The Lighthouse Witches(4)

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.

Swastikas?

Bloody hell. Was I working for a Nazi?

Some of the symbols floated within the rectangle frame alongside the triangles. They looked older in style, and I wondered if they might be Egyptian hieroglyphs. How the hell was I going to paint something like this on the inside of a lighthouse? I tried to imagine how this would even be physically possible. The walls of the Longing were sectioned by the staircase, so the mural would be carved up by the stairs and I’d have to take enormous care to ensure it matched up. Also, there was the small matter of the curved walls. The sketch had been drawn by hand, but evidently rulers and protractors had been used, given how straight the lines were. To achieve such straightness in a curved building was going to be a logistical nightmare.

I went to check on Saffy in the small loft bedroom to ask her opinion about the symbols at the fringes of the diagram. She’d taken an interest in mythological symbols for a school project and the last time we’d had an actual conversation, she was showing me a painting she’d done of the Eye of Horus, explaining excitedly about how it was meant to protect against evil.

But the bed was empty, her boots and coat gone from the hallway. My heart thumped in my throat. Where was she?

“Morning, Mummy,” Luna said from the stairwell, her brown hair askew and limp with grease.

“Have you seen your sister?” I asked her.

“She’s still asleep in your bed.”

“No, not Clover. Have you seen Saffy?”

Luna yawned and shook her head.

I kissed the top of her head. “Stay inside, please.”

“Where are you going?”

“To find Saffy.”

I walked quickly outside to the Longing. A wave slapped against the rocks and sprayed me with foamy tide as I tugged the heavy door open and stepped inside. The smell of the place hit me, and I covered my mouth and nostrils with a hand as I looked around.

“Saffy?” I called.

At the very top of the staircase, I spotted someone in the lantern room. A child, with long white-blonde hair. A girl, I thought. A flash of a pale shoulder told me she had no top on, and she was small—about five years old. It was dangerous for her to be up there.

“Saffy!” I shouted. “Are you up there?”

No answer. I took to the stairs, running as quickly as I could and cursing myself for being so unfit. By the time I reached the top my heart was beating so hard in my throat I thought I might be sick. I forced myself to look down all the way to the bottom. I don’t have a problem with heights, but all that stood between me and breaking my neck on concrete was a rusty banister. I took the next flight to the lantern room, determined to order Saffy downstairs.

Light poured into the lantern room through dozens of honeycomb windowpanes. It offered views of the whole west side of the island, as far as the towering white hills that marked the boundary between the desolate west and the more populated east, jagged as a spine. But it was empty.

“Hello?” I said. “Anyone here?”

I looked around in case another flight of stairs might appear, or a doorway to another room in which a child might be hiding. In the center of the room was an old metal frame upon which I imagined a Fresnel lens had once thrown a bright beam of light across the North Atlantic. The plaster was crumbling, and those patches that did remain were covered in graffiti.