by Gemma Amor
And then, I see that dark, limping shape silhouetted against the black and brown slope.
And this time, things are different. Because the shape lingers, has permanency. It does not vanish.
It is the shape of the boy. Unhurt, unchanged, real, and solid, and perfect.
And he is still moving towards me.
There is hope, after all!
After all these years!
I start to run, and so does he. My legs are tired, but they are spurred on by one, bright thought:
I might just make it, this time.
I might just save one of them.
Finally, gloriously, after what feels like eons of running towards each other, the boy is within reach. I grasp his outstretched arm, heave him up into my embrace.
It is the boy called Luke.
He had held my hand, and I had known him. His fingers had met mine, and I had recognised him from some previous encounter. Or was it from this encounter? I could not tell which was the right way around, anymore. Time was a close loop, knotted tight.
‘Hurry!’ The boy shrieks, and I can feel him flickering in my embrace, his form pulsating between solid and...something else. Something less real. Something less now.
Behind him, tall pines with strange, white trunks watch, impassive.
We run. We are going to make it. The fence is mere feet away. Then, we are beneath it, and clear out the other side.
I saved one.
I saved one!
Tears roll down my cheeks.
The tall, pale pines rustle gently around us, as if applauding.
Is this what they had been waiting for, all along?
I lie down next to the boy on the ground and hold him tightly, soothing him as he sobs hysterically.
I’ve got you, I think.
Then, I take him home.
54. Luke
I brought him home to Taigh-Faire. When Rhoda saw me carry him into the kitchen, she went white as a sheet, her trembling hands covering her mouth in shock.
The boy shivered and shuddered in my arms, his eyes wide, fixed, staring into space. I carried him upstairs with enormous difficulty, never letting on how much pain I was in, and put him into my bed. Rhoda followed, and we both looked down at him with tears in our eyes.
‘He doesn’t look any older,’ she murmured.
She was right. Ten years had passed, and you could mark every year on our faces, but Luke looked just the same age as he had been the night White Pines disappeared.
Time moves differently in the Other Place, I remembered.
The boy said nothing for weeks. He lay in the darkened bedroom, sleeping, for hours and hours of every day. Rhoda and I took it in turns to sit beside him, working in shifts so that he was never alone. He did not like being left alone. On the only occasion he woke in his room to find that he was by himself, he screamed, terrified, and didn’t stop for two hours. We learned not to make that mistake again, and so we sat by his bedside, watching him twist about in sweat-sodden sheets as nightmares ate away at his sleep.
He was not the only one to dream.
I only had one dream, but it was the same dream, over and over, night after night. Matthew and I were always together in my recurring nightmare, sitting side by side on the cairn in the centre of the Island. A party was always happening in the town square below us. Tall pine trees stood to attention in a bright, distracting circle running around everything. I found it hard to tell if this scenario was a dream construct, or a memory, or both, but my brain kept taking me back there, nonetheless.
Matthew would watch me, in these dreams, studying my profile in the golden glow of a late sunset. Working up to something. A big statement of some sort. Matthew had always been good at those.
‘Ever feel like you started out with the wrong person in life?’ He would say, eventually, in a tone that was far too casual for the subject matter.
I would fix my eyes on the party, on the swirling people who danced through the square, and even in my dream, I could not commit to him. Even though I knew, deep down, I was about to lose him, I kept my voice neutral.
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ I would say, for in my dreams I still had a tongue and a voice.
‘Well, your marriage, and mine,’ he always said. Music spiralled in the air between us. Sweet and light, but with a distinct dissonance that grew worse as our conversation continued. ‘Both over and done with. I lost years of my life, years that I put into being married to the wrong person, and now, I can’t get those years back. Don’t you feel like that, too?’
I would face him then, and it was easier with the sun in my eyes, because I couldn’t see the expression on his face.
‘Do you mean that if you and I had met at the right time, before everything, we’d have married each other instead? Are we the right people for each other?’
Matthew would move closer still, so that I could feel his breath warm on my face. ‘I feel,’ he’d say, ‘I feel as if you and I…’ He’d stop, always carefully choosing his words.
And, when they came, they were always good words.
‘Maybe they wouldn’t have been wasted years, if I’d spent them with you.’
Then he would kiss me, and it would feel natural, and wonderful, and I would respond, sliding a hand up the side of his face to bring him closer. He would grab me around the waist, and pull me onto him, and I always straddled him, suddenly at the mercy of my own desire, and our clothes came away as easily as leaves falling from trees at the turn of the season, and flesh met flesh, and I closed my eyes, sliding down, filling myself up with him, and when I opened them, a three-headed pig stared back at me.
Every single time.
I would scream, and the pig heads would scream too, teeth gnashing and chomping in pain.
I slept less and less as the days passed by.
‘I don’t remember anyone called Matthew,’ Luke said one day six weeks later, crushing my hopes with six small words.
