Oh God not an under-age girl no, no, no!
The front door opened behind him and he heard Moira Bell's voice.
“Ah, I see you've met our Morag!” said the woman.
The priest turned, jaw slack, to see Mrs. Bell standing in the doorway. She was holding a small camera, and as he began to raise a hand in protest there was a flash, and a whir. Behind her ranged a loose cluster of at least a dozen locals. One, a round-faced fisherman in a thick woolen jumper, grinned and gave a thumbs-up sign.
“Get stuck in Father!” the man shouted cheerfully. “I would!”
This caused a ripple of laughter.
“What is this?” Malahide managed to say.
Mrs. Bell shook her head in mock-despair and handed the camera to a man behind her. Then she stepped into the hallway.
“It's a twosome!” shouted the cheerful man, to more laughter.
“Now you hold your peace, Fergus!” Mrs. Bell said. “This is not a laughing matter!”
“Not if you're doing it right!” Fergus muttered, nudging his neighbor.
Mrs. Bell sighed, closed the door, then turned to face Malahide again. As she did so, Morag's small, delicate hands began to caress him, her fingers running through his hair and over his cheeks. He pulled away, but this took him towards Mrs. Bell, who reached out and took his face in her hands.
“Now, now Father,” she said. “Some girls don't cope well with rejection, you know. And people are expecting great things of you.”
“Great things, I'm expecting,” breathed Morag, again attaching herself to him. “But not in the hallway, eh Father?”
Mrs. Bell laughed, a businesslike noise, that of a busy woman performing a necessary task.
“Quite,” she said, taking Malahide by the arm. “Come on, Father, into the living room, and we can get to know each other a little better.”
Malahide tried to shake off the stocky woman's grip, but she was stronger than she looked. What's more, Morag had him by the other arm, and she too had a startlingly tight grip. Soon he was sitting on the sofa between the two intruders. Mrs. Bell talked while Morag teased him in a slightly mocking way.
“Father Hackett didn't adjust to our ways at first,” the woman explained. “But I like to think I made life a little easier for him. While he could still … enjoy that kind of thing.”
“You mean–” the priest said, staring. “You were his – mistress?”
Mrs. Bell nodded.
“Paramour, mistress, concubine, lover,” she said, preening herself slightly. “I was a lot younger then of course. Almost as young as wee Morag, here.”
“You mean – you were under-age? Oh my God!”
The others laughed at that. There was, he felt, a slight edge to their laughter, a peculiar undertone that was melodic and yet slightly menacing.
“None so blind as those who will not see,” Mrs. Bell said. “You haven't done your research! No child had been born on the island for a good while.”
Malahide twisted around on the sofa to look at Morag. She gave a toothy grin, blew him a pouting kiss. She still seemed very young, barely pubescent. But that wasn’t the most disturbing thing about her now. She was so close that, in full daylight, he could see that her eyes were odd-looking. They were a shade of green that seemed almost luminous. In addition, she seemed to have a very low blink rate. Very sparse eyebrows and tiny, vestigial-seeming eyelashes had contributed to her childish appearance.
Then Morag blinked. The priest recoiled slightly. Just before her eyelids had closed, he thought he had seen a semi-transparent membrane flick across her eyes from the inner edges. He stared, wanting her to blink again so he could be sure, then felt he was being rude despite the circumstances. Malahide looked down, flushed red, then looked away.
“It's not just the face that's on offer, Father,” the girl said in a wheedling voice. “It's the whole package.”
“Morag is not as young as she seems, Father,” Mrs. Bell insisted. “We keep our looks a long time, here. I shouldn't talk about another woman's age, but Morag here won't see thirty again. It's one of the blessings of our way of life. The census taker is a local man, of course, so we can adjust records accordingly. The only permanent outsider we have to cope with is you. So you have to become part of our little world.”
“Monstrous – wrong – I can't–” Malahide managed to blurt out, shaking his head.
