“Then you’ll take us?”
“Nae today. Today we gather tangle before the tide takes it back,” he said, referring to the seaweed washed up by the storm.
“Yes, today!” I said hotly. “We must get there today!” I had waited time enough and could not endure a moment longer. The vehemence of my response made MacGregor break stride. He stared intently at us, peculiar strangers who would make such demands of him.
Lily stepped forward and touched his arm. Her silent gaunt face and teary eyes were more persuasive than my temper, for his friends whispered among themselves.
“Go on, Doughall, do this boon for your granny. We’ll nae be missing what you would have gathered anyway, such a wee bit it’d make nae difference.”
After a moment, MacGregor good-naturedly cursed his friends, then led us to his boat.
Despite the forced nature of our coming aboard, MacGregor spoke easily the entire trip. He never asked what called us so urgently to the Mainland. He simply talked about the sea: miraculous accounts of mermaids and mermen, the Fin Folk, and the seal people who could shed their fur skins to walk the shore as humans.
I had hoped he would sail us to the top of the Mainland to the town of Brough Head. The tiny nameless island I wanted, the island where my father had created then destroyed my mate, was about five miles off Brough Head into the Eynhallow Sound, not on any map and so far west as to be nearly in the ocean. On this point MacGregor was firm.
“As long as I’m on the Mainland, I have business I can do in Orphir,” he said, “so I’m puttin’ ashore at the bottom.”
By now the sky was dark again and the water white-capped and choppy; at twice more the distance, Eynhallow would take MacGregor out of the natural harbor of Scapa Flow into the Atlantic, so I asked no more of him. From Orphir, it was about fifteen miles overland to Brough Head. What were fifteen miles and another day?
When we landed, MacGregor said, “Whenever you’re ready to go back, I’m in Orphir most Wednesdays in the morning. Just ask for me at the market.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very generous.”
“Nae at all. I’m rightly in for two favors, I suppose,” he said with a wink. “There are two of you. And neither one of you murdered my granny.”
December 30
“Come, let me show you something.”
Yesterday, when Orphir was some miles behind us, I led Lily onto the strip of land between the Loch of Harray and the Loch of Stenness and from which both lakes can be seen at once. With the dark sky and heavy air, one might believe the water could rise up from either side to engulf us.
“Do you see the standing stones?” I asked Lily. “I discovered them during my first journey here. There are two separate sets.” Their pattern became clearer the closer we walked. “The four thin stones are the Stones of Stenness,” I said. “The larger group that forms the big circle is the Ring of Brodgar. It’s believed that the ancients built the Stones of Stenness as a temple to the moon and the Ring of Brodgar as a temple to the sun.”
I brought Lily to the Stones of Stenness. Their sharp angular surfaces against the leaden sky hinted of menace, as if the tallest of them at five meters could call down demons on a day such as this.
“Stand here,” I said, placing her in the middle.
“Why?” she asked with suspicion.
At first, I thought this remembered ritual was well suited to a woman’s sentiments and hoped it might work to soften Lily—that if I first gave her a wedding of sorts, it might ensure her giving me my wedding night. Now, looking at her face implacable in the gray light, I remembered that she had already had a wedding.
“Couples pledge their faithfulness here,” I continued, knowing it was now too late to stop. “The woman stands within Stenness, the man in Brodgar, and each swears an oath of fidelity. Then they come together at that stone there fallen out of the circle,” I said, pointing, “called the Stone of Odin. There is a hole that pierces it. The lovers join hands through the hole and so seal their oath, which is considered binding to the death.”
Lily’s voice was soft: “We are not lovers, Victor.”
“Have you not promised me?”
I am not my words. My limbs began to tremble—unaccountably, because for once I felt no anger.
“What would you have me do?” she asked.
I told her what to say, believing that she had to be told, that such words were as alien to her nature as they were to mine. Then I left her within the uneven square of Stenness, prisoner within the four knifelike thrusts.
The Ring of Brodgar where I was to stand formed a huge circle nearly fifty meters across. It was surrounded by a moat, dry now, carved from the bedrock. Of the dozens of stones worn round with wear, only half still stood upright.
I reached the center of the ring and nodded to Lily as a signal that we might speak in unison what I had composed while on MacGregor’s boat. Because I thought it was what a woman wanted to hear, I used once more that word Biddy Josephs first used: “I give myself to you and take you to be mine. I will love you and no other, now and for always.”
What spells did Lily chant instead? For, although she spoke, there was no concurrence between the movement of her lips and the words I had bid her say.
Slowly we walked toward each other, the fallen stone of Odin between us. Kneeling, I thrust my hand through the hole. From the other side Lily’s hand, small and cold, slipped into mine, then quickly pulled away.
We stood up and faced each other over the stone. Behind her a single fork of lightning cleaved the sky. No thunder sounded. Without speaking, Lily pointed to Mirabella’s necklace. I removed it from my wrist and fastened the little chain of charms round Lily’s throat.
It did not matter whether Lily had echoed my words or not.
I knew we were both liars.
December 31
It is nearly midnight. The hour hovers between the old year and the new, in that precise moment when there is no moment, when time ceases and no man can be born or die.
