Page 155 of Bonetide

He takes in a deep breath and opens the door.

I brace for horror.

What I find is…another chapel.

Not literally, not like the one I found him praying at. There’s no altar, no crucifixes. But as I stand in the doorway and take it in, I’m filled with that same feeling of reverence. First of all, it’s a round stone room rising the full height of a tower, which means it’s probably the tower part I can see from the cottage. It’s lit by three narrow windows, and around every curve of wall, floor to as high as a tall man can reach and even beyond that, are shelves. Dozens and dozens of them. Each one shallow, each one holding a small arrangement of objects, and each one with a name cut into the wood beneath it in careful, antique letters.

A comb, bone-backed, gold teeth. A ring. A spectacles case. A hair ribbon pressed flat under a smooth stone. A locket, open, the portrait inside long faded to brown shadow.

I count them.

I get up to seventy-two before I give up.

And the names…Mary Beaton. Sileas. Una NicRath. Pavlina. Margaret Brodie. Catriona Carmichael.

I stop at Catriona’s shelf. A brooch sits on it, thistle-shaped, and a bus ticket, 1962, gone soft as cloth with age, and I think of Effie at her kitchen window writing he knows I know it was him, and my nose burns with the threat of tears.

“You kept them,” I say, my voice echoing. “All this time. You kept…why? What is this, Alasdair? Is this guilt or are these trophies, because I need to know which room I’m standing in…”

“It’s neither.” He moves into the room slowly, and his eyes go shelf to shelf the way mine went, except he doesn’t have to read the names. “Every woman the creature took, the man came up here after, set down something of hers, cut her name into the wood, and said it aloud. Every year on the day of her taking, I’d come and say it again. Some of these names I’ve said four hundred times by now.”

He stops in the center of the room and turns to face me, his expression frank. “It was how I stayed a man, Iris. The monster doesn’t mourn. It can’t, there’s nothing in it that knows what it takes. So the man mourned for both of us, deliberately, like tending a fire, because I learned early what happened when I let the fire go out. The remembering was the discipline. The grief was the leash before there was a leash.” His voice drops. “I’d have told you this room was my conscience. I’d have been proud of it.”

“And now?”

“Now.” He looks at the floor, and then makes himself look back up, whistling through his teeth. “There’s a thing I knew and didn’t let myself know. The women in the loch, foxglove. My drowned? You’ve seen them, you’ve felt their hands.” I go cold, and he nods at my reaction and continues. “They’re not in the water because the water keeps them. They’re in the water because I do. The bones, what the creature didn’t eat, what remained. I gathered them, all these years. They’re below this room, in the old well-chamber, laid out properly. I told myself it was burial. It was the only burial I could give them.”

He runs a hand over his face, and sighs. “But the dead stay where their bones are kept, lass. That’s old law, older than me. As long as I held them, they couldn’t go. The mourning that kept me a man kept them in the bay. Every woman whose hands pulled at you in the dark is down there because my grief wouldn’t open its fist. I rented my soul off their backs for centuries and called it…remembrance.”

The room goes quiet and still. I look at him standing in the middle of his conscience finding out what it cost, and the funny thing is, that I don’t hate him for it. While there is horror in this makeshift museum of the dead, it pales compared to the worst of what I imagined on the walk over here. What I find instead is the size of the grief in this room, centuries of a man reciting names so he could stay tethered to humanity, and the wreckage of the women who paid for it.

“Will you show me?” I ask gently. “The well-chamber?”

“You want to see the bones?”

“Aye,” I say and the word comes naturally, and I wonder if I’ll eventually have a Scottish accent one day. “I want to see them. I think…I think perhaps we could do something for them.”

He looks at me a long moment, and then he nods and takes the lamp from its hook by the door.

We go back out and down the same spiral staircase we came up, except we keep descending, past the level of the great hall, and the stairs keep going, turning down into the rock the castle stands on. The walls change around us as we go, dressed stone gives way to rougher courses and then to raw rock, dark and damp-sheened in the lamplight. The air changes too, colder with every turn, and wet, and carrying the mineral smell of the loch.

“How deep does this go?” I ask.

“Not deep. It can’t.” His low voice sounds hushed in the stairwell. “We’re on a sea rock, lass, the water’s everywhere under it. Another few feet and you’d be digging into the loch itself. The old builders cut down just far enough to reach the spring. Every castle needs its well, for the sieges. This one’s needed it for…other things.”

The stair ends at a doorway with no door, and he stops, and lifts the lamp, and lets me look.

The well-chamber is a low round room cut whole out of the rock, the ceiling close enough that Alasdair has to stoop, and in the center of the floor is the well itself, a dark mouth ringed with worn stone. And from it comes the sound of water, moving, somewhere just below, not the drip of a cistern but a slow breathing slosh, rising and easing, rising and easing.

“It feels the tide,” he explains. “The spring’s fresh, but the loch presses on it from below. When the tide comes in, the well comes up. They were never out of the water here, Iris. Not really. That’s how I held them to the bay without ever letting myself understand that I was doing it.”

And around the well, on the dry margin of stone between the dark mouth and the curved walls, laid out with terrible care, are the women.

Dozens upon dozens of their bones. Each one wrapped in old linen gone grey with years, each bundle laid straight toward the well like spokes around a hub, like sleepers around a fire, and at the head of each a flat stone with a name scratched in it. The oldest linen has gone the color of the rock, while the newest…is still white.

I look at the white one for a long time.

“Becca Rhys,” I declare.