White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  ​Murdo leaned on the handle of his shovel, and suddenly that made sense to me, too. What it was for.

  ​They wanted me to take apart the cairn, and dig up what was beneath.

  ​‘What’s down there?’ I asked again, looking from one to the other.

  ​Neither replied.

  ​I set to work.

  37. Rock by rock

  It took a while. Soon, I was grateful for the lack of clothes. The work was hard, laborious. I was covered in sweat within minutes. My cheeks burned, turned red from the thin light overhead. The cairn was made of maybe a hundred varying sized stones, smallest at the top, largest at the bottom, stacked on top of each other in a dense, tightly organised cone. I worked my way down from the peak, laying the stones carefully in a separate pile to one side as I removed them. It felt odd to do this, take apart something built with such care and precision. Odd, and disrespectful. I did it anyway.

  ​My hands grew sore and chafed from handling so many rough rocks. My back burned with the effort of bending down and standing up, time and time again. Then, I found a rhythm to what I was doing, found myself in the swing of it, carting rock from mound to mound, back and forth, back and forth, back…

  ​Until there were no rocks left.

  ​Underneath, there lay dark soil. Not dark like the dead earth inside the triangle. This was rich and fertile soil, moist and coloured deep with rotting matter. Insects and worms wriggled around in it, rudely exposed to the light of day.

  ​I straightened up, panting. My throat was raw, and I needed water, but there was none forthcoming.

  ​Murdo simply offered me the shovel.

  ​I took it, and dug.

  ​It was incredibly hard work. I wore no shoes and could not use my foot to stamp the shovel into the ground. I had to use the force of my arms alone. Every cut sent a jolt of impact juddering up my forearms, across my shoulders, down through my chest and along my spine. I gritted my teeth, feeling blisters form on the palms of my hands. Down, and down I dug, bringing up scoops of earth and roots and twigs and insects and more stones, my arms straining under the weight of the soil and the effort it took to extract. I stopped to rest more than once, panting and sweating, legs almost buckling with exertion. Every time I did this, Fiona and Murdo stared down at me with cold, beady eyes until I resumed my labour.

  Once the hole was deep enough to stand in, I did so, stepping down carefully, soil splurging up through my toes, shifting from one side of the hole to the other as I dug first one half and then the other, deeper and deeper, all the while sinking further below surface level.

  ​And then I came to it. The shovel glanced off of something hard with a loud metallic clang, and I stopped digging.

  ​‘Is this it?’ I asked, struggling to catch my breath. ‘Is this why I’m here?’

  ​Fiona towered above me, her feet level now with my head. I had to crane my head back to speak to her, and I had a feeling that she liked that, me being this far below her.

  ​She kept her silence, and I handed the shovel up out of the hole to Murdo. I caught his eye as I did so, and had a shock. His usually impassive face was gripped with something that looked very much like fear. Or pity. Or maybe something else I couldn’t quite put a name to.

  ​Compassion?

  ​I knelt to examine the thing beneath the soil, clearing away the last thin layer with my torn, bleeding hands. It took me a moment to figure it out, but then I realised what it was. Same stone, same size and shape as the one in my cellar at Taigh-Faire.

  It was a capstone.

  I cleaned the last vestiges of muck from the thing, and found the symbol staring up at me. The dots at the corners of the triangle had mud in them, and an earthworm slithered out of the hole in the centre as I sat back on my heels and stared at it.

  ‘What is this?’ I looked up at Fiona. She had taken possession of the shovel, and now she raised it slightly, as if in threat.

  ‘Open it,’ she commanded.

  The message was clear. If I didn’t do as she asked, she would hit me, hard.

  A part of me knew it was an empty threat. She needed me. It was why I was still alive, why I was here, because she needed me and my special heritage for something. I knew this. She knew that I knew this.

  ​And yet, I was still afraid of her.

  ​I set my right hand upon it, working my fingertips into the holes, picking out dirt so that I could slot them in more comfortably. Once again I had that sensation that I was putting my hand into a long-favoured glove, one tailored exactly to my hand’s shape and size.

