Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Idrive a dead man’s car to the monster’s house.
The road is bad, and the light is going, and I take the bends too fast, the loch black on my right now, the headland rising.
I don’t dare look at the water.
By the time the castle comes up out of the dusk, Caisteal Eachainn, all broken-teeth-standing stone, the part of it that’s still roofed black against a sky going to indigo.
My hands have started shaking so badly on the wheel that I have to stop.
I bring the car onto the flat scrub below the curtain wall, kill the engine, and the silence comes in.
He’s there.
Alasdair stands at the foot of the wall where the old sea-gate is, where the castle meets the shore, and he’s a man again; naked and soaking wet.
The water sheets off him in the last of the light, running down his hair and his shoulders, pooling dark around his bare feet on the stone, like he’s only just come up out of the loch and put a man’s body back on over whatever he actually is—or however the fuck that actually works.
He’s not braced for my arrival. For once I’ve caught him off guard—he doesn’t expect the detective’s car, doesn’t expect me to be driving it, and there’s a half-second where his face is unguarded and I see something on it I’ve never seen before, something close to total dismay.
The fact that he has this emotion at all gives me a bit of courage, like there really is someone in there, someone human, that’s worth saving.
I get out of the car on shaky legs.
We look at each other across the bracken and road, the dead man’s car ticking as it cools between us.
“We have a problem,” I say.
“Aye.” He grunts, hair in his eyes.
“And put on some pants,” I tell him, my voice cracking and absurd. “I can’t talk to you about this with you standing there like that.”
“Aye, foxglove,” he replies, and something in how gently he says it nearly undoes me on the spot. He turns and goes through the courtyard into the dark of the castle, and I stand alone by the car with my arms wrapped around myself, the cold coming up off the water, and, somehow, I don’t fall apart.
He comes back in trousers and a dark shirt he hasn’t bothered to button all the way, his feet still bare and hair still wet, stopping a few feet from me. He doesn’t try to touch me, which means he’s read something off me that’s telling him not to.
Wise man. Must be the abject horror on my face.
“Come inside,” he offers, “you’ve had a shock. I can get a fire going.”
“I don’t want to come inside.”
“You’re shaking.”
“Of course I’m shaking.” And there it goes, the practical animal losing its grip all at once, the whole afternoon coming up my throat.
“Of course I’m, fuck, Alasdair, I watched you kill him!
I watched it all happen! I stood outside my home and I watched you.
You broke him. You didn’t even…you didn’t kill him clean, you broke him to pieces and you dragged him over the rocks while he was still alive.
I heard him, I heard the sounds he made, and then they…
in the water, they—” My voice climbs and breaks.
“And it came at me. Before. On the hill. It came down the hill straight at me, you came at me, you put your, that thing put its head down and it ran at me and I thought I was going to…”
“I was trying not to,” he says quickly, the first fast thing I’ve heard out of him, and there’s an edge under it. “Iris. I was trying not to touch you. I moved you out of the way because if you’d stayed where you were…”
“You can’t control it.” I’m crying now, and I hate that I’m crying in front of him, scrubbing at my face with the heels of my scratched palms. “That’s what you’re telling me.
You came up my hill as that thing, and you couldn’t control where it went, or what it did, or whether it ran me down, you just—trust it not to—and—”
“I could never really control it.” His voice is quiet again, and that’s so much worse than the edge.
“Iris. Look at me. I’ve not been honest about that, and I’ll be honest about it now, because you’re owed it after what you watched.
I don’t decide. Not that shape. When it comes up in me, I can steer it, a little, the way you’d steer a horse that’s already bolted, I can keep it from the worst, but I don’t decide.
It decided to take the detective. I didn’t. ”
I stare at him. The loch is black behind him. “Oh, so you’re absolved? Well, if you didn’t, then who did?”
“The horse.” He holds my eyes, unblinking. “The creature. The part of me that was never a man. It’s been kept down a long time, foxglove. There was a bargain, and the bargain kept it down just enough. I took what I could to keep it satisfied, but the bargain’s…you know what happened.”
He takes in a deep breath. “I am losing hold of it, Iris. I’ve told you as much. The monster is winning. I am afraid of what’s at the end of that, and I have not been afraid of anything in a very long time.”
The cold goes that through me has nothing to do with the breeze off the water.
Because I came here bracing for a monster who’s done a terrible thing on purpose, but instead I find that the man I…
that the man is being eaten from the inside by the monster—and the monster is patient and winning—and somewhere at the end of that road is a version of him with no man left in it at all, loose on this loch.
“Come inside,” he says again, softer. “Please. Before you go to pieces out here in the cold. Let me…let me at least do that.”
Against my better judgment, I go inside the castle.
It doesn’t take long for the fire to build.
He sits me in the chair near the hearth and puts a glass of good whisky in my hand, the peat of it sharp and warming.
I drink it too fast, down in two swallows, fast enough to make me cough.
The heat of it spreads down into me and steadies the shaking enough that I can think.