“Of course you can,” Mrs. Bell said, patting his hand in a matronly way. “Father Hackett adjusted. Of course, he was a devil for the drink after the first few years, but it helped him cope. Perhaps you're made of sterner stuff, eh?”
“In the name of God–” he began, trying to stand up. But the two women grabbed him and held him down.
“Your God abandoned you the moment you got off the boat, holy man,” said Morag into his ear. “Come on, let an older woman teach you a few things!”
“Don't insult the man's faith!” snapped Mrs. Bell. Then, more gently, “Father, you do have a choice. We will show you what that choice is in due course. Now, if you really do not want to avail yourself of Morag's charms it will be a pity, as she's a very spry creature and needs to keep in practice.”
“Go away!” he managed to shout. “Leave me alone!”
Mrs. Bell nodded with a hint of sadness, and got up. She signaled curtly to Morag, who pouted some more and then ran gracefully out of the room.
“No hard feelings, eh Father?” Mrs. Bell said. “Ah well, perhaps it's for the best. Father Hackett needed to be shown the error of his ways. Hence the whiskey.”
As the woman moved sedately towards the hallway Malahide felt a surge of shame and wounded pride. He got up and held up the cross that he wore around his neck.
“I will not abandon my faith for you, or for anyone!” he declared. “I will leave this vile place by the next ferry and give a report to the bishop!”
Mrs. Bell stopped, looked back over her shoulder.
“No, Father,” she said. “We can't have that.”
Speechless, he watched as the islanders left, Morag still naked, with her clothes slung over one arm.
Malahide watched from the living room window as the small crowd went down the track, back to Soray town. Morag took a few moments to put her clothes back on. She took so little time that the priest concluded she was well-practiced. Nobody else seemed to find it odd that she was naked, or that she was getting dressed in public.
Almost, he thought, as if being naked were natural to these people.
It occurred to him that none of his parishioners had invited him inside their homes. He wondered what he might find inside the pleasant, pastel-painted cottages clustered around the bay. His experiences had been so bizarre that he struggled to keep his mind on an even keel. The underground cavern, the disappearance of Jeff, the sexual overtures of Morag and Moira Bell. They were pieces in a jigsaw he could not fit together.
“What don't I know about this place?”
The question hung in the air for a few heartbeats. Other questions naturally followed, ones he immediately felt he should have asked far sooner.
“How did it all begin? How did they get like this?”
Malahide suddenly thought of the church door, and the small area of color that had been exposed. Beneath the bland whitewash, the walls must be covered in murals or frescos. Colorful works of art had been common in medieval churches, but the rise of Protestant sects in Scotland had often led to their destruction. Stained glass had been smashed, pictures painted over.
But Soray was always a Catholic parish, at least nominally.
They had been concealed for a reason. He got up and went into the kitchen to search for some tools and other items. Then he walked around to the church. He saw no one when he left the house, but felt sure he was being watched. When he got inside the church, he slammed the door.
“Right, let's find out what lies beneath.”
He splashed a bottle of turpentine onto the wall and then started to scrape away the whitewash
with an old knife. The covering came away quickly, confirming his suspicion that it was relatively new. It was another part of the jigsaw.
They covered the paintings because a stranger was coming to live among them for the first time in decades.
Scraping with an ordinary knife was a crude approach, and as the painted plaster-work was exposed his frantic efforts left it scarred. But after about half an hour, he had exposed enough of the imagery to step back and take a look. At first, he felt disappointed.
Just pictures of fish and rocks and seaweed, he thought.
Then Malahide noticed that there was something more to the mural. The scene he had uncovered showed a simplified version of the village and the bay, with the treacherous rocks just off the coast. But, almost obscured by his rough scraping, there were also traces of a figure emerging from the sea. There was something very old-fashioned about the technique as the upper half of the pale green body was the same size as the houses of Soray.
People didn't do proportions and perspective properly back in those days, he thought. Especially amateur artists in a place like this.
