Where the World Ends

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Quill turned and pointed out to sea. “Look, man! Shark! There’s a shark coming to eat you up! Run! Run!” And Niall looked too.

  Plainly the nightmare imaginings rampaging around his skull showed him shark and worse. Despite his torn shins, despite his icy feet, and muscles cramping with cold, he splashed barefoot across the shelf and up the rock face, pursued by invisible demons.

  There was a hollowness under the shelf – which was simply a ragged-edged platelet of stone left behind as the waves patiently gnawed away at the base of Warrior Stac. There were no footholds to help Quill up, and Niall had left him one unwelcome gift. The conger eel had squirmed its way out of Niall’s head and into his own. He was suddenly convinced that it was there, jaws gaping, its teeth razor-edged, coiling around his legs, deciding just where to sink its first bite – which morsel of him to rip away first…

  A wave carried Quill’s legs and body under the ledge and sank his head underwater.

  What becomes of drowned boys, Murdina?

  Their blood is in the spume of whales, Quill.

  And his eyes, spangling for want of air, were suddenly filled with the dark enormity of whales spouting silver into a sunny sky.

  The backdraught of the waves drew his body out again, and his head broke surface. The sea shoved him painfully up against the shelf and something hit him so hard on the cheekbone that he let go of Warrior Stac.

  It was a rope’s end. Murdo, in throwing down his rope from high above, had been a little too accurate in his aim.

  For a while, they looked at each other from either end of the white rope, Murdo from the ledge, Quill rising and falling on the swell.

  “Sorry,” called Murdo, laying a hand to his own cheek.

  “What for?” said Quilliam. “But I mind there’s a conger down below, so if you wouldna take too long in coming down…” His voice barely carried. His throat creaked and croaked. As blood retreats to the body’s core in time of danger, the fever had retreated to his lungs and nested there for the summer.

  One day, out of the blue, John chose Calum as her betrothed. She was a Kilda woman, after all, and on as tiny an island as Hirta, choice had never been a big factor. Raised as a boy, she knew how boys (among themselves) talked of girls, approving or discarding them as potential mates, keeping any genuine feelings well hidden, for fear of mockery. Most of them could not hold a romantic thought, even with a bucket to carry it in. Conversationally, Calum might be quiet to the point of dumbness, but at least when he sang the old songs, romance and tenderness poured from his lips. For the sake of that, she could ignore the twist in his nose and the beak scar across his cheek. When they were married, she would have him sing to her every night, insisting on it, like a chick gaping to be fed.

  Calum was so gratified that he went and washed the guillemot droppings out of his hair in a rain-filled hollow higher up the Stac. He even washed a few other parts as well. But when he came back, John informed him that the wedding would not actually take place until they were back on Hirta and she had new clothes to wear. At which he shook his long, dripping hair, like a dog, and regretted getting it wet.

  Everyone there knew that John would have preferred Quill – apart from Quill himself. But before leaving Hirta to go fowling on the Stac, John had never imagined her betrothal to any boy. And Calum with his singing was better than the prospect of Col Cane punching her nightly. Or Kenneth’s idea of sharing.

  “What shall I call her?” Calum asked. Out of shyness, he asked the room as a whole. “I canna marry a John.”

  “You can and you shall,” said the bride. “I canna be doing with a new name!” And Calum withdrew the question. Her voice was as shrill as any of the fishwives skinning gannets at the gutting tables on Hirta.

  Murdo sat down beside Quill, their quarrel over the rope forgotten. “Lassies, eh?” he said.

  “Lassies, aye,” Quill agreed.

  They celebrated the betrothal with crab racing, riddles, jokes and singing. Then, in a game that had grown up during the days of starvation, each man and boy brought one imaginary course of food to the feast.

  “Porridge with milk and eggs.”

  “Oatcake and cheese and whey.”

  “Fish heads stuffed with the livers.”

  “Mutton with sorrel and potatoes!”

  “Nettle beer.”

  Memories from a previous life: luxuries long lost to them, yes. But while everyone could still call them to mind, they still existed. Sometimes even a taste came with the memory.

