Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
“So it’s the morse.”
“The what?” he says, his lip curling as in disgust.
“The morse. The man-horse. Or just the horse.”
“It’s not the horse either,” he says, still looking troubled by the use of the word morse. “The horse eats grass. Oats, if he finds them.”
I put my head in my hands. “I’m disgusted and confused and I’m not sure I want to be unconfused but…who is doing the killing and eating here?”
He finishes the rest of his wine and then pours us both more. “All this time, until your Effie passed, it’s been fairly easy to keep myself separate. There is the man, Alasdair MacCoinnich. Eachann, being the word the locals bestowed on whoever lives in the castle. That’s me. Then, there is the horse. And then there is the monster that lives in the loch. I can turn into either thing and those things can turn into each other, but when I am those things, there’s very little of me that is still a man, that still knows right from wrong, that still has some sort of morals. I am all of those things but rarely at the same time, you understand. Altogether, I am the each-uisage. The horse lures; the monster feeds.”
“And what does the man do?”
He holds the glass at his lips and gives me a wry smile. “He fucks.”
I shake my head as he drinks the wine. “You know, you’ve started a quick descent into vulgar language, you know that? What happened to Mr. Fucking Manners?”
I’m joking, because if I’m not laughing, I’m crying, but darkness passes over his features like a storm cloud. Suddenly he seems grave.
“That part of me is something I’m slowly losing,” he says in a quiet voice, and suddenly I’m reminded of what Mhairi said, that over time he would lose himself and his humanity completely and only the horse—and I suppose the monster—would remain. “The crudeness, the…appetite. I’m slipping a little. This year…this year I’ve lost enough of myself that I’ve let the man do the luring.”
I swallow hard, feeling something like worry and fear clawing at my chest.
“Well, we’ll do what we can so that doesn’t happen again,” I tell him. “Though I have to say, I like it when you’re crude.”
I add that last part for some levity, but it doesn’t work. He nods, but he doesn’t look like he believes it.
I’m at the kitchen sink washing dishes when I look up through the window at the loch as I always do, expecting to see Alasdair’s castle across the bay (where he goes, from time to time) and some birds floating on the water near the mussel beds by the opening to the loch.
And while those things are there, there’s also something else.
Three fucking dead women, standing in the shallows at the foot of my spit where the water goes knee-deep at low tide.
Just standing and staring right at me. Their hair is dark and weighted and hangs around their faces in long wet lines, and their shifts are grey with age. Their faces are sunken in, one looking far older and more decomposed than the rest.
I nearly scream and drop my mug. I definitely almost pee my pants.
I feel Alasdair’s presence behind me, silent but heavy and strangely reassuring.
I don’t turn around. “Alasdair…”
“Aye, foxglove.”
“There are three women in the shallows.”
“I know.”
“They’re the drowned wives.”
“That they are.”
“What are they doing? Why are they staring at us?”
“They’re waiting.”
Waiting?
“For what?”
A long beat. “To see if you’ll be one of them, lass.”
I close my eyes, open them. They’re still there. The smallest is closest to shore, her face tilted up at the cottage windows, and I can’t make out her eyes at this distance, but I’ve got the strong feeling she can see mine.
“And what decides,” I ask, my voice shaking slightly, “whether I’ll become one of them?”
He comes closer and stops just behind me, his front near my back without touching, his chest at the back of my head, the cold of him coming through my robe.
“I decide,” he declares quietly. “And they’re not getting you.”
I exhale.
The drowned women continue to stare.
He puts his hand on my shoulder, turns me gently away from the window, and walks me back into the warmth of the kitchen, pulling the curtain across the window over the sink.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I have to face a fact, which is that I’ve nearly stopped being afraid of him, least not like I was when he first broke through the wards and came in through my window in the night.
Back then I was a woman split open and holding the halves of herself together with both hands. Now I’ve placed both hands together, and maybe that resembles hands during prayer, but I think I’m coming to terms with how scary, bizarre, and fucking impossible everything is.