Page 136 of Bonetide

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.

There is no version of it that ends with anyone believing me, and every version of it ends with me in a room being asked whether I’ve been sleeping enough and if I’m on any medication. They are not Mhairi and the village folk who accept truth like they do the weather. Whoever comes looking for Sinclair will come from the city and have city sense, and city sense knows that if a woman alone on a sea loch says a horse ate a policeman, the next stop is the padded cell.

So I’m not going to call anyone. I work that out standing in the cold, staring at the car, and I stop being a person something happened to, and start being a person who is doing something.

I just don’t know what the fuck that is yet.

What I do know is, from countless TV crime shows, is the car can’t be here.

The car can’t be here, in my driveway, my fingerprints on the door I’ve pulled open. I get in the car and turn the key. The seat’s pushed back for a tall man, so I drag it forward, my hands going through the motions now, acting before I have a chance to give the command. Some practical animal has taken the wheel; it is going to deal with the car first and let me fall apart later, on its own schedule, when there’s time.

That’s what compartmentalization is all about, kids.

But even my subconscious has decided I won’t take the car toward the village. Toward the village is the road out to the world, to people. I take it the other way, around the head of the bay on the narrow road that hugs the shore, toward the dark mass of the far spit and the castle on it, because the only thing better at making things disappear than the loch itself is the thing that lives in it.

And right now, because those eldritch gods have a wicked sense of humor, the thing that lives in it is the only ally I’ve got.

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

Idrive a dead man’s car to the monster’s house.

The road is bad, and the light is going, and I take the bends too fast, the loch black on my right now, the headland rising.

I don’t dare look at the water.

By the time the castle comes up out of the dusk, Caisteal Eachainn, all broken-teeth-standing stone, the part of it that’s still roofed black against a sky going to indigo. My hands have started shaking so badly on the wheel that I have to stop. I bring the car onto the flat scrub below the curtain wall, kill the engine, and the silence comes in.

He’s there.