at the old man to stop playing silly beggars. I hope that’s the end of it.
Sunday 9th — Disaster. We all went to church this morning—old man Thomas stayed behind as usual. We saw the smoke from all the way down in Dunvegan, and although Dad got the Post Office man to get the van out and get us back here right quick, we were too late to save the barn. The poor cows—all burned away.
Monday 10th — Dad called the bobbies to talk to the old man—he’s sure it was him that lit the fire in the barn—but they went away again and Mr. Thomas is still out there laughing and cackling. I walked down to the shore earlier and looked in his door—he’s got the wall covered now with his wee stick men, all black and thin and nasty looking. I don’t like them. I don’t like them one bit.
Tuesday 11th — We’re going home! Well, to Gran’s anyway. I’ll leave this diary here in case we come back, but with the old man killing himself like that just next door, I can’t see Mum wanting to have anything to do with the place ever again. Hurrah!
8
That was it—the rest of the notebook was just slightly damp, empty pages. There was no clue as to what had finally driven them away—but I guessed it was the old man dying in the cottage on the shore. And I had a pretty good idea of how he’d gone—I could almost see the flames in my mind. My decision to raze the old ruin to the ground was feeling more right by the minute.
The girl’s diary left more questions than answers—of course it did—but in my mind it was all tied to the old cottage, and I’d already got rid of that. So what if I kept getting soot marks? That’s all they were—marks, and they weren’t doing me any harm.
I had a sentimental moment while cleaning up the mess in my room, and put the notebook back where I had found it—it was obvious the girl wasn’t going to come back for it, but somehow it just felt right.
It took most of the morning to clear up the flaked paint, tattered paper and dust I’d dislodged in my attempt to get to the attic. There was a bare patch on the ceiling now that I was going to have to look at until I got into Portree to buy some paint and brushes, but that couldn’t be helped.
I went through and opened the patio doors wide despite the chill outside, and stood there for a while, letting my mind drift, letting the quiet fill me up and drive out any thoughts of burning barns and matchstick men.
That afternoon I put my landscape painting away—the light wasn’t going to be right again for it until next summer anyway. I started on something new, an abstract that was a style completely new for me but one I could see clear as day in my mind’s eye. It was going to work well—if I could only transfer it onto paper. I was so lost in it I jumped several inches when my phone rang. As it happens, I was working on a dark area, and I left a thin black streak, six inches long, on the canvas.
The call was a wrong number, but when I went back to the painting, my enthusiasm for the task had drained away so I left it where I’d stopped, black streak and all.
I looked out the window to see clear blue sky. It being Saturday, I decided it was well past time I had a few beers down in Dunvegan. I put on a heavy jacket and my walking boots, put the flashlight in the deep inside pocket, and headed down the shore.
* * *
Tourist season was long finished. Dunvegan Castle sat, squat, solid and quiet on its rocky promontory with only the mildest of lapping waves and the squawk of gulls high above to disturb it. The girl’s diary and its talk of the fey folk reminded me of the castle’s most famous exhibit—the Am Bratach Sìth, the fairy flag of the MacLeods. I knew there were many legends associated with the ancestral heirloom, and wondered if any of them were linked to my house. After all, it was the nearest dwelling to the northeast of the old castle.
As I got settled in the Dunvegan Arms twenty minutes later, I started my attempt to steer the conversation towards the subject, knowing it might take all night—indeed we might never get round to it.
The locals were in talkative moods—old George in particular. George was probably the oldest man in town—certainly the oldest still active enough to get out to the bar for an evening.
“I was glad to see you got rid of the cottage,” were his opening words to me as I joined him and his cronies at their corner table.
“At least I’ve improved the view,” I replied, a noncommittal gambit to start with.
“Improved more than that, I’d bet,” Sandy Johnston added. Sandy was George’s straight man, and together they made a double act that kept the bar entertained for hours at a time.
Over the evening I learned many things. Farmer Donnie Fraser lost his whole potato crop that year to a blight; the back road was shut again due to “bloody council incompetence,” it had been a good year for tourism in the town—and still nobody was going to tell me anything about my house or its history. It seems my inclusion into their ranks only went so far. The company was good though, and I thoroughly enjoyed all their stories and banter. I had a most pleasant evening, and even considered staying past my normal leaving time, but as soon as the band started up at nine—a sixties tribute band, badly out of tune and with voices like strangled cats—I made my excuses and went out into the night.
Fog had rolled in—candy floss thick and wet against my cheeks, with visibility ten yards and less. I wasn’t too worried—I knew the track well, and I had my flashlight.
