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  A few others laughed. The young man in the Polish eagle hat told Aram to come back to the shore, and once he had done that, he offered Aram his rod. I’m freezing, he said. Use this and split your catch with me fifty-fifty.

  Aram did not like to share his catch, but he would not snag a single fish without a line. He nodded, and with this new means hauled a huge sum of salmon. They were more abundant than he remembered them being in the wild – nearly as abundant as they’d been on the farm, where they had been forced to spawn.

  Each time he caught one he threw it to the fisherman whose rod he was borrowing. The man was waiting by the lochside to pack the pink slipperies into a cooler. By the time the sun started to sink, just past four in the afternoon, Aram was frozen up to his taigeis. In a strange way the sting delighted him, as a token of his long commune with the elements. Better still, he had filled four coolers, and two of them were his to take to the hut and eventually to the church. He was connected, proud.

  You’ve done this before, the fisherman said, when Aram was beside him on land.

  A few times.

  I wish you had come sooner. It’s been a bizarre year. Feast and famine.

  Why’s that?

  No idea. I swear the salmon are demented. You’d think on the farm, at least, we could regulate them. That’s why we have a farm in the first place, so we can control the conditions.

  But your supervisor should have sorted all that out, no?

  Moody bitch. Some days she’d come and scream at us, tell us we were worthless and she was going to ship us home. Other days she’d bring us bowls of boiled sea lettuce and fawn over what a brilliant job we were doing.

  On the horizon Aram saw a pelican, a bird he had never noticed in the Outer Hebrides. Growing up at sea, he’d seen them routinely. They would then appear to him in dreams, while he was huddled beside his mother in the boat hold, always opening their bills to swallow him, or using their sharp tips to drill his eyes deep into his skull. Bed-wetting nights, crying-dry nights. This pelican loomed over the water until it dropped, spurring only a faint splash, and came back into the air with its beak bloated.

  Anyway, the other fisherman said, good riddance to her. I’m heading to Lisbon for the winter. I can work at a call centre there.

  Aram nodded. If it weren’t for his family, he might have asked to come along. Instead he asked if the other fisherman could show him the supervisor’s house. He could not explain her strong lure, but he felt it, in his pulse and his damp palms he felt it.

  Sure, he said. She’s home for some creep holiday, though, and she’ll poison me if she finds out I brought you there. So keep my name out of your mouth.

  That’ll be easy, since I don’t intend to know your name.

  They set off together toward the hut with their arms laden with fish. They dropped the coolers in the pantry area, and once they had left, Aram secured the door tightly so the marten could not steal this hard-earned fare. After a brief stop at the other man’s boat – a bowrider with five on board, shouting at the man in an unknown tongue – they followed the loch toward a headland, an isolated cut of the coast. All at once Aram’s skin itched, and he tried to tear his sweater from his body. He was sure the shirt was infested, that there were living things crawling inside. He had been this way before.

  II

  Gainntir had changed. The latrine was tarnished with blood and carved with profanities; the goatshed had been torched and the cowshed stripped of half its siding. The silo looked strangely pristine, covered as it was with a gleaming coat of white paint. Where before there had been chirping and crowing, the sound of that young girl singing her aria, now there was silence. Aram waved his hand to dismiss the other fisherman, who seemed anyway to sense he was not welcome on these grounds. He shook Aram’s hand and returned the way he’d come. By then the sun had set completely, and it was a clear and brittle night, somehow void of both cloud and moon.

  With the other man gone, Aram stole to the dining-room window. On his way he bumped into a compost drum. His boots were still wet and so the sound fell dully. In the dining room were a dozen lit pillar candles, and in their intense glow he saw a seated figure, erect in a bishop’s throne, with her back to the window. Around the table were four complete place settings and in the centre a charcuterie board piled with all manner of fruit and meat, terrines, rhubarb preserves, sausages, cured garlic, loaves of bannock, mustard. Above the unset fire was a banner that read, in a childish scrawl, WELCOME TO THE DARKER HALF OF THE YEAR.

