Page 122 of Bonetide

The days start to run together, like time has been granted extra fluidity. I don’t know if it’s because Alasdair likely experiences time differently because he’s been exposed to it for so long, and that has started rubbing off on me. Or that the seconds, minutes, hours, days all start to slip past when your brain is so focused on making sense out of one-hell-of-a fucked-up situation.

Because that’s all I’ve been doing, other than breathing, eating, drinking and fucking. I’m trying to marry together what I know about Alasdair, the myth and legend, and what I experience in my day-to-day life with him.

And, for the most part, things really do seem normal. The terror I sometimes feel when I remember what he is doesn’t stay sharp. It blurs, the way someone who lives by a railway stops hearing the trains.

The cottage takes him in, in a way I never thought it would. All these decades it has been warded to keep him out, but now that he’s inside, it’s embraced him and made it look like he’s always been here. He has a place at the kitchen table now, the chair across from mine I never used to use. He has a place in the sitting room, Effie’s wing-back by the fire where he reads in the late afternoons. He has a place in the bed, the side between me and the window because he sleeps with it open a crack, the briny scent of the loch filling my dreams.

He keeps the fire going while I work, and he makes me work, reminding me of deadlines that seem to belong to another life, and he makes me coffee in the morning. I take care of breakfast and lunch since he’s fond of kippers. I tried it once, smoked, with a poached egg on top and it was fine, but I never really got into that tinned-fish craze. To be honest, I don’t think Alasdair is much into tinned fish either, I’m sure he’d rather be swimming in the loch and eating them there, but I figure hey, I don’t care what he eats…so as long as it’s not people.

The thing is, none of this feels strange. All of this feels right, like it’s supposed to be this way.

And that’s the part that should worry me, the not-finding-things-strange.

Because there are some little things that remind me of what he is from time to time. For one, he’s often wet for no reason. Not always, and not in an icky uncomfortable way, rather his hair is perpetually damp, and if it’s not, then the hem of his pants or his shirt is. This is how I know Alasdair is not autistic like me, because I would be driven absolutely mad to have continuously wet sleeves. No sensory issues with this guy.

He’s also always cold to touch, his skin soft and smooth but with a chill like he’s just come from outside. He doesn’t seem to sleep at all, not even the dolphin method, he’s often very still, not moving an inch, and I can’t tell if it’s because he’s in predator mode or not. I suppose I should be grateful that what I’m seeing from him is the part of him from the loch, and not the part that is a horse. He doesn’t snort or neigh or eat hay. If I hadn’t known the about the each-uisge, there would be no reason to think he was a horse-man.

Man-horse.

Morse?

He also goes for long swims, for hours at a time. Just walks into the bay butt-naked and dives under and doesn’t come back until later. During that time, I do my best to draw and paint and forage since when he’s back, he’s devastatingly distracting.

Because, yes, I’m still one horny bitch, and if you think him being a monster on the side is enough to gird my loins, you are sadly mistaken. Our desire for each other has only increased, and we spend most of our time naked together, fucking all over the damn cottage.

Which does bring me to the strangest, and certainly most unnerving thing about him now. That sometimes, during the height of passion, especially when he’s being rough—and believe me, I like it rough now, apparently—his eyes do that thing. That all-black thing, where there is no iris, no white, only pupil. It’s like a horse’s eye but a horse’s eye is soft, and his eyes are decidedly not. They are fathomless black pools that have the same pull as a bottomless pit, like a black hole that leads to a never-ending void. Looking into them sometimes I feel like I’m looking past the man—and even past the beast—seeing into time immemorial itself, where great ancient, terrible gods rule the cosmos, rendering all of our little lives pointless and inconsequential.

Suffice to say, when his eyes go that way, I try not to look, lest I fall into them and never crawl out again. And anyway, he’s still able to make me come countless times anyway, so I wouldn’t say it actually puts a damper on things. Who knew I was this freaky at heart?

It’s Sunday now, I realize. Sunday means six nights since he came in through my window. Sunday also means we’re no longer in August.

I open the front door to put out the recycling that gets collected by a rusted old truck twice a month, and the cold hits me in the face like a slap. It’s properly cold, like god (or perhaps that eldritch being in the cosmic void) snapped their fingers. The bracken on the slope has started to turn, copper at the tips of the fronds, the green giving up to bronze. The heather’s past peak, the deep pink fading toward a duller rose and I’m glad I collected and dried and pressed as much of it as I could in early August. The light through the clouds has gone thin and clear the way it does once the season’s shifted in the night, and I feel that sense of melancholy I always get when summer comes to an end.

I stand on the step with the bag in my hand and let myself feel it, the air and the loch and the smell of the moor winding down. Fall has arrived overnight.

I’m not ready for it. I haven’t bought a proper coat or made sure I have enough wood for the stove, and I’m unsure if the heater I bought for the studio will be enough after all.

I should call Maddie, I think.

But I know that it will only remain a thought. The truth is, I have only texted her reassurances this last week but I’ve kept a lot of distance between us. Because what the hell can I tell her that won’t have her on the next plane out here, either to call the police or have me committed? Not a damn thing.

I close the door, put the bag down, and take a breath. The cottage is warm. Alasdair is in the sitting room reading, having gone for a swim earlier. The wood stove’s going, the bay through the windows is slate grey, and the cool wind is making the rowan tree move against the walls.

Things are good for the moment, and I’m trying to concentrate on that.

But I do wonder how long things can stay good when you’re cohabitating with a monster.

That evening at the table, with the bread that Alasdair baked earlier, cheese from the village, and the wine open between us, I ask him a question I’ve been saving—and I’ve been saving a lot of them, choosing to parse them out over the days like nosy seasonings.

“Why only women?”

His blue eyes meet mine over the rim of his wine glass. “Iris,” he says in a warning tone.

The problem is, his warning tone doesn’t work on me much. “Well? Why the drowned wives? Not drowned husbands?”

“They weren’t all wives, that’s just the name the villagers gave them.”

“Why women?” I repeat. “Is it some…sexual thing?”