I have arranged for us to be taken tomorrow to the nameless bit of rock where my father set up his laboratory. I had almost given up finding someone who would take us there. It was not that anyone recognized me from ten years ago. I had hid myself while following my father, swimming to the rock during the night and keeping to its far side when “deliveries” were rowed in. No, it was the island itself that frightened them. No seal rests, no bird roosts, no boat lands there. For more than ten years the rock has lain foul in the water, as if the whole sea could not wash it clean. It is there I go, this outcropping of Hell, on the promise of being saved and given back a life I never had.
Walton’s journal:
He is close, too close for words, he rushes toward me and no longer waits to be pursued. The wind on my face is his breath; the dark sky overhead, his murderous glance. I have waited in anticipation and now I wait in fear. He is not where I expected. He is behind me now. I have overreached my mark and now the beast is at my back.
January 1
The island sits like a jagged skull emerging from black water: steep sides, cavelike depressions for eyes and nose, a strip of stony beach for a toothy grin. Above us, birds screeched warning. A tern, then a bonxie dived straight down at us. We nearly capsized the boat dodging to avoid them. The captain sailed the boat closer to the island, and the birds fell back as if giving us up for lost.
Fresh blood smeared the notes I forced on the captain. The notes were from his creditors: he was the only one in town who would take us here, and threatening his creditors the only payment he would accept. A few debts had been released unwillingly, as the blood testified. The captain’s eyes shifted from water to sky to jagged rock; all the while he licked his lips. He had been drunk when he agreed to take us last night and drunker still this morning; however, the nearer our destination, the more sober he grew.
Lily pointed to the skull.
“Is the place feared because of its shape?” she asked.
The man’s anger was sudden. “Are we fools to you?” he snapped.
I had to press him for the story, what the villagers thought had happened there.
Devoid of most life, the island had never been considered more than just a reference point when landing on the Mainland Orkney. Then, ten years ago, a foreigner arrived and rented one of its huts. The stranger paid well to ensure his privacy.
Huge crates from England and the Continent arrived, reeking of death and decomposition. The area’s few farm animals began to disappear; others were found mutilated. Every scoundrel who went missing was believed to be on the island, dying or already dead, though none would put a name to it. Unnerved by the odors and by the sights half-glimpsed through the window at night, the island’s few inhabitants left. Soon the stranger’s hired brutes would only pull their boat close to shore, throw those increasingly dreadful items referred to as “supplies” onto the sand, and row away.
The town was poised between terror and outrage. Unable to confront the man, the people left the pub and rallied round a newly arrived shipment. Our captain himself had been present that day and was one of those who had favored opening the crate. He remembered eyeing the crushed bottom corner that bore a dark seeping blotch, remembered hearing a rustle from within, a faint scratch at the boards.
He wanted to open the crate. He truly did.
“In the end nae one o’ us would take a hand to it.” He trimmed the sails so that we drew parallel to the island. “For all the liquor in us, we were just too scared.”
One night, fishermen returning late saw the stranger in a skiff a distance from shore. The stranger waited till the clouds overspread the moon, then dumped large bundles into the water. When the deed was reported, a group of men at last sailed out. They were too late: he had vanished.
“And inside the hut?” Lily asked. “What did they find inside the hut?”
“An awful gory mess. The worst had been cleaned up, which only made you wonder what had been there before.” Two days later, a head washed up with the tide. It was badly decomposed. From its long strings of hair it was presumed to be a woman’s.
I pulled my cloak closer against the grisly tale. Though I myself had witnessed much of this, the story was freshly grim when told from the outside.
“You heard no more of the stranger?”
“Nae a word,” said the captain. “Till you.”
With a touch, he let the sail fall slack. We bobbed on the forbidding water. All was silent but for the wild cries of the birds in the distance.
“I do nae trust a man whose face I can nae see.” Sweat broke out on his forehead and he wiped it away. “What’s your business here?”
“You would not wish to know,” Lily answered.
His eyes flicked to her. “What is yours?”
She smiled with thin, silent lips.
At last the captain let the sail fill with wind and landed us.
Now his boat grows ever distant as I sit writing this entry. Beside me on the stony beach are our few provisions: food, water, and large blocks of peat, as the island is treeless and has only bushes for kindling. On the sand, pulled up beyond the tide, is a dinghy and oars for our return trip.
Although I have had a single feverish thought the last days of this journey, I am now reluctant to go up and enter the hut. Lily said that being here will free me of the past and give me back my stolen life.
Will it? Am I not yet a man? I am already a fool. I have a fool’s mind, a fool’s heart, to do what I fear, what I know is doomed, is damned. More than appetite spurs me now. Over these last days I have seen the gentleness in Lily’s expression change into a death’s-head grin, but I am caught in a web. Struggle only entangles me, so I lie still and wait for the spider.
Later
When I at last put down my pen, gathered the provisions, and climbed the hill, I found that Lily had passed by the two stone huts closest to the trail and gone on to the third. There the door canted inward, attached at one rusted hinge. The thatched roof had collapsed and made a rotting veil that obscured the entrance to the inner room, which my father had made his laboratory. No furniture, no chemical apparatus, not the tiniest shard of glass from a broken vial remained to indicate his presence.
