I sat on the bed, closing my eyes. My face felt rigid. Ice in my veins. I pulled my legs up and hugged them, as though I could close myself off somehow. I imagined myself inside a shell. Some creature that is soft and unformed, protected by an armoured carapace. But still I felt the tears on my cheeks.
Dot put her arms around me but I stayed rigid. After some time, I lay down. I could feel her watching me but I said nothing. And, as so often over the past months, at the last moment before I fell asleep, I remembered again the feeling of pushing my coat down over the sailor’s face. And I knew that I must be a monster to do such a thing. That I must be a monster to long for that for myself sometimes. The peace, the silence.
In the morning, when I woke, Dot was gone.
‘Dot!’ I cry now, into the blank, faceless mist on the cold hillside. She will hear me; she will turn; she will run back to me. ‘Dot!’
And then my foot catches on a dip in the land and I fall, my ankle twisting, my hands smacking painfully against the rocky ground.
I lie there for a moment, stunned. The mist eddies around me in a silent blanket, no noise except my own sobbing breaths. No movement apart from the rise and fall of my chest.
She’s gone.
Pain scythes through my ankle when I stand and, though each step is agony, I continue up the hill, limping and, when the pain gets too much, crawling. My hands are ripped by stones and gorse bushes and, through the thin material of my trousers, I can feel my knees throbbing with a warm wetness that must be blood.
I can’t leave her out here.
And then I see a shape moving in the mist. A man. A man, walking towards me. And I know who it is.
He’s found me. And we’re out here alone. In the fog, no one will hear me cry out. No one will hear me scream.
I stay very still, my body frozen, my face pressed against the cold, damp ground. My breath is tight in my chest, as if something is pressing down on my airway. As if fingers are digging into my windpipe.
And I know that I was foolish ever to leave the bothy at all, foolish to think that I could work in the infirmary, that I could be anywhere near Angus without putting myself in danger.
If I can just stay still, perhaps he won’t see me.
I open one eye, then the other.
Stillness, except for the swirling mist. And silence. No sign of the figure in the mist. It wasn’t my imagination – I saw him, I’m sure of it. And perhaps he’s out here, searching for me still.
Gradually, I make my limbs move. I manage to push myself upright, to crouch and then to crawl forward. Slowly. The rocks dig into my knees. I wince and struggle to my feet, still breathless, still waiting to feel his hand on my shoulder, his fist in my hair.
I walk forward quietly, moving up the hill. Away from the camp, away from the infirmary. Away from the men.
At last, I see a building rearing out of the mist. At first it is distorted by the vortices of whirling cloud, but then it resolves itself into home. Our home. The bothy. The place where I know we’re safe.
Before our parents left, before everything with Angus, I used to feel like that about returning to the blue house in Kirkwall – even the sight of it was warmth.
Some tension in my gut uncoils and I drag myself over the doorstep, calling Dot’s name, wanting to throw my arms around her, to apologize, to tell her that all I want is for her to be safe.
But the bothy is empty, the fireplace cold. The bed hasn’t been slept in.
With a sob, I turn back to face the blank rectangle of mist in the doorway and I shout her name again and again, the sound disappearing into the mist.
There is no reply.Dorothy
The mist has cleared and it’s almost dark when I reach the bothy. My throat is raw from shouting for Con. My legs ache and my stomach clenches around itself. I’ve eaten nothing all day. Instead I walked along the beaches and, with my heart in my mouth, I stared into the beating water beneath the cliffs, searching for her pale skin, her red hair.
In the end, I’d returned to the bothy, although I doubt she will come back here as I know the roof reminds her of Angus.
The bothy looks gloomy and skeletal in the dusk, almost as if it is years into the future, after Con and I have gone and the land is rising to reclaim our abandoned home. But as I reach the door, the shadows resolve themselves into the solid shape of the place we left some weeks ago.
My lamp casts shivering shadows on the pockmarked walls. The little table is bare. The stove, when I touch it, is cold. She hasn’t been here.
As I turn to leave, I hear a sound. Something like an exhalation from the corner of the room. I wheel around, the lamp swaying in my hands, so that the light flickers and almost dies.
The blanket on the bed is moving.
And I think of the curse on this island, the stories that Con has always been so ready to believe: the talk of dead lovers and restless ghosts and desolate spirits. I think of the Nuckelavee: the skinless monster, half man, half horse, that is said to crawl from the sea, ready to exhale madness and disease.
The blanket shifts and writhes, then sits upright. And,
