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)
But this isn’t the loch. This is a little stream that probably starts as snowmelt up on the mountain and runs down to the bay. Surely the drowned women don’t have access to a tributary. Surely the rules of folklore include some kind of plumbing diagram. Wives confined to main body of water, no jurisdiction over inlets. Could they pop up in any standing water, in puddles…oh god, in the toilet?
I’m scaring myself. I am scaring myself before anything has actually happened, which is a Galloway specialty. My dad had it too. He could spook himself out of a perfectly ordinary walk by thinking too hard about the wrong thing at the wrong hour.
And, judging by the salt and horseshoes and rowan tree and maybe that fox’s jawbone, I’d say my great-aunt had it too.
I step over the water. I don’t even break stride.
Nothing happens.
But the unease doesn’t entirely leave me. I’m now aware of every small sound in the thicket. The cluck of a wren in the bush. A drip of water from leaves still wet with overnight rain, kept cold by the mountain’s shadow. The wet shift of my own boots in the leaf litter. The wind that’s just a very faint stir of the upper branches.
Then I notice the bones.
I’d been seeing them without really seeing them as is usually the case with me: small grey-white shapes among the moss and ferns, scattered along the base of the trees. I thought they were rocks at first, but they aren’t.
Of course they aren’t.
There are three or four small leg bones and a couple of vertebrae, white with some pink flesh still on them, lying on a flat slab of stone.
Probably a deer that died here a while ago, maybe a sick sheep that got separated from its flock and was finished by something with teeth or beaks—pine martens, foxes, eagles. I’ve seen worse on hikes back in Colorado.
But still, not only is there still some disgusting meat on them, the bones are placed. That’s the weird thing. They aren’t scattered the way bones get scattered when scavengers work a body. They are in a small clear arc on the flat stone, as if someone had picked them up and laid them out.
Could have been Effie, I tell myself. Seems like something she’d do at this point.
But at the same time, no. It couldn’t have been Effie. The fox’s jawbone was old and clean and placed on the bed a long time ago. This skeleton is fresh, maybe from the last few days. My great-aunt has been dead a long time now.
I stand looking at the stone. The basket is suddenly heavy on my arm. The thicket has gone, not silent exactly, but quieter.
And just like that, I’ve had enough of this area.
I turn, carefully, and start back the way I came. I tell myself I’m being silly. If not Effie, the bones could have been placed by a child, a hiker, perhaps a particularly artistic corvid? And that tight pressure in my chest, that unease, well that’s because I’m overtired and overwhelmed, that’s all.
I tell myself this and I walk faster, and I’m almost back to the stream when I hear it.
A sound behind me in the thicket.
Not a footstep, exactly. More like…pressure. The slow shifting of weight on wet ground. Like someone moving carefully and trying not to, a physicality caught mid-motion.
I freeze.
I listen.
The thicket has gone fully silent now. The wren is gone. The drip is gone. I barely hear the stream. There is just my own breathing, very loud in my own ears, and the slow shifting somewhere behind me in the trees.
I do not turn around.
I have read a lot of horror novels in my life and they are unanimous on this point: you do not turn around. If you do, that’s when you see that red-eyed pig thing in the window.
I take a step forward. The boots make their squelch, suddenly extra loud. The shifting behind me does not match my pace. It’s slower. It’s continuous.
It’s stalking.
Oh god.
My heart starts to feel too big for my chest as I try to control my breathing. I take another step. Another. I am almost at the stream.
If I can get over the burn, out of the thicket, and into the open ground, I will be fine. This is not a logical thought of course. This is folklore-thought. If I cross the running water, I will be safe.
I cross the burn at a stride, now out of the thicket. The slope opens in front of me, the cottage two hundred meters down, the boat shed below it, the bay below that.
I run.
I absolutely should never run. My hips are tight and my body has not done a sprint in years despite the fact that I know I need to work out regularly, and I’m wearing Wellingtons that fit like a child wearing her father’s shoes.