  “We must look to building another raft,” said Domhnall Don. “Come summer it will be an easy crossing.”

  “To Boreray?”

  “For a start.”

  The sap of optimism was rising in their veins. Only Kenneth failed to bring food to the imaginary table. If he had it would have been gall and wormwood to poison the lot of them. For he still blamed them for saving his life by leaving him a cripple.

  They were turning into birds. They kept moon time. No more calendars. They measured the passing of time in months, by the wax and wane of the moon: each moon-month, the blink of an eye.

  Their clothes were bird-skin and down. Their legs, mangled by scurvy, were mottled and yellow and crusted with sores. They lived in the Present: the Past was past mattering, the Future a shapeless improbability. And yet they had come this far: why should they not persist? – spring, summer, autumn, Dead Time.

  They were turning into angels; still patiently devout in their strange, half-pagan religion, they went on waiting for the white ship or angel chariot, Amazon Queen or the drying up of the sea to release them from the Stac. But they could not spare those a great deal of thought. Too much to do. Too much pain to be endured. Too many birds to harvest.

  All the white ropes were too dangerously worn for cliff work, the nets were shredded, so boys and men clambered about the slabs and spires of rock with no more advantage over the birds than a little ingenuity. And with no wings, no walking on water, they were more garefowl than shearwater or guillemot. Or were they storm petrels, burning down from head to foot until at last each of their flames went out?

  The lone garefowl reappeared… Well, it may have been another, but it had the same peculiarity of being solitary. Sometimes single birds within a flock become disorientated and the compass in their head swings awry, and they strike off from the others, like mystics quitting their old lives to go begging through the world. So the garefowl was there again, wading through the gannet and fulmar colonies, seemingly in search of something that would make sense to it. Murdo came to tell Quill he had seen it, and if his lungs had not been so shot, Quill would have hurried all the way there. Slowly, slowly he made the climb, and saw her, and he was glad of the sight. All day long he followed in her tottering, tick-tock tracks.

  Niall, though, took the news differently. He had grown calmer over the weeks. His shins had healed; he had not even succumbed to lung fever. Only at night, in his dreams, did the monsters and blue-green men troop by again, gurning and snapping, licking him with icy, wet tongues, shutting off his breath. He talked about them, but mostly to himself, and rarely took part in conversations going on around him. Even so, hearing the words “garefowl” and “sea-witch”, he cried out as if he had been bitten by a rat…and then the bite festered, and feverish hallucinations again took over his every waking moment. “The witch!” he kept saying. “The witch is coming! Keep the witch away! She bites off ma head!”

  Quill tried to reassure him, but he was still numbered among the monsters in Niall’s dreams. If he came too close, Niall still cowered down – did so now, pushing Quill’s face away with the flat of his hands. “You stole my boots!”

  So Quill told the others: “I think she tried to help. I think the garefowl tried to feed him – y’know? The birdy way? Puking up food like he was one of her chicks.” It seemed as plain as day to him. During his banishment, he had fed the garefowl fish at the mouth of his cave. Now she, in return, had tried to feed the boy trapped in the roc
k cleft. It was what Murdina would have done. It was what his garefowl would have done.

  The boys rucked their lips in blatant disbelief. Birds are birds are birds (except when they are witches or the souls of the malevolent dead).

  So naturally he said no more – about the fish offal in Niall’s hair and clothes – about seeing the bird watching the rescue like a concerned mother… Unable to speak well of the creature out loud, naturally, Quill found her waiting for him in his dreams.

  In his dreams, she rode ashore, stubby wings outspread, within a great transparent wave which set her down in Village Bay. She walked up The Street, past the houses, nodding her big nose at the assembled Parliament, by way of greeting. The island dogs barked at her, but were too daunted to attack and could only watch as she crossed over the rigs, and circled the graveyard, plodding on towards Conachair. She meant to climb to the mountaintop and sleep there, because the place was magic.

