Chapter Three
The Man on the Rocks — Mara
I got him sixteen feet up the beach and my legs quit.
Here’s something they don’t put in the guidebooks about the Scottish coast: the stones are the size and shape of grapefruit and they roll, and a grown man is heavier than anything you have ever picked up when he isn’t helping.
He wasn’t helping. His broad chest went up and down under the wet wool, his eyes stayed shut, and his boots dragged two furrows through the shingle behind us.
I dropped him above the weed line and sat down in the rain.
“Hey.” I patted his cheek. “Hey. Come on.”
Nothing.
“Tavish. Right? You said Tavish.”
His mouth moved. No sound came out of it.
I put two fingers under his jaw for a pulse and found one, slow and steady, and I kept my fingers there longer than a pulse takes to count.
He’d been in the North Sea in October. His skin wasn’t cold. Not warm either. The temperature of a hand, in a storm, in the dark, after the sea had rolled him across a rock shelf.
I wiped my fingers on my jeans and drew the phone from my pocket.
It showed one bar in the corner. I pressed the phone to my ear, huddled over the screen, and thumbed the emergency call.
The screen pulsed black and died. I stared at my hand as if the network might resurrect itself under the pressure of my will.
I tried the power button, once, twice, but the glass stayed dark and unresponsive.
A breath left me in a low, stupid sob—familiar, but useless.
I eyed the landscape for another crazy soul nearby. No one.
Which meant the cliff path, and going up the cliff path meant leaving him on the stones.
My left hand was still holding the front of my coat shut. It had been holding my coat shut since the boathouse, through the running and the dragging and the sitting down. My camera hung under the wool on its strap, knocking against my ribs every time I moved, and I hadn’t thought about it once.
I could have opened the coat. I could have taken the thing out and set it on the stones beside him and gone up the path with both hands free.
I made myself let go of the wool instead. My fingers came off it stiff.
“I’m coming straight down,” I told him. “Straight down. Don’t die.”
I met the torch halfway up the steps.
“Somebody down there?”
“On the beach. Past the tideline. He’s breathing.”
The light swung off me and down the path. The man behind it was already moving.
“Cold?”
“No. That’s the strange part.”
He didn’t stop for the strange part. Late fifties. Waxed jacket. Wide through the shoulders and moving like he’d done this before. He went down those wet steps at a pace I couldn’t hold, and he never once put a hand on the rock.
“Callum Brodie,” he threw over his shoulder. “You’ll take his feet.”
I didn’t ask what he was doing out in this weather. I was too glad he was.
We got him up in eleven stages. I counted them, which is what I do when the counting is the only part I can control.
Callum took the head and the weight, hooking his arms under and lifting from the knees every time, and I had the boots, and the boots were two sizes too big and kept coming off in my hands.
“Grip changes at the turn,” he said. “Say when.”
“When.”
“Aye. Down.”
We put him down. Callum shook out his hands, and I got a look at the palms in the torchlight—rope scars across both of them, old ones, and a little finger on the right that had healed crooked. A plain iron ring on the middle finger.
“Boot’s off again.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Leave it. He’ll not miss it tonight.”
At the sixth stop he leaned against the rock and breathed and said, without any particular weight to it:
“What took you down the far end in this?”
“Photographs.” The answer was out of my mouth before the thought had finished forming. “Long exposures. Capturing the surf.”
“Aye.” He hitched his grip. “Wild night for it.”
It came out smooth. I heard how smooth it came out and I kept climbing.
Isla Macrae opened the door before we reached it. Eleven at night and she was dressed, cardigan and shoes, reading glasses on their chain. She took them off when she saw him.
She had the fire built up, and a chair dragged over inside a minute. She set the poker down against the hearthstone and handed Callum the blanket without turning around. He was already reaching.
“Doctor’s in Fraserburgh,” Callum said. “Ninety minutes, this road.”
“No.” Tavish’s eyes had opened. “No doctor.”
He didn’t dress it up. I waited for one of them to argue.
Neither of them argued.
“I’ve seen him about.” Callum wrung the rain out of his cap. “Down the shore. A year, two.”
Isla folded the blanket over the arm of the chair. She took her time about answering.
