The Lighthouse Witches(3)

The lighthouse stood twenty feet away from the bothy toward the far end of the island. We all pushed against the wind toward the heavy metal door at the base. I could make out an object wrapped around the handle. A tree branch. I made to pull it off, thinking it had been blown on there by the wind and become stuck. Isla stopped me.

“Rowan wood,” she said. “It’s for protection.”

I had no idea what she meant, but I stepped back as she tried to leverage the door open. Finally, it shifted. I lifted Clover onto my hip and held Luna’s hand tight as we followed Isla inside.

“Bloody hell,” Saffy said, looking around. “This place is rank.”

I shushed her, but couldn’t help agreeing internally.

I’d never been inside a lighthouse before. I’d expected floor levels, an enclosed staircase. The Longing, however, was a grim, granite cone. A rickety staircase was pinned loosely against the wall, spiraling Hitchcock-style to the lantern room at the very top. The place reeked of damp and rotting fish. I wondered why we were standing in an inch of black liquid, until Isla explained that one of the lower windows was broken, and over time seawater had poured inside and pooled on the floor.

“I gather you’ll need something to pump it out before you start,” she said.

“Mr. Roberts is turning it into a writing studio, is that right?” I asked, and Isla nodded.

“He’s not published,” she added. “Just a hobby. I wouldn’t be expecting him to produce The Iliad or anything like that. He bought it last year and didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Next thing I know, he’s asking me about getting a painter in to prettify it, make it into a writing studio.” She gave a shrill laugh. “Whoever heard of such a thing? Surely all you need to write is a pen and paper.”

“Maybe the views will inspire him,” I offered.

“Aye. Inspire him to go off sailing, more like.”

We were shrouded in darkness. Clover was clutching on to her toy giraffe, whimpering to go home. Bats flitted overhead. Moonlight trickled in from the small upper windows, revealing the height of the place.

“It’s a hundred and forty-nine feet tall,” Isla said, swinging her torchlight to the very top. “A hundred and thirty-eight steps to the lantern room. Braw views up there. I can show you when it’s light.” Her torchlight rested on patches of paint that had crumbled off, revealing raw stone. About halfway up someone had graffitied a section of the wall in garish shades of lime green and black.

“There was a breakin,” Isla said darkly. “Outsiders, you see. We get them here a lot more now, since the rental properties on the east side opened up. And the Neolithic museum, that’s new. You should take your girls.”

Isla reassured us that breakins like this were rare, that tourists—or “outsiders”—didn’t frequent the place often. Lòn Haven’s population was predominantly grassroots, with sixty or so archaeologists from “the University” working at the Neolithic sites. Some of the younger population had inherited crofts that they didn’t want to live in, so they’d started renting them out. The older population objected strongly both to the younger islanders moving away (“All of them want to live in Edinburgh or London,” Isla recalled with a sneer) and, as a result, drawing “outsiders” to the island to rent out the crofts.

Breakin aside, I was intrigued by the Longing. As an artist, two of my favorite things were shadows and curved angles, and this place had both in spades. The shadows seemed alive, like the wings of a giant bird stirred by our presence. It was creepy, yes, but also elegant—I loved how the staircase whirled upward in increasingly narrower circles within the cylinder of the structure, how the lack of right angles gave every small edge extra significance, how the architecture drew my gaze upward.

“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.