No call had come from the police about the missing child, and I felt worried. I had made a nuisance of myself, calling again and again and pressing each officer who answered about whether there had been a report of a missing child from the parents. No, they said. No one had reported a missing child.
The boy was still out there. And the women I so admired, my new group of friends . . . they’d suggested that the boy I’d seen and comforted wasn’t human. That he was some kind of creature, a fae. And that if I saw him again, I was to kill him.
I tried to put aside my disgust at Isla’s story in order to imagine how a history like the one experienced by the community of Lòn Haven might filter down to the present day. Everyone believed in one false narrative or another, I reasoned. I remembered my mother telling me that for every child that was born, someone close to them had to die. I remembered that every time someone died, I linked it to someone who was pregnant, or who had given birth, and the narrative began to make sense to me. Even when Saffy was born, I started calling my grandparents more often, worried that her birth would cause one of them to die. And when my grandfather did die a year later, I told myself it was related to Saffy’s birth. That he’d just clung on a little longer.
Such bullshit.
A wild place with a Viking soul, Lòn Haven had a violent and tragic history that had clearly infected the minds of its inhabitants, creating beliefs rooted deeply in fear. And they were prepared to slaughter innocent children in order to protect their community.
I couldn’t get past what Isla had told me. I was fast learning that Lòn Haven was an island of two halves.
I was just about to go to bed when I spotted something outside, moving toward the Longing. A figure. The boy.
This time, I didn’t hesitate. I raced outside and ran after him, slipping on the rocks, my voice carried off by the wind. I pulled open the door of the Longing and went inside, shouting, “Hello! Hello!”
My own voice answered, echoing again and again as it spiraled up the walls of the building. Then I took to the stairs, moving quickly to the lantern room. If he was there, I’d find him and bring him home.
He wasn’t there. I looked down at the bones on the floor. Angrily, I scooped them up and threw them out the window.
Whatever secrets the community of Lòn Haven was hiding were long past being brought to light, and I swore then that I’d no longer stand for anything based in fear or hearsay. No matter how much it terrified me, or left me friendless.
IV
I was desperate to make sense of what Isla and the others had told me that night at the café. About the history of Lòn Haven, about the curse the witches had placed on the island. About wildlings.
I’d heard about a memorial to the witches who had been killed at the Longing. It was a plaque inside the Auld Kirk, or old church, in the south of the island.
I drove there the next morning. The church building was small and plain, the stonework blackened over the years and the graveyard filled with indecipherable tombstones that lay wonky and haphazard among mossy lawn, their script smoothed away by time. An old clock at the apex of the church had stopped. A Latin verse was carved into the stone around it: Maleficos non patieris vivere. Later, I’d discover its English translation:
You shall not suffer a witch to live.
It was dark inside. Stained glass panels depicted scenes of Christ’s life along the east wall. The pews were empty, and I noticed some shrines set up along the sides, paintings of angels on wooden boards shimmering in the faint light of candles. At one of the shrines, a small black-and-white photograph of a child was propped up against the wooden board. A little boy, his hand held up as though he was waving. I squinted at it. Who was he?
“Can I be of any help to you?”
I looked up and saw a man in a long black robe and a white collar standing there. The pastor. “I was just . . . I was wondering about the memorial to the women who were burned during the witch hunts,” I said awkwardly.