Chapter 20 #2
“I just figured that those paintings had to go somewhere.”
“But…the paintings are all of him.”
“Aye.”
“They’re dated,” I say, hoping she’s picking up what I’m putting down.
“They are,” she confirms. She has that same way of direct answering that Alasdair does.
“He’s the same in every one. Every single one. From the sixties onward. He looks the same. You understand that’s crazy, right? He looks the fucking same.”
A long beat. She takes a nibble of her shortbread and gently wipes the crumbs from her lips.
“Aye, hen. He is the same.”
I take a breath.
“It’s not possible.”
“Many things aren’t until they are.”
Helpful.
“I want to know who he really is, what he really is,” I tell her.
She nods slowly.
“All right, hen. Ask away and I’ll tell ya. It’s better this way.”
Here I go. “He’s a vampire, isn’t he?”
She chuckles, which is a bit of a relief. “Good heavens. No. No vampire. Not sure they exist really, and if they do, I’ve never come across one.”
I never really thought Alasdair was a vampire.
To be honest, I never really thought he was anything other than possibly an eccentric at best, and a serial killer at worst. I mean, he doesn’t have fangs, he walks about in broad daylight—as broad as it gets here—I’ve seen him eat garlic, and I’ve felt his heart beat. He’s not undead.
“Is he a…merman?” I ask next, because that’s also been nagging at me, the fact that he’s always swimming, even though I’m almost smiling as I say it because it sounds so ridiculous.
She shakes her head. “No, hen. There are no such thing as mermen. Mermaids, sure, though I’ve never seen ‘em. Rumor has it they died out a long time ago, or migrated to other parts of the world.”
“Uh. Okay. Selkie?” I mentally rummage through every mythological or supernatural creature.
“Selkies are real,” she confirms, “but he isn’t one. Selkies come up out of the sea, shed their skin, and walk about as men and women. They are beautiful and they are not safe, but they don’t drown women. They integrate, and marry, and break the hearts of the people they leave behind.”
I throw a hand up. “Okay, so what the hell is he then? Just…an immortal? Someone who sold his soul to the devil?” I pause. “Oh, I know! He’s Dorian Grey!”
She looks at me for a long beat.
“You really want to know?”
“I want to know. I need to know.”
I need to know what the fuck I’m sleeping with.
“All right. Here, in these parts, we have the each-uisge.”
She says it easily. Ech-OOSH-keh. The ch in the back of the throat.
“Each-uisge?”
“Ech-oosh-keh. Like a loch.”
“Each-uisge?” I repeat, trying to really lay on the Scot’s brogue.
“Aye. Closer. Water-horse. The old word.”
“Horse!”
“Aye. Surely you would have seen that connection by now.”
“He’s a fucking horse!?” I exclaim, then quickly look around the shop to see if anyone came in without me noticing. It’s still empty.
“A horse that lives in the water,” she explains, her tone so matter-of-fact it’s almost comical.
“They come up out of the lochs at certain times of the year, and they will let you ride them, but if you put your hand on them your hand will not come off. The horse will go back into the loch and you will go with it, and that is the last anyone will see of you. Your liver will wash up later, sometimes. That’s how they’re known. ”
The liver. That’s what the locals at the pub had said, about the woman in Applecross, how only a liver remained.
“The white horse in his woods…” I say slowly, remembering how it watched me near the castle, how he warned me not to touch it.
“Aye.”
“The white horse is…Alasdair?”
She takes a sip of her tea.
“That is what it is.”
“He is the horse,” I repeat.
“He is.”
“And the man.”
“He is both. A shapeshifter. He has been one for a very long time.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know exactly. He was on this coast when my grandmother was young. He was on this coast when her grandmother was young, by what she told me. The records of this village do not go back as far as he does, you see.”
I try to let that fact sink in, but it’s hard.
Every part of my brain wants to fight against what I’ve been told, even when I’ve seen some evidence of it.
At the very least, I know that he’s been alive and hasn’t aged for a very long time, the paintings are evidence of that, and yet I still can’t seem to wrap my head around the rest of it.
“But I saw him riding a horse…”
“He rides them, aye. There are wild horses here that belong to him, running loose on the hills and the moors. They are kin, in a way.”
“He told me his last name…” I offer, feeling like I finally have some information she may not.
“What did he tell you?”
“MacCoinnich.”
She nods. “Aye, it is. Or it was. That was the spelling before they anglicized it. It’s Mackenzie now.”
“Mackenzie!” I exclaim.
“Aye. The clan is everywhere on this coast. He’s from before the change in spelling. He’s never updated. Why should he? He doesn’t really exist.”
