The Island House

by Posie Graeme-Evans

  “. . . and four hundred and thirty-seven. Thank you, God, whoever you are.”

  Freya stumbled around the last curve, past the twisted old rowan. Pausing to let her breathing settle, she hitched the pack higher and flexed her right arm—stiff from pulling the cart. There was the house, cold and dark and empty. Forlorn; that made two of them.

  A bath. Whisky! Who cared if it wasn’t even lunchtime; she didn’t. Only a few steps now, four hundred and thirty-eight, nine, four hundred and forty. . . . So, Dad, I need to find where the crucifix came from. You have to help me, you owe me that—at least. Four hundred and forty-one, two, three . . .

  She hurried into the house from the rain. What a relief it was to wipe her face and put her burdens down. She’d take out the books and . . . her present, later.

  Now, if she wanted that bath, she had to make the stove fire up. Paper, dry heather, peat, flame—simple things, simple tasks, the remedy for confusion.

  It was quiet inside Compline. Thick walls stopped most sound, and there was only the rain—fingers on the glass, pat, pat, pat—as Freya struck a match and the paper caught. Soon the firebox would heat up, and so would the kitchen. She pumped water to fill the pipes at the back of the range. Something was working, and that was a relief. Now for the whisky.

  Freya put the empty glass on a stool beside the bath, but it wasn’t until she’d eased herself very, very slowly into the scalding water—gasping as her body flushed scarlet from toes to collarbones—that she saw why her father had bothered to build the dais that supported the tub. Fully relaxed, she leaned back and found her face at the perfect angle, the perfect height, to inspect the green mound that stood like a sentinel behind the house.

  The hill—smooth, flat-topped, and symmetrical—was gracefully framed within a deep, single window set in the thickness of the wall. Rain blurred the image but only in the pleasing way of an Impressionist painting seen too close.

  Natural optimism bobbed up as Freya soaped the length of her body. All the nonsense she’d experienced had to have a reasonable explanation, and she was definitely going to find it. The things around her—the bath, the soap, the water, this house—were all just as real as the cliff; the rest, the visions, had to be about the work of an overwrought imagination and jet lag; sometimes that lasted for a week, and she’d been here only a couple of days. What other explanation could there be?

  Humming, Freya pulled the plug, stood up, and saw the side of a building through the glass. She’d not noticed it before. Was that a bell tower? Curious, she slung a leg over the side of the bath and padded toward the window. The rain was heavier, streaming down the pane, when she got there, and whatever she’d seen the moment before was no longer visible.

  Freya was perplexed. The only structures on the island were the house, the barn behind it, and the ruins. There was nothing else. Was there? Her feet were getting cold on the slate floor and, looking down, she glimpsed her own nakedness. Nauseated with a sense of sin solid as a blow, Freya wrenched a towel from a chair and covered her torso, her thighs, with trembling hands.

  Mortal sin! To uncover nakedness, even one’s own, was to slip into the Devil’s waiting hands. She would need penance, much penance, to expunge this evil. Holy Mary, help me! Dress and hurry—no, run—to the church. And she would eat nothing until she had been confessed of this heinous breach of her vows. It would be little enough to offer to God in apology for offending Him.

  Freya opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor of the bathroom. Naked. Shivering.

  She sat up. Stood. And though her heart squeezed against her ribs like something captive, anger spread from her gut to her head so fast, sweat burst out on her face.

  Snatching up clothes, Freya pulled them on so fast she ripped the neck of the T-shirt.

  “No more jokes!”

  She slammed the bathroom door with a crash and marched to the kitchen. She was angry because she was frightened; she understood that, of course. Schizophrenics experienced delusions, saw visions, saw God, thought they were God, didn’t they? Was that it? Was she becoming schizoid? Schizophrenia occurred less rarely in women, especially past the teens, but late onset did happen, didn’t it?

