While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  ‘Do you?’

  He paused, weighing his words. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, as Hamlet says. Until a theory is conclusively disproved, I’m prepared to allow the possibility of it.’

  ‘So you believe in ghosts?’ She made it sound like an accusation, but all the time she was thinking of the woman singing, the scratching at the door, the fleeting laughter, the skittering footsteps. She realised her hands were freezing.

  ‘Ghosts, she says.’ He smiled. ‘For an artist, you’re very literal-minded. Let us rather say I believe time is not necessarily linear. In certain places, I think, it can exist in layers, with past and present superimposed on one another, and perhaps there are moments when we catch echoes or fragments from another time that seem familiar, though we can’t comprehend them with our senses as we do our present reality. And people have come to use the word “ghosts” because it’s the only crude means we have to express our experience of those moments. But the phenomenon recurs across cultures and ages. Does that make sense?’

  ‘That sounds batshit,’ Zoe said, and forced herself to laugh, because his expression had grown so earnest and still while he was speaking that she almost believed him, and the idea was horrifying. Charles didn’t laugh.

  ‘You’ve never known anything of that kind?’ It seemed to Zoe he was watching her intently, though his tone was merely curious.

  ‘No,’ she said, and felt the hairs stand up along her arm. ‘Tell me about Ailsa and the murders.’

  He sat back and crossed his legs. ‘Why do you speak of murders, in the plural?’

  ‘Edward said she’s supposed to have killed her son and then herself, but …’ She curled her lip.

  ‘But you’ve decided she was a victim too?’ He spoke softly. ‘Why? Because she’s a mother?’

  ‘Well – yes.’ Zoe straightened, aggrieved. ‘I mean, what’s more likely? This rich woman living alone, miles from anywhere, hated by all the villagers, called a witch but supposedly quite sane and intelligent – she suddenly loses it and kills her child and herself? Or someone murders them both and covers it up with a story the whole island’s glad to jump on because of course she must be a witch so what else would you expect?’ When he did not immediately reply, she pulled her chair closer and slapped her palm down on the desk. ‘If you’re going to write about this, you must have considered it. Someone got away with murder that night, because this whole society believed a woman who doesn’t obey the rules has to be punished.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s possible that a mother could harm her child?’

  There was a long silence. Zoe struggled to swallow.

  ‘I know it happens,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m just saying I don’t think it’s the most obvious explanation in this instance.’

  ‘There are plenty of documented cases where mothers have killed their children out of a misguided desire to protect them,’ Charles said gently. ‘Perhaps if the child is abnormal in some way. She may feel she’s sparing him a life of suffering.’

  She looked down, plucked at her sleeve; his stillness and his steady, searching gaze unsettled her.

  ‘OK, but usually if the woman’s disturbed, right? And I thought you didn’t believe that.’

  ‘Well, unfortunately, unless Ailsa’s journal ever comes to light, we can’t know her state of mind at the end.’

  ‘How do you know she kept a journal?’

  ‘William Drummond refers to it in a letter to Richard Bonar, the solicitor, after Ailsa’s death, when he’s dealing with her estate. William didn’t come back for the funeral, you know – he couldn’t face the islanders and their accusations about his family. But he implores Bonar that if he should find this journal anywhere in the house, he must destroy it by fire without reading it or allowing it to be read, “lest the poison in her mind corrupt the souls of others”.’ He made quote marks in the air with his fingers to illustrate William’s words.

  ‘So even her brother thought she was crazy.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Charles said evenly. Zoe looked at him. A new silence unfolded around them.

  ‘Or what? Possessed, you mean?’ She was openly sneering now, but she could hear the waver in her voice, and her skin was prickling.

  ‘Bear in mind that William was a churchman, and an islander at heart. He made sense of the world according to the principles he knew. And this is 1869 – long before Freud published anything. People didn’t talk about neuroses then. Not people like William, anyway. They talked about madness and possession.’

  An image jolted into her mind from her dream the night before; that half-turn to see Ailsa McBride’s reflection staring back from the window instead of her own, the shock of those hard black eyes, the malice in them, and the way she had sensed it directed at her, at the same time as she had also seemed to be seeing through Ailsa’s eyes. If you were a simple crofter in 1869 who’d never been off the island and a woman looked at you with that stare, you might well imagine evil had taken hold of her.