  Aram knew by the long torso and the cropped black hair that this was not Euna. He was scared, but in a larger sense sad, seeing this woman alone at her abundant table. Then the singing girl, who had introduced herself those years ago as Lili, came tramping down the stairs. She was wearing a one-piece playsuit and a paper mask over her lips, which by its flaws looked homemade.

  The two sat on opposite ends of the table, facing one another. Lili pulled off her mask and Aram was surprised to see her lips were perfectly normal, not disfigured, meaning the mask served a function other than concealment. The two women filled their own plates, then filled those in front of the two empty chairs. Until these ghost meals were piled and pretty, they did not say a word. Then Lili closed her eyes and recited a prayer Aram could hear only in part through the glass: Ancestors… veins… home of autumn… remembrance. The restful haven of the waveless sea. When she was finished, both women ate the feast with their hands, preserves and mustard staining their fair skin. The one whose back was to him uncorked a bottle of red and poured a glass for each place setting. When she stood to fill Lili’s he recognized her body – she had answered the door when he came to Gainntir looking for Euna, and within a few minutes had threatened to hack him with a mattock. It was not entirely sage to be hiding, uninvited, under her window.

  As Lili lifted her wine glass to toast, she caught sight of him. Her eyes went wide and girlish, as if she had discovered a secret trove of Samhain presents. The other woman must have noticed this, too, because she whipped her head in his direction. Aram was too slow to sink himself into the burdock; the torso woman looked at him and cocked her shoulder back. She shattered her glass against the window so wine attainted it, forced red through new fractures. Oddly his instinct was not to run. He stared through the split and tint at the woman. She was gruesome, even sourer than he remembered, with a severe and uneven haircut and a sunken, sallow look to her cheekbones. She wore a strange pair of spectacles, ones that hooked around the backs of her ears and looked antique.

  He gestured toward the door. She came close to the window so that when she spoke her lips grazed the broken glass. We haven’t finished eating. Stand there and watch. When we are done I may open the door for you.

  Who is it, Muireall? he heard Lili call.

  So that was her name. He nodded. Lili reached under the table and put a different mask on, this one with two painted cat eyes covering her own. They ate what remained on their plates, Lili, blinded by her mask, overreaching her dish a few times. After they finished, Muireall stood, and on the outside of the farmhouse Aram ambled to the front door, hoping she was mirroring his movement on the inside. To his relief, she opened the door. Her energy was spidery and obscure – when he first came, at least, she had been outwardly hostile. Now she took him by his wrist, firmly, with a taut smile, and brought him into their dining room. She pulled back one of the chairs, a campstool, really, and pressured him to sit. Famished, and assuming her seating of him was a kind of invitation, he reached out to pick up a link. The woman slapped the sausage from his hand so it fell on the table linen, and then she arranged it with care on the plate again. She seemed more scared than she did cross.

  That’s not for you, she said.

  Understood, he said. I don’t want to interrupt your feast, but if you don’t mind, I have a few questions.

  Lili started to hum at a high volume, until abruptly she clapped her hands and flung the cat eyes from her face. Muireall’s hands were moved by tremors, fa
int ones, but visible no less. Otherwise she was stolid, a stone wall.

  Hello, he said to Lili, my name is Aram.

  As he spoke, Lili creased her forehead. Wait, she said. I know you.

  Yes, we’ve met, he said. I’m a friend of Euna’s.

  Euna, she repeated, fear and reverence in her voice. Is she alive? She pinched Aram’s forearm with her nails. Wait… are you alive?

  Muireall was still standing immobile, her mouth gently agape. Now tears were teeming in her eyes. She was completely cleft from the act, as if she were not even aware she was about to cry. Aram said, I haven’t seen her in a few years. But yes, sweet girl, I’m fairly sure she’s alive.

  From upstairs, Aram heard the ringing of a hollow-sounding bell. Instinctively, Lili straightened, lifted the only plate that remained untouched, and ran up the steps. Muireall looked through her tears at Aram. We lost a huge part of our family, she said when Lili was out of sight. Our cridhe. Our shared heart.

  She sat down stiffly on her throne. We haven’t heard a word from her, she said, wiping mustard smut from her fingers. Not a single postcard.

