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White Pines

Page 13

by Gemma Amor


  Then I remembered what Luke had said. This community had only been here since 1990. Which meant the Island was uninhabited when I was a child, and probably still contaminated with anthrax. Obviously, Granny would not have brought me here if that were the case.

  It also meant the trees would not have been planted, which was why I couldn’t remember them. I thought about that. Like everything else, it didn’t make sense. Those trees, if planted so recently, should still have been young, little more than saplings. The pines we had walked beneath were enormous, stretching high up ahead, and well-established. And there were so many of them, it was hard to believe they had all been planted by hand by a few people.

  So why was I so drawn to this place? What was it that had called to me, so desperately? If I hadn’t been here as a child, it couldn’t be nostalgia at play. It felt wrong to be leaving the Island without an answer to this question.

  We reached the base of the cairn, slightly out of breath. It was big, much bigger than I’d realised, and made of hundreds of stones, neatly stacked on top of each other into a conical shape. At the very top, someone had set a small lantern, and I was reminded of the everlasting candles that burned in churches. Matthew and I could see that the trail circled the mound of rock before heading down the other side of the slope behind it, back towards the pine trees. Once inside the tree line, it should be easy enough to find the path we had come in on, and trace our steps back to the spit, and the cave.

  Matthew looked up at the pile of carefully arranged stones, and sighed.

  ‘You know, in Mongolia, these things are called ovoos,’ he said, voice neutral. ‘You walk around them, like a ceremony. Make circles around the base, clockwise I think. Nice little ritual.’

  ‘I like that,’ I said. The tension between us had eased, and I was glad for it. Now that I had agreed to leave the Island, he was more relaxed, less frustrated. Or maybe it was the beer. Either way, it made life simpler.

  The pile of stones loomed above us, that single lantern flickering like a pilot light on top.

  ‘It’s massive,’ I said, only fully appreciating the size of the thing now that we were close to it. Like everything else here, scale and space were fluid concepts. Deceptive, tricky things. Maybe that accounted for the escalating queasiness in my belly. Or maybe it was seeing people flicker in and out of existence under my nose.

  Or maybe it was simply the beer. I bit back a slightly crazed giggle. It was strong beer, for sure.

  ‘Perhaps there’s an ancient Pictish lord or warrior lying in state beneath it,’ Matthew mused. ‘Wouldn’t that be something?’

  I had an intense flashback to my dream. To the stone god cradled by the roots of a cherry tree. A pocket of sour saliva filled up my cheeks. It stung, and I felt a cramp of discomfort in my stomach.

  I turned and looked back down the slope, back past the chapel, past the ranks of stone houses spread out across the Island rise, to the town square. The party. The people. From here they looked smaller, like ants. I could hear their merriment, rising up into the night. Everyone was so happy. Everyone belonged. I envied them. I wanted to belong too.

  ‘Can we go now?’ Matthew asked.

  I felt immensely weary, then, overcome by the Island, by circumstance, by confusion, by everything that had brought me here. My stomach roiled and cramped again, maybe reacting to the ale, and I sagged, then dropped down into a crouch, before finally sitting on a sprig of heather at the base of the cairn.

  ‘I’ll take that as a no,’ Matthew said, dryly.

  ‘I just want to sit here for a bit first,’ I said, feeling forlorn and exhausted. ‘Sit, and drink this incredibly strong, home-brewed beer, and maybe watch the stars for a moment or two, and the people down there having fun. And then we can go. Alright? It’s been...’ I tried to put everything I had seen and experienced that day into words, and failed. Instead, I summarised.

  ‘It’s been a long, and very strange day.’

  ‘It has that.’

  ‘And I don’t feel very well.’

  Concern clouded his eyes once more.

  ‘Like...anthrax unwell?’

  I shook my head vehemently. ‘For heaven’s sake Matthew, let it go. Look at everyone down there. Do they look sick to you? There is no anthrax left, you heard the boy. This is...this is something else.’

  Unconvinced, he dry-washed his hands together in that fastidious, anxious gesture he’d developed since he’d arrived here.