  Abruptly Freya dragged a chair close to the stove. Hands between her knees, she rocked back and forth, back and forth. Maybe she should ring home, see if anyone else in the family had had to deal with this stuff—with bipolar or whatever. Was that why he’d left them? Had Michael been mentally ill all those years ago?

  She stared at her watch. It was the wrong time in the Southern Hemisphere—she’d completely freak Elizabeth if she rang in the middle of the night.

  Why, Mum? Oh, you know, just ’cos I’m seeing things at the moment. Was Dad crazy by the way?

  They did say, whoever they might be, that mental illness was the great undiagnosed epidemic in society. Was this what it felt like to be mad?

  “Oh, how would I know? Time to work!”

  It was past midday, that’s what the hands on the old wall clock said. Seated at Michael’s desk in the big room as rain battered the windows, Freya stared at the crucifix. She’d been reluctant to touch it again—had left it in the cotton wool nest—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t look.

  “Who made you?” The Christ stared back at her across the void of time, mute.

  “And you, what about you?” She opened the small lead box and . . . nothing happened. Freya grimaced. As if they had a voice, the manuscript pages begged to be translated. “I know, I know, but I’d be at it for years.” Katherine. Would the librarian help her? She’d be bound to know who read Latin in Portsolly.

  Freya shifted restlessly. It would be logical—and sensible—to invite Katherine to the island to at least look at the manuscript and give her opinion. And she might know about it anyway, since Michael had given her the crucifix. So many questions. Was she, Freya, brave enough to ask Katherine some of them? And did she really want the answers? Now that was the real question.

  She dropped her head into her hands. In the last hour, she’d assembled all the reference cards she could find that mentioned the dig in the stone circle, and she’d located site plans and photographs, especially of the crucifix—to compare to the original. But the more she’d read, the more perplexed she’d become. Just as her father had been. “But it would have been blasphemous, surely, to carve a likeness of Christ that was not perfect in every respect?” It would indeed, Dad. Staring out toward Portsolly, she consciously defocused, waiting for inspiration. Nothing.

  The new gas camping light was excellent on a dark day. Nothing so romantic as a pretty glass shade, but the white glow showed a whole lot more detail in the cavernous space of the undercroft.

  Judging by its iconography, the crucifix was very old. Perhaps there were Byzantine influences in the work, but her father had not thought so; he’d placed it as much older—Celtic, perhaps.

  Freya shook her head. Not Celtic, Dad. But what? Pictish? And yet those enigmatic early inhabitants of this part of the world certainly weren’t Christians. Why would they carve a crucifix?

  Freya examined the surface of the timber panel propped against the wall. Was there really a family resemblance between the popping eyes, the bared teeth of these carved warriors and the face on the wall of Simon’s church? She tapped the surface of the wood very gently. This at least was very, very Pagan.

  So. Christian objects and Pagan artifacts—and all on Findnar. She nodded companionably at the ferocious little men. “Charming, the lot of you. I’m not scared, by the way—just remember that.” And she wasn’t, not of them, anyway.

  It was an interesting piece, though, and Elizabeth would like it. Her mother had a collection of tribal art and votive objects from all over the world on one wall of her living room—this would look well among them.

  Freya laughed. Here she was standing in front of quite possibly one of the more important pieces of carved wood to have survived the very early Middle Ages, and she was thinking about the thing as a desi
gn statement!

  She flexed her neck and her back; she was stiff from sitting after the walk up the hill path. She had a choice—continue to study Michael’s notes or go outside and try to locate where he’d found the crucifix. Physical work to take her mind away from her thoughts.

  She peered at the windows in the front wall of the undercroft. The rain had stopped.

  No contest. Dig.

  >The sky had cleared, and the sun, a little past its zenith, shone down untroubled by cloud.