“Longer.” The woman’s brow wrinkled. “He moves up and down in a pattern folk can read if they care to. Any village that takes him for three weeks a year watches a man go gray ahead of schedule and puts it down to drink or hard living. He has a rhythm; they just never asked what for.”
Callum gave a nod, scraped his boots on the flags, one and then the other, taking his time with it.
“That hip any better?”
“It’s a hip.”
“Aye. Mine too.” He put the cap back on and worked it down. “There’s a lad in Peterhead does them now. Six weeks and you’re up a ladder.”
“I’ve no ladder.”
“You’ve a stair.”
He stopped at the door with his hand on the latch, still working the cap.
“You were at the far end, aye? Past the boathouse?”
My hand went to the camera strap at my throat.
“I was shooting the surf.”
“Right you are. Mind the steps in the morning; they’ll be worse.” He nodded at me, at Isla, and the door shut behind him, leaving only the sound of the storm he’d stepped back into.
I stood in the hall with my coat buttoned to the throat and tried to work out why I’d lied twice to a man who’d carried a stranger up a cliff for me.
I couldn’t.
Upstairs, I put the bundle in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, under my spare jumper, and pushed the drawer shut with my knee.
I came down again. I’m not going to pretend it was for tea.
Isla had made up the small room off the back hall for him, and he wasn’t in it. He was awake in the chair with the blanket over his knees. His eyes came up and stayed on me from the door to the hearth, and there was nothing polite in it, and I didn’t drop mine either.
He shifted his chair while he was reaching for the cup—a few inches, nothing, the sort of adjustment anyone makes. It put him farther from the poker.
He was gray at the corners of his mouth. Scars, pale, along both forearms. No coat, in October.
“Where were you coming from?” I asked.
“North.”
“North where?”
“Up the coast.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
“Is there anyone I should call?”
“No.”
“Anyone who’ll be looking for you?”
He turned the cup around in his hands. “No.”
When he spoke again it was small talk.
“Did you find anything in the boathouse?”
“No.”
The fire cracked. He drank his tea.
I sat there with my hands on my knees and worked through it, twice, and got the same answer both times: I hadn’t told anybody about the boathouse.
I was keeping it now. On purpose.
Nobody in this village had said a certain word out loud.
Not the old woman in the wet oilskin. Not the sign hanging over the door of the inn I was sitting in.
Certainly not Isla, though her hands had paused on the counter when I first described what I thought I’d seen: a human figure on the rocks, too far from the tide for sense, and the seals vanishing in a slick-whiskered panic before it.
I hadn’t said it either. Not to Tavish, not to Isla, not even to myself except in the interior monologue that ran all night and all morning and any time I put my head down to a pillow. Selkie.
I resented the myth for gluing itself to my thoughts, for refusing to be displaced by the rational explanation I kept rehearsing—exposure, hallucination, some rare breed of coastal hermit whose pulse ran to the tides and who lived off the storm’s leftovers.
I went up the painted stairs at a slow, deliberate pace, forcing myself to think only of how the wood flexed under my heel and the way the draft found every loose board in the hallway. In my room, I lay on top of the blanket in my clothes and stopped moving for a while.
I left the lamp on and the window cracked an inch, the way my father had taught me when I was small and the power went out in storms: always leave one way to hear the world outside, in case you needed to gauge the distance to danger.
Just before three, the house sounded wrong.
With a deliberate slowness, I crossed the room, the floor creaking under my weight, and leaned my ear to the door. Someone was breathing out there, close enough that I could hear the airflow catch at the back of their throat, a dry and human sound.
I opened it.
He stood in the corridor with both hands flat against the frame, and he wasn’t touching the handle.
His eyes met mine. There was something in them I hadn’t seen before—awareness, focus, like he’d been waiting for this moment.
“I heard the rain,” he said. “On the slates.”
It was true. It explained nothing.
“That’s all.”
“That’s all.”
I held still. He didn’t step forward, and he didn’t step away, and I didn’t shout for Isla, and I took both of those as facts about him and put them somewhere I could reach later.
“Go back to bed.”
“Aye.”
He stepped away, and I shut the door. The latch didn’t catch the first time. It caught the second.
I stayed where I was, my hand still on the door, listening to his footsteps fade down the stairs.