  When she returned, her beak was full of words, pebble-round words and sharp shards, which she fed to her chicks, who sat on benches in the village schoolroom. The chicks were somehow familiar… When she reached Quill, he too opened his mouth, feeling all the greedy excitement of a hungry chick, waiting for her mouth to dip towards his. Not her beak, but her mouth, and not masked at all, but…

  The garefowl took hold of him by the loops of his collarbones and shook him painfully. He woke to find Lachlan leaning over him.

  They had taken to doing that – leaving Quilliam to sleep when they went out fowling. Mr Farriss said the lung fever – like the Kilda Gloom – needed time to work its way out of a man.

  “We got it. Want to see?” said Lachlan. “We got it! Easy as winking! Calum put the sack over it then Mr Don hit it and then we all hit it and hit it and hit it with a rock ’cos it was talking and saying things, and Euan said if we didn’t kill it, it would speak the Devil’s Secret Word and damn us all… You shoulda seen us take it down!”

  “Leave him be,” said Farris sharply, “unless you want to catch his fever.”

  It is true that Quill, as he sat up, was filled with a hot bile that slopped around in him like the oil in a fulmar. But that was not the lung fever: it was the fear, the sickening foreboding, the horrific realization of what Lachlan was telling him. Looking through the forest of their legs, he saw that they had brought their prize home, too.

  The sack lay ragged and ripped, but as plumply puffed up with feathers as when it had been the Keepers’ Throne. The whitened hessian was red now with the blood of the garefowl inside. Her huge flippers and lower body stuck out at the bottom.

  “I tried to stop them,” said Murdo.

  “Killed the witch, didn’t they?” said Kenneth, peering into Quill’s face for a gratifying hint of sorrow. Though his crippled feet had stopped him being there, he was sharing now in the pleasure of knowing the sea-witch had been slaughtered.

  “Witch be damned,” said Mr Don, who had done his best to stop the boys’ descent into savagery and bloodlust. He had only suggested they kill it because its huge stomach was so useful for storing bird-butter. Its skin could be used like leather, and its bones carved into all manner of things. He had pictured a month of pleasant and useful evenings with everyone sitting about in the Bothy sewing shoes or purses or whittling pipes, spoons and thatching pegs.

  Then all out of nowhere the words “witch” and “storm-bringer” and “the Devil’s Word” had fallen into the mix, and talk of Davie’s death and Niall’s head being bitten off. A “murderous zeal” was the only way Don found to describe the boys’ barbarous hysteria and the way they set about the poor beast, in a frenzy of violence.

  He had to admit that the noise coming from the sack had unnerved even him – that jumble of vowels and consonants and snatches of breath. He had hoped a quick blow from him would still both bird and the boys’ excitement. But the garefowl has a thick skull and a rugged constitution; this one had taken a lot of killing.

  For a good few moments Quill wanted to kill them all: Lachlan with his “good news” face; Niall giggling insanely at the death of his monster whose blood was all over his hands and face; Euan rejoicing in his pious slaughter of an innocent creature. Even Mr Don, who had looked at Quill’s friend and seen only a case of useful commodities.

  Kenneth ducked his head to look in under Quill’s brows, trying to catch him out in tears…

  Quill would have punched him but was hampered by that same feeling of falling he had had on the night of Euan’s vision. Something, if not the world, had ended. He knew it, with a clear-eyed certainty. That was why all the million birds on the Stac were screaming. He could hear them. Inside his head he could hear them. Nothing was left. Nothing would ever come back – not Davie, not the garefowl, not Niall’s wits, not Murdina Galloway, not friendship among this mob of vicious, blackback boys.

  “Killed the witch, didn’t we?” said Kenneth yet again, numbering himself now among the triumphant witch-hunters.

  “More fool you, then. Now there’s a witch’s curse on all your heads,” said Quill and he left the cave.

  In spring there were eggs to gather. There were seals, too – great slabs of slick grey, strewn about on the landing place like washed-up bodies.

  “Lard a fit man with seal fat and he might swim as far as Stac Lee!” said Domhnall Don, everlastingly planning an escape. But it would not be his. His arm had healed with a slight corkscrew twist in it, and its hand trembled like that of an old man. Well, he was old. Forty, maybe. Forty-five?

