“Are you my father?” she asked him, that first night he came to her. After all, the girl had never known her father, so, for all she knew, perhaps the dark man was him.
He laughed, but not unkindly, and told her no, that he wasn’t her father, but that he had met her father years before, in Korea, during the war. “He asked me to look after you, once your mother was gone,” the dark man said.
“He knew that she would die?” asked the girl.
“Everyone dies,” the dark man had replied.
On his second visit to the cottage, he brought her a brand-new transistor radio, so there was news and soap operas and music, if the weather wasn’t too bad. The first song she heard on the radio was “American Pie” by Don McLean, and she has never heard a song that she’s liked better.
Sometimes the dark man brings her books.
And sometimes he reads to her, and other nights he tells her stories that are all his own and no one else’s. The dark man knows many stories.
Some nights, like tonight, they sit together at the fire and listen to the sea shattering itself against the rocky shore, the ravenous Atlantic patiently eating away at the island, one grain at a time. To the girl, it has always seemed that the breakers are interwoven with murmuring voices, if only one knows how to hear them.
“What are the waves whispering tonight?” the dark man asks her, because (as he’s told the girl) he does not himself know the language of the sea. He was born in the Egyptian desert, hundreds of miles from the ocean, and he only knows the languages of sand dunes and scorpions, of serpents and of men.
“‘Come away,’” she says. “They are saying, ‘Come away. Come away with me.’”
The dark man has just finished the last of the laverbread and steamed cockles that she cooked for their dinner, and he lights his pipe and sits back in his chair and watches her for a few minutes before he says anything more.
“Someday,” he tells her, finally, “when you’ve done everything here you were born to do. Just take care not to let the sirens have their way with you before then. Take care not to end up like your poor mother.”
The first night he came to the cottage near Tŵr Mawr lighthouse, the dark man already knew everything about how her mother had died, how late one morning she’d gone alone to the beach below the cottage, taken off all her clothes, and swum out as far as she could before the cold and exhaustion had claimed her. Before the sea had claimed her. He knew that the girl had watched it all from the doorway of the cottage. He knew that the she’d seen her mother drown. He also knew that the body had never been recovered, and he knew that the girl had gone to the beach and waited for her mother to return, that she’d waited until sunset, and then she’d gathered up her mother’s clothing and gone back to the whitewashed cottage. He knew that the clothes were kept locked away inside a cedar chest at the foot of the girl’s bed. And he knew that, from time to time, the drowned woman rose to whisper terrible secrets to her daughter and to tell her about the cities that sprawled in the deep places and about the beings who’d built them, aeons before the coming of man. Some nights, the girl could be persuaded to share those secrets, but not always, even though her mother had assured her time and again that the dark man was a friend and could be trusted and would never betray her.
“I don’t intend to drown myself,” says the girl.
“I know,” the dark man replies. “But few ever do. Usually, it’s the last thing on a person’s mind, drowning.”
“It wasn’t the last thing on my mother’s mind,” she says.
And he replies, “No, but your mother was weak, and she despaired. It wasn’t her time, and she knew it. She wasn’t finished here. She hadn’t taught you all the things your father had trusted her to teach you.”
“Which is why you’re here?” she asks.
“Which is why I’m here,” he replies. “That, and also because I wouldn’t see you starved or worse.”
She asks him, “What would be worse than starving?”
And he answers, “Many things, child. More things than I could ever count. But worst of all for you, that you might be stolen away to some place far from the sea, where neither your mother nor your grandparents could ever find you again.”
“My grandparents have never visited me,” she reminds him. “Because of what my mother did.”
“All the same,” he says. “It would be worse than starving.” And then he blows grey smoke rings towards the low rafters of the whitewashed cottage. He’s stopped watching her and is staring instead into the small, fragrant peat fire crackling in the hearth. There are nights when the dark man sees visions in the flames, and the girl suspects this is because he was born in a desert, where the sun burns everything dry and brittle and black. Her mother—who’d been born by the ocean—saw visions in water, so to the girl it seems a reasonable enough explanation for why the fire in her hearth talks to the dark man.
“I suppose that it would be,” she tells him. “Worse than starving, I mean.”
“You can count on that,” he says.
The girl is quiet for a while then, watching the dark man watching the fire and smoking his pipe. Tonight his smoke smells of oranges and cinnamon. She’s only ever tasted an orange once, when he brought her one as a gift on the night of the summer solstice, wrapped up in a swatch of gingham and