The early part of my walk home went smoothly enough as I climbed the small hill out of town and up the avenue past the castle car park. I almost shit myself when a large owl swooped down from the trees and passed over my head while checking out this interloper in its territory but that was the only movement I saw for the next half hour, lost in a moving wall of gray dampness.
Things got worse when I strayed off the path—I know, I know—I’ve seen all those movies too. Keep to the path, beware of the moors. Luckily on this particular track it wasn’t possible to stray far without meeting the sea on one side and gorse or bog too impenetrable to pass on the other. I was able to find the track again after a diversion in a particularly soggy patch, but not before getting soaked up to the knees and tearing several long rips in my favorite trousers.
I was uncomfortably damp and thoroughly fed up as I approached where I knew the house to be—the trouble was the fog was even thicker now and although I must have been within ten yards of my own home, I couldn’t find the bloody thing at first. I stood still, pointed the flashlight at the ground, and turned full circle. Something caught my eye—a darker patch.
The woodpile?
I walked over and shone the light in that direction. I stood over the space where the old crofter’s cottage had been. As the contractor said, there was indeed a hole belowground. The flashlight showed a six-foot or so cube, mostly lying in deep shadow. The floor looked like packed earth, and there was no sign that anything had been stored there for a very long time. I crouched on my haunches and shone the light on the walls.
Two minutes later I was standing with my back to the French windows of my house with no memory of how I’d got there. My mind was full of what I revealed on the walls of the cellar— black lines, matchstick figures, hundreds of them, dancing and cavorting in the unsteady beam of my flashlight.
* * *
The next morning I found a sooty streak down my bathroom mirror, and that was it—my rationality only stretched so far, I’d had enough. As I’ve said before, my natural tendency is to run. I decided i
t had better be sooner rather than later.
I didn’t even bother to clean off the streak. I went straight to the phone, intending to call Alan and tell him to get selling, never mind it was early Sunday morning and he’d more than likely be nursing a hangover. The laptop pinged at me as I picked up the phone. I had three e-mails, garbled English again, and with only several words clearly standing out.
They were different words this time.
Stay. Beth needs you.
9
Now I wanted to run even farther, but as I stood and turned away from the laptop, I looked straight at the urn on the mantel.
What if?
So I stayed. I wiped clean the bathroom mirror and stuck to my routine. I took my morning coffee out onto the patio. The fog had lifted, leaving a crisp clear morning with more than a hint of the winter chills to come. The stoat seemed bemused to see me again, and sat on top of the woodpile, head tilted to one side, staring at me as if I could be hypnotized like a frightened rabbit. Three sparrows trotted around near my feet, but I had no crumbs of comfort for them that morning.
My gaze kept being drawn to the hole I’d looked down into the night before. I’d backed away from it so quickly I only had the vaguest of memories of what I had seen beyond the stick figures. I’d let the dancing beam of light from my flashlight spook me in the fog and the dark. But now it was the cold light of day. I decided to take another look.
I fetched my phone from the desk and went back outside.
Part of me—a larger part than I was willing to admit—believed that I’d find only blank walls, that I’d had a mental fog as thick as the real one I’d been lost in, and imagined the whole thing. I was almost surprised when I crouched down and saw the black lines scrawled on every available surface. I used the camera in the phone to take as many pictures as I could. To do the job properly would have involved dropping down into the cellar and taking a series of photographs that could be spliced into a panorama, but I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to pull myself back out, so did what I was able to do from above.
* * *
I took the phone inside, downloaded the pictures onto the laptop, and tried to make sense of what I was looking at. Whoever had drawn the figures had packed them tightly, a miniature army ranked side by side in tightly regimented formation. Some had all four limbs, some were missing an arm or a leg, and some were just a single streak with a dot for the head, like an upside-down exclamation mark. It did not take long to realize that I was not actually looking at matchstick men at all—it was a code—maybe even a language, just one with which I was completely unfamiliar.
I spent the rest of the day online—it proved to be both expensive and fruitless. I couldn’t find any analogous scripts anywhere. I posted my pictures in several linguistics forums, hoping that someone might have an idea what I’d stumbled upon, but by the time I logged off in late afternoon, I’d not had any replies.
There were no further e-mails either.
I had my afternoon snack sitting in the dining room, facing, not out to the view, but up at the mantel, to Beth’s urn. I’d always believed that the contents were all that was left of her. Most of her had been scattered to the winds that day in the crematorium and the urn itself was my link to better days in the past, not the future.
Beth hadn’t been a believer either. She wanted to dance in the cosmos, to be scattered far and wide, ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust. I’d complied with those wishes. I had no expectation of ever being with her again in some mythical better place—my consolation was in the thought that bits of me, and bits of her, however small, would mingle and coexist throughout eternity—maybe not conscious, but existing nonetheless.
