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)
I stop at the edge of the rocks, not daring to go in. The water’s still heaving where they went under. I can see the white shape of the horse beneath the surface for a moment like a beluga whale, moving fast, going deep, then the dark masses that were the detective and the horse are…gone. Nothing resurfaces, and the bay goes still.
For one held second, the loch is flat and silver and giving nothing back, and I stand on the rocks with my bleeding hands and my screamed-raw throat, thinking it’s over, that the worst thing I have ever seen is over.
Then the water moves.
But not just where they went under, but everywhere.
A flurry breaks across the bay—a dozen lines of current cutting the surface from the deep middle toward the place the detective sank, fast, converging. Along the lines, a head breaks the silver; dark wet hair, the curve of a shoulder, a face turned down toward the depth. It’s the drowned women, surfacing from wherever they wait, coming from every part of the loch at once.
They go down where he is.
And then the water churns and turns.
It blooms red from underneath, a dark stain spreading up through the silver, and the surface starts to roil, a frenzy, the way I’ve seen footage of piranhas strip a thing in a river, that terrible, joyful thrashing. Things break the surface in the churn and go under again. A length of blue rope. A piece of a grey wax jacket. And once—only once—something pale, soft, and unmistakably part of a man, lifted clear of the water for an instant in the grip of a dark-haired woman before she pulls it back down into the red.
I don’t scream; I’m past screaming now. I stand on the rocks with my hand over my mouth in utter horror as I watch the bay eat a man. I can’t look away, because looking away feels like a worse crime than watching it happen.
It doesn’t take long. The frenzy peaks and thins and the crimson blood diffuses, spreading out into a pink that the tide will carry off. The heads slip back under one by one, and the lines of current scatter back toward the deep middle of the loch. The surface closes, and smooths, and stills.
The bay goes silver again. Flat and quiet.
A gull cries somewhere down the shore as if nothing has happened, as if there is not a detective’s car sitting on my gravel with its trunk open, as if the water in front of me is not still faintly pink at its edges where it laps the rocks at my feet.
I stand there for what feels like forever, and maybe it is.
Then I turn and walk slowly, past the cottage, toward the detective’s car, my arms hugging my sides as if I’ll shatter into pieces if I don’t literally hold myself together. The horror and the shock of what I just witnessed isn’t going away, but I have to move through it, move past it, because I’m going to be in some serious, serious shit if I don’t.
I reluctantly go to his car, peering inside it as if it’s some alien creature. The keys are in the ignition, pulled out enough so that the car doesn’t ping, like you’d do when you’re only stepping out for two minutes to ask someone a question, when you have every intention of getting back in and driving to the next person you’ll interrogate. The little fob dangles, catching the last of the light, and the trunk still open from when he pulled out the rope.
He shouldn’t have done that, I think absently, he shouldn’t have tried to tame the horse.
At the very least, maybe I should have insisted he come inside for tea. I could have pulled him inside, locked the doors, and kept the monster at bay. But I know that would have only worked for so long. The horse would be out there when he came out. It would call to him. What was it that Alasdair said? The horse lures, the monster feeds?
Of course, this time, the monster did not feed.
He doesn’t like the taste of men, I recall bitterly.
No, he brought Sinclair into the water to drown him, and then the drowned women fed. They tore him limb from limb and feasted, perhaps Alasdair’s own appetite being passed onto them through death, cursed forever.
What a horrible thing. To die that way, and then, on top of it, become a ghost, a monster of the loch to pull others under. How many people do the drowned wives even take? Men and women? Children? Animals? What is their range?
The questions are dumb and useless, as if I’m cataloging these monstrous creatures the way I catalog the flowers I draw.
I should call someone. The thought floats past and doesn’t mean anything—because call who and tell them what, exactly? I rehearse and it’s painful each time but I can’t stop—hello, yes, a detective came to ask me questions, and a horse came down the hill—and the horse was my, the horse was—the water turned red, and the women…the sentence dies before it’s even fully built.