Chapter 21 #2
I look at it for a long beat, cursing the machine and myself for not updating it for the last ten years, then I go back to my phone.
I’ll just read the ebooks from the mobile app.
But when I start looking for the right books online, all I find are anthologies of Celtic Tales and children’s books.
The few I really want aren’t available for a US-based account.
Fine, then.
Seems the universe wants to do this old-fashioned way.
I’m going to the library.
I get dressed, grab my shit, and open the front door.
I pause on the doorstep and look at the salt line before stepping over it.
I can only hope it holds while I’m gone. Last thing I want is to come home and find a fucking horse in my kitchen.
The nearest library is in Lochcarron, forty-five minutes south, and the drive is the kind that should do me good, all pastoral and scenic, the road following the loch, the morning sun catching on the heather, the long curves through bracken.
But instead, the drive is the kind of drive where I keep checking the rearview, and the verges, and the gaps in the trees, because every white shape between trunks could be a horse.
(It’s always a sheep.)
By the time I get to Lochcarron, my shoulders have been at my ears for forty-five minutes, and my hands have created grooves in the wheel.
The library is in a converted village hall, small, low, with two big windows and a sign that says it’s closed. I’m about to despair, when I then see a small handwritten note that says I’m at the post office I’ll be five minutes.
I wait on the doorstep with my hands in the pockets of Effie’s wax jacket, the wind off the loch in my hair.
After about three minutes, a small woman of approximately seventy in a navy quilted coat walks briskly down the road.
She gives me a friendly nod, unlocks the library, and tells me she’s Anna welcoming me in out of the cold.
I almost say if it’s this cold at the end of August, what’s it going to be like in the fall? I refrain because I’m no longer sure I’ll be here then. I’m not sure of anything anymore; let alone how the known universe works.
The library smells of old books and damp coats and the kerosene heater that she has just turned on. There are books on shelves around three sides of the room, and a long wooden table with reading lamps in the middle.
Then I notice the small section at the back labeled LOCAL INTEREST with a hand-printed card, complete with a thistle and smiley face.
I head right on over and scan the spines.
Highland Folklore and Tradition, by someone called Briggs, 1976. The Water-Beings of Scotland, by McKay, 1992. Songs and Tales of the West Coast, by Mary MacLeod, 1958. A thicker hardback called The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, the spine cracked, the cover faded.
I take all four to the table.
Anna watches me carry them over with a small, interested look on her face, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s probably the kind of village woman who has seen a lot of foreigners come in for a lot of reasons over a lot of years, and has long since stopped asking.
I sit down and open Highland Folklore and Tradition. I go to the index and get somewhat excited to see that each-uisge is there. Pages 47-52 and again at 184-186.
I flip to 47.
The book is matter-of-fact about it in a way that is somehow worse than if it had been melodramatic, addressing the folklore as if it’s reality.
Here, the each-uisge is a category. They are distinct from kelpie—though similar in many ways, kelpies are tameable river creatures and the each-uisge are sea-loch creatures, larger and deadlier.
They come up out of the water in the form of a fine horse, often white or grey, with a wet shine to the coat.
They might seem friendly. They will let you approach.
They will let you mount. But the moment you touch them, your hand fuses to the hide.
You’re basically glued. Then they carry you into the deep water.
They drown you. They consume the body. The liver is sometimes returned to shore as a sign and the only part they will not eat.
They are particularly fond, the book notes, of beautiful young women.
I loathe myself for taking that line like it’s flattery.
The book also says they can take human form.
Often a tall, handsome man. Often dark-haired.
Often with something wet about him that he cannot fully shed—the hair, the cuffs of the sleeves, the smell of the loch.
He will be charming. He will be a good lover.
He will seek out women near his loch, and he will court them in human form before he takes them, and the women who go to him willingly are the ones he keeps the longest.
The women who are eaten quickly are usually the strangers and the hill-walkers, the ones with no connection to the land.
The women who are eaten quickly, the line repeats in my head, bouncing around like a ping pong ball.
The women who are eaten quickly.
He eats the women.