  Aram had relied on his lost love being in Gainntir now, as she had been then, hoarding her virtue for him. He had no back-up plan. He withered, knowing his faith would, for now, go unrewarded. So she’s not in Pullhair? he asked.

  Muireall sucked her breath in, clearly bothered by his interest. Of course she’s not here. If she were here, she’d be in our home, I promise you that.

  That was enough. He stood up from the campstool, ready to rush back to the bowrider, cross the ocean to Portugal with the men talking foreign tongues. At least he could work in the call centre and scrape together a bit of tender, live a humble, righteous life. Then he stopped. He had forgotten his son entirely.

  The whole ride north, the old man’s house, the ferry, Aram had deceived himself. His was not some divine quest. He had only been looking for her, earthy, embodied her.

  Why are you even here? Muireall asked him. She was happy before she met you, old man. You infected her with all your dirty ideas and made sure she was miserable.

  She was the one who came to see me, Aram said. She chose to come.

  You don’t know her the way I do. She’s fragile. She’s not suited for the brutal world outside.

  In that moment, Aram loved Euna so much he could not dream of another timeline, one in which they had never met. But he was ashamed he had embraced her overtures, made her carnal, rushed what had so clearly demanded slower, more careful judgement. She had been a rose in a greenhouse, and he had fissured the glass. You’re not wrong, he said.

  Muireall drank right from the wine bottle. You don’t get to come here and atone, she said. I lost my baby. My heart will never unbreak.

  I understand, he said. I’ll go.

  It was plain in her face that she wanted to throw him out, as Effie had, tearing his sweater. And yet she seemed reluctant to let him leave. Come to the library, she said, picking up one of the pillar candles. That’s where we go after dinner.

  He followed her past the stairs and front entryway into an airy, book-lined room. The space felt icy, grades colder than the grass outside, and despite the furnishings and the softcovers, rather vast. She led him to a corner nook, and with the held flame she showed him a kind of sanctum. On hooks hung Euna’s tweed trousers and linen shirt, as well as a nightgown he did not know as intimately. The one shelf in the alcove had been carefully adorned with a hardback, The Witches Speak, a laundry stone, and a dried salmon sliced lengthwise, eyes and teeth intact.

  Muireall said, This is our seomra thiar. Our room to the west.

  He reached out to touch the tweed, remembering the chill it had carried that autumn day, Euna’s warmth beneath the cloth. Muireall grabbed him by the wrist again and forced his arm back to his side.

  He asked, What do you want me to do?

  She let go of his wrist and took the laundry stone into her free hand, turning it over, making even its slight weight menacing. Men are all the same, she said. You just want an answer. You want us to do the work of thinking for you.

  I want to do right by you, Muireall, he said. But I can’t possibly guess what you’re thinking.

  Muireall turned from him, taking with her the room’s only source of light. He could no longer see the seomra thiar, not the dried fish or the dull linen. The nightgown, white and fluted, held its shape even in that new pitch, a phantom frame. Muireall lay on a bearskin rug in the centre of the library, the candle close to her and the bear’s hair. She had Aram all muddled. He missed Fenella, her constancy, her straight bent. Muireall was more like the guards, and her vagary gave him the same feeling theirs had – of being bound to someone’s impulses, of desperately wanting to submit to their rules, but not knowing how, fickle and formless as they were.

  He heard Lili darting back down the stairs. She rushed to the bearskin rug and lay down so the crown of her head was touching Muireall’s. She’s not doing very well today, she said, winded. I could only get her to eat a tangerine.

  Aram came to join them. He could not lie with his crown touching theirs, not without feeling unseemly and out of place. Instead he sat cross-legged at the rug’s edge. Who are you talking about?

  Lili said, Grace. Our other bana-churaidh. She’s not doing very well.

  What’s wrong? Aram asked, gently. I used to treat my mam when she was seasick. Maybe I can help.

  It’s not like that. She’s sad and it’s making her do things. She tried to… Lili paused for a long time, then took one of her plaits and wrapped it around her throat, mimicking a hanging motion.

