Cursed

by Marie O'Regan

  “You grew up on the Shetland Islands?” My eyes widened. They seemed as unknowable to me as a place in a story. I wasn’t certain I could have pointed to them on a map.

  “On Foula,” she said, clearly loving to speak of it. “The most westerly of them all, and separate from the rest – divided from them by a nasty reef, the Shaalds, though I always thought of them as the hungry rocks. The loneliest island in Britain.” She said this last with a touch of pride.

  Caught up in her words, I only said, “I thought I detected an accent,” though the truth was that at times I could and at others I barely heard it. It seemed to come and go, like something she half-remembered.

  “Aye, it’s still in me, when I think of it,” she said. “Mostly it’s gone. I lost a lot of things when I left. Found some too. That’s what happens, I suppose.”

  She glanced at me as if she saw right through me and I thought of the way I’d inherited the house, had been given everything. It had been at once too easy and too hard. I had lost my mother; I had done nothing to help her. I hadn’t earned such a home, hadn’t given enough. But I was helping now, wasn’t I? Old people liked to chat about their lives, their memories. Annis certainly seemed to relish the chance to talk to someone, and my mother might have liked to know that I listened – so I asked Annis to tell me all about her life on Foula.

  I wasn’t sure she heard. She was staring into the garden, focused on a little twig that was still twitching as if a bird had just flown; then she looked away as if it was nothing after all. Her gaze softened, as though she saw only distant places, other times.

  “I saw a trow when I was thirteen years old,” she said. “Is that the sort of tale you like, hen?”

  I smiled and nodded, wondering what on earth a trow was – a fish? A bird? – trying not to feel like a child at bedtime, listening to stories at her mother’s knee.

  “The aurora shone that night,” she said. “The dancers were merry then, perhaps a little too merry, so in a way it was all their fault, for if they weren’t shining the path would have been too dark to go out. It was approaching winter, and the nights were longer than any you’d imagine, though it was between the weathers; we had gales before and gales after, but that night it was still.

  “I’d only been to the Turvelsons’. They had the next croft to ours, and my mother had sent me to borrow a little butter. She was baking biscuits for the wee ones’ birthdays, but it was me who had to go.”

  Her accent seemed to deepen as she remembered. She pronounced mother as modir.

  “It hadn’t taken long, and the parcel was greasy in my pocket. It’s lucky our neighbours were close by. Fewer than forty souls lived on Foula even then, all of us on the easterly plain. Most of the Isles are empty, did you know that? And none can count them. There are said to be a hundred islands and skerries, but no one really knows, and some are said to appear and disappear at the bidding of the selkies.”

  I smiled at her whimsicality, but now that she had begun she seemed barely conscious of my presence.

  “The sky to the north was all aglow,” she said. “Every few steps the path shone green at my feet and I saw everything – and nothing, for the shimmering in the sky made the hills darker than ever. The trows are hill-dwellers, did you know that? I looked at the great mound of Hamnafeld, which drops on the other side sheer into the ocean. On its top, that’s where they say the door is: the Lum of Liorafeld, an opening that goes straight down to their homes underground. Some have let lines down to try and find the bottom, but no one ever can. Those who seek it rarely even find the door.

  “That’s what my grandmother told me, and that’s what I was thinking of. Perhaps that’s why it happened – they were drawn to my thoughts, or perhaps it was only the butter, or they liked the pretty lights. Whatever the reason, I felt their eyes on me.

  “That feeling you have sometimes, of being watched – it doesn’t happen often on Foula. There are more ponies than people and more sheep than ponies and more birds than the rest put together, and never a stranger, especially not in winter. Still, I knew it when it came, that feeling, crawling all over me like dirty fingers.

  “I turned about and there he was: a shape where none should be. He stood halfway between their home and mine, as if he’d just then stepped out of the peat bog. One moment he was clear, outlined in the flicker, and the next I could barely make him out. But tall he was, and grey; I thought his clothes were grey and his skin too, his raggedy beard and tatty hair, all of him, and I knew he was looking at me, though I couldn’t rightly see his eyes.

