Chapter 5
Chapter Five
B ee stood up. ‘What do you mean?’
Seren appeared from the kitchen, a tea towel over one shoulder and carrying Bee’s meal. She stopped at the sight of Hammer and Winter.
Hammer pushed wet hair from his eyes and looked around at them all. ‘We went to àite Marbh.’
There was a collective gasp and Fiona tsked loudly as if Hammer had sworn.
Bee’s expression was tight-lipped, but her eyes burned.
‘We were together. This close…’ Hammer stretched out an arm to demonstrate. ‘And he just disappeared.’
‘On the islet?’ Bee snapped.
‘Inside,’ Hammer said, meeting her gaze. ‘There was a mound, a hill. We went underneath.’
‘Oh shit.’
Esme looked at Bee. She didn’t think she had heard the woman swear before.
Hamish, probably picking up on the sudden tension, began to cry. Fiona lifted him up for a cuddle.
‘What is it?’ Esme was watching Bee carefully. If any of them would know, it would be her. Or one of her sisters. ‘Where is he?’
‘Between,’ Bee said after a pause. ‘If I had to guess.’
After that, Bee left in a hurry, and Esme and Luke went soon after. Esme found she couldn’t stand to be around the group and their questions. Questions without answers.
Leaving the pub with Luke, she knew she didn’t want to be entirely alone either. Luke offered to stay with her and she accepted. ‘Just for company,’ she added awkwardly.
‘I know,’ Luke said. ‘Until you say otherwise, I won’t think anything else.’
Back at Strand House, she had offered various beverages and snacks, but Luke had turned it all down. He looked as spooked as she felt, and they agreed to head upstairs.
‘I’ll stay until you fall asleep and then I’ll go home,’ Luke said, when Esme came out of the bathroom. She had brushed her teeth and changed into flannel pyjamas.
‘You can stay,’ Esme said. ‘I won’t make you sleep on the floor.’
He looked at the double bed.
She looked at the double bed, suddenly uncertain. She trusted Luke, but the urge she had felt for him to stay with her, for the comforting solidity of his presence, was dissolving in the face of the reality. Could she really sleep with a man so close by? Would her subconscious feel a threat and wake her up with one of her nightmares? She hadn’t really suffered for years, but what if they came back? He would see her shouting and sweating, a wild and mad woman. Her flannel pyjamas felt gossamer thin, and he was suddenly very close, even though he hadn’t moved an inch.
Luke seemed to sense her discomfort and he moved to the other side of the bed, sitting on top of the covers and arranging a couple of pillows so that he could sit upright. He flipped the duvet open on the other side, inviting her to get underneath.
Esme tore her gaze from his legs. His long, jeans-clad legs were on her bed. He was wearing navy wool socks. His Viking god body was filling the left side of her bed. Her duvet cover was white with tiny spring flowers embroidered all over it. The blanket at the end of the bed was a crocheted rainbow. Her mind seemed to be intent on cataloguing the familiar items, as if trying to reassure her that the world hadn’t changed. That things were safely the same.
‘We can go back downstairs to talk, if you want,’ Luke said. His tone was gentle and easy, and his eyes were kind.
Esme felt the tension flow out of her chest. The small inner voice that she thought of as her true self, the one she had been nurturing and trying to hear, told her that she was safe, that all was well. And that she really wanted Luke Taylor in her bed. She flushed, telling her true self to pipe down and not start trying to run before she could walk. ‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m shattered.’
He smiled, bigger this time.
She got into bed and he flipped the duvet back over her legs. ‘You can lie down. If you want.’
She wanted him to hold her, but didn’t want it to mean anything else. She felt numb from the news about Tobias and startlingly awake because Luke was in her bedroom, inches from her flannel-clad arm.
‘I can’t get my head around it,’ Luke said. ‘How can he be just gone?’
Bee had explained to Esme before that there were other worlds, other realities, that were layered up alongside our own. ‘This is all metaphor,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to talk about because we don’t have the right language in this world.’
Apparently, some of these realities were far away, and some were very close. And there are physical places in our world where the membrane between the realities is very thin. When Bee said that Tobias had ‘gone between’, Esme guessed that she meant that he had slipped through the membrane and into another reality.
‘I know this is a stupid thing to say, but I need to say it anyway. Shouldn’t we tell the police or something?’
Esme turned to her bedside table to take a sip from the glass of water she kept there. She was glad he couldn’t see her expression. ‘I don’t think they can help,’ she said.
The tiredness that had been dogging her all day swooped in. She had intended to prop up her pillows and sit up next to Luke, but now she found she didn’t want to be upright for a moment longer. She laid down, curled onto her side, one hand underneath her cheek. Speaking quietly while facing away from him, and not sure whether he would even hear her, she let the quietest part of her say the thing it most wanted. ‘Will you hold me?’
Matteo left The Rising Moon at the same time as Fiona. He held the door for her and she was grateful for the simple kindness. Hamish was wriggling in her arms, fussy and tired. ‘I need to get this one to bed,’ she said at her front door.