  ‘What did you mean about Tamhas’s letters being connected with the murders, depending on your view of magic?’ she asked, lowering her voice as if someone might be eavesdropping.

  Charles hesitated. ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’

  ‘Don’t you dare, Dr Joseph.’ She pointed her finger towards him in imitation of his schoolmaster gesture, only half-joking. ‘Don’t drop your ominous hints and then tell me it’s too scary for little me. I want the whole story.’

  She succeeded in staring him down. One corner of his mouth twitched; amused, she supposed, by her stubbornness.

  ‘Dr Joseph?’ A woman with a grey tea-cosy of hair stuck her head around the archway from the front of the shop and waved a book at Charles. ‘Don’t want to interrupt you, but could I pay for this?’

  ‘Of course, Mrs McDaid, I’ll be right there. Have you met Zoe Adams? She’s the new tenant out at Mick and Kaye’s place.’

  ‘Aye, we’ve heard. The American. How do you like the house?’ Mrs McDaid seemed to come with her lips ready-pursed, as if to save time by disapproving in advance.

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’ Zoe beamed at the woman. Damned if she was going to have any of these harpies thinking she was anything other than happy as Larry in her cursed house. ‘So peaceful. And I love the island. Everyone’s been so friendly.’

  Mrs McDaid appeared wrong-footed. ‘Aye, well, it’s that sort of place. Everyone knows everyone here. We keep an eye on each other.’ She made this sound far from benign.

  ‘Help yourself to more coffee,’ Charles said, pushing his chair back. ‘You might check on our young friend while you’re there.’ He nodded towards the kitchen.

  She found the boy slumped on a high stool by the window, almost filling the narrow space between the Formica units and the opposite wall. He held the rocket book open loosely on his lap. Beside him, the counter was strewn with crumbs and an empty cookie wrapper. He jerked his head up as she opened the door, his face automatically guilty, and stared at her with that same naked suspicion.

  ‘Hi,’ she said brightly, lifting the coffee pot from its hotplate. ‘Good book?’ She almost added that her son loved space travel too, but checked herself in time. No discussion of her family with anyone while she was here: that was her self-imposed rule.

  ‘S’all right.’ The boy looked down as if he had forgotten he was holding it. Since they seemed to have reached a conversational dead-end, Zoe smiled and turned her attention to pouring.

  ‘You stay at the McBride house,’ the boy blurted, so suddenly that she started, jolting the jug and splashing scalding coffee over her fingers. She cursed quietly and moved to run her hand under the tap.

  ‘That’s right.’ She flinched at the sting of cold water. ‘Do you know it?’

  The boy’s unhealthy pallor blanched a shade whiter; his mouth worked as if gasping for words, but no sound emerged. Too late, Zoe realised that Charles had called him Robbie, and that Edward had mentioned a Robbie, the surviving boy whos
e friend had disappeared last summer near the house. Was this the same child – the one who now lived under the suspicion of murder? He looked so stricken at the mention of it that she guessed it must be.

  ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, glancing down, ‘none of my business.’

  ‘Do you—’ he stopped, as if he did not know how to continue. Zoe gave him an encouraging nod. ‘Do you like it out there?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, making herself meet his eye. And then, firmly: ‘I really like it.’

  He went on staring at her, his unexpressive features clenched as if words were effortfully gathering force behind them.

  ‘You havenae—’ he began. The inflection told her it was the beginning of a question.

  ‘Haven’t what?’ she prompted gently.

  ‘You havenae heard—’ As he broke off she saw his eyes flicker sideways, past her shoulder. She turned to see Charles leaning in the doorway.

  ‘Everything all right, Robbie?’

  ‘Aye. I have to go.’ The boy slid down from his stool, scattering crumbs, and thrust the book at Charles before bolting from the room as if from the scene of a crime.

  ‘Something I said?’ Zoe looked towards the door where Robbie had vanished.

  ‘It’s not you. Skittish around adults, that one. Doesn’t like being asked questions.’

  ‘He was the one asking me questions. About the house.’

  ‘Ah.’ Charles nodded, as if this made sense, but didn’t say any more.

  ‘That’s the kid whose friend disappeared up there, right?’

  He gave her a long look, a faint crease appearing between his brows. ‘I see you’re acquainting yourself with all the local stories. Edward’s doing, I suppose. Yes, that’s a very troubled boy you met there. And I don’t know how to help him, except by trying to win his trust, little by little. Edward’s terribly worried about him, I expect he told you.’

