Fionn handed over the money. ‘Thanks.’
The shopkeeper shook his head as he slid the bag towards him. ‘On the house, lad.’
Fionn glanced at the crumpled fiver still in his fist. ‘Are you sure?’
‘For the Storm Keeper.’ The shopkeeper winked. ‘Tell him Donal sends his best.’
‘I will,’ said Fionn, tucking the strange nickname in the back of his mind and the paper bag under his arm. When he turned around, the red-haired man was staring at him, a magazine dangling limply in his hands. Fionn kept his gaze on his feet, hoping he hadn’t heard what Donal had said about him. He felt guilty enough by association.
‘You’re just like him, you know,’ Donal called after him. ‘It’s uncanny. I had to do a double take when you first came in.’
Fionn paused in the doorway.
‘Your dad, I mean,’ said Donal, his voice a little thicker than before. ‘He went to school with my son. That’s a long time ago now. Feels much shorter somehow.’ He shook his head, like the melancholy was a hat he could remove. ‘It must be wonderful for Malachy to see him again in you …’
Fionn didn’t wait to hear the rest. He waved a hasty goodbye, ignoring the crushed flowers on the way out, and not noticing when they resprouted along the headland on his way home. He didn’t want to think about his father – how they had the same eyes and the same face and the same nose.
How they had never got to meet.
Fionn had seen the photographs, had marvelled at their sameness as he grew. But he didn’t want to be a stand-in for his father. He just wanted to be Fionn. More than that, he wanted his father to be unchained from the lifeboat at the bottom of the sea and stand in for himself. He wanted it so badly it rocked him to sleep most nights and woke him up most mornings. All his life, it had dwelled in the sliver between his soul and his heart – where desire dissolved into impossibility.
When he got back to the cottage, Fionn stowed the tea bags beside the kettle, where another full box leered back at him. In the sitting room, he sank into his grandfather’s chair and reopened the encyclopedia. The words swam off the page as his eyes glazed over, thoughts of the wish he’d make crawling out of his head and sitting on his chest.
Chapter Four
THE WOMAN WHO FOUGHT THE SEA
Just after midnight, Fionn sat bolt upright in bed with a scream trapped in his throat. He wiped his brow, his gaze travelling the length of the shoebox he and Tara were sharing. Moonlight seeped in through a crack in the curtains, casting strange shadows across the walls.
Tara sighed and turned over in her bed. Fionn knew she hadn’t found the enchanted Sea Cave earlier, but whatever she did get up to had kept her away for most of the day.
We’re going to try again tomorrow. That’s the thing about adventures, Fionny. They take a bit of time.
This time, Fionn hadn’t asked if he could go with her. He knew she would say no. She was still stewing about the doll thing. Plus, the fact remained: he was afraid of the sea. And now everyone knew it.
It needled him that Tara was right. He was not brave. He didn’t know how to be brave. Whenever he watched The Lord of the Rings, he imagined himself as a lone rider galloping away from a battle while all the other characters were marching into it. When everyone else was in Helm’s Deep, he’d be back in the Shire, making a sandwich.
Even so, he couldn’t stop thinking of the Sea Cave. If there really was a wish hidden somewhere on the island, would he have enough courage to go and get it? What if he met the same fate as his father? He had fallen asleep imagining himself crawling inside it, through seaweed and seafoam, shouting his wish at the top of his lungs. It was only when the dream turned to visions of a cave swallowing him up like a mouth, that he lurched wide-eyed from his sleep.
He slipped out of bed and into the hallway, trailing his fingers along the shelves of candles as his grandfather’s snores echoed through the little cottage.
In the sitting room, Fionn was surprised to find the giant candle still blazing on the mantelpiece. It was a fire hazard, surely, and yet, considering the way the wind was squeezing itself through the cracks in the walls and howling down the chimney like a banshee, the candle was probably the least of this place’s problems. He watched the flame for longer than he intended to. The sea settled in the air around him, and Fionn opened his mouth and tasted a storm on his tongue.
