Coffin Road

by Peter May

  For a moment I am distracted by Bran racing among the dunes, barking and chasing rabbits, and when I look back I see Jon and Sally going up the drive of a house near the top of the hill. I realise they are neighbours. Sally turns and waves before they go inside. The house has a two-storey glass porch in the design of a gable end, built out from the front of it. I can only imagine how spectacular the views must be from the inside, though given that Jon and Sally are neighbours, and friends, I must have seen them often enough.

  There is only a handful of houses strung out along the road as it curves up over the hill beneath a brooding sky and failing light. A rising horizon unbroken by a single tree, and delineated by drystone walls. Away to the west, beyond the beach and a sea that seems to glow with some inner light, the mountains of Taransay rise against the setting sun, the sky clearing beyond them in a freshening wind from the south-west.

  I shout on Bran and he comes racing back.

  Once inside, I hear him lapping water from his bowl in the boot room as I go into the kitchen and turn on the lights.

  So I am writing a book.

  I cross to the bookshelf and lift the booklet on the mystery of the Flannan Isles and sit down to flip it open. In it I read that the largest of the seven islands, Eilean Mòr, which is Gaelic for Big Island, rises 288 feet above sea level and was chosen at the end of the nineteenth century as the site for a lighthouse that would guide passing vessels safely around Cape Wrath and onward to the Pentland Firth. The island is less than 39 acres in size, and the lighthouse they built there is 74 feet high. Lit for the first time on 7 December 1899, it flashed twice in rapid succession every thirty seconds, and sent a 140,000-candlepower beam 24 nautical miles out to sea.

  It was almost exactly a year later, on 15 December 1900, that the captain of the steamer Archtor, headed for Leith on the east coast of Scotland, reported by wireless that the light was out. But whoever took that message at the headquarters of Cosmopolitan Line Steamers failed to report it to the Northern Lighthouse Board, and it wasn’t until the 26th of the month that relief keepers, delayed by bad weather, were finally landed on the island to discover that keepers James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur had vanished without trace.

  As I read, I find myself being drawn into the mystery. Printed in full is a colourful poem written about the event twenty years after it, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. In it he imagines that the relief keepers, on landing, were watched by three huge birds that flew from the rock, startled by their arrival, to plunge into the sea. And when the men entered the lighthouse, the smell of limewash and tar that greeted them was as ‘familiar as our daily breath’, but reeked now of death. They found an untouched meal of meat and cheese and bread on the table, and an overturned chair on the floor. The men’s bunks had not been slept in, and there was no trace of them anywhere on the island.

  This fanciful version of events is contradicted in the booklet I am reading by extracts from the actual account given by assistant keeper Joseph Moore, who was the first man to enter the lighthouse after the arrival of the relief vessel Hesperus. Making no mention of a meal on the table or an overturned chair, he wrote:

  I went up, and on coming to the entrance gate I found it closed. I made for the entrance door leading to the kitchen and store room, found it also closed and the door inside that, but the kitchen door itself was open. On entering the kitchen I looked at the fireplace and saw that the fire was not lighted for some days. I then entered the rooms in succession, found the beds empty just as they left them in the early morning. I did not take time to search further, for I only too well knew something serious had occurred. I darted out and made for the landing. When I reached there I informed Mr McCormack that the place was deserted. He with some of the men came up a second time, so as to make sure, but unfortunately the first impression was only too true. Mr McCormack and myself proceeded to the lightroom where everything was in proper order. The lamp was cleaned. The fountain full. Blinds on the windows.

  There are, it seems, two landing stages on the island. One on the east side and one on the west. Whilst everything was normal on the east side, at the west landing a box holding ropes and tackle had gone, the railings were buckled, a 20-hundredweight block of stone dislodged, and a lifebuoy ripped from its fastenings – all 110 feet above sea level. Below, ropes lay strewn over the rocks, and the only conclusion that investigators could come to was that a freak wave had broken over the cliffs and carried the men away.