  ‘He said some people think Robbie killed the other boy.’

  Charles looked away towards the window, but she caught the small, disapproving twist of his mouth. When he spoke, it was quietly, as if musing aloud. ‘That child is paralysed by fear. It ought to be obvious to anyone. But what’s frightening him will remain a mystery, unless he can be persuaded to confide in someone. And at present, it’s clear that his terror of the consequences is greater than his desire for help. No one is going to force the truth out of him.’ He spoke with stern finality and Zoe felt implicitly chided for speculating on local gossip, though she sensed that his irritation was directed not at her but at the whole community, for their lack of compassion. But what if the boy had pushed his friend to his death, she wanted to ask?

  ‘You were talking about Tamhas McBride’s letters,’ she said instead. ‘The connection with the murders.’ But she could see that Charles was distracted, his eyes fixed on the door and a thumbnail worrying at his lower lip.

  ‘Hm? Oh, the letters.’ He pulled his attention back to her. ‘Well, they suggest that Ailsa was involved in her husband’s experiments. Whether that counts as a connection very much depends, as I say, on whether you believe there was anything to them.’

  ‘Experiments?’ She dropped her voice to an outraged whisper, though the back room was empty.

  ‘In common with many people at the time, Tamhas and Lévi were concerned with trying to summon spirits.’

  ‘Like a séance, you mean?’

  ‘Similar. But not dead relatives from the beyond – they were more ambitious than that. They rather looked down on traditional Spiritualists as dabbling in the shallows.’

  ‘What, then?’ She found her skin had grown cold again, despite the sun slanting through the window.

  Charles leaned against the doorframe, tucking the rocket book under his arm. ‘They were interested in ancient religions. The Egyptians, Persians, Sumerians, Chaldeans, Manicheans.’ He stopped at her blank expression. ‘The philosopher-magicians of the Renaissance believed that adepts of these ancient cults communicated with immortal beings and were able to channel certain powers as a result. Lévi saw himself as continuing this tradition. It appears from the letters that he and Tamhas McBride were attempting to conjure these spirits and reporting their progress to one another. Shortly before his final voyage, Tamhas writes to Lévi of “success in our Great Work”. He couches it in careful terms, of course, but he begs Lévi to visit him here on the island when he returns from America. Of course, Tamhas never did return, and none of his own writings on his experiments have survived, so we can only surmise from the letters what he thought he’d achieved.’ He shook his head sadly and crossed the room to his desk, where he opened the nautical atlas as if the story were over. Zoe stood over him.

  ‘But what about Ailsa? Was she summoning spirits with him?’

  ‘That I don’t know.’ He laid a hand flat on the book and looked at her. ‘But in that final letter, where he writes of his success, he goes on to say something rather enigmatic.’ He cleared his throat to announce Tamhas McBride’s words:

  ‘The effect upon my wife has been transformative – such that I am almost loath to leave her alone in the house. I would that you might see the results for yourself. Yet much may come of it to ensure our legacy – you know whereof I speak – provided she remains obedient and keeps herself apart from the censure of the narrow-minded and puritanical, that is to say, all of Society. Though in this place I fear that is no simple task.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Zoe stared at him. ‘It sounds like he was experimenting on her.’

  ‘That’s one way to read it. I suppose it depends how suggestible Ailsa was, and how much in thrall to her husband. Her letters give the impression of a practical, level-headed woman, but Tamhas was clearly a forceful personality. He may have persuaded her that she was susceptible to certain influences.’

  ‘Hypnotised her, you mean?’

  ‘Needn’t be so overt as that. If you keep someone socially isolated and repeatedly tell them certain things about their behaviour or their situation, it’s not surprising if they come to accept your version of reality. Happens all the time, even now – most frequently, I’m sorry to say, between husbands and wives. It’s a form of control.’

  ‘But Ailsa wouldn’t have let herself be bullied like that.’ Zoe realised as she spoke that she was basing this defence on nothing but the picture of Ailsa she had formed in her own mind. Yet the memory of those eyes in the photograph, and the strength of will she had sensed in her dream, convinced her that she was right: Ailsa McBride had been a fierce woman, unforgiving, implacable. Zoe admired and feared her in equal measure, though she could not have explained how she felt she knew Ailsa so intimately.

