Chapter 33 #3
The room goes quiet and still. I look at him standing in the middle of his conscience finding out what it cost, and the funny thing is, that I don’t hate him for it.
While there is horror in this makeshift museum of the dead, it pales compared to the worst of what I imagined on the walk over here.
What I find instead is the size of the grief in this room, centuries of a man reciting names so he could stay tethered to humanity, and the wreckage of the women who paid for it.
“Will you show me?” I ask gently. “The well-chamber?”
“You want to see the bones?”
“Aye,” I say and the word comes naturally, and I wonder if I’ll eventually have a Scottish accent one day. “I want to see them. I think…I think perhaps we could do something for them.”
He looks at me a long moment, and then he nods and takes the lamp from its hook by the door.
We go back out and down the same spiral staircase we came up, except we keep descending, past the level of the great hall, and the stairs keep going, turning down into the rock the castle stands on.
The walls change around us as we go, dressed stone gives way to rougher courses and then to raw rock, dark and damp-sheened in the lamplight.
The air changes too, colder with every turn, and wet, and carrying the mineral smell of the loch.
“How deep does this go?” I ask.
“Not deep. It can’t.” His low voice sounds hushed in the stairwell.
“We’re on a sea rock, lass, the water’s everywhere under it.
Another few feet and you’d be digging into the loch itself.
The old builders cut down just far enough to reach the spring.
Every castle needs its well, for the sieges. This one’s needed it for…other things.”
The stair ends at a doorway with no door, and he stops, and lifts the lamp, and lets me look.
The well-chamber is a low round room cut whole out of the rock, the ceiling close enough that Alasdair has to stoop, and in the center of the floor is the well itself, a dark mouth ringed with worn stone.
And from it comes the sound of water, moving, somewhere just below, not the drip of a cistern but a slow breathing slosh, rising and easing, rising and easing.
“It feels the tide,” he explains. “The spring’s fresh, but the loch presses on it from below. When the tide comes in, the well comes up. They were never out of the water here, Iris. Not really. That’s how I held them to the bay without ever letting myself understand that I was doing it.”
And around the well, on the dry margin of stone between the dark mouth and the curved walls, laid out with terrible care, are the women.
Dozens upon dozens of their bones. Each one wrapped in old linen gone grey with years, each bundle laid straight toward the well like spokes around a hub, like sleepers around a fire, and at the head of each a flat stone with a name scratched in it.
The oldest linen has gone the color of the rock, while the newest… is still white.
I look at the white one for a long time.
“Becca Rhys,” I declare.
“Aye.”
The lamp shakes a little in my grasp. The cold down here is total—the breathing of the well goes on and on—and all around me are the bones of the women he’d killed. Yes, it was the monster who did the eating, but Alasdair did the luring.
And he also laid them out like this with so much care that it’s almost heartbreaking. Horror and grief are side by side in this place.
“Let’s get them out of here,” I say, when I can. “All of them. Today.”
“And take them where?” he inquires.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “But I’m sure you will, when you think about it.”
We work for the better part of an hour, mostly in silence.
He brings the canvas bags down from the hall, and we lift the women two-handed, one at a time.
They weigh almost nothing since they aren’t complete skeletons but random bones he managed to scavenge, and yet it’s the weight of the moment that feels the heaviest.
The last thing Alasdair does, when the chamber is empty and the bags stand waiting by the stair, is take the lamp around the circle of name-stones one final time, reading them. His lips move as he repeats them to himself.
Then we climb up out of the rock toward the daylight, carrying the dead between us, and the well goes on breathing in the dark behind us, holding nothing anymore but water.
“If you we take the bones away from here, can they move on?”
“Aye,” he confirms with a nod, “just can’t be in this loch.
We can bury them somewhere, but I would worry they might be dug up since I’m not about to bury them here.
But we can take them past the headland, where the loch gives onto open sea.
Beyond the reach of the bay, beyond my keeping.
The sea takes what the loch can’t hold.”
“Then it sounds like we need a boat.”
He frowns. “We?”
“Well, of course I’m going to help you.”
“It’s not a small thing I’m asking. You’ll be handling—”
“Bones?” I gesture to them. “Listen, these ladies mean well, but let’s not forget they tried to drown me not long ago. I want them out of the loch as much as you do. They need to move on, and we do too.”
He rubs his lips together. “Well, it may not surprise you, but I don’t have a boat. I’ve never needed one.”
“Yeah, well luckily that’s something I happened to inherit.”