  ​My hand, which was a key, slid into the lock. There was a moment of stillness, and then the sensation of something moving, some catch beneath the stone being released.

  ​And then I heard a whisper, right in the centre of my mind.

  I clapped my spare hand to my head in agony. The whisper was loud.

  The capstone rotated slowly, lifting up and away from whatever it lay on top of, twisting sideways on an invisible axis, until it stood upright upon its rim, looking for all the world like a giant coin that had been dropped from above and had miraculously landed upon its side.

  I looked down.

  And what lay beneath took my breath away.

  38. Sealed

  In a circular hole that was about six feet deep by three feet wide, lined with curved stone slabs that tessellated perfectly to make an airtight sort of tube once the capstone was lowered, lay the mummified, curled, compact body of a small human.

  ​Brown, shiny skin stretched taut across small, bird-like bones. The skin clung to most of the body except for the hands and fingers, where it had rotted away, leaving bone exposed. The feet were crossed at the ankles, and I could see toenails, veins, tiny hairs. Arms clasped around knees which were raised to the chest, like that of a baby in the womb. Thin, slack breasts squashed up around the knees. I saw a nipple, hard and brown like a sweet chestnut. On top of a ladder-like column of vertebrae sat a round, small skull, perfectly intact. A mass of clumped orange hair still covered the skull. There were tiny flowers in the hair. They looked like daisies.

  ​And a face, perfectly preserved. Eyes closed, cheeks sunken. Lips slightly parted over brown teeth. Frown lines across the forehead. Eyelashes, also orange in colour, red seeming to be the only pigment that had survived interment.

  ​It was a woman. Ancient, tiny, frozen in time. She looked as if she were asleep, rather than dead.

  My ancestor.

  The cairns marked the locations of ancient tombs. Matthew had been right.

  The Island was a burial ground.

  That meant there were three other tombs on this Island that I knew of. Did I have to break into every single one? Was that the ritual?

  ​The whispering voice still echoed around my skull. A strange vibration rattled my teeth, and my skin buzzed. I swallowed, scratching at my arms. What now? What was I doing here?

  ​I looked up at Fiona once again, and the smile was back on her face. My heart flipped.

  ‘Get in,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I didn’t understand.

  ‘Get. In.’ Her eyes were huge, expectant. She gripped the shovel handle with white fingers.

  ‘No.’ My part in her game was over. I reached an arm up, tried to hook it on the edge of the hole, hoist myself up and out of it.

  The blade of the shovel came down flat and whip-fast, and smashed into my fingers. I howled in pain.

  ‘Do as you are told,’ the woman said, in a voice of ice.

  ‘No!’ I cried, trying once again to climb out of the tomb. The shovel came down once more, this time on my shoulder. I heard something crack. My collarbone. I kept trying to hoist myself out, regardless. The mad bitch meant to bury me down there, cover me with stone and soil until my body dried out and became brown, waxy, still like the woman at my feet. I would not have it. I would not!

  But every time I tried to get out of the hole, the shovel came down upon me, over and over again, until I w
as sobbing, covered in bruises and welts and long, nasty gashes which welled up readily, spilling my blood into the ground like an offering.

  And the Island drank deep, and shuddered in pleasure.

  Then, Murdo reached down.

  ‘No!’ I screamed, bucking and straining, but he was strong. He took a hold of my shoulders, forced me down hard, and I lost my footing, slipping down into the hole with the ancient, sleeping body who waited for me at the bottom, and the mainlanders looked down at me for a moment as I sobbed and shrieked, and then they both made the symbol of the triangle in the air. Murdo reached across the hole, and I realised with horror what he intended to do.

  ‘For the love of God, no!’ I scrambled for purchase, feeling cold bones and hard skin under me, but it was no use. It was simply no use.

  Fiona and Murdo pushed against the capstone. It rolled ponderously back over the top of the tomb, and the light disappeared, and the sky was sealed from me, and my screams were swallowed by the earth, just like my blood.