  Charles looked at her curiously. ‘Ah, well. I suppose we’ll never know. Ailsa’s voice has been lost to us.’

  It seemed that he was about to speak again, but a middle-aged couple in hiking gear appeared through the archway, asking for maps. He excused himself and Zoe sensed that he was relieved to abandon the McBride story for the present; Robbie’s sudden departure seemed to have troubled him. But as she slipped past him towards the door, raising a hand in farewell, he called out an invitation to dinner the following night, saying he would be in touch. Surprised and pleased, she nodded her agreement and opened the door into a riot of unseasonal sunshine and a salt breeze. It was hard to feel too unsettled by tales of séances and possession with this warm light on her skin and her own beach calling to her across the island.

  8

  The road over the moor rolled out clear and unmistakable in the blazing sunshine; it seemed absurd to Zoe now that she could have lost her bearings the day before. With each mile, she grew more familiar with the hiccupping Golf and its character flaws – the odd jerking of the brake pedal, the place where the gear shift stuck between third and fourth – so that her confidence tentatively returned, and from time to time she allowed herself to stop holding her breath and venture above 20 mph. The road lay empty in both directions, silvered with a wash of light where the sun’s glare met pools
of water from the previous day’s rain. At the horizon, a row of hills rose up in a haze of purple, their spines curved gently against the blue sky, a world away from the looming shadows of the previous night. Almost for the first time since she had arrived on the island, Zoe felt a lifting of her spirits, a brief charge of possibility.

  She parked in the drive, dropped her bags of shopping in the kitchen and let herself out of the back door, racing along the veranda and down the steps to the beach, nearly tripping in her haste to pull off her boots and socks as she ran. It must have been seventy degrees at least, summer weather; the dry sand curled warm between her toes as she ran over the strand towards the water’s edge. The tide was on the retreat, strewing the beach with rags of kelp and bladderwrack. Zoe turned to face the house, jogging backwards, shielding her eyes against the glare. Long shadows stretched across the dunes and the empty beach; the cliffs behind the house shielded her from view. She glanced back at the sea. Small, white-edged waves licked at the sand; further out, patterns of light strobed and flickered across dark-blue water. Seized by a sudden impulse, she stripped off her sweater, jeans and underwear and let out a wild cry as she hurled herself the rest of the way towards the sea, feet pounding the sand, legs pistoning under her, all her senses vividly awake, until the slap of icy water shocked her into silence. She pressed on, determined, until she was immersed and the numbness that spread through her skin gave way to new sensation; she struck out into the waves with broad strokes, skin tingling, laughing aloud as the water buoyed her up and she swam out towards the curve of the cliffs at the southern end of the cove. The tide propelled her forward; her muscles were warming up now, her arms cut through the rising waves and with every stroke she felt powerfully alive. Pausing, she trod water to look back at the shore, surprised to see that it was further away than she had anticipated. A movement in the distance registered at the edge of her vision; she squinted into the reflected light and felt her heart lurch. Someone was standing on the beach, up by the house, watching her. She squeezed her eyes tight, brushing salt drops from her lashes, and peered harder; the figure was still there, motionless against the backdrop of the cliffs. She remembered her first night, the dream and its aftermath, the silhouette she would swear she saw out on the sand through the window of the gallery, there and gone in a blink. Her pulse quickened; she hung in the water, unsure whether to go back or forward. The waves had grown choppier out here, the water colder, and she could feel the pull of the undertow. She knew she needed to swim back towards the beach before the tide carried her any further. Stretching down with her toe, her foot scrabbled hopelessly for solid ground; panic jabbed her under the ribs as she realised she had swum out of her depth. She struck out blindly, lashing at the water as hard as she could, but the swell seemed to have grown stronger. Brine and liquid light stung her eyes as another wave crashed over her. Sticking her head forward, she ploughed on, straining her arms as if she could shovel water out of the way with brute strength, but when she looked up, she seemed no closer to the beach; her heart juddered with fear and her limbs grew slack and heavy. The next time she raised her head, the figure on the shore appeared to be moving closer towards her. She was shivering violently now, chilled through, hands and feet numb; she flailed an arm, though she did not know whether she meant to call for help or ward him away. Gathering her forces for a final push, she struck out and, as she did so, a cold grip curled around her ankle, anchoring her.