The explanation, while reasonable, did not quite satisfy him at a gut level. Not after what he had already seen and heard. He resumed his work on the whitewash, removing another few square feet, working his way 'offshore'. But it proved a waste of time, as all that he uncovered was a patch of dark green paint, again scarred by his blunt knife.
Nothing there. But why waste paint on depicting nothing?
Peering closely at the dark area, he found himself imagining a still, darker form lurking in its center, something not quite a formless blob. As he stared, he started to see movement, but attributed it to straining his eyes. He tore his gaze away from the murky patch and began to work upwards. This led to a new revelation as he exposed letters, inch-high and crudely formed. After a minute, he had exposed what might have been two words, but was unsure as to their meaning.
-OTH-R -YD-A
“Mother?” he said to himself, putting the knife down. “Bother? They weren't much good at spelling back then, though, so it could be–”
It occurred to him to search for more lettering at the same height and he worked back towards the painted coast. Sure enough, directly above the man-like figure he found two more incomplete words.
FA-THE- -AG-N
“Father?” he murmured. “But not God the Father, clearly.”
“Father? Where are you?”
The call came from outside. The clear, high-pitched voice might have been Morag's. Malahide went to the plain-glass window nearest the door, crouched down, and peeped out. The now-familiar gang of islanders was moving away from his residence, heading for the church. Mrs. Bell was in the lead, looking businesslike, with Morag and the rest following. But what startled him about the group was not their determined appearance, but the fact that they had all changed their clothes.
They were all wearing long robes in various shades of green and blue. Mrs. Bell's was the darkest and most elaborate garment, moss-green shot trimmed with silver braid, while Morag and some of the 'younger' islanders wore sea-blue. There was an air of pageantry about the group.
If Malahide had seen a similar spectacle on the mainland, he would have assumed they were historical re-enactors of some kind, perhaps re-creating some ancient Celtic rite. But not here. He was sure that their ritual, whatever it might be, was as real to them as anything the church practiced. More so, in fact.
Communion was just a sham, he realized. Them coming to take a look at me in my natural habitat. A kind of freak show.
Malahide felt a sudden panic-terror. While the group approaching did not seem to be armed, they outnumbered him so badly that he would have no chance of fighting them off. He recalled a horror movie he had once seen about an unwary policeman being sacrificed by pagans on a remote Scottish island.
But if they kill me, I'll be missed, there'll be questions, he told himself. That sort of thing doesn't happen nowadays, not in a civilized country.
All the while he was retreating up the aisle, trying to remember if the church's small rear door was normally kept locked. The question became academic when he heard the door open and voices in the vestry. He was cut off, and the locals entering from the rear, and would be inside the main body of the church in seconds. Then he caught sight of the confessional, and a desperate thought occurred to him.
They don't know for sure I'm here, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to the house first.
The confessional was the old-fashioned kind with curtains concealing the upper half of each booth. Malahide pulled both curtains closed and then clambered up the side of the wooden box, using small windows as hand-and-footholds. The top of the confessional was just large enough for him to curl up close against the wall in the dust and cobwebs. If his estimate was right, to see him someone would have to be on the far side of the church and looking up at the right angle.
The voices grew louder, began to echo around the stone building. The main door opened and he heard Mrs. Bell say, “Well, it seems the bird has flown. Again.”
“Look!” exclaimed someone. “He's started to uncover the mural!”
“Clever man,” Mrs. Bell remarked. “We underestimated him. But he's still just one man, however astute he may be.”
“He can't have gone far, anyway,” said a lighter, girlish voice that Malahide recognized as Morag's. A man, older by the sound of him, spoke next. Then the priest heard the sound of the curtains on the confessional being whisked aside.
“Nowhere else to hide,” Morag said, seemingly from inside one of the booths.
“You don't think he'd be daft enough to go inland?” the man asked. “He could die out there if the weather turns.”
“More likely,” Mrs. Bell said, “he'll try and steal a boat. Assuming he can run one.”