  39. See

  I screamed until I exhausted myself, then crouched in the pitch-black tomb, panting. I tried to tell myself to take shallow breaths. The air was horribly thin, and stank of stone and peat. Soon, it would run out, and I would suffocate.

  Something crawled across my left arm: a centipede, a worm, I couldn’t tell. A thousand tiny feet tramped across my bare skin, and I would have screamed again, but my throat had seized up. So I hunkered in the earth, horribly aware of the mummified remains of a woman who may or may not have been my ancient ancestor, trying not to move so that her fragile bones didn’t break beneath my superior weight. I could feel her ribs and vertebrae and finger bones and pelvic bone and shoulder blades all poking into me, and the meeting of dead flesh with my live skin was the worst sensation I could have ever imagined possible.

  I moved to one side of the hole, so that the ancient corpse lay with its back to me. My hands brushed against her knobbled spinal column and the smooth, hardened skin of her back. I shuddered, and shrank as far back from her as possible.

  All was deathly quiet apart from the noise of my own distress.

  Relax, I tried to tell myself, over and over. You have survived worse. Hard to believe, but you have. I could hear my own pulse hammering in my ears. I gagged repeatedly on what little air I could. Had it been minutes or hours since the mainlanders had thrown me in the tomb? I couldn’t tell.

  A rambling internal dialogue started up in my head:

  How long have I been down here? I can’t die down here!

  Relax.

  How long?!

  Relax.

  There are bones sticking into me.

  Relax. Think.

  I know, I know. I’m trying!

  Try harder. You are not going to die down here. If they wanted you dead...

  If they wanted me dead, they would have hung me from the gallows by now.

  Exactly.

  They need me, for whatever reason they think they do.

  Relax, Megs.

  I won’t die here. I won’t.

  Breathe slowly. Don’t use up the air. Start counting.

  I forced myself to count to ten, and began breathing in time with the numbers. I squeezed my eyes shut so that I wasn’t distracted by the dark, by the all-consuming black. It was like being blind again, and I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t…

  I can’t…

  Relax.

  My breathing slowed, little bit by little bit.

  I saw Matthew’s face, in that last moment before he disappeared.

  He was brave, Megs. So are you.

  I opened my eyes.

  So, I was in a tomb.

  So, there was a dead body down here with me. I had seen worse. I had seen the face of a woman emerge from the torso of a man. I had seen a three-headed pig. I had seen an entire town disappear in the blink of an eye. I had stared into the face of a colossal giant, a creature from myth, a thing that should not exist.

  I had woken a sleeping god beneath a tree.

  I can survive this.

  Keep thinking. You were put down here for a reason, Megs.

  Yes. So what is it that I am here to do?

  I listened then, listened hard to the tomb, to the sound of insects creeping and my own careful movements, to the sigh and creak of stones settling against each other.

  I waited for another whisper in my mind, but it didn’t come.

  Patience. It will come, eventually.

  I lay down, slowly, conscious of fragile parts alongside me, wriggling and working myself so that the woman’s delicate, wizened back was to my chest. There was just enough space in the hole for me to lie beside her. She had been no taller than four feet, and was tiny in every other way aside from her height. Were it not for the breasts, I might have thought her a child.

  My eyes adjusted, little bit by little bit, to the intense blackness all around. And in doing so, the dark seemed to soften. A muted grey glow blossomed around the sleeping form before me.

  I had a sense that somehow, despite her sleep, the ancient one knew I was there.

  I used my right hand, felt gently along the tiny frame, frightened at first that I would damage her, that she would crumble beneath my touch, but then growing in confidence as she didn't. I started at the head, traced down from the skull and followed the path of the right arm bones, the humerus, the ulna, and found what I was looking for.

  The woman’s right hand.

  I felt for her finger bones, and found the small, delicate digits clenched tight, the sharp fingertips curled inwards.

  Laboriously, my breath coming harsh and quick as the air in the tomb grew thinner and thinner, I counted them.

  A thumb, and one, two, three...three fingers.