  ‘Sickness aside, you heard what the woman said, Megs. We should leave, before we get caught. That party can’t go on all night, and when it is over, the locals aren’t likely to be as tolerant as they’ve been so far.’

  I nodded. ‘I know. And we will. But can I just sit, just for a moment? Please?’

  Matthew gave up, and joined me in silence, positioning himself to my left, just close enough that our knees brushed together.

  We sat and watched the people down below. A formal dance had started in the square now, and the locals were going at it with gusto. The tune playing was ‘strip the willow’. I remembered it from a childhood dance I’d been to once. It was hundreds of years old, repetitive, and easy to learn. A fun dance. Couples stood opposite each other in long, straight columns, and held hands, swirling around in a figure of eight up and down between the rows of people, exchanging partners at each turn. I found myself leaning forward as I watched them move, mesmerised by the music and the shapes the people made with their bodies. I saw patterns everywhere, then, circles and triangles and squares and a unique, geometric symmetry to everything. People moved, and left glowing trails of colour in their wake, in the same way that a plane leaves a line of cloud behind it in the sky as it flies. I rubbed my eyes, and the trails were gone. I felt so strange, so disconnected. Like I had felt in the burial ground at Laide. Had that really been me? It had felt so long ago, now.

  Why was I here?

  ‘I think about that night so often,’ Matthew said suddenly.

  ‘What?’ I murmured. Shapes, lines, colours. Everyone connected, everyone tied by glowing threads.

  Sacred geometry, I thought. Everything has significance.

  We are all bound together.

  Apparently it was not just the people of the Highlands who spoke in riddles.

  Matthew carried on, undeterred.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. How you felt, how you tasted.’

  He was talking about the Christmas party.

  I drained the last dregs from my beaker. Another cramp hit me, hard, and I winced in pain. I reached out to place a steadying hand on Matthew’s shoulder, because I felt, even though I was sitting down, like I might fall over.

  He took my touch for affection, and watched the people dancing, looked at the patterns they made with their bodies. Did he see them too? Shapes in the night. Everything connected by that interlocking series of lines and configurations. If he did, he chose not to comment on it. Instead, he pointed to something else, something beyond the square.

  ‘What are those?’ He asked. I looked, and saw two smaller mounds that I’d not noticed until now, now that I was up high enough to see the Island’s interior more clearly.

  I squinted, feeling tipsy.

  ‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘They look like...more cairns?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah. Smaller than this one. They look like boundary markers, or something. The town is built...yes, look! Wow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The town is laid out inside the lines you can draw from cairn to cairn.’ He stuck out his index finger, and drew two straight lines across the air, from one cairn to the next. I watched him do this, and a great lump formed in my throat. I thought of a photograph, where a crowd of people stood facing this Island, their hands in the air. I thought of Fiona and Murdo, the pop of a rifle, triangles traced by hand into the blooded sky.

  ‘See what I mean?’ He asked.

  And I did see. The land upon which White Pines stood was a natural, gently sloping plain surroundi
ng the main cairn, where we sat. The smaller cairns were, as Matthew had said, like boundary markers. If you drew lines between them, they became corners. Inside these corners, the town spread wide.

  But there was something wrong with this. Something numerically off. Two corners isn’t enough, I realised.

  I thought back to the lintel above the door at Taigh-Faire. To the capstone in the cellar. To Fiona’s tattoo, and Granny’s grave.

  Three sides, three corners, four dots.

  I thought about where we were sitting, under a pile of rocks set dead in the middle of the Island. I chewed my lip as I gazed at the other two cairns, and a slow tingle spread across my scalp.

  Shapes. Symbols. Cairns. Sacred geometry.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ I said, suddenly scrambling up to my feet. I nearly tumbled straight back down, dizziness attacking me as I stood upright, but I managed to save myself at the last minute by grabbing Matthew’s shoulders.

  ‘Where are you going?’ He asked, taken aback by my unexpected momentum. ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you drunk already?’

  ‘I just need to check something out,’ I said breathlessly. I righted myself more slowly this time, and told Matthew to stay put.

