The Visitors (20 page)

I did it, she hissed.

It was me, and I’m glad.

Slowly, carefully, I put the book down, cover flat to the desk. I tried to read a detective paperback, but couldn’t shake my mood. All I could see was the map of the islands on John Dobie’s bedroom wall. A red pin stuck into the northern coast of Bancree. Uncle Anders, our Anders. The sky seemed so much lower. The sea seemed so much deeper, so much darker. I chucked the book onto the floor and tried to sleep. When I dreamed, it was the selkie again. Mad things struggled in her furs. The coat wrapped itself to her, clinging and binding. No matter how I tossed and turned, the shapes were always sliding. Nothing stayed the same. As a backdrop to my dream, vast dark eyes filled the sky.

By the time I was up for school, Mum was ironing her way through a week’s worth of work shirts. Jamie sat between her ankles, baffled by the lurid plastic blocks he held in either hand.

‘Where’s Ronny?’ I said.

‘He’s gone back to Anders’ house,’ she replied. ‘The police think he might be able to help because he knows the place. He’s not good, Flo. He’s really upset.’

‘Anders will be fine,’ I said, and started tying my shoelaces. ‘He’ll be passed out in a bar, somewhere on the mainland. All that mess will be him fighting his own shadow.’

She frowned, and turned back to her ironing.

‘I don’t know, pet.’

‘Come on, it’ll be fine. Remember the time he tried to make a goulash, and he was so drunk he thought mice were heckling him, and he turned his kitchen upside down trying to catch them? That’s all that’s happened here.’

‘I hope so. I’m trying to be strong,’ she said. ‘I’m trying really hard. He’s not officially missing for another day. But Ronny’s right. That’s three people gone in six months. It doesn’t look at all good to me.’

‘How about the time they walked naked back from Tighna?’ I said, forcing the grin. ‘Or when Ronny called from
Inverness after midnight, saying he might be a bit late for tea, and you could hear Anders in the background, singing the Danish national anthem at the top of his voice?’

Mum managed a thin smile. ‘Aye. I remember.’

‘It’ll be something like that. Just wait and see.’

She nodded, and nodded again – too much. She’d ironed the same shirt twice without realising. There was nothing I could say.

Oh, Anders. Where have you gone?

‘He’ll be back, Mum. He has to be.’

She hung the shirt on the back of the door, and leaned on the ironing board. ‘Won’t you be late for school?’

‘Double History before lunch and double Spanish after, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m still working on this selkie project.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Good. It’s good. The selkies are really mysterious, and I enjoy … discovering. I like finding out old things and putting them together.’

‘In that case, you could excavate the freezer.’

‘Not likely. I haven’t time to defrost a thousand years of ancient foodstuffs.’

‘No,’ she said, glumly, ‘I suppose not. Never mind.’

‘Better go, Mum.’

I kneeled to kiss goodbye to Jamie. He clattered the plastic bricks together. Astonished by the noise they made, he looked up at me for answers.

‘Sorry, kid,’ I murmured. ‘I don’t know either.’

I patted him on the head, then grabbed my bag and waited for the bus.

First thing at school, I went up the library and ransacked the net for any mention of Anders. It was a fairly common name in a couple of Scandinavian countries, and I couldn’t isolate him. I managed to find him in a roughneck’s blog from
a few years ago, but that was all about an arm-wrestling tournament. Which Anders had won, I noted with a grin. But that was everything. His disappearance hadn’t been announced yet. I sat at my desk for a full half-hour, watching gulls skid past the windows and not crying. The school bell shattered my vigil, and the bustle of changing classes pushed me back to work.

When I finally checked my emails, there were a few bland lines from Richard, talking about his life in Bristol. He’d swapped Philosophy for Art History. It was much more him, babe. He’d started working in a nightclub. Everything was wild. I felt a pang at what my life would look like, if I was in Bristol, then deleted it without a second reading.

The next message was more surprising. A week after I’d sent my query, there was a reply from Broch Books. Or, rather, from the former proprietor of Broch Books, a man called Kenny Lawrence. His email explained that the company had foundered several years ago. And Marcus Mutch, he said, was a reason they’d gone under.