  Freya was whistling—a cheerful sound in the same key as the soft breeze from the south—as she set off over the meadow behind the house toward the rising ground. She had loaded up the wheelbarrow with her father’s tools from the barn—a shovel, a spade with a narrow blade, several big wooden sieves, paintbrushes small and large, and an assortment of scrapers and digging implements. She also had several of Michael’s red and white ranging poles in various lengths, and two folded PVC tents to protect work in progress. And, since she meant to document everything as meticulously as Michael always had, a digital camera was slung around her neck. Finally there was a thermos of hot tea and sandwiches. Archaeology, like an army, always marched on its stomach, and she was planning on staying outside as long as she could.

  Green and voluptuously smooth, the hill loomed closer as she walked. Freya put the handles of the barrow down and shaded her eyes. Scanning the area slowly, she tried to understand the lay of the land, tried to visualize, so far as she could, what it must have looked like in times past. She didn’t know much about ancient tree cover or historical climate in Northeast Scotland, and until she did some serious research, the nature of past settlement on the island—except for the few pieces of information she’d gathered so far in Katherine’s library—could only be guessed at. Michael had said the ruins were ecclesiastical, and Katherine had called them “the Abbey,” but how old they truly were and from what actual era, she could not say. And Freya didn’t want to consciously speculate because that brought her close, far too close, to the strange visions. But she would not acknowledge the dread, she was here to work, so . . .

  Locating the exact place where someone else has already dug is generally a frustrating process. Freya knew she was lucky that various landmarks—the largest ruins, the house, the hill, and the standing stones—had been noted on Michael’s plans of the area, yet even triangulating between points on these structures, she would be left with a dauntingly wide area in which to dig.

  Archaeology, Michael used to say, was about strong backs, sensitive hands, and good boots. Freya had not done fieldwork for a while—recently, her time had been taken up by writing about fieldwork—but as she trudged off toward the circle, she started to feel excited.

  She absolutely was not a treasure hunter. She was about legitimate research based on her father’s careful notes—research that, if she were clever, would bear directly on the meat of her thesis. Regional Iconography—well, the form of the crucifix was certainly regional, not to say so local that she’d never seen anything like it in any of the artifacts she could remember—And neither had you, Dad; you said that.

  She badly needed other comparable examples from the island, and to be able to place them in their correct time context too. Then she could begin to build her case based on original research into these previously unknown objects—provided she could prove that their form was influenced by the society on Findnar at that time, as opposed to more standard Christian iconography in other societies around the same time.

  Certainly, and you’d like a unicorn with that?

  “Ow!” Because she was not paying attention, Freya’s foot had gone down a hole, and she pitched over the top of the barrow, banging her head on a white stone half-sunk in the surface of the meadow.

  Laugh or cry? Sitting up, she touched her skull gently; already a fat lump was growing under the skin, but her fingers came away clean—no blood.

  Archaeology—dangerous work. Not usually.

  But what had tripped her up? “There you are.” It was quite a large hole, but made by what, exactly? Too big for a rabbit, it might have been a badger, but Freya had no idea if they liked being this far north. “A fox?” Unlikely, considering the number of nesting birds there seemed to be on Findnar.

  Freya knelt down and peered into the opening in the turf. About the size of a child’s head, it was close to the stone and just a bit off to one side. She slid one of the ranging poles inside—it went down more than half a meter until it struck earth; quite a deep hole, then.

  Time was wasting. But as Freya began to get up, the pole slipped from her fingers. Cursing, she reached down into the hole and found it, but when she moved, the pole knocked against something. Not stone, not wood—something else.

  Intrigued, Freya extended her arm into the void and felt around carefully. Something smooth, the shape of an inverted bowl. The cranium of a skull?

  She’d not expected to turn up a skull in the middle of the meadow, but that’s what happened when she enlarged the burrow—and there was more than just a skull.

  As she carefully peeled back damp turf and dug into the ground beneath, it became clear that an entire skeleton lay in the earth. Complete except for the skull, which had been dragged aside by whatever creature had made the burrow, it was small, but not that of a child, since the pelvis suggested an adolescent and the sutures on the top of the skull were still clear. So, a teenager?