Now I found I needed to adjust my reality paradigm—and my mind had trouble with it. I could no longer explain away the soot marks as a quirk of the house—something was at work here. It might be some way outside my view of how things were supposed to work, but just as I’d been reminded the night before, people in the movies spend too much time questioning what is immediately obvious to anybody who has seen a few films. I resolved not to go down that route. Something was trying to communicate with me. I had a duty—to both myself, and to Beth, to try to talk back.
* * *
I started with my pictures of the stick figures. I wasn’t particularly keen on puzzles—but I’d spent plenty of time as a computer programmer and knew how to both build things up, and break them down into simple principal components. I approached the pictographs as I would approach a piece of code that needed to be analyzed.
It became obvious that the figures were arranged in clusters—groups of eight that immediately had me thinking of bits and bytes and wondering if it was indeed a representation of a computer program. But no matter which way I tried to splice my pictures together, I could not find a starting, or indeed an ending, point, and could not make sense of what had been represented. My notes looked like something from a war-zone surgery.
Left arm gone, right leg gone, all limbs intact, no head, legs gone, no arms, limbs intact, left leg and left arm gone.
Right arm gone, no head, no legs, no arms, no limbs, right leg gone, all limbs intact, left leg gone.
I drew out grids of eight, over and over again, looking for a pattern. I found one repeater, a group that came up at regular intervals across all my pictures.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
For a time—a short time—I thought I might be getting somewhere, but that was the extent of my discovery. I was surprised to look up and see it was near midnight—but not at all surprised to be almost immediately hit with a pounding headache bought on by peering at the stick figures all evening.
I lay in bed for hours, staring at the hatchway in the ceiling, watching the play of shadow through the room, and wondering whether I had joined the previous inhabitants of the house in going ever so slightly insane.
* * *
The next morning I found the expected soot smudge on my laptop screen, but this time it was more than a single stroke; there was a dot above it—a head. I had an epiphany, and drew up a grid, eight by eight. In the first box, top left, I drew in a stick figure, just a body and head.
My morning routine from then on included drawing the day’s smudge in its place on the grid. After eight days I had my first group—the repeater.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
I was definitely getting somewhere.
10
Alan arrived on the middle Saturday in October to get the dinghy out of the water before the weather got too bad. It happened to be a clear, calm day with barely a ripple on the surface of the loch.
“What do you say?” he said. “A wee trip down the loch, then a few beers in the Dunvegan later? That is if you don’t mind me kipping on your couch again?”
“Just as long as you still respect me in the morning,” I said.
Truthfully, I was happy for the company. I’d spent most of the week trying to solve the riddle of the pictograms until it felt like I was bashing my head against a brick wall. A trip on the water and a few—maybe more than a few—beers sounded like perfect medicine to me.
Alan was also more voluble than the regulars in the Dunvegan Arms. On our trip down the loch he kept me entertained with a potted history of the MacLeod clan and the old castle. I didn’t even have to mention the famous fairy flag—he gave me chapter and verse on all the various myths and legends—of which there are many. I couldn’t see any correlation with my own circumstances, until a single sentence knocked me for a loop.
“The flag used to be covered in writing, or so they say,” Alan said. “Or rather drawings—little black lines and crosses. They’re all faded now, but nobody could ever figure out what they were anyway and…”
I’d tuned him out. Little black lines and crosses. I was afraid I knew exactly what those might have been.
We were in the bay to the imm
ediate north of the castle.
“Is it open?” I asked, interrupting him.
“The castle? No. They bugger off to warmer climes after the end of September. Can’t say as I blame them. They open up again around Easter.”
It looked like I wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter. But now that I knew, I would be able to do some digging online—there might be some old photographs of the flag, something that might even help me with the pictographs.
“Are you okay?” Alan asked. “You’ve gone awful quiet.”
I almost told him, but bit my tongue—I’d have to tell him it all if I started; about the soot smudges and the crofter’s cottage, and if I did, I feared he’d think I was suffering from similar delusions to the previous occupant. So I held my peace.
“Just a bit of a headache. Nothing a few beers won’t cure,” I replied.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said.
We went back up the loch at speed—quite exhilarating in the small dinghy. It took us ten minutes to get it out of the water and up onto the trailer. I went to fetch the flashlight.
“What do you need that for?” Alan asked.
“The walk back,” I replied.
“Walk? Me? I think not. We’ll get a taxi.”
While he was on his phone I sneaked in a quick image search for the old flag. I found what I was looking for almost immediately. The photograph was dated 1912, and there they were, painted onto the thin silk—matchstick figures, eight of them. I recognized the pattern straightaway. It was the repeater.
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