by Gemma Amor
I was a giant slayer.
Like something from a child’s fairytale.
But instead of triumph, I felt...diminished. Bereft.
Changed.
My hands wandered across my face. My eyes were still gone. In their place, two sunken holes, cauterised, the lids deflated and empty on top. I felt for my ears, felt the dried, sticky blood that had congealed around each one.
Finally, I poked a finger into my mouth, and instead of a tongue, I found only the ragged remains of my frenulum, that small fold of mucous membrane that connects the tongue to the floor of the mouth.
Taken.
It had all been taken from me, a fee, a tax I had paid for the incredible power that had helped me kill the beast.
And now, the power was gone. I could feel it. My body was weak, twisted, and frail. I was human once again. My joints ached, my skin was tender and sore.
A tax paid cannot be reclaimed, not on the Island.
I opened my mouth wide, to let out my grief, but no sound came forth. As if to taunt me, a dog barked from outside the triangle.
I had enough time to turn my head, see Murdo and his pup, walking across the barren land towards me.
Then, I returned to the black.
49. Locked out
I tried to go back.
Once I had healed, and even before then, I tried, many times over. Because I needed to finish the ritual. I had to do more for the people of White Pines. I wanted to rescue Matthew, and Luke.
The Island had different ideas.
I made it as far as the pine trees, each time. I would enter the woods, determined, mouth set, fists clenched, and walk the path I had walked before. But no matter how long or far I travelled across the blanket of pine needles, through the preternatural quiet, I never came out of the other side of the trees. The pines never gave way, never spat me out into the Island’s interior like before. It was just endless rows of black and white, the pale tree-trunks like stripes in a barcode, stretching endlessly in every direction. I once tied red string around each trunk I passed, hoping to mark my way like Theseus with Ariadne’s ball of thread through the labyrinth, but when I turned back to check my progress, the string had always snapped, come loose, and was trailing behind me like thin, forlorn entrails dragging across the ground.
It took time for the message to sink in, but sink in it did. Eventually.
I was locked out.
Unwelcome.
The centre of the Island was kept from me as surely as if a door had been slammed in my face.
I had sight, still. I could not see the way normal people could see, but I had vision, despite my missing eyes. It was not as strong and clear as it had been when first gifted to me, but it was still there.
I could hear, too, although my ear drums had both been destroyed. The old ones had allowed me to keep those senses.
I could not, however, speak without a tongue.
Mute, I existed as a shadow, marking each day as it came and went with scratches on the wall of Granny’s kitchen. I made them with a teaspoon, deep and deliberate in the old, soft plaster, and tried not to despair. I tried to think of it as all being part of some great, as yet uncommunicated plan. But it was hard. Because Matthew waited for me. So did hundreds of innocent people, thrust into a reality they were never prepared for. I wanted to help. I had to help. It was my job, as a Key, as someone who could go to the Other Place and come back, alive, and unchanged.
But the Island would not let me in.
And so I remained a prisoner at Taigh-Faire, doomed to stare out of my Granny’s windows at the small land mass in the bay and wonder about Matthew, about the boy, Luke, and all the other people taken from this world, and the angry god beneath the tree, and the dead giant once known as Nimrod.
50. Layers
The first year Matthew was gone was the hardest.
His face followed me around in my every waking moment, and for most of the sleeping ones, too.
The longer he was absent, the longer I had to dwell upon it, this grief, the longer I had to figure out that there are layers to loss. First, the flimsy outer layer, which, when ripped away without warning or ceremony, exposed a raw flesh beneath, a tender dermis that screamed the longer its nerve endings and capillaries remained exposed to the cold air. Eventually, the fragile network of feelings and regrets and anger and shame dried out, shrivelled away, and the pain-layer sloughed off to reveal acceptance: bitter, hard, like a crab apple. Over time, that eroded too, because everything decays, in the end.
At least, it does in this world.
If I struggled, so did Rhoda.