I crossed the threshold. A chill brushed me like dank breath.
“Lily?”
“In here.”
Unerringly she had found the right hut. Unerringly she had found the right room. I swept aside the fall of thatch.
Inside, it was bare except for a stone block that was long enough and wide enough to hold a creature that matched me in size. Now Lily lay there, stretched out like a corpse awaiting burial, arms at her sides, eyelids lowered. With her pale shadowed skin and sunken cheeks, her death was not difficult to imagine, and I gasped. She laughed softly at the sound.
Turning away, unable to touch her so soon, I laid the peat in the hearth, then grabbed a fistful of thatch to help the blocks catch fire.
“This is like a huge altar,” Lily said. “And I am the sacrifice. Or perhaps she was. She’s still here; did you know that? I can feel her. We share a close kinship, my sister and I. Each of us is your bride.”
“She was never my bride.” Striking the flint, I remembered the scarred mass that had been so like me; remembered the pulpy face that already held anguish and anger before it had taken its first breath. My trembling hand betrayed my hatred of ugliness. “I did not want her. I only wanted not to be alone.”
“And now it is different?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at Lily, wondering how that might be possible.
She leaned on her elbow and half-rose. “Am I like her?” she asked coquettishly, a girl teasing a suitor. “Am I unnatural?”
“No!” The word came too quickly and she laughed again. “It was never a woman,” I said. I stepped close to the block of stone. “It was never alive.”
“And yet she is here. What would have given her life is still here, still waiting for the body she would possess. Perhaps I should let her take mine.”
Lily lay back down and gave herself up to the darkness. She took my hand where its thick scar bound it to my wrist. She slipped my hand under her jacket and shirt and, sighing, held my hand against her cold breast. Although its weight and fullness surprised me, I could number her ribs with my fingertips; I could feel her heart beat wildly beneath my palm.
“She is in this room,” Lily said. “I can feel her.”
“Do not speak of such things,” I whispered, hoarse with desire.
After so much waiting, fulfillment seemed suddenly too soon. Should I make tea first? Should we stroll the island like honeymooners, coyly postponing the bridal bed? Was there a way to pretend that Lily did not lie on a stone block once washed in blood?
We had both come here, if not for the same reason, then to perform the same act and, I now saw, to perform it quickly. Stretching out beside her on the stone, I felt what any oaf must feel in knowing he is too big, too clumsy, too ugly. Then I felt a greater torment. I looked at my hand and wondered what women it had touched during its first, its natural, life. I felt a tingling throb in my lips and wondered whose mouths they had once covered with kisses.
Did she understand?
She reached up to loosen my shirt.
“You have never let yourself be seen before, have you?” she said, misinterpreting my hesitation. “Do not worry. That day at the farmhouse when you bathed, I spied on you from the window.”
“And that night you refused me.”
She shook her head and uncannily echoed my thoughts: “I was made not for such pastoral settings, but for this.”
She spoke dispassionately even as she half-rose at my side to bare each part of me for her inspection. Like a seamstress examining a bolt of cloth, she fingered the dramatic changes in skin texture where each limb was joined to my torso. She found on me red hair and black, brown hair and blond; a section of skin, too, curiously hairless and as smooth as a woman’s. She taste
d my every scar and counted each stitch that held me together.
I lay unprotesting, each touch bringing me exquisite pleasure and impossible pain. If only I had seen the smallest kindness in her face, if only there had not been such hunger … She stripped me in every way possible, herself remaining protected from revelation of her own soul.
I pushed aside her clothes and saw what I had only felt before: her breasts full, distended, a harsh contrast to the boniness of her frame. The diseased bloat of her stomach reminded me that the worm was with us still. The unpleasant image sent through me a powerful yet enervating thrill. Again reading my thoughts, Lily leaned over and whispered, “She is here, too.”
“No, do not speak.”
There would be no words of endearment, neither truth nor lie. I knew everything she would not say; I knew everything I feared she might. So I closed her mouth, covered it with mine, held her, and stroked in memory the soft body I had not touched before, as Lily ran along the cliffs at Tarkenville, and again, draped in purple silk at the party, as she took my arm in hers and led me into the ballroom. Once she had been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was no longer beautiful, but she was mine.
The night of the party she had tossed her head and offered the sweet length of her throat to my greedy sight. Now she leaned down over me and offered it to my lips. I kissed it and felt its sweetness reduced to sharp ridges. I tasted in its hollow dirt and salt. I smelled sweat, but oh, too, I smelled the remembered scent of lavender. If I closed my eyes, she might be beautiful once again.
“Take me now,” she whispered.
Humanity and inhumanity met and joined in us; I did not know which would be more changed for it.
The remembered smell of corruption choked me, and I opened my eyes. Like a graven funerary ornament, Lily was a stone angel kneeling above me, her eyes fixed at a spot beyond me. What was she thinking, what was she feeling? From every corner she gathered in the darkness. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugged the darkness close, and breathed it in like smoke.
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