Beth’s urn danced and rattled on the mantel as the beat got stronger, inching perilously close to the edge. I wasn’t going to be able to reach it in time to stop it falling onto the hard stone of the hearth.
“Enough. I get the message,” I shouted. “I’m going.”
I dragged my weary limbs back outside.
* * *
Afterwards I had little recollection of it. I dug. The hole got bigger; I got more tired. At some point the car headlights dimmed and died. I fetched the flashlight and kept digging. When the battery went, I dug in what little light there was coming through the French windows from the dining room.
I dug, until there was no more left to dig. My eyes had adjusted enough that I could see the black markings on the walls of the cellar, but in the darkness I could not make out any detail, and I was too tired to think, almost too tired to stand. If my legs had given way at that point, I might have been found, days later, frozen in the cellar, as stiff and cold and accusing as the stoat on the woodpile.
It took me three attempts to pull myself up out of the hole, using up the very last vestiges of my endurance. I crawled in the snow to the patio doors, rolled inside, dragged my body over onto the sofa and was asleep, dead to the world, seconds later.
7
I woke to pounding—a heavy thumping that in my confused state sounded like another summons to the digging.
“Fuck off—I’m done,” I shouted.
“Jim? Are you okay?”
It was Alan. He sounded far away. The pounding started again.
“Come on, Jim. Let me in. It’s bloody freezing out here.”
I finally came fully awake. He was at the front door.
“Hold on—I’m coming.”
I got up off the sofa too fast and had to hold on to the mantel to avoid falling to the floor. Using the wall and furniture I was able to stay upright until I got to the door and opened it wide, just in time to see a taxi depart back down the track.
“Happy New Year,” Alan said, and thrust a bottle of whisky at me. His smile turned to shock as he looked me up and down.
“For God’s sake, Jim. What’s happened here?”
I tried to smile and nearly managed it.
“I had a wee bit of car trouble,” I said.
“What did it do, try to eat you?”
I looked down at my clothes—I was caked in dirt from neck to toe, my trousers torn, shirt frayed. My hands were gray with clotted gravel, looking like a bad effect from a cheap horror movie, and I guessed my face must look the same.
I laughed, and Alan smiled back, but I could see he was concerned.
“I lost the place a bit,” I said. “Bloody thing refused to start so I decided to see if a good kicking would sort it out.”
“And did it work?”
“No. But I felt a damned sight better afterwards. Come on in—I’ll be with you in a minute.”
I left him in the kitchen while I went for a shower. On my return I found him heating a takeaway in the microwave.
“Curry and Talisker,” he said as I joined him. “It’ll cure most anything except for a moody car.” He passed me a large glass of whisky. “And in case you missed it the first time—Happy New Year.”
I looked at the clock—it was two in the morning.
“I’m not dark, not handsome, but I’m tall—and I have more booze in the bag, so I’m the perfect first foot.”
“I must have fallen asleep,” I said.
I saw him look at the sofa, and the trail of dirt that led from there across to the patio doors.
“Cleaner’s day off?” he said, and raised an eyebrow.
I knocked back the whisky in one gulp, feeling the heat warm me from the inside.
“Get me pissed enough and you might get a story before I fall asleep again,” I replied.
“Best offer I’ve had all year,” Alan said, and poured another.
* * *
On that first morning of the year, the whisky kept me fueled and I did indeed tell Alan a story—some of it was even true. I talked about Beth, how we met, how we lived and how she passed. I talked about grief, and why I kept her ashes in the urn on the mantel. I talked about why the painting I’d given his parents for Christmas was so bloody bleak and empty, and I talked about loneliness, and closure.
What I didn’t talk about was the house. If Alan noticed, he didn’t say, and after a while we’d both had too much whisky to be attempting any rational thinking. With my confessional done, Alan took over the talking duties, keeping me amused with more tales from Portree and the lives of both the locals and the tourists who descended on the place in the summer.
At some point around sunrise everything caught up with me and I drifted off to sleep in the middle of a tale about a policeman, a nude sunbather and a Great Dane that would have been uproariously funny if I’d been sober enough to appreciate it.
When I woke, it was dark again, and Alan was gone.
He’d left a note on the table.
Family duties call. See you next Saturday in Dunvegan?
The way I felt right then, booze was the last thing on my mind. I spent ten minutes clearing up the worst of the dirt between the sofa and the patio, put on a load of washing, and loaded up an old movie on the laptop. All the time I was aware of the reopened hole out on the shore, worrying at it like a tongue at a fresh cavity. I’d opened a door. I didn’t need to have my thumbs pricked to know that something was coming through.
It was just a matter of when—and what.