Not in the way he’s been eating me, either, he…
I blink that fact away and continue to read.
Of particular note, the book says, is the each-uisge’s apparent need for an ongoing bargain with a local woman or line of women.
The creature seems to require an anchor of sorts, a household, a hearth, which it cannot fully cross until permitted.
The traditional ward against an each-uisge is salt at every threshold, iron over the lintel, and rowan at the door.
These are not symbolic; the creatures are reported to be physically unable to cross a properly maintained ward without invitation.
There is a body of folklore around the keepers of these wards, women who maintained vigil over an each-uisge for the protection of their village, sometimes for decades or generations.
The keepers were respected and lonely women.
I read the paragraph again.
Particularly that last damn line.
Then I read about the binding. The book is less specific here.
The binding requires a piece of the hide: taken from the creature in horse form, willingly given, kept hidden by the keeper for as long as the binding must hold.
The book doesn’t say what willingly given means.
The book doesn’t say what hidden means either.
The book also doesn’t say what happens if the hide is found, or how you even get the hide.
The whole idea makes me sick to even think about it.
I read and read and after some time Anna brings me a cup of weak instant coffee unprompted. I thank her and slam it back, cringing all the way.
When I leave, I check out two of the books, Highland Folklore and Tradition and The Water-Beings of Scotland.
The librarian looks at the titles as she’s stamping them, but doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t have to. The look she gives me is exactly the look Mhairi gave me yesterday, that knowing-too-much look, and I realize, standing at her little desk in her tiny library, that the women in this part of Scotland have a network I have only barely begun to see the edges of.
“You take care now,” she says, handing the books back.
“Thank you.”
“Drive safe on the road home.”
“I will.”
“Mind the road. The verges are deep this time of year.”
But I know she’s not talking about the verges.
I’m not too far from the turn-off to the cottage when Maddie calls, her name coming up on the display screen. I stare at it for two rings before I answer, because two rings are what I need to brace for impact.
“Hey, Maddie,” I say, trying to sound bright and cheery even though I know she’ll call my bluff.
“Iris.”
The single word has a whole speech in it.
“I’m sorry.” I immediately apologize.
“You went radio silent.”
“I know, I know. I’ve been a bad friend. Bad sister. I’m sorry. I’m okay though. Really. I was going to call you today.”
“You were going to call me today?” she repeats flatly.
“Well, I said I was going to in my text, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t call me. This is me calling you.”
“I got…distracted.”
“Hmmm, well I almost booked a flight.”
“Please don’t book a flight. I’m fine. Truly, I am.”
I am lying through my fucking teeth and she knows it, but I have to do what I can to make her think otherwise.
There’s a long pause on the line before I hear her exhale. I can picture her with her hand over her face the way she does and I know she’s mad at me. But she’s also worried, so the proportions are about even.
“Iris…”
“Yeah.”
“Are you actually okay though?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not just saying it?”
I have to get some form of the truth out. “I’m sleeping with someone,” I blurt.
She inhales sharply.
“Girl…”
“I know.”
“You said you wouldn’t.”
“I said I wouldn’t sleep with the neighbor. I slept with someone else.”
Liar, liar, liar.
“Mmm. Right. Who?”
“Just…some guy.”
“Does some guy have a name?”
“Yeah.”
“And what is his name?”
Horsey McHorseCock.
“Eachann MacCoinnich,” I say somewhat triumphantly. Not a lie!
“Is he the castle guy?”
I swerve around a rabbit that attempted to cross the road and nearly go into the verges myself. “Sorry, I almost hit a rabbit.”
“It’s the castle guy,” she says definitively, my lies collapsing.
I sigh in defeat. “It’s complicated.”
“What does complicated mean?”
I take a breath.
“It means I’m in over my head, and I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”
“Iris, that’s the kind of sentence that gets a friend on a plane.”
“Please don’t get on a plane,” I beg, “I forbid it.”
“Then talk to me.”
I am rounding the bend where the single-track curves around the headland and the bay opens up, the long silver throat of it stretching toward the open sea, and I think for a beat about telling her. About telling her the whole thing. The whole fucking crazy-ass truth.