There’s a fine line when it comes to thinking and whisky, and I have to be careful when I toe it.
Alasdair sits across from me, keeping his distance. He holds his own glass and sips it on occasion.
“The car,” I begin, when I feel like I can finally talk.
“Someone knows Sinclair was out here. He told me he was driving the south shore, knocking on doors. He’ll have told people that.
He’ll have…a detective has a system; they log where they’re going.
They’re going to come looking for him, and the last place anyone knows he was headed is out this way. ”
“I’ll deal with the car.”
I frown, sitting up straighter. “How?”
“The same way I deal with everything I need gone.” He says it matter-of-factly. “It goes in the loch tonight, out past the headland where the bottom’s never been found. It won’t come up. There’ll be nothing to put him on your land. Nothing to put him here.”
“That’s not…” I press the glass to my mouth and take it away.
“That’s not the problem. Or it is, but it’s not the whole problem.
Alasdair, I was probably on his list. He came to me twice.
There’ll be a record that he meant to talk to me, or did talk to me.
When they come, they’ll come to me. They’ll ask when I last saw him. ”
“Aye. And that’s when you’ll lie.”
And there it is.
Just a fact. Like, yes, obviously I’m going to lie.
I’m going to sit across from some tired officer and look them in the face and say, Sinclair?
He never came, I never saw him, I’ve seen no one out here; it’s only me.
And they’re going to write it down and believe me, because the truth is unsayable and unbelievable, and I’m just a grieving American with a dead aunt and a quiet life and nothing about me reads as a woman who’d drive a corpse’s car to a castle in the dark and ask a monster to hide the evidence.
“They’d never believe me anyway,” I say, making peace with it already, so easily.
My voice has gone flat and far away. “That’s the thing.
Even if I wanted to tell them. There’s no version where I tell the truth and anyone believes it.
So, I gotta lie. Because lying’s the only thing that sounds sane.
” I look up at him, a sneer pulling across my lip.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you? Made people lie for you. Made them—”
“No,” he denies. “Not made. I’ve had folks choose it, across the years, the way you’re choosing it.
It’s not the same thing, and I’ll not let you pretend it is, even to hate me cleaner.
” A pause. “Hate me for the rest. Not for that. You’re choosing that yourself, foxglove, the same as I chose what I am every time I’ve come up out of that water and not stopped. ”
I don’t like it, so I don’t say anything. The whisky and the fire are warm, and across from me there’s a monster who just told me, frightened, for the first time that I’ve ever seen him frightened, that it’s losing the war for its own body.
And yet the pull is there, even now, even through all of it, the awful, magnetic pull toward him that I’m not sure I’ll ever be rid of.
He sees it, the bastard. He sets his glass down and leans forward, his hand coming up toward the side of my face the way it’s come up so many times before.
I let it get an inch from me, my eyes threatening to close, to give in.
Then by some stroke of luck or last-minute courage, I turn my face away.
“No,” I whisper, “not…I can’t. Not tonight. You need to deal with the car.”
His hand stops where it is, hovering for a moment before he takes it back. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t push, just folds it all away and stands. “Wait here where it’s warm. I’ll not be long. Then I’ll see you home.”
“No. You’ll deal with the car, and I’ll see myself home. I want to walk. I want—I need to be by myself. I need a single hour where there’s nothing, where it’s just me and the road.”
He looks at me a long moment, and I stare at him right back in challenge, and his jaw goes hard, like he wants to argue with me.
But he doesn’t.
He just nods. “Lock your door when you’re in.”
I watch him do it from the scrub above the sea-gate, because I find I can’t make myself leave until it’s done, until I know for sure there’s nothing left to be a witness to.
He gets in the car—the first time I’ve properly seen him in one, even though I know he’s driven mine—and drives it down off the flat and along the spit to where the land drops away to deep water past the headland, the headlights sweeping once across the black loch.
He takes it to the edge, the car undulating over the rocks, and then the lights tip and go down.
The loch takes the car the way the loch takes everything.
There’s a brief commotion and then nothing, the automatic headlights glowing green until they dim and disappear beneath the surface as it sinks—one hell of an eerie sight.
He goes down with it until both car and driver are gone.
The surface then closes over, the moon rising and painting it metal.
I turn and start walking home. I walk every step cold and alone in the dark, second-guessing everything, including who I am as a person.
Who is Iris Galloway underneath it all?
I went out today a woman who was sleeping with a monster. That at least had the feel of something that could happen to a person, something done to you. Right? I mean, weird shit happens, monsters are real.
Now I’m walking home a woman who drove the evidence away with her own hands and has already, in the privacy of her own heart, agreed to lie to the police to protect the, the thing that did it.
Nobody did that to me. I did that! All on my own, too. Here’s a gold star for being morally complicit.
The cottage comes up out of the dark at last, small and stone, one lamp burning in the window because I left it on this morning when I was still someone else.
I let myself in and lock the door behind me, standing with my back against the door. I have absolutely no idea who the woman is who lives here now.
But I know what she’s going to do when the police come.