His gaze was drawn to a shelf tucked away in the corner of the room, where a small, dark blue candle was peeking out from behind a lopsided wax snowflake. It was round and squat, like a piece of fruit, with a silver thread zigzagging through the centre.
The label glinted at him in the dimness.
Evelyn, it said.
Fionn climbed on to his grandfather’s chair and plucked the candle from the shelf. Why would he name a candle after his mother? And why was it hidden away in the furthest corner of the cottage?
He traced the silver streak with the pad of his thumb as he lifted the wick to his nose. There was no smell. He hopped off the chair and found a box of matches at the end of the mantelpiece. He lit the wick and the flame sparked with a faint whoosh. The scent enveloped him: hurried strides across damp earth, grass collecting between toes, the bite of an unforgiving wind. And there beneath the rest of it, two different kinds of salt: warm teardrops in a freezing ocean.
What on earth …?
Fionn held the burning candle in his hand until his curiosity yawned and stretched itself into action. A rogue breeze had slipped underneath the front door and was curling around him.
It pressed itself against his back.
Walk, something inside him said.
He waded out into the night.
This way.
The air shimmered as he pushed through it, the wind shoving harder until he was running so fast his feet were barely touching the ground. The flowers shrank into the earth around him and the grass grew until it brushed his ankles. He didn’t notice his bare feet scraping on the rough earth, or the cold seeping through his pyjama bottoms. He followed the moon with the flame in his hand and the wind at his back as the island swept by him.
He stumbled past sleepy houses and little cars, the secondary school and the corner shop and the pub. The island was beautiful dappled in moonlight. It looked like a black and white painting, punctured with amber flecks, where stragglers were still awake, reading or watching television. They winked in and out as Arranmore rose and disappeared above him, and a new one crept up from the ground.
When the wind finally settled, Fionn hovered on the edge of the beach and watched the sea get angry. The waves swelled, spraying the pier with foam as thunder rumbled through storm clouds so dark they ate the stars.
There was a girl standing in the middle of the sea. The fractured moonlight danced on the crown of her head, and dark hair tumbled down her back, tangling and swaying like ropes.
Fionn hopped over the wall and ran on to the beach, panic guttering in his throat.
‘Tara!’
The wind took the name from him and gobbled it up.
‘Tara!’ She was so far in, he didn’t know if she could wade back out again. Not with the waves tugging at her elbows. She started flailing her arms, like she was trying to beat up the sea with her fists. The clouds swirled lower, static crackling along their underbellies as the thunder growled like an angry bear.
Fionn raced to the edge of the beach, where it curved into the sea in a peninsula. The candle was still clamped in his fist, the flame fighting the wind the way his sister was fighting the sea. The wax was melting over his knuckles but he didn’t feel it.
When he reached the end of the peninsula, the waves dipped and Fionn saw a bump protruding from the girl’s stomach.
He looked at her face. More closely, this time.
‘Mam?’ This time, the storm didn’t steal the name. It spluttered out all on its own.
Fionn’s mother was screaming at the sea. The sky was roaring back.
‘Mam!’ Fionn wave
d the candle in the air, like a flare. ‘Mam! Come back!’
A wave crashed against her and she fell backwards, a hand cupping her swollen belly. She scrambled to get back up but another one washed over her head, burying her from view.
Fionn launched himself into the water. The waves spat in his eyes and tangled salt in his hair, pushing him back to shore. The harder he tried to get to his mother, the harder the ocean fought back.
And then from the darkness came a flash of pale skin and long limbs. Fionn’s grandfather appeared as if from nowhere, hurtling across the strand like an Olympic athlete and flinging himself into the sea head first.
He resurfaced ten strides later, his bald head shiny with droplets. He seemed so much younger now, so agile and fearless. The wind didn’t steal his warnings the way they had taken Fionn’s – they tornadoed round and round, as loud and stubborn as a ship’s horn.