  The one inconsistency in this theory, according to my booklet, was the fact that regulations stated that one of the keepers should remain always within the lighthouse. And while the boots and oilskins of two of the keepers were gone, the waterproof coat worn by the third, Donald McArthur, still hung from its peg in the hall. So if he had broken regulations and gone out at all, he had done so in his shirtsleeves. No one could explain why.

  I close the booklet and run my hand over my face, aware for the first time of the bristles that cover my cheeks and chin. How long, I wonder, since I last shaved? But I am more focused on the mystery of the vanishing keepers, and wonder what I have written about them. Quite a lot, I imagine, since apparently I am close to finishing.

  I shift seats to sit in front of my laptop and waken it from sleep, to be greeted, as before, by an almost empty screen. This time I search it more thoroughly. I open my browser to comb through its history. But there is none. It has been set to private browsing. Both the cookie and download folders are empty. A glance at the top of the screen tells me I am connected to the internet. And even as I look, I become aware of just how familiar I am with this laptop and its software. Computers are not some technology foreign to me. I know my way around. I check Recent Items, and find it, too, empty, apart from the mailer and browser that I have opened only in these last hours. And I realise that I must have been covering my tracks. Whatever use to which I was putting my computer, I did not want someone else knowing. All of which is very frustrating, when I am trying to learn what I clearly went to great lengths to prevent anyone else from finding out.

  I breathe frustration through my teeth and am just about to shut down when I notice a folder sitting innocently between Downloads and Music. It is labelled, simply, Flannans. I double-click and it opens to reveal a long list of files. Chapter One, Chapter Two . . . all the way through to Chapter Twenty. Again I double-click, this time on Chapter One, which triggers the opening of my Pages word-processing software. The document opens. There are headers and footers and a chapter heading, but not a single word of text. I look at it, startled by its emptiness, before opening Chapter Two. Exactly the same. With an increasing sense of disorientation, I open every single document, and find every one of them empty.

  Now I sit back and gaze at my blank screen, feeling more and more bewildered. Whatever I might have told Jon and Sally, or anyone else, I am not writing a book about the Flannan Isles mystery. I am a fraud.

  I can feel the sense of frustration building inside me, bubbling up like molten lava to erupt as an explosion of anger. My chair falls to the floor as I stand up suddenly, just as in Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s poem. There must be, in this house, something that will reveal to me more about who I am. There has to be! I live here, after all. I’m not a ghost. I must leave traces.

  And I spend the next half hour going through every drawer and every cupboard, pulling stuff out of them in a frenzy, searching for something, anything, I don’t know what. I pull every book from the shelves of the bookcase, shaking each in turn by the spine, in case there should be something concealed among their pages. By the time I head for the bedroom, the floor is littered with debris, the detritus of my desperation.

  But I stop in the doorway, my attention caught by a map lying on the coffee table, next to the bottle of whisky. An Ordnance Survey map, all neatly folded up within its shiny, cracked covers. I step over to the table and lift it up. A South Harris Explorer Map. It is well thumbed and torn along some of its folds. It is large and unwieldy as I open it up
to reveal the myriad contour lines that delineate the shape and form of this lower half of the Isle of Harris. A landscape pitted by countless lochs, ragged scraps of water reflecting stormy skies. Red denotes the A859 main road, such as it is, with minor roads in broken black lines and yellow. Tràigh Losgaintir, where I washed up only hours ago, is a vast triangle of yellow. I find the cemetery, and my house next to it. Then my eye is drawn to a thick line of luminous orange, tracking part of a broken line from the south end of the beach, that heads almost straight up and over the hills towards a cluster of lochs on the east coast. It is a line I must have drawn on the map myself, with a marker pen. But not recently. It is quite faded, and I wonder how long I must have been here for the ink to lose its colour.

  Holding it under the light, and squinting to read tiny print, I see that the track my marker pen follows is called Bealach Eòrabhat. Gaelic. But I have no idea what it means. I cannot imagine why I might have marked this track in orange, but if nothing else it gives me somewhere else to look. A starting point tomorrow. For there is nothing I can do about it now, in the dark.