  “I don’t know what I would have done, screamed or run or nothing at all, but thanks be, he started walking away. He didn’t walk like ordinary folk, though. He walked like a trow, and that is, backwards – he never so much as glanced behind him to see his way. At least, I don’t think he did. He came and went in the light, but I felt him still watching me, and I shivered, because I knew then I’d seen one of the folk. Some say the trows are like Norwegian trolls, others the English fairies, but I think they’re something in-between.

  “The fear took me then and I ran all the way home. When I let myself in at the door, my mother called out for the butter; my little brother and sister looked up from their game; and Gran took one look at me and shrieked fit to wake all the angels in heaven.

  “Well, there was uproar then. ‘What is it? What is it?’ My mother cried, and I could scarce speak for trembling, but Gran only held my face to the lamplight, tilting it this way and that way.

  “‘What did you see?’ she spat, and I was so frightened I thought to lie, but I knew she’d see it on me. She saw many things, my Gran; too many, perhaps. So I told her.

  “She crowed as if she’d caught a fish. ‘I knew it!’ she said. ‘It’s left its mark on you!’

  “Well, my brother grinned and my sister laughed, but my mother only sighed and went back to the oat-biscuits, taking the butter with her. Me, I went to the mirror. I stared and stared into it, trying to see whatever Gran had seen. Left its mark on you, she’d said, but no matter how I tried, then or after, I never could see a trace of it.”

  Annis stirred in her wheelchair, blinking as if she didn’t entirely know where she was. I became conscious of her feet constantly shifting against the blankets, the sound seeming suddenly loud. I realised it had been there all the time she spoke, almost like whispering, or perhaps like waves breaking on the shore. Now I realised she was waiting for me to respond and yet I didn’t have the first idea what to say.

  “There’s more to it, of course,” she said. “I should tell you of the year I turned sixteen – of Yule, and of the thing that happened to the twins – my brother and sister.”

  Her whole body twitched in her seat and she gave an especially hard kick. The tartan blanket fell aside and I caught a glimpse, not of some wide-fitting brogues or house-slippers or any such thing, but the most exquisite bright red shoes. She caught her breath, pulling at the blanket to cover them once more.

  “I’ll tell you of those too,” she said, “but not now.”

  I must have stepped closer without meaning to, thinking to help her I supposed, for she reached out and grasped my hand in one bony claw, crushing my fingers.

  “I’ll go inside,” she said. “I’ve said enough, I think.”

  She cast glances to the left and right before waving me towards my own garden, ignoring my goodbyes and offers of help as she pulled at the wheels of her chair. I’m not sure I was really seeing her any longer. I could still picture those shoes, the brightness of them, the perfect red of them: their pointed toes, the tiny, almost invisible stitching, the suppleness of the leather. I realised I hadn’t said a word about her story. It wasn’t until I got inside that I found her soft woollen blanket was still draped about my shoulders.

  * * *

  As I got on with the task of settling into my mother’s house, Annis’s tale began to seem more and more outlandish. I didn’t know what to think of it, or of her for telling it. Her words w
ere surely make-believe, or at least little more than a mingling of her past and the tales she must have heard in childhood.

  Still, I kept returning to the blanket where I’d left it on the table, picking it up and touching it to my cheek. Was that scent still there – the harsh, raw wind, carried across the Atlantic? But when I closed my eyes it was those shoes I saw, such pretty shoes for one so old, and I wondered how it must feel to wear them. Was that why she was always fidgeting, as if she longed to dance? Or did her feet simply follow in the wake of her wandering thoughts?

  I shook away the idea and decided I would look in on her again. It seemed like fate, then, when I looked out of the window and saw her emerging into her garden, into a day that was still struggling to become bright.

