“Has the lighthouse ever been submerged?” I asked. I could hear wind pummeling the stone walls, the loud suck and slap of the waves close by.
“We get our fair share of storms,” Isla said, and I could tell she was choosing her words carefully so as not to put me off. “But the Longing has been standing for a hundred years amidst all that Mother Nature and the sea gods have to throw at her, and I daresay she’ll stand a hundred more.” A pause. “So long as you keep rowan on the door, you’ll be fine.”
It was as she said this that I felt a wave of déjà vu pass over me. Saffy, Luna, and Isla were beginning to head toward the door to leave, but the feeling of familiarity was so strong that I paused, as though someone had spoken and I was trying to understand what they’d said.
“Liv?” Saffy said from behind. I turned all the way around, moved by absolute certainty that something was in the corner by the stairs, just underneath it, as though I’d left it there.
“Everything all right?” Isla said as I sloshed through the oily water to the staircase. Her torchlight fell upon something floating on the black water ahead of me. The slender white limb of a baby’s corpse.
Luna gave a scream that bounced off the surfaces of the lighthouse.
“What is it?” Isla said, rushing forward.
Luna was still shrieking, clawing at me and crying, “No! No!” She turned to rush out, and I grabbed her, reaching down with my free hand to scoop the little body out of the filthy water.
It wasn’t a baby. It was only a doll, one of those naked newborn dolls that Clover liked to play with.
As I looked down into the grotesque face of that doll, its eyes blacked out with felt tip, adrenaline flashed through my body. I had known it was a doll. I had known it was there before I saw it, and that we’d mistake it for a dead child. Like a memory.
But that was ridiculous. I had never been there before.
IV
The next morning, I woke at sunrise, disoriented and stiff. I gave a start at the scene squared off by the musty bedroom window, a gray wave reaching above rock like a ghostly hand. Wind whistled through the cracked windowpane, and an albatross sat on the windowsill, eyeing me boldly. When it stretched its wings and lifted into the sky, a lighthouse appeared on the outcrop. I reminded myself: I was in Scotland, on a tiny island on the eastern shore of the Highlands. I was here to paint a mural inside that lighthouse.
I got up, made coffee, and tried to work out how to turn on the TV. There was no aerial attached so we couldn’t get a single channel. In the TV cabinet was a VCR player but no videotapes. We’d left York in such haste that I’d only packed the bare essentials—a few outfits, a handful of toys for the girls, and definitely no videotapes. I gave up and sat down with the paper Isla had given me spread across the kitchen table. The mural for the lighthouse.
What was it? A crop circle? Some kind of zodiac?
It would have made a pretty tattoo for someone, but as a mural for the inside of a building as big as the Longing it was . . . unusual. I had expected something that told a story—a nautical scene, perhaps. A galleon with white sails full of wind, a sky transitioning from day to starry night, and heaving seas with whales and cephalopods lurking in the dark depths—something of that nature would look fabulous in the lighthouse, logistics notwithstanding. But this . . . it was like a physics equation, dry and strange.
I traced the symbols with my index finger to tease out a pattern. Two triangles, one upside down, overlapping at the narrowest point, and a smaller triangle overlapping the two larger ones, with a rectangular frame. That was the base of the diagram, and from that central design lines, arrows and other shapes fanned outward in all directions over the rectangle. Some of them were like the lines of a family tree, others like the right-angled spokes of a spider diagram. Some of the lines were crossed with three shorter lines, others were Cs and backward Cs, and others looked like swastikas.