As Rhoda had predicted, he eventually stopped sleeping as much, and began to speak instead. Only a few words to begin with. More as he relaxed into our company. We tried to make things as stable, peaceful and calm for him as possible, knowing that he had been through something so profoundly traumatic that change, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, would set him back to the point of catatonia. So we built a new, carefully timed routine around him. Breakfast at seven-thirty, every day. It was always the same, porridge with a dollop of jam, and milk, and sweet tea. After, we would walk Murdo’s dog on the beach below the house. Then lunch. Then a board game, or a book. Then dinner, then bath, then more milk, then bed. Every day, exactly the same. Day in, day out. A ritual, like walking an ancient path between piles of stone. It helped Rhoda and I every bit as much as it helped Luke.
And after a time, he began to talk.
I refrained from asking too many questions. It was hard, because with his speech came my insatiable desire for knowledge, but I knew that pushing too much and too soon would set him back.
He eventually began to offer up nuggets of information on his own. He could not remember meeting me, or Matthew. He did not remember the event, the moment White Pines vanished. He just remembered waking up on a beach, and his mother was nowhere to be seen. He never found her, after that. Never saw his Ma again.
But he did find his father, stumbling around in a daze not far from where he had woken up. Together, they found shelter behind some large rocks at the base of a cliff. They saw things that Luke couldn’t, or wouldn’t describe. He called them ‘scary things,’ and I didn’t push him for more detail.
And then, Nimrod came.
Luke wouldn’t talk about this at all, but he did draw a picture for me on one of our walks. He used a stick, and traced lines in the sand. I saw long legs, a long, slender body, eyes on long stalks. A wide, open mouth. Luke drew two stick figures running away from the creature. A small one, and a big one.
Then he rubbed the
big one out with his hand.
I understood from this that Luke’s father was dead. Eaten by Nimrod.
Silently, I bent down, and rubbed the outline of the giant out, too, so that only Luke’s figure remained on the sand.
I held him to me, then. Held him tight. He was family to me from that moment on, just as Rhoda was family. We were bound together by the Island, by loss and terror and grief, and even as I hated it for what it had taken from me, I found a new appreciation for the fresh gifts it bestowed.
Family.
After Luke, the Island gave nothing else back. The trees let me pass, but nothing ever moved in the barren wasteland inside the triangle.
I learned to be content with that, for a while. I did not trouble the final cairn, as much as I wanted to. I had a child to raise and do right by, and he took a lot of my time, and energy. My sense of urgency around rescuing the citizens of White Pines faded. My hope for Matthew dwindled along with it. I began to think of him as I thought about my Granny, my parents, my marriage, Mac, Johnny, and Fiona: dead.
Gone, beyond.
I decided to focus on the living, instead.
But still, in my nightmares, Matthew came for me.
55. Ever burning
The boy turned twelve. We held a small party for him, a quiet but joyous celebration with a cake and a brand new mountain bike, which Murdo had found from somewhere on our request. He uncovered it with the shaking hesitancy of a person who had seen too many unexpected things in his time, and did not like surprises very much. When the bike was revealed, he stroked the handlebars and fiddled with the gears and smiled a smile so bright I felt it pierce right through me.
After, I took him for a walk across the beach, which was the thing we liked to do most together. I noticed, as we meandered in silence, how much darker his hair was than it had been when he had first come to us. I noticed the more angular set of his jaw, and how long his legs were. The puppy fat of childhood was slowly melting away. In its place, was something leaner, and less vulnerable. I was grateful for this. He had been through so much, so much that would stay with him for life. Watching him grow and become a stronger version of himself brought me joy,
We walked along the beach, and I occasionally reached out to ruffle his hair, a thing I loved to do, but he was less keen on this now that adolescence was upon him. Sometimes he accepted my affection, other times not. Today, he could sense the mood, and allowed me to be attentive.
We stopped at our usual spot on the beach, a spot where we could see the Island the most clearly. We sat, and stared at it, and thought about the people it had taken.
‘Megs,’ Luke said, and I blinked, shaking myself out of a memory where a melted ball of pig flesh writhed and screamed and fell down a slope toward me.
I nodded.
‘I think I would like to start calling you Ma, now. If that’s alright, I mean.’
I reeled.
He repeated himself. ‘I think I would like to start calling you Ma. My real Ma isn’t coming back.’ He pointed unnecessarily to the Island. From here it looked so small, innocuous. I felt it scratching in the back of my mind. Waiting. Always waiting.
For what?
‘You look after me like my real Ma used to.’
I shook my head. I could never replace his real mother.
‘And, I love you.’
I felt a hot, tight lump in my throat.
He went on, filling up my silence.
‘I think she would be happy that you are looking after me so well,’ he said, and I couldn’t help it then. I started to cry.
Luke slipped a hand through the crook of my arm and rested his head on my shoulder. We stared at the Island, and I knew that later that night, while he slept, I would creep into his room and sit by his bed and watch him sleep, because my love was white hot, and ever burning. Luke was the fuel to that fire. He was proof that I could make things right, somehow. That there was still hope.
But that was for later. I sat, on his twelfth birthday, and enjoyed the weight of his head on my shoulder.
‘I love you, Ma,’ he said, again.
White hot, and ever burning.
56. The Call
A rumbling woke me from my regularly scheduled nightmare not long after Luke’s birthday.