She appeared at my house the same day I killed Nimrod, blackened and bruised but alive, which was all that mattered to me. Fiona hadn’t killed her, hadn’t taken her tongue. For that, I was grateful. The people of White Pines still had a voice. I had some company, for the long, grey hours where the Island taunted me through the kitchen window.
I don’t know, thinking back, how she bore it as well as she did. I know I didn’t. I mourned for Matthew. I mourned for White Pines too, of course I did. For Luke, and his mother. For Mac, and Johnny. But I hadn’t lived amongst them as Rhoda had. They had not been my community. Taking on her loss as my own was in poor taste.
Instead, I wrestled with guilt. Because if anyone could find them, help them, bring them back to this life, I knew it was me.
It should have been me.
I just couldn’t find a way in.
To cope, we developed new rituals, as a couple. I wrote a lot. The word processor I’d carted from my old life in the South finally came into its own, helping me in a number of ways. First, because I could no longer speak. Rhoda knew sign language, but I never really got the hang of it, my missing finger not helping the cause. So I wrote, and left notes for her around the house, little letter trails for her to follow, so that conversation still flowed between us.
Second, because I had a story to tell.
And what a story it was.
We developed other habits as time wore on. Walks along the bay. Breakfasts eaten in silence. Evenings by the fire, where little was said, but lots was felt. Fishing in the bay. Endless games of chess. Preparing meals for ourselves and Murdo’s dog, who turned up at our doorstep in much the same fashion that Rhoda had one day, after which, he never left. We didn’t give the dog a name. He remained ‘Murdo’s dog’ until the day he died, many years later.
Turned out, he was a good dog, too.
Food was never an issue, to my surprise. It was brought to us every week by a mainlander, who wordlessly left a well-stocked cardboard box of groceries by the front door every Monday morning. I never questioned this, and the locals never demanded payment. I assumed it had something to do with Murdo, that this was my reward for freeing them all from Nimrod.
And Fiona.
Little by little, as we went through the motions of living something akin to a normal life, Rhoda began to talk to me, about all sorts of things. She had been a teacher, once, and it made her happy to share information. She liked history, customs and tradition. She had respect for the past, believing in its power to shape the future. She still held stubbornly to some of the old ways from her childhood. On the first day of May, she washed her face in the fresh, early morning dew. She said it brought her good health, and as traditions went, it seemed harmless enough, so I indulged her and washed my own face, too. On the Island, she had been planting new traditions, new customs, like seeds, before her people were so rudely ripped away from her. The seeds never flourished, and so instead, she told me stories.
And I wrote them down.
As we sat together of an evening, flames leaping high into the chimney breast that really needed sweeping but hadn’t been dealt with yet, I learned the history of White Pines from Rhoda, who found that staring into the fire and talking of easier times eased the pain a little.
And this is what I learned.
51. Declassified
Anthrax Island, also
known as Gruinard Island, was, long before I had ever laid eyes on it, a largely uninhabited chunk of Torridonian sandstone, comprised of four hundred and eighty four acres of land that sat uninhabited in Gruinard Bay, halfway between Ullapool and Gairloch. I say largely uninhabited. In 1881, a population of six was recorded. By 1890, that number went back to zero. I wondered about those six people a lot in the years to follow: who they were, why they were there. Why they were only there for nine years. Did they know of the cairns, the gateway, the Other Place? Of Nimrod? Did they disappear like the people of White Pines?
Or were they punished for trespassing, sacrificed to the beast from the gallows of Laide?
Before that, in 1549, a clergyman by the name of Dean Munro wrote in his records that the Island was wooded, making it an ideal spot for smugglers and rebels and pirates to shelter on, concealed from the eyes of the mainland. Rhoda told me this was a big part of why Mac chose to reintroduce trees to the Island all those years later. He believed in history too, and the power of nature to heal. And he liked the idea of a private, secret place hidden from view.
