Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
The closet is not a closet.
Surprise, surprise, something I thought was something in this damn house is not the thing I thought it was.
I stand in the guest bedroom with the Gothic key in my palm, the door to the closet-not-closet open in front of me. As the cold of an unused space comes across my face, it takes me a beat to understand what I’m looking at, the area dimly lit only from the light of the bedroom.
It’s a small room, maybe five feet deep, the same width as the bedroom, but a room nonetheless, tucked behind the wall where I had assumed there was nothing but eaves and pipework.
The ceiling is low because it’s under the slope of the roof, and the air inside is colder than the bedroom by a few degrees.
There’s a smell coming out of it. Beeswax, old paper.
Something underneath that’s sharper. Pigment or linseed oil, maybe?
I duck and step in, but I don’t get very far. It’s enough that I pull on the cord hanging from the bulb and the light comes on, illuminating everything in a stark wavering light as the blub swings above me.
There are paintings upon paintings stacked against the walls, some hung, some leaned, some racked in narrow wooden racks.
Canvases of many sizes, though none larger than two feet across.
A small worktable along the far wall with brushes in jars and clay pots of dried pigment and a glass cup of old turpentine that has gone the color of weak whisky.
A paint-stained smock on a peg. A small kerosene lamp on the table, with a box of kitchen matches beside it.
A bundle of rowan twigs tied with red thread.
A small dish of grey hair—I’m sorry Effie, but I can’t help but shudder at that one.
Hair that’s not on a head is an ick of mine.
I take another step, and my feet crunch on something.
I look down and cringe, fearing the worst, like I just stepped on a bunch of dried out spiders.
There is salt on the floor.
On the floorboards in patterns. Circles.
Several of them, drawn in coarse sea salt, some disturbed and redrawn, the older lines visible underneath the newer ones, the way a pentimento shows under a painting that has been reworked.
Jars of more salt on a shelf above the worktable.
A small leather-bound notebook on the table beside the lamp.
It’s all so witchy as fuck but I still don’t understand any of it.
I turn to the nearest painting to look at it closer and then…
Then I understand all of it at once.
It’s Alasdair.
A small oil portrait in a plain dark wood frame, his face in three-quarter profile. The angle of his jaw, the cleft in his chin, the Alasdair blue of his eyes.
The signature in the bottom right corner reads, E. Galloway. 1989.
I blink at it, my brain short-circuiting, then turn to the next.
It’s Alasdair again. Different painting. Smaller. His face turned to the viewer this time, his eyes finding mine in dots of vibrant cornflower. E. Galloway. 1972.
The next. Alasdair on the rocks of his spit, in dark clothes, looking across the bay. E. Galloway. 1994.
The next. Alasdair at a kitchen table I do not recognize, a candle in front of him, his hand on a book. E. Galloway. 2003.
The next. The white horse standing in bracken, mane long, eyes black. E. Galloway. 1981.
The next. A close-up of Alasdair’s hands. E. Galloway. 2017.
I keep looking at the paintings. There are dozens. Some half-finished. Some signed and dated and finished. The earliest one I find on the wall is dated 1962. The latest is dated 2023.
He is the same in every fucking one.
Thirty years apart, fifty years apart—it doesn’t matter. The same face. The same eyes. The same line of his jaw.
I sit down on the floor, my back against Effie’s worktable. There isn’t much room to sit but I sit anyway, because my legs have stopped wanting to hold me up.
The math is absolutely not mathing.
There is no version of it that does, even though I try every logical angle. Alasdair has a father who looks exactly like him. And a grandfather who looks like him. That could happen, couldn’t it?
I reach around and pick up the leather-bound notebook on the worktable. I flip it open to see her handwriting, see the first date in 1962.
I tried the salt circle with the rowan again. He came to the gate. He did not cross. I do not know why the wood does not work alone. I also don’t know why he keeps coming back.
—E.
I flip forward a few pages.
Catriona is missing. They came to my door. I told them what I could, and what I could not. I sat with my tea afterwards, watched the bay from the kitchen window, and waited for him to come to the rocks. But he didn’t. He hasn’t come for three nights. He knows I know it was him.
I flip forward. 1981. The year of the white horse painting.
I have tried the binding seventeen times. The thing my grandmother told my mother about, the piece of the horse hide. I cannot do it alone. He will not give it to me. The bargain only takes the form he can keep.