PART 3: CLOSURE
1
I didn’t sleep well that first night. I lay awake watching shadows crawl, alternately eyeing the ceiling and the doorway, wondering if she would be back, part of me hoping. I dozed fitfully, seeing the time on the alarm clock tick over the hours as the night drew on. I got up at four and did a circuit of the house, checking for fresh soot marks—there were none. At some point around five I managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep, but I did not feel at all rested when daylight drove the shadows away.
After a shower I took a mug of coffee out onto the patio. The snow had melted, leaving damp grass with slushy puddles in places, mostly where I’d walked to and from the root cellar during my digging. At some point the stoat’s body had gone from the woodpile but I had no urge to walk over to check, nor to check on the fruits of my labors in the root cellar. Just then I was content to sit on the patio and watch the play of clouds in the sky and light on the water, trying to regain some calm and stability.
It had taken me long enough, but I was coming to understand the moods of the place, get the feel of the rhythm of the house. I was also coming to think that my analogy of peeling away layers of an onion was closer to the truth than I had guessed. Every new manifestation seemed to take me deeper into the place’s history. I have no idea where they came from, or even what they were, but somehow the house’s story was being revealed, and by digging out the root cellar, I had, in effect, issued an open invitation for the story to continue. I couldn’t go on considering everything to be merely booze-fed imagination. That was just too many coincidences to have to pile up in any one place. I had to accept, and be open to whatever it was that was trying to communicate.
At least that’s what I told myself. Another part of me saw it in a different light—memory and need and grief fused in a fantasy that Beth was just on the other side of a veil that I could part anytime I wanted to. I pushed that away—it felt like an even faster road to madness than the one I was on.
The only things that tried to communicate with me that morning were the sparrows. I fed them; they chirruped happily, and for a time I achieved the calm I had been searching for. I was feeling good, and the day, if a tad chilly, was a dry one. I decided to take a walk down into Dunvegan to stretch my legs and clear my head.
* * *
The walk took longer than usual, mostly due to having to dodge the deep, slush-filled puddles that were dotted at irregular intervals along the rutted track. A flag flu
ttered on the high pole above the old castle, but there was no sign of life and I didn’t see any people until I was all the way down at the main crossroads in town. I bought some groceries—no more booze though—and was about to head back home when I heard a knock on glass to my right. I turned to see Alex Wark sitting in the bay window at the front of the Dunvegan. He pointed at the table in front of him—a Bible and a cup of coffee sat there. I was hoping he meant the coffee as I went in to join him.
He closed the Bible as I sat down, and ordered two more coffees.
I pointed at the book.
“How you can still believe in God when there are so many things going wrong in the world and it is obvious that he doesn’t care?”
He looked up and smiled.
“The Bible says that God is love. And part of his loving nature is that he allows people to have free will. As a result, we have evil, pain and suffering, due to the choices we and others make.”
“We’re defined by what we do, not what he does? So I was right. He doesn’t care?”
“Of course he cares. He sent his only son to die for us. That’s how much he cares. He could intervene and control everything about our lives but then we would be just robots and not truly free.”
“That’s the bit I never got. He gives us free will. Then, when we use it, he punishes us for not doing what he wanted in the first place. That’s not free will. That’s tyranny.”
Alex seemed to warm to the task. He smiled again as the coffees arrived, and took a long sip before continuing.
“God doesn’t violate our wills by choosing us and redeeming us. Rather, he changes our hearts so that our wills choose him.”
“So, if, to be saved, I have to give up my free will, then am I even free at all? Is it really our choice to be saved if in the end we do not have the ability to choose salvation for ourselves?”
“When you accept Christ as offered in the Gospel, you receive salvation by your own decision. As such, salvation is your work. You must initiate the act. But it is also God’s work, for it is God who offers salvation to you. Without Christ, there is no salvation.”
“So all I have to do is ask, and it shall be given?”
“If your heart is pure. Yes.”
“And there’s the rub, Alex. I’ve got my fair share of impure thoughts, like any man. And that’s something else I never understood. Why give us sensual bodies, and a full range of pleasurable activities, then tell us not to enjoy ourselves?”
“He never says not to enjoy yourself. In fact, God loves joy…when it is done with no thought of self-gratification.”
“But why? Why shouldn’t we gratify ourselves? Aren’t we made in his image? Aren’t we in fact honoring him when we do something for ourselves?”
Alex laughed.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you? You remind me of a Jesuit friend at the university. But if you want to joust…I think Romans says it best.”
He flicked through the Bible, found the right place, and read.
“For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the spirit do mind the things of the spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”
“Very nice. But it’s just more directives from on high. It still doesn’t answer why.”
“There are some things you have to take on faith. I’m heading for a prayer meeting this afternoon. Perhaps you would like to join me?”
I drained my coffee.
“Thanks, but no thanks, Alex. What was it you said? ‘They that are in the flesh cannot please God.’ There’s the thing—I’m not even interested in trying to please him—he lost that right back in a hospital room in London. I believe I’ll stay on the side of the flesh for a while longer. You know where you are with that.”