Broch was a tiny press. It made its money in walking guides, and the odd collection of island trivia for the tourists. Marcus had suggested a collection of folk myths, and Kenny had agreed. It seemed just his sort of thing. Over a bottle of whisky, Mutch had talked him into a swingeing advance and a binding contract. He’d promptly disappeared for six months, funded from afar by his increasingly worried publisher. He returned with the selkie manuscript. Horrified, Kenny had tried his best to edit the material into something palatable, but the gruesome pictures limited what he could do. There was no more money, and Mutch refused to change a word, claiming it was all true. Kenny realised he was dealing with a lunatic. In the end, he decided to take a chance on the original manuscript. Seeking at least some small return,
he gambled on printing a few dozen copies, and he lost. No one wanted the book, and Mutch was brutalised in both rumour and review. Never much liked, he was now openly ridiculed by his Kirkwall neighbours. Kenny set lawyers on the writer, trying to recover his money, but Mutch fled the island in a fury and Broch Books was bound for bust. The final publication had been a collection of Kenny’s own poetry. There were still one or two copies available, said the email, if I ever wanted to read them. All I had to do was send a cheque …

I could have perhaps guessed a lot of the story, and it told me nothing about why Mutch hated selkies. But I’d learned two important things. I knew his name, and I knew that he believed in his own ideas.

Marcus Mutch.

I searched for the author online. After refining the search to strip out all the usual junk, I was surprised to discover a few positive hits.
The Truth About the Scottish Selkie
was published in 1992, and Mutch abandoned Kirkwall the following year. In 1996, he was listed as an artist residing in the community in Findhorn, and then his name appeared as part of a writing conference on Lewis in 1998. Two years later, he was listed as part of a green wood workshop in Castlebay, on Barra. All these pages were historic. Mutch was never more than a name on a list. There was no solid information about him, no photographs, and nothing current. The most recent entry came from 2003, when a newsletter announced that he’d joined a crofting co-op outside Tobermory. After that, he disappeared.

Dead ends. All it told me was that he’d moved around the islands. I sketched the path in my notepad, joining the dots with a biro.

He’d been all over the place.

I tapped my biro on my notepad, but couldn’t make any more sense of it. I spent half an hour tracking down contacts for the different locations, and sent them the same generic message, asking if they could tell me anything about Marcus Mutch. The green wood workshop and the writers’ conference pinged back immediately with defunct email addresses. No dice with those two. I kept my fingers crossed for Findhorn and Tobermory.

The other books I’d ordered had arrived, and I sat with them for much of the day, making notes on any variations to the selkie stories, and reading up on Viking shapeshifters. I noticed how selkie myths only really existed within Viking lands. I was fascinated to think of the codes by which they lived, and those same stories, filtering through time, diverging and evolving as they travelled. I thought of the pink stones in the corrie. Even as they were reclaimed by lichen, the stories lived on.

Regardless of how much I discovered about selkies, I kept returning to Mutch’s book. I drowned myself in the dark magic of it. No matter how poisonous his writing, I loved the idea that he truly believed his stories. And even though his
work was hateful and unpleasant, I preferred it to the bland, historical accounts of the myths, because it held a cord of magic with both hands and never ever let it go.

I returned the borrowed books to the librarian and drifted out of school. Tanno was dreich. Bursts of rain slanted through the drizzle, and the pavements were slippery with water. I had a toastie and a cup of tea in Dora’s Diner. Across the empty café, Jow sat at a formica table. Frowning deep in concentration, he studied the Page 3 girl in his paper. She leaned forward, spilling pink, spilling white, her smile bright and wide and open. She was nothing at all like me.

My phone pipped. It was a text from Ailsa.

Hey Flo. You said you like seals? You should get to Dog Rock soon as
.

Out of practice, I thumbed a clumsy reply.

If it’s just one or two, don’t worry about it. Seen loads
.

The reply was swift:

It’s not one or two. Trust me. Come home
.

Intrigued, I weighed up an afternoon of Spanish irregular verbs. It was no competition.

I’m on my way
.