‘Evelyn!’ He yelled, his arm looping around her as he tugged her backwards. ‘Come out of there before you drown, Evie!’
Fionn tried to wade towards them but the sea danced around him in a prison of salt and brine until he lost his balance. He dropped the candle and the flame went out.
The island inhaled.
Fionn’s grandfather disappeared and took his mother with him. The tide sank and the clouds evaporated into a star-laden night. Without the clash and clamour of a troubled sky, Fionn could hear his heartbeat in his ears. He remembered to be afraid, and once he did, the fear climbed down his throat and stole his breath.
He was in the sea! And the sea was going to drown him! He stumbled backwards and tripped on a rock, his body twisting as he fell. He landed face first in the ocean and inhaled a lungful of seawater. A wave rolled over him. And then another.
Come out of there before you drown, Fionn!
It wasn’t his grandfather’s voice now; it was his own.
Fionn dragged himself from the water, spluttering and vomiting on to the sand. He crouched there, shaking and panting, until the stars in his vision winked out. Then he rolled on to his back and stared out at the empty sea. It was calmer than he had ever seen it, the sky above a star-speckled obsidian.
He got to his feet. He had only been underneath the water for a few seconds, but the sea had made the most of it. He was sopping wet from head to toe. Crystals of salt were stuck to his eyelashes and streaks of seaweed had woven themselves into his hair.
He trudged home, wincing from the pain in his feet.
Slowly, slowly, the world reset itself.
He did his best not to think about the island as it watched him go by. What it had taken from his family all those years ago. Why his mother had waded into the sea and screamed at it like that.
Where was she now? Was she there, or here?
Where was his grandfather? Swimming underneath the tide like a fish or at home in bed where Fionn had left him?
Where am I?
In the cottage, Fionn peeled off his wet pyjamas and changed into new ones. He dried his hair with a tea towel in the little hallway outside his grandfather’s bedroom, listening to the steady rise and fall of his snores. How could he have been in two places at once? Fionn couldn’t wrap his tired brain around it.
In the kitchen, he made himself a cup of tea, then took it through to the sitting room where he watched the candle on the mantelpiece with a new sliver of mistrust. Why was it lit? And what was it doing to him? He peered around the dusky room, half expecting a ghost to unfold from the patchwork chair. It was stupid to leave a candle burning at night. Hadn’t anyone ever told his grandfather that?
This thing could kill us all.
Fionn set his mug down.
Then he stood in front of the fireplace and blew the candle out.
It exhaled like a sleeping giant and pushed a breeze through the cottage that rattled the windowpanes. Fionn felt it on his ankles as he sank into his grandfather’s chair.
There. That’s better.
Exhaustion swept over him as the tea settled into his bones. Sleep dragged him to a dark place, where he forgot his name and the island along with it, until –
‘HELP ME!’
Fionn jerked awake to the sound of his grandfather shouting the walls down, his fingers scrabbling to light the candle on the mantelpiece. Spittle was gathering at the sides of his mouth and his breath was stuttering out of him in laboured gasps.
‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!’ he shouted, his fingers slipping and sliding as another match snapped in half.
Fionn sprang to his feet and grabbed the matches from his grandfather’s shaking hands. He lit the candle on the first strike. The flame hissed as it climbed towards the ceiling, raging and thrashing as if it was angry with him for blowing it out. The darkness broke apart and flecks of dust floated around Fionn’s surprised face.
He shuffled backwards. He was afraid of his grandfather, wild-eyed and unkempt in his mismatched pyjamas. He was so much frailer than the man Fionn had seen in the ocean, dipping and diving like a fish. He towered over him now, the light bleeding back into his eyes as he took Fionn by the shoulders and pulled him close.
‘I will tell you this once and once only, lad. As long as you live here in this house, as long as you live on this island, as long as you draw breath and pump blood around your body, you are never, ever, to touch that candle again.’ He brought his nose right up to Fionn’s, two sides of the same coin staring into the same deep blue eyes. ‘Do you understand?’