  Freya took a set of photographs—close-ups of the front of the skull and wider shots of its position near the rest of the skeleton. Carefully, so as not to disturb the sides of the hole she’d dug, she eased down to squat beside the bones. Lifting the skull gently, she examined the back. “Wow—what happened to you?” There was massive damage there, and some of the bone was missing. Without proper analysis, Freya could not tell how old the skeleton was, but judging from the color—the bone stained almost ocher—it had lain in the sandy earth here for some time. Unlikely, then, to be from a contemporary person—something of a relief; Freya was spooked enough without contemplating a murderer loose on Findnar.

  Examining the skull closely, she decided these might be the remains of a girl, since there were no prominent brow ridges; however, there was no dating evidence visible and no grave goods. And nothing to say what the status of this person might have been.

  “Were you Christian?” Freya was not convinced; the layout of the grave was wrong, for Christian graves faced east, invariably, and this one did not.

  Clambering out, she crouched beside the pit. It was then she noticed something odd. She’d peeled back quite a lot of turf from the site and laid it to one side, and now she saw there was a layer of water-smoothed pebbles in cross section on all sides of the pit. Once the little grave had had a covering of stones just like a white blanket, and she found that touching. The pebbles could only have come from the cove, and that meant a lot of trips up and down the cliff to decorate the resting place of this nameless person.

  On impulse Freya picked an armful of meadow flowers and scattered them around the lip of the excavation. And though she could not replace the covering of pebbles, at least she could mark where the small skeleton lay and cover it with the PVC tent until she returned to gather the bones.

  Standing back to contemplate her work, Freya pulled the thermos out of the barrow and poured a cup of tea. A surprise is always a good beginning, and that was the lure, of course, the anticipation, the hope, that other finds lay waiting for her.

  She threw the dregs of the tea onto the grass. Time for the real task of the day—just what was the best way to approach the site within the ring of standing stones?

  Since the afternoon was fine now, Freya enjoyed the stroll toward the outer circle of stones across the rising ground. In their shadows she put the wheelbarrow down and stared. Close up, the monoliths bulked larger than she’d imagined, and though they were severely weathered, the enigma of their presence was still powerful. “I’m one of the mayfly folk, aren’t I? You’ve seen us come and go
for so many, many years—just little blurs in time.”

  She didn’t have to count them. Michael’s notes had told her already that there were the remains of thirteen standing stones in the outer circle with an inner ring of eight uprights.

  A significant depression at the very center of the two rings showed, Michael thought, that at least one large stone had been removed, and another lay half heeled over, leaning against its neighbor. There appeared to be no altar stone or central offering table.

  “How old are you?” Freya stood in the center of the inner ring. Who knew? Who could ever tell? Some of these monuments, all over Europe and Russia and Ireland, were thousands and thousands and thousands of years old, and she was so privileged to be the temporary custodian of such a site. These stones must have taken much effort, and many, many people, to erect, so it was clear Findnar had been very important once, a sacred island.

  Freya flung her arms wide. “Where did your builders come from? Can you tell me?” Because you didn’t tell my dad . . . Ah, Findnar—talking to the stones seemed somehow normal, a definite worry.

  But she was here to dig—the crucifix site, that was her real target.

  Owl-light had settled on the meadow before Freya stopped. Weary, she clambered out of the third test trench and groaned. It was torture to stretch her back; still, it felt good to be a physical being again.

  She’d enjoyed this afternoon. Time had disappeared because the excitement of discovery was always a profound drug—no good pretending she wasn’t addicted. But the first two trenches in the center of the circle had yielded only animal bones—a lamb, probably, and a rabbit. The finds had been properly bagged and noted for future study, but she’d filled the pits in again.

  The third test trench, however, had become interesting. Freya had dug into the depression where something big had once lain. The earth had been rich and loamy and almost black, and she might have missed the pieces of pottery, except for that first flash of terra-cotta red in the soil. The shards she uncovered had incised lines—Samian ware perhaps? If it was, that meant long-distance trade routes, and if the pot wasn’t from Roman Britain, it might have come from ancient Gaul or even beyond.