She was waiting on the beach when I arrived into Grogport. I waded through the dune grass, the blades snagging on my clothes. Finches scattered through the thickets. Ailsa smiled and clapped her hands together when she saw me, and hauled the dinghy towards the surf.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘hurry up!’

‘What’s the rush?’ I asked, fumbling with my laces.

‘It’s a surprise. Trust me, you’ll like it. Come on, hop in.’

I rolled up my jeans and helped her push the boat out. The sand was damp, though the rain had stopped, and the water was shockingly cold. We cast off with me in the prow and Ailsa at the tiller. She fired the little motor into life and, rather than heading for Dog Rock, instead guided the inflatable between the headland and the islet, towards open sea.

‘Where are we going?’ I yelled. Dog Rock slid by one side of the dinghy, and a net of salt spray misted across us.

She grinned, shook her head, and simply pointed ahead. I turned and looked again, intrigued, seeing nothing before us but the Atlantic. Zipping across the water, we moved out of the bay and into the ocean. Almost at once, the breeze picked up. It was easy to forget how Dog Rock and the twin headlands sheltered Still Bay from the Atlantic. I hunkered deeper into the boat, wishing the dinghy’s inflatable walls would dull the wind.

Still smiling, Ailsa looked straight ahead, her hair tugged and thrashed in the breeze. She gave me a thumbs-up. I studied the sea. Like single stars in a vast constellation, orange buoys staked out sporadic lobster pots. The Atlantic rolled for ever. After ten or twelve minutes, Ailsa cut the motor and we glided, carried by momentum. We were about two miles from Bancree. Waves began at once to lift and slop beneath the dinghy. Without the engine, the sounds of the open ocean were devastating. The slosh of water underneath our boat, and the sometime mewling gulls, and the deep, sad, lowing of the sea.

I waited. Ailsa beamed.

‘OK, so what is it?’ I demanded.

‘Shush,’ she said, and put a finger to her lips. ‘Look.’

I turned and looked again. Ocean. Sky. Ocean and sky. I couldn’t work out what I was supposed to be seeing. Ocean and sky and ocean. Then something else, something in the corner of my eye, disappearing. I whirled and looked, but there was nothing there. Then there was something on the other side, again at the fringes of my vision. I turned in time to see something dark sink beneath the surface, a ghost trail of ripples washed away at once. I waited. I watched. Then the seal emerged straight in front of me, almost within arm’s reach. Its snub head hung in the water, buoyant on the waves, openly quizzical and looking right into my eyes.

I’d seen seals all my life. Growing up in Grogport, there were always single seals lounging in the bay. I’d seen them basking on the foreshore, playing, and hunting. But I’d never seen one so brazen and close. After half a minute, it simply sunk beneath the surface, straight down. I was close enough to see its nostrils flare and close before it submerged.

‘That was incredible,’ I breathed, scanning the waves, willing it to come back.

‘Isn’t it?’ said Ailsa. She’d moved a little closer up the boat, the better to see the seal. ‘Try the other side.’

I turned round and gasped in astonishment. There were at least a dozen seals watching us. The nearest was within touching distance. They were right there, right there beside the boat. They regarded us with open, sardonic curiosity.

‘I’ve never …’ I said, and ran out of words.

‘I know. It’s something else, isn’t it?’

Even as we spoke, more seals were appearing, and others sinking down or turning tail, water slicking from their mottled skins. There must have been two dozen overall. They were constantly changing position, swimming towards us or away. As we sat in the boat, bobbing and tossed on the hefting waves, they took turns to study us. The seals came close, and closer, watching us side on, as curious about us as we were them. They came close enough that I saw the bloodshot crazing in their dark, dog-like eyes – the beads of water clinging to their whiskers.

‘There are so many. They’re amazing,’ I said, entranced.

‘They are, aye.’

‘I’ve never seen a rookery this size.’

‘Or so bold,’ grinned Ailsa.

In front of us, a seal yawned wide. As its head tilted up and the lips slipped back, its teeth were exposed, sharp and gnarled, yellowing to white, the roof of the mouth ridged in pink and black. A splosh and it was gone, leaving nothing but ripples lifted on the waves.

‘How did you know they were out here?’

‘Dad told me. He said they were worth seeing, so I called you.’