Malahide had never steered a boat of any kind, and bit his lip to avoid giving a moan of despair.
“No way could he handle a boat on his own,” Morag said, with her familiar giggle. “He'd probably just fall into the harbor.”
“We don't want that,” Mrs. Bell retorted. “Or at least, not yet. Not until we've explored all the other possibilities.”
“Well,” the man said, “what do we do now, Moira?”
“Form small groups,” said the woman, “spread out. I'll go back to the house with Morag in case he doubles back. And remember to keep an eye on the post office – he might try to break into the telephone exchange.”
Malahide, who had not even known there was an exchange on the island, blasphemed silently.
“Right, let's be off,” said a new voice. Footsteps, followed by the slam of the church door, led to silence. Malahide waited for what seemed like ages, but was probably only a few minutes. He developed a crick in his neck, felt his arm going to sleep as it was doubled up under him.
Damn it, I can't just lie here.
He moved cautiously and peeped over the edge of the box. There was nobody in the church, and the door was indeed shut. Feeling bolder, Malahide crawled to the edge of the booth and then lowered himself by his fingertips. He dropped the last few inches to the stone floor, and paused again.
Right, what next?
They would be expecting him to try and escape the island or call for help. He toyed with the idea of going inland precisely because it was crazy. At least he could use the rolling, rocky landscape for cover. But he was not dressed for hiking, and if the weather turned, he might simply catch pneumonia.
If I can stay free until nightfall, I might have a chance, he thought desperately.
From behind him, Morag giggled.
The priest turned in time to see the girl pull back the curtain of the confessional booth. She was wearing a dark blue robe, which she opened as she stepped out onto the cold stone floor. Predictably, she was wearing nothing else.
“You didn't think you could get away from me that easily, did you?” she said, reaching for him.
Malahide staggered back, collided wi
th the end of a pew. The other curtain was flung open and Mrs. Bell stepped out, smiling, her expression patient.
“I'm sorry, Father,” she said. “Perhaps we have too cynical a view of your kind. Usually they are very easily seduced.”
She gestured toward the doorway.
“You know something of our secret,” she said. “But there is so much more.”
“Blasphemy!” he cried. “Some evil cult, paganism, orgies!”
Mrs. Bell wagged an admonitory finger.
“You've seen the cavern, Father,” she purred. “You must know there's more to it than that.”
Then, before he could reply, she casually disrobed, just as Morag had done. For a long moment Malahide did not grasp what he was seeing. Her body was younger, more shapely than he had expected. It was also not quite human, from the long, webbed toes to the slits under her ribs. The slits, he saw, opened and closed with the rhythm of her breathing. He looked at Morag, saw vestigial signs of the same mutations.
“Monstrous!” he moaned as the women, after closing their robes, padded closer on soft, bare feet. He started to scramble across the pews towards the entrance, but then the door swung open to reveal the rest of the search party.
“Surprise!” called the man in the woolen jersey. He still sounded cheerful, as if it were all a game.
“Don't worry,” said Mrs. Bell, as they took him by the arms again. “It doesn't take long.”
They took him to the harbor, singing all the way in what Malahide thought was Scots Gaelic. After struggling for a few minutes, he gave up and let them drag his feet along the cobbled streets. Twilight was almost upon them when they reached the fishing boats that bobbed by the short jetty. He was lifted on board the largest vessel by eager hands, and then they cast off to take him out beyond the bay.
“Don't kill me!” he begged, lying in the stern of the boat, clutching his crucifix.
“Silly man,” said Morag. She knelt to stroke his hair with what seemed, to the priest, genuine kindness. “This is all about life, not death.”
Twilight had deepened to near-dark by the time the boat stopped its engine about a mile off Soray. They rose and fell on the Atlantic swell for a few minutes while the islanders disrobed. All, Malahide saw, were in various stages of some bizarre transformation. He tried to look away, but kept gazing in fascinated horror at bodies that
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