Alex had lost his smile now.
“You be careful, lad,” he said. “You’ve got a quick mind, and you’re imaginative. That’s not always a good combination around here.”
* * *
I was still mulling over the conversation as I walked along the shore. I wasn’t a believer in either a God or a benign universe. I grew up Church of England and went to Sunday school. None of it took.
I’ve prayed once in my adult life—at Beth’s bedside. I prayed, not for me, but for her. She was in the final stages of dying, would be gone by morning.
I was on my knees for two hours. I prayed and I cried in equal measure. There was no catharsis. When she finally passed, I felt just as shitty as before and more than slightly disgusted with myself. Alex was the first man of God I’d talked to since a perfunctory handshake with the vicar at Beth’s funeral. He hadn’t convinced me to change my mind any, but I spent a while mulling over one sentence in particular.
“For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the spirit the things of the spirit.”
A thing of the Spirit was waiting for me when I got home. I don’t think it was thinking much about God either.
2
A fog rolled in as I got close to the house, ice-cold against my face, driven in waves by a breeze off the loch. I was more than happy to get inside and shut it out.
My laptop sat on the desk, open and switched on. I had an anonymous e-mail—not garbled English this time, nor a grid of drumbeats, but a verse, in Gaelic.
Dheannain sùgradh ris a nighean duibh
N’ deidh dhomh eirigh as a ‘mhadainn
Dheannain sùgradh ris a nighean duibh
Dheannain sùgradh ris a’ghruagaich
‘Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal
It didn’t take me long to find where it came from. It was a chorus from a folk song, its origins lost in time.
I played with the young dark-haired girl
When I woke in the morning
I played with the young dark-haired girl
I played with the long-haired girl
When everyone was asleep
As I read, the verse’s rhythms synchronized in my head with the drumming of my fingers on the desk.
I found myself chanting, almost singing the short verse throughout the day as I wandered around the house. I had one of my intermittent bouts of cleaning; I vacuumed and dusted, did all the laundry, and cleared the sink of dishes and cutlery. And all the time the verse, melded now in my mind with the repeater rhythm, went round and round in my head.
In late afternoon I rewarded myself with a microwave pizza and a beer. I sat at the dining table, looking out the closed windows at the foggy scene beyond. I’d changed the view again with my placement of the cairn of rubble I excavated from the root cellar. It sat on the edge of the shore, a squat pyramid, dark against the fog behind it. It drew my gaze so often while I was finishing the pizza that in the end I rose and closed the view off by drawing the curtains. What I couldn’t close off was the Gaelic verse, a new earworm going round and round in my head, worse than any pop song or advertising ditty, a constant whisper that seemed to be a warning of the night still to come.
Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal; when everyone was asleep.
* * *
I put off going to bed for as long as I could—I watched two more movies and drank—coffee rather than beer or Scotch. All that meant was that I knew there would be a wakeup call from my bladder in the early hours of the morning, which only added to my trepidation.
I opened the patio doors and looked outside around midnight. There was nothing to see but fog—even the new cairn was lost in the soft gray darkness. I wasn’t in the least tempted to venture outside. I closed the windows and the curtains, had a shower and went to bed.
Sleep was the last thing on my mind, but I was physically exhausted after my trials on Hogmanay, then the subsequent drinking, walking and cleaning. I had hoped that would be enough to send me to the
land of Nod, but it wasn’t to be.
The shadows danced and swayed on the ceiling, keeping time to the chant that continued to echo in the void in my brain. It was all I could think about.
Dheannain sùgradh ris a’ghruagaich
‘Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal
I waited for my dark-haired girl to come.
My fingers drummed the rhythm on the sheets. My legs twitched in time. I danced, lying there on the bed, keeping the beat with my partner in the shadows. Shimmering luminescence flitted across the window, as if something moved just out of sight on the shore. I couldn’t get out of bed to look—the chant had me struck immobile.
The shimmering poured into the room like an incoming tide, blue and gray and silver, all dancing. The stereo started up in the main room.
No limbs, no limbs, no head, no head, left arm gone, left leg gone, no legs, no head.
The Gaelic chant swelled, roaring in my ears in accompaniment. A deeper shadow moved in the doorway; she stood there, the lady in the cloak, her hair no longer pinned up but streaming in a swathe across her shoulders, black as pitch.
I opened my arms. She came to me.
Dheannain sùgradh ris a’ghruagaich
‘Nuair a bhiodh a’ sluagh nan codal.
I played with my long-haired girl when everyone was asleep.
Again I felt her body against mine, cold as the fog yet heavy, most definitely alive. She lifted her head up to look at me, her hair falling away from her face—green eyes, deep as rock pools, lips the palest of pale, almost blue.
We kissed. As our lips met she fell into me, cold and mist and blue mixing like oil paints on a board, ice in my veins.
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