  I drop the map, still open, on the table and go through to the bedroom to continue my search. Here there is nothing but clean clothes and laundry. The spare bedroom at the other end of the hall is in use, it seems, as a dressing room. There are more clothes. A suitcase on top of the wardrobe, but it is empty. Only when I turn to go back out do I see the shoulder bag hanging from a hook on the back of the door. A canvas satchel. I grab it and sit on the bed to open it. Finally, something personal. My fingers are shaking as I undo the clasps and delve inside to find a blank notebook and a wallet. To my intense disappointment, verging almost on anger, I find only money in the wallet. Notes and some coins. No credit or business cards, no family photographs. Nothing. I throw the damn thing at the wall and drop my face into my hands, fingers curling into brittle claws to drag at my skin. And my voice rips through the silence of the house as I raise my head to the heavens. ‘For God’s sake! Who the hell am I?’

  Of course, no one replies, and I am left sitting here in the desperate silence, bereft. Perhaps I am a ghost after all. Perhaps I died somewhere out there at sea. Yesterday was a stinker, according to Jon. And I had cancelled my trip out to the Flannan Isles. Or so I said. But what if I had gone? How did I get there, and what was the purpose of my visit? Certainly not to research a book. But something happened. I know it, I feel it. Something dreadful. Maybe I drowned. Maybe it was just my body that washed ashore on the beach. And it was only my spirit that rose from the sand to haunt this place. Perhaps that’s why I can find no trace of myself.

  I clench my fists and dig fingernails into my palms and know from the pain I feel that I am no ghost. I look up as Bran lopes along the hall to stand in the doorway and look at me. ‘Tell me, Bran,’ I say to him. ‘Tell me who I am. What am I doing here?’ And he cocks his head to one side, ears lifted. He knows that it is him I am speaking to, and maybe he detects the question in my voice. But he has no answers for me.

  Emotionally and physically spent, I rise stiffly and he follows me along to the bedroom. I do not even have the energy to go through and turn out the lights in the kitchen. Instead, I slip out of my jeans and T-shirt and flop on to the bed. If I could, I would weep. But there are no tears in my eyes, just a dry, burning sensation. My mouth is parched. I should drink water. I should eat. But I am too tired. I lie on my back, reflected light spilling from the hall into the darkness of the bedroom, and close my eyes, only vaguely aware of Bran jumping up on to the bed and curling up at my feet.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I am awakened for the second time by a noise I don’t hear, but which is somehow transmitted from my subconscious to send me spiralling up from the deepest of sleeps to break the surface of consciousness, blood pulsing in my head. I blink in the dark, pupils shrinking to bring focus to the light that falls in a skewed rectangle across the floor and far wall of the hall. And I see a shadow step through it.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I know it is my voice, but it seems disconnected. I feel I should be scared, and yet I am not. I hear Bran issue a strange throaty sound and turn to see him lift his head into the darkness, sniffing furiously. But he has not been moved to rouse himself from the bed.

  A silhouette steps into the hall from the sitting room, and I know immediately that it is Sally.

  ‘Jesus!’ I am not sure why I am whispering. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’

  ‘Why? Did you think I wouldn’t come?’

  ‘I didn’t know I was expecting you.’

  ‘Idiot!’ I can hear the smile in her voice, and roll on to my side as she starts to undress, clothes falling to the floor, until I can see the smooth curve of her hips and the darker circles of her areolae around hard nipples.

  ‘What about Jon?’

  ‘What about him? You weren’t expecting him to join us, were you?’ And she slips, grinning, into the bed beside me.

  ‘Won’t he wonder where you are?’

  ‘He’s still on that medication. Knocks him out. He won’t surface for another eight hours.’ I realise I am supposed to know what the medication is for, so I don’t ask.