In the 1940s, Gruinard Island became Anthrax Island when scientists from the Microbiological Research Department at Porton Down decided to bomb the tiny landmass with a particularly virulent strain of anthrax called Vollum 14578. This part I already knew. I wrote it down anyway, and embellished it with my own research. This was made much easier in 1997, when a video was declassified of the scientists at work. I managed to get hold of a copy of that video, through connections in my old life as a journalist. I watched it on a brand new VHS player, hooking it up to the ancient television set in the living room at Taigh-Faire.
Rhoda refused to watch. She said she didn’t need to see it to know it had happened, and besides, she had seen far worse since.
I wanted to watch it though. A part of me knew that this was what Matthew would do, if he were still here.
Watch, learn, and extrapolate.
The grainy, wobbly film opened with an information placard, and quickly changed to idyllic scenes with blue skies, the camera sweeping around the beautiful scenery of Gruinard bay, as if the cameraman were shooting a video for the tourism board and not a biological research department. The Island, now of modest and completely normal proportions, came into view. I saw no trees upon it. The place looked naked without them. Wrong, somehow.
Sheep were unloaded from a fishing trawler and ushered along the stone spit by a man with a sheep dog. A collie dog. I wondered if it was a distant relative of Murdo’s dog. I wondered why that mattered to me, but it did, for some reason.
I couldn’t make out much of anything after that until men in brown suits and gasmasks took the sheep out to an open part of the Island, not too far from a large rocky summit in the centre that I knew very well indeed. An Eilid, Luke's mother had called it. The men in suits did not recognise what sat on top of it: a cairn.
The fourth cairn.
The only one remaining intact, now, after my botched ritual.
The resting place of an ancient entity.
Ignoring it, the scientists of the past tied sixty poor, doomed sheep to wooden frames set up for just this purpose. They moved quickly, in a business-like fashion. It was a chilling echo of what happened with the gallows at Laide.
A pole was then thrust into the ground. It had something attached to the top of it, something that was then released.
And then the spores were unleashed.
There was a sequence of images, spliced together with increasing rapidity. A brown mist, spreading across the Island. Sheep, anchored to their pens, oblivious to their painful fate.
And then there it was, that sign I’d been after. Hard to tell for sure, given the degraded quality of the film, but after rewinding and rewatching several times, I was almost certain. There was a flicker in the mist, a sudden parting of ways, as if the vapour hit a solid surface. The illusion was gone in the blink of an eye, but I knew what it was. It was something from the Other Place, flickering into view for just a second, mostly obscured by the gas, but affecting it.
Then it was gone, sucked back to the other side of the veil.
But White Pines had yet to be built, so what was it that had come back?
Maybe the Other Place wasn’t static like I had thought.
Maybe, things moved more like a carousel, behind the veil. Like that story I had read as a child, the Magic Faraway Tree. A new reality with every rotation, glimpsed through a single gateway: the Island.
The video kept playing, a 16 mm colour display of death. Sheep carcasses were dissected, analysed. Some of them were then burned in a makeshift furnace. Others were dragged away and dumped in a cave I knew very well. Matthew and I had walked across their bones.
The scientists took their leave, and there was a period of quarantine for the Island. This lasted until 1986, when two hundred tons of formaldehyde and seawater was dumped all over the place in an effort to sterilise it, just as Mac had told me.
Four years later, the government sold it back to Mac for five hundred pounds.
He had no idea what he was taking ownership of.
52. Nothing
I kept visiting the Island, despite knowing I could not find a way in. It felt like I had to try, and keep trying, or fade into the obscurity of acceptance, and so I did. Try, that is. I wandered amongst the pines like a will-o’-the-wisp, aimlessly rambling to and fro, trying to get out of the woodland. Never succeeding. Returning to Taigh-Faire frustrated, yet ready to try again the next day.
And then, on a morning no worse or better than any other in what had become an endless parade of lacklustre sunrises, the trees opened up for me.