Fionn could feel his pulse in the tips of his ears. ‘I understand.’
His grandfather turned and stalked out of the room like a storm cloud, his footsteps thundering back to his bedroom where he slammed the door behind him. Fionn froze in the middle of the sitting room, surrounded by hundreds of candles that peered over him judgementally.
His sister stood across from him in her Hogwarts pyjamas, her arms folded across her chest. ‘I told you never to touch that candle, Fionny.’
Fionn wanted to launch himself across the room and shake her and shake her and shake her until all of her meanness fell out.
He swallowed the quiver in his throat. ‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Oh,’ she said, shrugging her way back into the darkness. ‘Well, I meant to.’
‘You didn’t tell me anything!’ Fionn called after her, but she was already gone.
In the seething silence, Fionn’s mind started to whirr. The truth was unavoidable now – he had seen it. He had lived it. Arranmore was full of secrets.
The island was full of impossibility.
Be brave.
The island had magic.
This is your adventure.
And he was going to find a way to use it.
Chapter Five
THE SHRIEKING SKY
The following afternoon, Fionn woke to find his sister had left without him again. After a lonely breakfast of marmalade-smothered toast and milky tea, he found his grandfather stirring a pot of melted wax in the back garden. It was little more than a patch of land wedged between an old wooden shed, a couple of rusty bicycles and some hundred-or-so overgrown plants, but there was something oddly cosy about it.
The sun peered over his grandfather, sprinkling its rays along the mottled workbench and glinting off the back of his bald head.
‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ he said, without looking up from the wax. ‘For a while there, I thought you were nocturnal.’
Fionn watched him work, lulled by the steady movement of his arm as he stirred. Round and round the stick went, back and forth.
‘I haven’t slept that long in ages.’
‘That’ll happen here,’ said his grandfather, his eyes narrowed in concentration. ‘Sometimes.’
Fionn cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry about last night. For blowing out the candle above the fireplace. I didn’t realise it was so important …’
This was not so much an apology, but a question.
‘I know.’
His grandfather’s response was not so much an
answer but a door closing on the topic.
‘Do we have any bandages? My feet are killing me.’
His grandfather kept stirring, the wax turning milky and smooth as the last chippings melted away. ‘I’ll have a look once I’ve finished this.’
Fionn stalled, his hands dug into the pockets of his jeans. He was waiting for his grandfather to look up at him. When he didn’t, Fionn said, ‘Don’t you want to know what happened to my feet?’
His grandfather reduced the flame on the burner but didn’t shift his gaze from the wax. Like he was afraid something might happen if he did.
‘I expect you cut them when you went out last night.’
Fionn pressed his lips together. He was searching for something beyond the quiet hiss of flame, the distant trilling of a bluebird – the perfect ordinariness of this moment. He could sense the whisper of magic writhing underneath it but he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from or what it would turn this candle into once it was sitting on one of his grandfather’s shelves.
‘Aren’t you wondering where I went?’
‘Do you want to tell me where you went?’ his grandfather said, gently shaking the pot, the wax lapping lazily against the sides.
‘I want you to ask.’ What Fionn really meant was, I want you to care.
His grandfather removed his horn-rimmed glasses and slid them on to his head. He looked at Fionn.
‘I know where you went.’
Fionn swallowed. ‘Oh.’
‘I know when you went, I should say.’ He drummed his fingers along the workbench, a frown tugging at his mouth. ‘And I’m sorry, Fionn. I didn’t think you’d burn that candle. I expected you might try one. But not that one. I don’t even know where you found it,’ he said, still tapping. ‘I knew you wouldn’t ask first though. That I was sure of.’
Fionn knew he should have said sorry then, for taking something without asking, for burning it up and dropping it in the sea, but this moment was so much bigger than that, so instead he said, ‘I saw you last night down by the beach. But you were here. You were asleep. And I saw my mam in the sea. But she’s back in Dublin in that place.’
The Storm Keeper's Island Page 4
