She removes her coat and wellies. She wears only the old heavy skeleton key that she found in the bothy, tied around her neck with a shoelace. It looks like something you’d find on a pirate ship, which she thinks is appropriate for the tone of the pics.
She sets the camera timer and poses, rolling her shoulders back, looking over her shoulder, pouting her red lips, opening her mouth and showing her tongue. She unties her hair and lets it hang long and loose, trying much more overt pictures in case the ones she’s taken are too tame for someone like Brodie. She opens her legs wider, lets her hands roam across her skin.
She tugs on her coat and looks over the prints that are coming into view on the small white squares. The prints are startling—she doesn’t look like herself.
She looks like a porn star.
Hopefully Brodie will like her now.
As she tugs the zip on her coat, the shoelace from which the skeleton key hangs comes loose, sending the key to the floor with a sharp clang. She tenses, worried in case someone outside will hear. The noise sends bats flittering above, and she’s about to grab the key and race outside when she notices something. On the floor by the stairs there’s an old lock peeking out from beneath a slab of wood.
Quickly she pulls the wood slab aside and fingers the lock. It has a similar insignia on the side of it to the one on the skeleton key; a snake eating its own tail, so it looks like a circle. An ouroboros.
She slips the key inside the lock and is amazed when it clicks open, smooth and unhesitant. She pushes the wood slab farther and finds that it was covering a strange metal grille that is now unlocked. She opens it to find nothing but a deep, dark hole. No treasure chest or room full of secrets. Just a weird old hole. A deep one, by the looks of it.
She locks it and ties the key around her neck. It will be her secret.
III
My mother was dead. There was no burial, no grave for me to visit and pay my respects. I could not speak of her to anyone. She was not missed, or remembered with fondness. The site where they burned her body was a black stain on the cliffside, the ashes of the bodies and the stakes swept away by sea and wind, but somehow the stone that had stood there since the beginnings of the earth retains the mark of the flame, scorched into it like grief.
I understand now that this was the beginning of my current mental state. Missing someone you love for an extended period of time can and will lead to madness, every bit as much as a wound that is not cleaned will lead to a festering sore, and thence an illness that spreads throughout the body. The only boundary between desire and obsession is time; if you crave someone long enough, it becomes a need.
It becomes your ever-waking thought. The only thing you live for.
Not long after my mother was burned, my uncle fetched away my brother, and I was alone, orphaned and unwanted. Amy persuaded her father to take me in, and so I kept myself scarce, trying to earn every scrap of bread he fed me by tending to the fields and caring for the animals. This helpfulness earned me both her father’s admiration and her brothers’ jealousy. They beat the living tar out of me almost daily, and while her father stopped it at first, I think he grew tired of having to defend me. It was extra work, and perhaps he questioned whether I didn’t deserve it.
Tavish was the strongest of the two and driven mad by his mother’s and sister’s deaths, for he liked to make a little stage play out of my beatings. He’d pretend I was a heretic, or accused of witchcraft, and he’d pull out a bag of stones and have me kneel while he cited scripture and stoned me.
Amy never spoke a word about her mother and sister, but she didn’t have to; I knew her thoughts as intimately as I knew my own. She barely spoke, never smiled, and I knew she blamed herself for what had happened. Had she never cursed Duncan, there would have been no trial. Twelve women had been burned to death. And in the weeks thereafter, three more women and their babies died in childbirth. Had Finwell been alive, it is likely they would have lived. And Amy knew it.