I close my eyes and give my head a shake. Too much. It’s too fucking much. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
I open them. Mhairi is watching me closely.
“The names,” I say, my voice coming out flat now. “I found a list in Effie’s trunk, of names of women throughout the years, including Catriona Carmichael…”
“Aye.”
“He killed them.”
“He did, hen.”
I knew it and yet refused to know it at the same time. The truth lodges in my chest like shrapnel from an explosion I’d been expecting.
“He killed all of them.”
“All of them,” she repeats with a grim nod.
The drowned wives. He was the one that drowned them. He is the one that created them. No wonder he talked about them with reverence. It was because he was fucking guilty.
“He killed Catriona Carmichael.”
“Aye.”
“The four this summer.”
She pauses and then nods. “Aye.”
The four this summer. It seemed like a lot at once considering how spread out it had been during the decades before.
“Why this summer?” I ask. “Why more?”
She sets her tea down. “Because Effie died, hen. She kept him bound, in a way. The one your bloodline has kept on him since the first Galloway came to that cottage, and whatever dwelling may have stood there before. As long as the Galloway woman of the line kept her threshold closed to him, he held to a pace. He took rarely. He held himself to the loch. It was a bargain between them.”
“What did he get out of it?” I ask. Because I have to ask. Because the only kind of arrangement I understand is the kind both sides want.
Mhairi looks at me for a long beat over her tea.
“An anchor, hen. They need one. A woman by the water who knows them by name while also refusing them. Without that, they forget what shape they are. They go back to the water and they don’t come back as anything you’d want to meet.
The keeper kept him a man as much as she kept him to the loch.
He needed her for that. He needs you for that, hen. And he’s losing it now.”
“How is he losing it?” I ask.
Mhairi takes a slow sip of her tea. Her eyes don’t leave mine over the rim of the cup.
“You’ve been there long enough to start seeing it, hen.
The four this summer. He’ll be holding to a pace he set centuries ago, and that pace is breaking.
He’ll be eating more, and what he eats is going to start looking less like the careful choices of a careful creature.
The form will slip on him when it didn’t used to.
Some night the man will sit at your table, and you’ll look up and not be sure for a second whether it’s even a man anymore.
He’ll know it’s happening. He won’t be able to stop it.
The longer he goes without a keeper, the less of him there is to come back to her when he comes up out of the water. ”
She sets the cup down.
“I’d give him a year, hen. Maybe two. Before there’s nothing left across the bay but the horse. And it will be as if the man never existed.”
I can’t even think about it.
“And so when Effie died…”
“The line went dormant. He has been losing the bargain in stages since the spring. The four this summer are what happens when there is no anchor.”
“Eighty years…” I can barely breathe.
“Effie was the longest keeper of the line. She refused him at the threshold when she was twenty-two, and she refused him every year of her life after that; the refusing held the bargain longer than it had ever been held.”
“And now I’m here.”
“Aye. That you are.”
“And I…have not refused him.”
She does not answer. She does not need to.
“I tried though,” I plead. “I didn’t know what Effie meant by keeping everything salted, but I did it anyway. I didn’t know she meant Alasdair—I feared she meant Alasdair—but…I didn’t invite him in. Yet…”
“Yes?”
“This morning, I woke up in my bed and he was there. He brought me there overnight from the castle. He came in through the front door. The wards did not hold. Shouldn’t they have held?”
“Hen,” she murmurs gently, placing a cool hand on top of mine. “You did let him in.”
“I didn’t. The door was locked. He unlocked it with the key but I know I didn’t…I was asleep but I know I wouldn’t have…”
“I do not mean the door, Iris,” she snaps sharply.
I frown. “Then what are you talking about?”
She gives me a pointed look.
“Your body, my dear.”
The shop tilts, and I suck in my breath to keep from going with it.
Don’t let him in.
“The bargain has not been about doors, at least not all of it,” she explains. “The salt at the windows and the rowan at the step have been the small theatre of a much older rule, and the older rule is that the Galloway women keep their thresholds closed.”
But if the threshold is also her body?
Effie kept hers closed for sixty years.
And I have decidedly not.
“Oh. Oh fuck.” I gasp.
“Aye, hen.”
“Oh my god.”
“Aye.”
“Mhairi—”
“I know.”
“But I didn’t know. Effie’s letter said—”
“I don’t know what Effie’s letter said, but I know she couldn’t have written it plainly. There are things one does not put on paper in this country, even now. She wrote what she could. She trusted you would understand the rest.”