  ‘Are you sure? You don’t look great, Megs, let me come with you.’

  ‘Just stay there!’ I said bossily. Then I ducked around to the other side of the cairn, and looked back across the rear slope, eyes scanning back and forth, looking for a little pile of stacked stones.

  And I found it, sitting low and dark in the moonlight, just in front of the tree line.

  A fourth cairn.

  Three sides, three corners, four dots.

  And I knew then, what this was. I knew that if I drew a map of the Island, a bird’s eye view map, I would look down and see three dots. These would be the three small cairns located around the outside of White Pines. You could draw a line between those dots and make a perfect, equilateral triangle in doing so.

  Inside the triangle, the town of White Pines lay. And in the centre of that town, one final dot: the cairn where we stood.

  As if hypnotised, my right hand came up to the level of my face, and drew a symbol in the air. A triangle.

  And it glowed softly in the night.

  I gasped. The shape faded, but a faint white residue stained the insides of my eyelids as I blinked.

  Everything is connected, I thought. And then I heard Fiona’s voice in my head once again.

  The Island deceives.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, out loud. This was beyond me. This was all beyond me. I was falling into a world of puzzles, of enigma, where every rock and tree and boulder had a purpose I didn’t understand, a significance so great I couldn’t comprehend it.

  The Island deceives.

  And then something tapped me on the shoulder. Something heavy, and cold.

  I started, whipped around, and came face to face with a double-barrelled shotgun.

  For a split second, when all I could see were the twin eyes of the gun, I thought it was Murdo, come for me. Or Fiona. They had shot the dog, god knew why, and now they were here for me.

  I fell back with a cry against the cairn. As I did so, my hands flew out, and made contact with the stones. A bolt of pure, raw energy raced through my body, almost ripping me in two. I convulsed, and heard a voice in my head.

  An old voice. An angry voice.

  A voice from my dream.

  It was the god beneath the tree, chanting, speaking to me once more in that language I didn’t understand. And I didn’t want to understand, I didn’t. I knew the god was saying terrible, terrible things, things I was too afraid to hear.

  Are you down there, under the stones?

  What are you?!

  Bile raced up my throat. I scrambled away from the cairn, feeling horribly cold, my body wracked with aftershocks, as if I’d been electrocuted. The air around me felt charged, heavy with static energy, and thinner, somehow. Breathing became difficult.

  And, as I crawled on my hands and knees, putting as much space between myself and the rock pile as possible, for the quickest of moments, the cairn was not a cairn at all, but a great, resplendent cherry tree, with branches that stretched high above me, and roots that dug down far below. I saw sand around it, and the sea beyond that.

  And then the rocks were rocks once again, the sand was dirt, the sea was gone, and I found myself staring up at a man.

  It was not Murdo.

  He levelled his shotgun at me.

  ‘You are not welcome here,’ he said.

  Mac, I thought, and then I vomited, right then and there on the ground in front of him.

  17. Unwelcome

  My body heaved and shook as I sicked up hot, acidic bile.

  ‘Hey!’ Matthew rounded the cairn, and quickly came to stand in front of me, shielding me from the gun in an act so automatically selfless, I didn’t fully appreciate it until much, much later.

  Would I have done the same, for him? It was a question that would come back to bite me many times over, in the days to come.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are, pointing that at her?!’ My unlikely protector said, his body tight with rage.

  The stranger stood steady, staring down at me from behind the gun’s front sight.

  I retched up the last of my stomach contents, wiped a thin dribble of acrid saliva from my chin, and got to my knees, panting. The voice in my head had died away, and as I grew more aware of my surroundings, I realised I had to calm the situation down before one, or both of us ended up shot.

  But standing was difficult, and speaking even more so. I climbed to my feet and just stood there, swaying, trying not to throw up again.

  What is wrong with me?

  The man, who was clad in a simple linen shirt and fishermen trousers, kept the gun level and trained at my head, unmoved by Matthew’s outburst.