  I don’t know whether to be alarmed or excited. The proximity of her naked body to my own is immediately arousing. The scent of her perfume, the warmth that emanates from smooth skin that suddenly slides over mine. Thigh on thigh as she moves between my legs, insinuating her body on top of mine. Hard breasts pressing into my chest, her breath in my face. I feel cool palms on each cheek as she holds my head and brings her lips to mine. I can only imagine we have done this many times before, but for me it is like the first time, and it feels as if she has lit a fire inside me. It rages and burns and fuels an unquenchable desire simply to consume her.

  I grab her arms and flip her suddenly over on to her back and hear her tiny gasp of surprise. Almost subconsciously, I am aware of Bran jumping down from the bed and sloping huffily away along the hall. My mouth finds hers again and our hunger for each other is limitless. She writhes below me as I move my mouth across every part of her. Breasts, nipples, belly and the soft fuzz of her pubis. To breathe her in is intoxicating. I feel myself losing control, driven, possessed and wanting to possess her.

  But she fights back, an equal battle for possession, and we go to war with our mouths and our hands, all intelligent thought sacrificed on the altar of physical desire, bringing us ultimately to a frantic, breathless conclusion that leaves us gasping and shiny with sweat, staring up at the shadows on the ceiling with wide eyes, awaiting the return of some semblance of sanity.

  Finally she says, as if only now catching her breath, ‘That was amazing.’

  I nod, at a loss really for words. Then I realise she can’t see me and say, ‘It was.’

  She hoists herself up to lean on one elbow and stare into my face in the semi-darkness, lightly tracing fingers across my chest. ‘Better than the first time. Better than the last. What’s got into you, Neal? You seem . . . I don’t know, different.’

  A dozen responses flit through my head, each one flippant or evasive, and all failing to address the truth. I feel nerves like butterflies fluttering in my belly. It is the moment to share, because I am certain I cannot keep this in much longer. And yet still I am afraid to address what it is I can’t even remember. In the end, all I say is, ‘I am.’

  I turn my head to see her half-frowning, half-smiling. ‘Are you? In what way?’

  I draw a deep, tremulous breath. ‘They say that all any of us are is the sum total of our memories. They are what make us who we are. Take them away and all you are left with is a blank. Like a computer without software.’

  She seems to think about that for a moment. ‘I’m trying to imagine what that might be like,’ she says. ‘Weird. I suppose memories are just experience. We learn from our experiences. So without them . . .’ She laughs. ‘We’d be just like children again.’

  ‘Not if all you took away were the memories of yourself. Who you are, what you
are. Everything you have learned in life remains. It’s only you who’s been taken out of the equation.’ I suppose I am trying to find a way of explaining it to myself. But it’s not easy, and I am not sure I am anywhere close, but now her half-smile has gone and only the frown remains.

  ‘What are you saying, Neal?’

  I sigh. There is no turning back. ‘Sally, the only reason I know that I am Neal Maclean is because I saw the name on a utility bill. The only reason I know your name is Sally is because that’s what Jon called you.’

  She laughs. ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’ Then, ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing, because it’s not.’ And that thought banishes her laughter, and the smile. ‘Neal, you’re scaring me.’

  ‘I’m only telling you how it is, Sally. Eight hours ago, ten, maybe, I don’t know how long it was, I found myself washed up on the beach out there. I was soaked through, freezing cold, and only still alive because I was wearing a life jacket. I don’t know where I’d been, or how I got there.’ I sit up, knees drawn to my chest, cupping my face in my hands and breathing into them. Then I turn to look at her with an intensity that I see reflected in her alarm. ‘I had no memory of who I was, or what happened. And I still don’t.’

  Her frown of consternation cuts deep shadows in her face. ‘How’s that possible?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it is. I’m the blank that’s left when you take away the memories. It’s not just my life that I can’t remember, my whole history, it’s who I am. What I’m like. What I’m capable of.’ I hesitate, almost too frightened to shape the thought with words. ‘I feel as if I have done something . . .’ I search for the right word. ‘Awful. I don’t know. Shocking. Every time I try to force memories from my subconscious, I find myself lost in some black fog of dread. Beyond it, I know, there’s clarity. But I just can’t reach it. And I’m not sure now that I want to.’