  After last time there seemed little point in standing on ceremony and so I went into my own garden and waved as I stepped over the fence. I made to hand over the lovely blanket but she gestured for me to hold on to it, so I wrapped it about me and nestled into it once again.

  “My grandmother had a lot of superstitions,” she began, as if I’d never been away. “She always said the trows would punish a lass for forgetting to place a little resting peat on a waning flame. They like the fire, you see. They also like to wash their bairns on a Saturday and she would bid me leave out the water for them. If I neglected to do it, or if I did it well, before she’d even thought of it, why, she put it all down to the night I saw the peedie man.

  “She wouldn’t let me forget, and anyway, I could not. I thought of him often: standing out there under the dancing sky, watching and watching for me. I don’t know if I still carried the mark Gran had spoken of. I didn’t like to think of it, much less ask – but the longing of it was on me, that’s what she always said, and it sent a shiver through me every time, as if I was still out there in the cold and the dark.

  “But it’s Yule when the trows really wander above the ground. They come out seven days earlier, on Tul-ya’s e’en, and so it was the year I turned sixteen. Gran had me stick knives into the hams to stop the trows getting them, and it was me had to do the blessing on the little ones.

  “I did it myself first: washed, then dipped hands and feet into the water while my mother dropped the coals in, so the trows couldn’t steal away the power in them. Then it came time for me to bless the twins, but they were older then, eleven years old, and they didn’t want me; they pulled faces and splashed till I was drenched, and so I told them they could take their chances.

  “Truth be told, I was sick of them then. I had to cook for them, make sure their silly matching faces were scrubbed, comb their matching hair. I had to fetch this, tidy that, while they put out their matching tongues at me behind our mother’s back. Besides, that was the year of the red shoes, and after I saw them, I could think of nothing else.”

  I realised that her feet were restless still, shifting and rustling under their blanket. I’d almost forgotten their movement, had neglected, somehow, to notice.

  “Oh, but I was wild for those shoes. I saw them in a fancy shop on the mainland, right in the window they were and covered in ribbons, and I couldn’t talk of anything else. Besides, the dance was coming, and I felt I had to wear them. If I only had those shoes, Alex Galdie might dance with me. If I only had those shoes, I’d never ask for anything else again. Have you ever wished for something like that, Sophie – needed it so badly it’s like a knot inside of you that won’t come loose?”

  She paused and I cast my mind back, but it was her shoes that came to mind, the lovely red of them, their softness, their perfect form, and I thought of dancing – of flying through the air as if I’d never fall to earth again. I blinked away the thought, but she hadn’t noticed my reverie.

  “I saved and saved,” she said. “I dropped one penny after another into a jar to help buy them, though it was never enough. I begged; I wept. I did everything I was asked to do, washing the bairn’s mucky clothes before I was told, sweeping the hearth, anything my mother asked of me. And in the end she gave a great sigh and said I must be witched – in the hill was how she put it, meaning in the trow’s power – but she said they would be mine.

  “Maybe she thought me cursed even then, you see, but I didn’t see it that way. Why should a girl only be dutiful all her days? Why must she think only of work and home and bairns and nothing more? It was a great wide world outside the door – right across the ocean. Every time I looked out I thought of it, and every time the young men looked at me I heard fierce music playing, felt the dance already in my feet.”

  I could almost see it; that, or a memory. When she went on, I had to drag myself back from the vision.

  “On Foula, Auld Yule is still celebrated in January, as it was in the Julian calendar, though all the rest of the world changed that in 1752. We hung onto things long past anyone else, perhaps because there was so little to go around. And so the dancing was set for the sixth. After that, the grey neighbours would go back inside the hill, their holidays over, but before then they’d dance all they could – and so would I.

  “There was rarely any snow on Foula. You may not believe that, since it’s as far north as Cape Farewell in Greenland, but Atlantic currents keep the climate mild; it only feels so cold because of the wind chasing in from the sea. But it snowed that night – the night of the dancing. A good skim of white, and the wind made it bitter, every flake like a knife driving into your skin. And the way they flew all about, it was hard to see your hand before your face.