  The gannets were sitting with their feet up, resting them on their tough little eggs, for all the world like old men in their armchairs, feet on tuffets. Take one egg, and the mother would simply lay another. So long as life went on. Pretty much every egg would hatch, too. Of course half of the chicks would die within the year. Storms. Starvation. So? Half would survive. So long as life goes on…

  Even without friends, life went on. The men still spoke to Quill, but no one else did – not since he had told them they were witch-cursed. They did not stone him or turn him out of the cave, but they avoided him as if he had somehow inherited witchery from his beloved garefowl.

  He accepted it. He deserved to be cursed with solitude. Because of his stupid talk of an “Iron Finger”, Davie had died thinking a fish-hook mattered enough to get smashed against a cliff. Quill had conjured up Fearnach Mor into Farriss’s head. He had fed his friends with stories, and what good were stories to anyone? It had been like feeding glass to dogs. He had even misled the garefowl by feeding her fish so that, in her well-meaning way, she had returned the favour, scared Niall out of his wits and been murdered for her kindness. He had told his friends they were cursed and, worst of all, felt no sorrow at the loss of their company. No man, when he dies, can take a companion on his journey into the dark: so why have any in life?

  “I know you now,” Farriss said to him one day. “We are kin. We both have black ink for blood.” Quill did not know what it meant, but did not dare ask.

  Farriss was within his eyeline now, setting puffin snares made from rope fibres. What foolish little creatures puffins were. One puts its leg through a snare. Another puffin, intrigued, comes for a closer look.

  I just put my leg through this loop, says the first puffin.

  What, like this? says the other. A neighbour passes by and they call out: Hey, graidhean! Could you lend us some help here? And over comes the neighbour to take a look…

  So gullible, so easy to take, and by the dozen. Summer brings such plenty.

  Farriss had straightened up. He might simply have been easing his back. He looked up at Quill. There was a question in his face. He nodded towards the sea. And Quill looked, too. There was a blemish on the water.

  Half rubbed out by sunlight, something was rounding Stac Lee. Basking sharks, perhaps: several had passed by yesterday. But no, this was not under the water but on it: something white. A flock of gannets, then, flying close to the waves, flapping?

  All over the Stac, boys were unsett
led, like fulmars when blackbacks come ripping out of the sky. They stopped their leisurely hunting, and hunkered down, holding still. Lately, Euan had been talking about the beast with 666 on its forehead, which would come rampaging during the Final Days of the world, eating people up. They pictured a sea monster: of course they did. Their world was built on the sea. Perhaps this was the Great Beast coming now, feather-crested with white and this was the top of its head breaking the surface as it walked across the seabed, scenting sin, scenting souls to eat.

  Part of Quill was still waiting for the white ship crewed by angels: the one Davie had been so sure would come. His own doubts had ceased to matter: after Davie died, Quill had felt obliged to put on the boy’s hopes and beliefs, as if he had inherited his clothes. Angels were scarcely less frightening than the Great Beast. They too would want to pluck the boys off their nests and carry them away into the sky. As sea eagles steal lambs away from their mother. Quill felt fear but also a surge of bitter resentment that the angels might be coming now, too late for Davie who had wanted and trusted in them so much.

  Or perhaps this was just a boat – a simple, single-sailed boat. In which case it was bound to sail on past the Stac, oblivious to the boys marooned there.

  Suddenly the boys were all on their feet or clinging to their spires of rock or at the Bothy mouth, waving and shouting. Fifty thousand startled birds funnelled into the sky – a whirling waterspout of birds circling and shrieking as if they too had been awaiting the salvation of a little boat tacking out of the west.

  In the end, there was no time to fetch anything, anything at all. The boys moved like tethered goats, setting off for the landing place only to be pulled up short by the thought of things it was unthinkable to leave behind: Davie’s mam’s cooking pot – a woollen cap – the new stock of petrel-candles – a crown daubed on to a cave wall… Half the cleits were full. There was fulmar oil, and bird-butter stored in the gut of a garefowl. There were feathers, too, though not a single sack left for carrying them down to the boat…