  The smallest finger on the right hand was missing. Just like mine was.

  We were the same. Same burdens, same ancestry, same tomb, same fate. She was a woman like me. She was an ancestor. Blood.

  She was a Key.

  She was family.

  I gently laid my hand over the old one’s hand, and rested my face against the back of her head. I felt a deep sense of sympathy for the dead, knowing, at least in some part, what burden she must have carried in her lifetime. The burden of knowledge. The burden of things seen that no one should see. My arms went around her, instinctively. I held the body as if it were a child, and I its mother, and we were drifting to sleep in the child’s bed, a sweet fairy story still lingering in our memories.

  A ringing sensation began to build in my ears.

  The stone walls around us grumbled. I heard earth beyond the tomb shift and move. I heard the roots of plants flex and stretch, as if waking up after a long sleep. Bugs and beetles and worms of all descriptions suddenly poured out of every crack and crevice between the stone slabs, and ran across my skin in a confused flood, invading every part of my body. I bore it. Even when things began to squirm and crawl under my armpits and between my legs, I bore it. I let nature caress my naked back and thighs, I let the tremors fold themselves around me like a blanket, I let the worms play in my hair, and I gave myself to the ritual, whatever ancient and practiced thing this was that I was doing. I allowed my instincts to lead, and thought:

  If I do die, this is as peaceful a way as any.

  I’m sorry, Matthew.

  I held my ancestor in my arms while the ground shook around us, and I thought about the capstone on top of us, thought about the weight of it, should it fall, should it be dislodged as the ground shook, and I thought about that sensation of life leaving me as it crushed me to a flattened husk, and I could feel my mind coming free of its moorings, slowly, slowly, drifting away, and it was such a relief, such a relief to let go of all of this, and maybe my skull would be full of earth too, at the end of all this. Like hers was. Maybe I could be a hollow, dried vessel full of worms and roots and rotted life and whatever strange power it was that lay deep in the land on this Island. Maybe I could just lie here, and feel the bones of those who had gone be
fore me, and...

  I felt them move.

  Just a small shift, at first. A twitch of movement beneath my fingers. Then a spasm, more pronounced, along the spine, and then another. Arms flexed, feet twitched, the head rolled around in a jerky, uncoordinated awakening.

  I pulled my own arms back, giving her space to move.

  The ancestor shook herself free of sleep and unfolded, like a flower opening up in the spring. Then she rolled, so that she faced me, nose to nose. I lay still as stone, waiting, waiting. I was not afraid. Fear was for other people. I was a Key. I had gone to a place beyond fear.

  The ancient one placed her mutilated hand upon my chest, and opened her eyes.

  There was nothing behind the eyelids except for black. The soft, delicate orbs of her eyeballs hadn’t survived the passage of time.

  It didn’t matter. I knew she was looking at me anyway.

  I smiled, and she dug her bony fingertips into my flesh. They sank into my skin easily, like fingers sinking into sand, and left four deep holes in me as she withdrew once again. Blood welled up from the wounds, hot and eager. It soaked into the soil, and I felt the Island stirring once more, that great satisfied shuddering rumbling up to the surface from deep underground.

  A strange sighing noise came out of her mouth. Hot, rancid air clouded into my face. The fragile mandible yawned open, then shut, shut and then open. Her teeth clacked gently against each other. I saw a decaying mass in her mouth: her tongue. It looked papery, like a wasp’s nest.

  A word slid into my ears like the maggots weeviling across my thighs.

  ‘See,’ the ancient one said, and her eye sockets began to glow a fierce, bright black.

  And I saw.

  Oh, how I saw.

  40. All that she knows

  I saw everything that had gone before, and everything that was to come after.

  I saw the Island, at the centre of everything we thought we understood, but didn’t.

  I saw ripples of consequence, of possibility, of potential, circling out into the sea from this simple crop of land, which was the epicentre, and those ripples manipulated the fabric of reality like the aftershocks of an earthquake, just as Johnny had said, folding time, flexing space, compressing distances hitherto incomprehensible until now.