I flip to the last entries.
I am eighty-three, and he looks the same as he did when I was twenty-two. When I die, the bargain breaks. The next Galloway will have to do what I could not, or refuse him entirely. I will be the one who left her this. I will have to die with that.
The last entry is undated.
Iris will have to do what I could not. I am sorry to leave her this. I see no other way.
I close the notebook and stare numbly at the paintings.
Effie tried for sixty years to do something, some binding, and she failed at it.
Effie created a bargain with Alasdair.
Effie left me the cottage knowing all of this. She was unable to tell me outright—perhaps because I wouldn’t believe it until I lived here long enough—until I eventually came to know Alasdair.
I sit there for a long time.
When I get up, I am decidedly undecided. I know only there is one more person I have to talk to before the day is done; before my brain absolutely melts into goo.
I duck back through the doorway. I lock the secret room behind me, refuse to look at the jawbone that I know is still on the bed, then go downstairs. I get my keys from the kitchen counter where Alasdair left them.
I drive to the village.
Mhairi is at the till when I step inside her shop, the air inside warm and a little stale, smelling of tea, and butter, and lavender.
It all seems so quaint, so normal and ordinary, and, for a moment, I think I’m being silly by coming here.
That there’s no way I’m about to tell this shopkeeper I barely know that my neighbor seems to be immortal.
Even Mhairi seems so unassuming, keeping busy by sorting a stack of envelopes. She pauses her shuffling and looks up at me when I walk in.
She stares a beat longer than she needs to and squints, raising her chin. She doesn’t say anything, but I think, somehow, she already knows. She sets the envelopes down, then turns and puts the kettle on.
“Mhairi?” My voice is clear as I approach.
“Aye, hen. Cup of tea?”
“I’m good,” I tell her, raising my palm.
“You’ll be even better when you have tea. Sit down.”
There’s a single wooden chair by the cold radiator at the back of the shop, beside the rack of postcards the odd tourist or hill-walker buys—who apparently don’t care that they’re all yellowing at the edges.
I sit down while Mhairi makes the tea. I know the stores back at home—least not the places I’ve lived in—would never offer tea to their customers as if they were old friends, but here it feels like a custom; part of the landscape.
Besides, even though I really should just get some bread and a few things, I do have a fuckton of questions for her, and she’s more likely to answer them if I just do as she says and have tea.
She brings me a mug and a plate with a tablet of shortbread on it then pulls a stool over from behind the counter and sits across from me. She looks at me with her clear, hazel eyes for a long second before she speaks.
“Let’s cut the idle chitchat, shall we?”
I nearly choke on my biscuit. Straight to the point, this one. I hope that comes in abundance today.
“You’ve been over there,” she states.
I don’t have to ask her to clarify where “there” is.
“You’ve gotten to…know him,” she adds with a glint in her eye. I don’t want her to clarify what that means either.
“I have,” I say slowly. “Fairly well.”
“And now you’re wondering who exactly you’re dealing with” She grimaces. “Or what.”
I stare at her, because we’re about to embark on a conversation I never thought I would have with anyone. A conversation about the fucking impossible. The supernatural. And Mhairi here is acting like this is just a regular workday for her.
“What do you know?” she asks between a sip of her tea.
“I don’t fucking know what I know,” I blurt, then I cover my mouth with my hand, eyes wide. “Sorry, didn’t mean to swear.”
“Aye, hen, you swear as much as you need to.”
I sigh and run my hand over my face, shaking my head. “This is going to sound crazy but…I discovered a box, and inside the box was a key, and the key opened a room upstairs, and in that room…”
“The paintings,” she states simply.
I blink at her in surprise. “You know about the paintings?”
“Your Effie was a great artist. She took great pride in her art, even those paintings she made of her neighbor. When I’d come to Tigh-na-Mara over the years, she would have them all over her walls.
She didn’t let many people in, mind you, but she did me from time to time.
I knew of her fascination with him. Couldn’t blame her, really.
” She takes another sip of her tea and lets out a long sigh.
“Then, the last time I came over, when she was doing poorly health-wise and we knew she’d have to get proper care soon, I noticed the paintings were no longer on the walls. ”
Suddenly I’m picturing the walls around my bed clearly. The paintings that were gone, the blank spaces left behind. Those paintings had been there. She had Alasdair watching her as she slept.