Giant! I thought, as I jolted upright. The rumble sounded exactly like a giant’s footsteps, thundering into the ground. But then I remembered, snapping fully awake as the rumbling came again, that Nimrod was dead. I had killed the giant.
So what was happening?
It was the dead of night. Murdo’s dog barked frantically from his bed downstairs. The tremor shook the walls of Taigh-Faire violently. Cutlery toppled and smashed in the kitchen. I heard the mirror in the hallway come free of its nail, and splinter as it hit the floor. Tiles slid off the roof, and landed with distinct thumps in the garden outside.
My head began to ache.
The rumbling stopped as quickly as it had begun, and in the aftermath I heard Luke, shouting. ‘Ma!’ He yelled, his voice thick with sleep and fear.
I went to him, as did Rhoda, and we both soothed him as he shook under his blankets.
‘What was it?’ Rhoda said, looking confused and disoriented.
I frowned. I could see a strange glow coming from behind Luke’s curtains. It was too early for dawn. I rose, and felt that familiar pounding begin to hammer at my skull, that harbinger of change that meant something on the Island was waking up.
Dry-mouthed, my knee joints swollen and painful, I shuffled to the window, pulled back the curtains.
And saw the Island in the bay, from which, a sparkling column of light shot up into the sky, piercing the night with an otherworldly glow, and I took this for a sign. A clarion call.
This light was for me. It was coming from inside the trees, from the centre of the Island, from roughly the same place as the final cairn.
Years ago, I had taken part in a ritual, an ancient, age-honoured ritual that I had never completed.
Now, it was time.
To finish what I had started.
‘But where are you going?’ Luke asked, as I unlatched the door to the cupboard under the stairs and began shifting boxes out of the space in front of the cellar door.
I didn’t answer until the small, wooden hatch was revealed. The flashlight hung on its nail next to it as always.
‘Are you going back?’ He said, and his eyes were wide, and afraid. Rhoda stood behind him, rubbing his back in a distracted, soothing gesture. ‘Back there?’
I nodded. My head throbbed and ached. I still had hooks in me, after all these years. There were still threads, pulling me along.
‘But Ma, I love you! You can’t!’ Luke was beside himself, distraught at the idea of losing yet another parent.
I gathered him up in a tight hug, marveling at how tall he’d gotten. I remembered carrying him as a small, frightened little boy. I remembered how fiercely protective of him I’d always felt. How I’d felt, even when we first met, as if I’d known him a long time. He was precious to me, so precious.
And yet, the Island called.
And I had no choice but to answer.
I pointed to the ground, then, in the same way I gestured to Murdo’s dog when we went walking. Luke knew what that gesture meant. It meant ‘stay put.’
‘But, Ma…’
I jabbed my finger downwards again, to make my point. I was deadly serious. I did not want him coming after me, because I had no idea what it was that I was walking into.
Rhoda put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I'll look after him.’ And I knew she would. She was old, but strong. A survivor, like we all were.
I smiled, then, taking in my family. My surrogate son, my surrogate mother. Our dog. A tight little unit. A community all of my own.
I turned my back on them, feeling sick, and cold, and yet strangely, horribly excited.
Because there was an end in
sight, I could feel it.
I made for the tunnel beneath the house.
57. Beneath
I felt the familiar tilt as the tunnel floor sloped down beneath the bay. I tried not to think of the tons of sand and water and rock above my head, bearing down. This was the first time I had been here in a long, long while. There were easier ways to get onto the Island if I needed to, ways that didn’t involve dragging my sore, aching body up a series of iron rungs hammered into a rock face, and so I had neglected this route.
But now, it felt right that I should be here.
I walked, and after what felt like an eternity, I came upon the skeleton of the giant deer. Still there, after all those years. I almost impaled myself on its antlers, but stopped myself just in time. The tunnel must branch away just beyond the deer, I suddenly thought. I knew it hadn’t come to be here from the Island, it wasn’t possible. It was too large, and could never have used the ladder to climb into the cave at the end of the tunnel. It must have come from somewhere else, a second passageway, perhaps, branching out from this one. I lowered myself slowly beneath the antlers, and then paused, gathered myself. From here on in, I needed to be extra vigilant. If Matthew and I had both missed the second tunnel and walked right past it the first time, it must be well hidden. I extended both arms, and used them to carefully feel the tunnel walls on either side of me as I walked, stooped like a cripple, sweeping my hands up and down and feeling for anomalies in the rock.
And, because I was searching for it this time, and because the timing was right, and because the Island had decided it would be that way, I came to it easily. My left hand trailed across the stone, and then suddenly met air. In torchlight, it would have been overlooked as a shadow, or an irregularity in the rock, which is why Matthew and I had both missed it. It was not a shadow, however, but a wide cleft, far wider at the top than it was at the bottom, easily wide enough for a giant antlered deer to fit through, but still somehow perfectly hidden, barely perceptible unless you were looking for it. No breeze came up through the fork, and there was no sense of space changing, or a shift in depth or breadth or anything noticeable at all except by touch, by absence of rock.