  “The sea was alive as we made our way to Norderhus, near the harbour. I heard its song, deep and fierce. The Atlantic and the North Sea were at war, the sea black, the sky above pale as death. That wasn’t the lights, though; the only merrie dancers were all within. I could hear the fiddles on the wind, loud one moment, the next quiet and quick. I wasn’t yet wearing my red shoes, was carrying those under my oil-coat so they wouldn’t get wet. There was my mother, grandmother and me; the twins were judged too young, and I wasn’t sorry for that.

  “Everyone was in the ben, the inner room, and in there, it was roasting. I left my boots with all the rest and slipped on my lovely shoes and the music was in them at once, fast and free and telling of new places, and almost as soon as I set foot in the room I was off – clasped by the hand by Alex Galdie, as close as you like, and he didn’t tear his eyes from mine a moment while we spun and we twirled. There was a light in his face when he smiled at me, and if I wasn’t witched before, I was witched then. I saw my mother watching and my grandmother both, and I didn’t care a bit. My shoes carried me off, and I was happy to go.

  “I never once thought of home, or duties, or the land I was born in or the trows and their ways – not even their love of the dance. That tune ended and another began, wilder than the first, and Alex never let me go. He danced with me again, whirling me by the waist, and my feet went faster and faster till I laughed with joy.

  “Trows love the fiddle, did you know that? It’s said they stole away the Fiddler of Yell for years and years, though he thought only a night had passed while he played for them. And it seemed they were not the only ones, for after a while I noticed from the tail of my eye the door opened and the twins glided in, all quiet-like, their eyes wide and their faces two matching smiles. Sneaked by they did, not speaking to anyone before they joined the dance. I saw them now and again as our paths crossed, touching hands, whirling away. Little knowing looks they gave me, and never a word. I remember thinking they must have longed for it just as I had, and I couldn’t blame them for that. I’d not sat down for a moment, never wanted to again.

  “They danced beautifully. Not a hink nor a kink in it, and them so young.

  “It was around midnight when my mother grabbed me by the hand and said we must be off. I looked about for the twins and couldn’t see them anywhere, so I asked her where they were, fidgeting all the while because the music played on and Alex waited and I could not bear to stand still.

  “She shook her head. I thought the music had stopped he
r ears and so I shouted louder, but she couldn’t fathom the question. All the time the twins had danced, you see, something had stopped her from seeing; she’d never even noticed they were there at all. And then Gran said they couldn’t have come, not all alone, because when she stepped out of the door she’d made sure to lock it behind her.

  “Well, there was an uproar then. The dance stopped quick enough and everyone put on their oilskins and sou’westers and went out to look.

  “The snow hadn’t stopped falling, but the sky was dark again, deeper and blacker by contrast with the lights that danced across it. The merrie dancers had come after all, just as if they were mocking us.

  “The bairns were not at the croft, of course. That was quiet, the door standing wide and the snow drifting in across the clean floor. Their beds were empty.

  “We found the twins at the edge of the peat bog, just where I’d seen the peedie man. They were dead. They were lying in the snow, their eyes open to the sky, and snowflakes drifted into them, not melting. They’d been there all night, you see. They never had been dancing and never would – it was the trows that had come, stealing their likenesses so they could join in with the human revels.

  “I don’t know if the trows had to steal their breath before they took on their shape, or if it was an accident they died. I didn’t know if those little bodies were really the twins at all – or if my real brother and sister were stolen away under the hill and those were nothing but the empty skins the trows had put on for the night, just like they were puppets.

  “I wonder sometimes if the twins are dancing even now, under great Hamnafeld. I wonder if that’s why my feet will never be still – because my dancing is an echo of theirs. When at last my shoes give me peace, maybe I’ll know my brother and sister are dead. But then, years pass differently under the hill. They might be children yet – or far older than I am, my brother with a beard reaching to his feet, my sister with the light of ages in her eyes.