It was so unexpected, that I couldn’t quite grasp it at first. The shift from dark to light was so abrupt, so rude.
But there it was, before me, sitting quietly in the ring of trees. A flat, desolate plain, with a sloping rise in the middle, on top of which sat a cairn. Around this, a blackened triangle. Around that, a tall barbed wire fence. The mainlanders must have put it up after I killed Nimrod. The Island was clearly not closed to everyone.
I wasted no time. I passed the first ruined cairn without stopping to remember what had happened to me down there beneath its stones. I was angry at the Island for toying with me. I was aware that my time within the circle of trees might be limited. I had only one thing I wanted to do.
The fence was high, but there was enough space for me to crawl beneath. I squatted low, wincing as a barb caught the back of my shirt, then unhooked myself, placing one foot carefully on unhallowed soil.
Come on, I thought. Come on, you bastard!
Nothing.
All was still.
I pulled my other leg out behind me, and stood up within the triangle.
Still, nothing.
Not even a flicker in the air.
Maybe I needed to get further in.
So I walked, where once I had run in terror. I walked as far into the triangle as I could without approaching the cairn. There was something about that final, unconquered pile of stones that I wasn’t ready for, yet.
But I was ready for the Other Place.
I stood in the danger zone and waited. Waited for something to come back. Waited for the air to flicker and fail, for the curtain to lift.
And nothing happened.
I waited for two hours, like an idiot.
Absolutely nothing.
It didn’t make sense. Why let me in, only to deny entry now? I was ready! I was ready to go beyond, again!
Was I no longer worthy? I had held the bodies of my ancestors in my arms, bled them of their knowledge, woken a god, slaughtered a beast, and now I was no longer good enough?
I bent down, touched the soil with my bare hands, felt an echo, a hum, an energy that set my teeth on edge.
But that was it.
Nothing else happened.
And nothing else continued to happen for the next ten years.
Days passed, and turned into weeks. Weeks b
ecame months. Months morphed into years, and time became a new enemy. Because I was older than I had been when Matthew had first disappeared, and somehow, that made his absence so much worse.
Arthritis set into my bones, and spread from joint to joint like mould on a damp wall. My hair grew grey, thick, dry. Rhoda’s grew sparse and wispy. Murdo’s dog slowed down, grew stiff-jointed like the rest of us, and Murdo himself, on the rare occasions that I saw him, became a stooped, worn figure. But the food baskets still came, every Monday. The locals did not forget their debt to me. Rhoda still bathed her face in the dew every first day of May, and every winter, we sat by the fire, and told stories of our past lives.
And nothing ever happened on the Island.
Until the boy came back.
53. Replay
It’s been over ten years, yet still it feels as if the Island is waiting for White Pines to return. Time has stopped here. Nature has not reclaimed the land. Instead, the ground remains scorched. Nothing grows. Not even weeds. Animals don’t forage here, birds don’t fly over the big, blank space in the soil where houses used to stand. I can’t even see insects flitting around on the breeze. There is no breeze, despite the fact that the sea is all around me.
No-one else comes here anymore, except for me. There is no reason to. There is nothing to see, no ruins to mourn over. No-one mourns.
But I still come.
Sometimes I take a small boat across the sea.
Sometimes, when I feel particularly numb, I swim across the bay, just like my Granny did. Sometimes, I use the tunnel, running my fingers over old carvings on the walls as I walk.
I come, and I pay my respects to the missing, and then I return to Taigh-Faire, and my seat in the kitchen, from where I can see everything and nothing, all at the same time.
And nothing ever changes. Hopelessness lies thick on the ground like snow. A tiny flicker here, perhaps an image there. Something returns for a split second, then vanishes again. But nothing I can ever determine, nothing I can ever get to. Once, I almost managed to grab a discarded shoe that popped into view a few feet from where I stood, but I was too slow, and just as my fingers brushed the leather, it vanished.