  Aram remembered. A man in a neighbouring cell had hanged himself. He had asked to see a doctor so many times – until, finally, he had chosen a sure end over that purgatory. Aram had been forced to listen through the night, through pillow fillings, finger earplugs. He had stifled those sounds a long time. In the hush of Gainntir, they came to him again.

  Lili was tapping his knee to get his notice. Was your mam ever that kind of sick? she asked, when he finally looked at her.

  He said, No, thankfully not. She was only ever sick in the physical way. But I did know someone who did what Grace tried.

  You did? Lili asked. I read about a girl doing it in one of the library books. But I didn’t know real people could.

  Yes, he said. Real people can. Grace might want to see a doctor, or at least get outside a bit more. What she needs isn’t here, and it might be somewhere else.

  Muireall, still lying down, rolled her eyes so they were on Aram. My Gracie, she said, my beloved Gracie, was perfect before you came along and stole our cridhe from us. Don’t you see, Euna was the anchor who held this all in place?

  Aram said, Euna must have felt a lot of pressure.

  I can’t believe you touched her, Muireall said. Her words were pointed and meticulous, as if she had gone from simply speaking to reciting an invocation. And then you had the gall to sleep with that filthy Aileen.

  Aram felt as if he had been collared. The room’s temper had turned. Aram couldn’t stand it, not after the castle, after years slowed by that same musty air. He stood up, brushed his trousers clean of the dust and ash that had amassed on the bearskin. Ladies, he said. If only you could know how sorry I am.

  You can’t leave just like that, Muireall said.

  Psalm 118:5. When hard pressed, I cried to the Lord; he brought me into a spacious place.

  Keep an eye on Grace, he said to Lili. She needs you.

  Lili nodded dutifully. To Muireall, he said, Oidhche mhath leat, good night to you. Though she tried to hide it, he could see she was impressed by his Gaelic. He left the house and headed out onto the heath, stopping by the dining room to steal a few sausages on the way.

  It was a bitter night, the wind as wide and cold as an ice sheet. And yet the air was tropical against the lasting bite of the library. When he made it to the dock he found that, of course, the bowrider was already gone. His new life had tipped before it le
ft the shore. He sat on the dock, where he had gathered splinters in his péire so many times, listing his womenfolk for parties of amused fish farmers, and looked out over the loch.

  Everything was still and sullen. Then in the darkness he saw an outline, akin to the nightgown in the nook. The shape was so vague he could not be sure what he had seen. Like Muireall’s rules, it was all but formless. He looked down for a while at the concrete dock, its shape constant. When he lifted his head again, the water was just water.

  In the off-season, when he was home from the trawler, Aram’s father used to tell him stories of the blue men of the Minch, small creatures that lived between the Outer Hebrides and the mainland. They would swim with their torsos above the sea, dancing, playing shinty. They recited poems and chatted with mariners, and sometimes the cruel ones waited for sailors to drown so they could drag them down to the loch-bottom. They looked remarkably like waves. Aram’s father claimed to have seen many, and at the time Aram had not questioned him. He had loved the story.

  Aram minded the peaceful scene and tried to forget the course his night had taken. But he still heard the man hanging himself. He still saw Euna, pulling her underclothes up hastily to hide the blood.

  He had gone to Gainntir inflated, airy with anticipation. He had held something close to the feeling of fullness, of vital, holy swell – sàimh. And he had left, just a few hours later, feeling that he was at best unimportant. At worst, he was a caustic force, and the town would be finer had he never lived there. No wonder Grace was laid up in bed. No wonder Euna had cut from this part of the country and Lili seemed stuck in her girlhood.

  He wished he could slip now into the water and forget all he had heard and done. He would live in that complete, bodiless void, floating, feeling only the pain of purification.

  *

  At first Aram stayed in the hut because he didn’t want to cart his catch around. Had he hauled those coolers too far, the fish might have lost their flush and flavour. Or so he told himself. Mostly they were heavy, and he avoided hassle as he did sea-lice. He worked hard when he needed to, but when he had the time to unwind, he would never deny himself that pleasure. And now he had nothing if not time.