  ‘You’re trespassing,’ he said, and his voice had a faint Scottish burr, but it didn’t sound like he was from the Highlands. It was subtle, but noticeable: he had spent time down south, like I had.

  Behind him, there was movement, and three more people came out from behind the cairn. A silver-haired woman, a man the same age roughly as Matthew, and a young lad of maybe seventeen, eighteen years old. They stood next to the man with the gun, and the woman folded her arms as she took in the scene.

  ‘We were invited!’ Matthew made an effort to gentle his tone, looking to the newcomers and holding his arms up to show he was no trouble. ‘There was a kid, a boy. He invited us.’

  ‘A boy? What boy?’ The man spat.

  A small voice rang out.

  ‘Me! It was me, Mac! I’m sorry!’

  And for the second time that night, Luke emerged from the shadows. His small face looked paler than ever, but he was unafraid. He squeezed past the cairn and planted himself next to Matthew, in front of me and in front of the gun.

  It was enough to break me out of my stupor.

  ‘Luke, no!’ I said, and pushed the boy aside. A grown man putting himself in the line of fire was one thing. A small boy doing the same was another thing altogether.

  Luke stared up at me with those huge, soulful eyes. ‘This is my fault,’ he said, and then he turned to Mac. ‘I found them outside the trees. I thought they seemed nice. And I've never seen a mainlander before! I wanted them to come to the party.’

  His face crumpled, and he began to cry.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, trying to sound stern and failing in the face of his tears. ‘Your mother told you to stay away from us.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to get lost. I snuck out again when she wasn’t looking.’

  I shook my head. ‘She’ll be worried sick,’ I said.

  The silver-haired woman watched this exchange, and decided to put an end to it. ‘Come here, Luke,’ she said, in a tone that brooked no refusal. ‘Now.’

  Luke did as he was told, still crying. ‘Please don’t shoot them,’ he begged, as he passed Mac. ‘Please,
they are my friends.’

  The man spat again. ‘We don’t have friends outside the Island, boy.’ The shotgun stayed trained on me.

  Matthew spoke in a low, furious voice, all attempts to placate the Islanders abandoned.

  ‘Get that gun out of my face, before I lose my temper,’ he threatened, and I put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing it tight in a warning.

  ‘Careful,’ I murmured.

  ‘How did you get here?’ Mac ignored Matthew’s threat. ‘I didn’t see your boat moored on the spit. Did you swim?’

  Fiona’s voice rang out in my mind: Your Granny used to swim in the bay every morning, come rain or shine...

  Matthew and I stayed silent. If he didn’t know about the tunnel under the bay, and the cave, then I wasn’t about to tell him.

  ‘They were seen in the square, earlier,’ the other man said. He had a tattoo on one cheek, the outline of a tiny fish. ‘Just brazenly walking about like nobody’s business.’

  The silver-haired woman came forward, then, tucking Luke behind her as she did so. She frowned at me. ‘You look familiar,’ she said, peering into my face. It was barely visible from the light of the lantern on top of the cairn, but something she saw in me made her pause.

  I kept my peace.

  She turned to her companion.

  ‘Mac, she looks familiar.’

  Mac didn’t care. Mac didn’t like strangers. Slowly, and very deliberately, he pulled back on the trigger, and I heard it click, heard a mechanism slide into place.

  ‘I’ll ask you again,’ he said. ‘How did you get onto this Island?’

  ‘We were invited,’ I replied, repeating Matthew’s words with my chin held high. And it was the truth. I had been invited.

  Just not by the boy.

  And this truth gave me courage. Because I knew Mac wasn’t going to shoot me. It wasn't part of the Island’s plan. Why show me the tunnel, why bring me here, just for that? It didn’t make sense.

  Down in the square below us, out of sight behind the cairn, the band rolled over into a different tune, faster, edgier, with livelier drums, louder strings, more pipes, everything hacking and sawing and clashing in a frantic rhythm. As we stood facing each other, like cowboys at high noon, the Islanders versus the intruders, I listened to the laughing clamour of the people of White Pines spiral up into the sky, thinking the same thing over and over without knowing why:

 

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