Since the day she was found, Luna’s thought about the cave, and wondered how it happened. She’s researched wormholes and the conversion of mass into energy. She’s researched resonance frequency—all human bodies have their own frequency—and whether something within the ancient rock of the cave, formed three million years ago, transferred the resonance of her body into a different temporal frequency. A physics professor in Cambridge told her he’d found microbes that he believed were from another planet trapped inside caves in Japan. Yet another emailed a long screed about dark matter particles found in rock samples collected from the Arctic, about quantum radiation creating wormholes deep within the earth. Another explained time as Russian dolls, the past and present stacked within the future like eggs inside eggs—when she went through the cave, she’d simply cracked one and slipped inside the other.
None of this explains how she got the numbers on her leg, etched as delicately as though writ by a human hand.
She still doesn’t believe in magic. It’s a technology, she’s decided. Just one that she doesn’t understand yet.
Saffy and Luna have decided to destroy the cave to stop anyone from the past coming through. Luna has been on the lookout for a specialist contractor. Someone to do the job right, without drawing attention. It’ll have to be done quick, at night, and with discretion. No trucks rolling up, no drilling. The explosion will have to coincide with a noise elsewhere on the island. A fireworks display, perhaps, organized by Cassie. A distraction.
Her phone beeps. It’s a message from the contractor.
Yes. I can do this.
The price is eye-watering, but she doesn’t hesitate.
The past belongs in the past.
* * *
—
“Should I put the flowers in the vase now?” Charlie asks as she weeds the grave and cleans the headstone.
She points at the ones that have died. “Take those out first,” she tells him, watching as he stretches his little hands to the old, droop-headed roses with the browning petals, replacing them with the new.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I came across the story of Scotland’s witches by accident. I moved to Glasgow in late 2019, just before we went into national lockdown. I’d been working at the University of Glasgow for four and a half years, but I’d not yet heard that the Scottish witch trials were the worst in Europe, nor that around four thousand people—mostly poor women—were tortured and killed on false charges of witchcraft. I’d not yet learned that their conviction meant that their memory was forever tarnished, that their loved ones were left without a body to bury—in Scotland, convicted bodies were always burned, sometimes while still alive—and without a gravestone to pay their respects. Left without a single way to remember their loved one with fondness, I can only imagine how profoundly traumatic and complicated their grief must have been.
When we finally relocated to Glasgow—mostly to spare me the 163-mile commute from our home in Whitley Bay, England—I learned, completely by chance, that we lived twenty minutes from a small plaque marking where eleven people were executed for witchcraft. Two of them were young boys, roughly the same age as my son, and, in fact, they had lived close to our new home. I had heard about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, and in England, but knew very little about the ones in Scotland. Gradually, my research revealed this dark stain on Scotland’s history, and I found myself astonished again and again by both the magnitude of this history and its persistent invisibility. For example, close to my home, I was able to find the megalithic Kempock Stone, known as the Lang Stane, or Granny Kempock. Sat opposite the shop Sainsbury’s at the top of a short path, the stone forms part of a story concerning a woman named Mary Lamont, who was accused of dancing around the stone and plotting with the devil to throw the stone into the sea to sink ships. She was sent to the gallows on the grounds of a church nearby. You will need to scour the depths of the internet to find this information. Although the stone is marked by iron signages and a plaque, there is no mention of Mary, not even on the Kempock Stone’s Wikipedia entry. I drove to the church where she was burned and found no mention of her execution there either.