Matteo smiled and nodded. His eyes were soft and Fiona had the distinct impression that he wanted to speak. She waited for a beat, giving him the opportunity, but Hamish was reaching for the front door, arms outstretched and pulling her off balance. She shifted her stance to avoid falling, and Matteo backed away. He raised a hand in farewell and turned to walk to his shop.
Inside, Fiona focused on Hamish’s bedtime routine. Warming his milk, dressing him in soft cotton pyjamas, reading his favourite stories. Finally, she wound the dial on the chunky plastic music box. It projected waves and fish onto the ceiling and played a lullaby. Euan had liked it as a baby, and she was glad she had kept it.
Closing the door softly, she went to the living room to sit down. Euan had emerged from his bedroom and was sprawled on the sofa, all gangly limbs and one arm stretched up behind his head. Fiona had an acute understanding that she was straddling two stages of motherhood. And then the realisation that, despite all of the protective thoughts she had thrown up – not to get too attached, that Hamish didn’t belong to her, and that his real mother might change her mind and ask for him back – she felt like he was hers. She felt motherly toward Hamish and there was no amount of rationalising that would prevent it.
‘You all right, love?’ She focused her attention on the half-boy-half-man prone on the furniture.
He rolled his head, and as soon as he saw her face, he sat up. ‘What’s wrong?’
Fiona sank onto the nearest seat and prepared to explain the inexplicable to her firstborn.
Winter stuck to Hammer’s side all the way back to the boathouse. He wasn’t a small dog and a less solid man would probably have been knocked over by the dog pressing against his legs as he walked. The moon was almost full and he didn’t need his torch for the path from the village to Harbour Bay.
The stove was banked up and Hammer woke up the fire to chase the damp chill of the evening. He thought Winter would be more comfortable in his own home, but the idea of staying in Tobias’s house was unthinkable. Better to consider this a strange one-off aberration. Nothing permanent.
He didn’t feel hungry, but warmed up a tin of stew on the stove. He opened a second tin and emptied it into a bowl, which he put down for Winter, along with a dish of water. He would need to get dog food, he supposed. Maybe he ought to pick up supplies from Tobias’s house. His mind rebelled again at this line of thought. Tobias would be back tomorrow. Winter would be back with his master, in North House where they both belonged.
There was a knock on the door and Hammer opened it quickly, expecting Tobias to be standing there, ready to take his dog and his rightful place in Hammer’s life. Constant.
It was Bee. Her long hair was braided, as usual, but strands had escaped, forming a halo around her face. ‘I need you to tell me what happened.’
‘I already did,’ Hammer said, but he stepped back so that Bee could enter.
She shook her head. ‘You come outside. Winter, stay.’
Winter whined softly, but when Hammer stepped outside to join Bee, he left his position of leg limpet and allowed Hammer to close the door. He left it ajar, making sure that Winter could come outside if he really wanted to. He knew what it was like to be imprisoned and it didn’t sit right with him to do it to anyone, even a dog.
Bee took a few paces away from the doorway, and it struck Hammer that she didn’t want to speak in front of the dog. He had clearly been on Unholy Island for too long, as it didn’t even seem odd.
She stuck her hands into her pockets, face serious. ‘What were you doing on àite Marbh?’
And there it was. The question he couldn’t really answer. He was the enforcer on the island. He was prosaic. There when heavy things needed to be lifted or a rowdy tourist escorted out of the pub. He was there to provide an air of menace so that just his presence ensured there wasn’t any trouble. And, if there was trouble, he was there to deal with it. This was above his pay grade, and he felt a stab of resentment.
‘I saw a light. Moving.’ He pointed to the islet. Its dark silhouette was deepest black against the night sky. His gaze skidded away, unwilling to look at it for long.
‘Like someone using a torch?’
He nodded. ‘Then there was smoke.’
‘And Tobias volunteered to go with you?’
‘He saw the fire,’ Hammer said, hating his defensive tone. ‘It wasn’t just me.’
‘Okay,’ Bee said. ‘You decided together to go to àite Marbh.’
He couldn’t maintain eye contact with Bee’s pale blue stare. ‘Yeah.’
‘And you didn’t think to ask what I thought?’ The words were crisp.
‘No.’ Hammer didn’t embellish. He wasn’t a big one for talking at the best of times, and this was one of the very worst. He felt bad enough about Tobias going missing on his watch, he wasn’t going to compound it by making excuses.
‘And then what happened? Exactly.’
Hammer tried to recount the trip to the islet. The mound. The doorway. Tobias being there and not there in the blink of an eye.
‘Did you see anything else?’ Bee was still searching his face, her gaze intent. ‘Could be anything at all.’
‘No.’
Bee’s lips tightened. ‘No lights or creatures or things that might have seemed like hallucinations?’
He shook his head.
‘Even a strange smell or sound. Anything out of the ordinary?’
‘It was very quiet.’ Hammer remembered now. The eerie stillness of the small island.
‘And Tobias went in first?’
‘Yeah. I was going to wait outside, but I followed him. He was right in front of me.’ Hammer held up his arm to demonstrate. ‘I could touch him.’
‘What happened?’
‘And then I couldn’t.’ Hammer let his arm fall. ‘He was just gone.’