Page 99 of Bonetide

There are paintings upon paintings stacked against the walls, some hung, some leaned, some racked in narrow wooden racks. Canvases of many sizes, though none larger than two feet across. A small worktable along the far wall with brushes in jars and clay pots of dried pigment and a glass cup of old turpentine that has gone the color of weak whisky. A paint-stained smock on a peg. A small kerosene lamp on the table, with a box of kitchen matches beside it. A bundle of rowan twigs tied with red thread. A small dish of grey hair—I’m sorry Effie, but I can’t help but shudder at that one. Hair that’s not on a head is an ick of mine.

I take another step, and my feet crunch on something.

I look down and cringe, fearing the worst, like I just stepped on a bunch of dried out spiders.

There is salt on the floor.

On the floorboards in patterns. Circles. Several of them, drawn in coarse sea salt, some disturbed and redrawn, the older lines visible underneath the newer ones, the way a pentimento shows under a painting that has been reworked. Jars of more salt on a shelf above the worktable. A small leather-bound notebook on the table beside the lamp.

It’s all so witchy as fuck but I still don’t understand any of it.

I turn to the nearest painting to look at it closer and then…

Then I understand all of it at once.

It’s Alasdair.

A small oil portrait in a plain dark wood frame, his face in three-quarter profile. The angle of his jaw, the cleft in his chin, the Alasdair blue of his eyes.

The signature in the bottom right corner reads, E. Galloway. 1989.

I blink at it, my brain short-circuiting, then turn to the next.

It’s Alasdair again. Different painting. Smaller. His face turned to the viewer this time, his eyes finding mine in dots of vibrant cornflower. E. Galloway. 1972.

The next. Alasdair on the rocks of his spit, in dark clothes, looking across the bay. E. Galloway. 1994.

The next. Alasdair at a kitchen table I do not recognize, a candle in front of him, his hand on a book. E. Galloway. 2003.

The next. The white horse standing in bracken, mane long, eyes black. E. Galloway. 1981.

The next. A close-up of Alasdair’s hands. E. Galloway. 2017.

I keep looking at the paintings. There are dozens. Some half-finished. Some signed and dated and finished. The earliest one I find on the wall is dated 1962. The latest is dated 2023.

He is the same in every fucking one.

Thirty years apart, fifty years apart—it doesn’t matter. The same face. The same eyes. The same line of his jaw.

I sit down on the floor, my back against Effie’s worktable. There isn’t much room to sit but I sit anyway, because my legs have stopped wanting to hold me up.

The math is absolutely not mathing.

There is no version of it that does, even though I try every logical angle. Alasdair has a father who looks exactly like him. And a grandfather who looks like him. That could happen, couldn’t it?

I reach around and pick up the leather-bound notebook on the worktable. I flip it open to see her handwriting, see the first date in 1962.

I tried the salt circle with the rowan again. He came to the gate. He did not cross. I do not know why the wood does not work alone. I also don’t know why he keeps coming back.

—E.

I flip forward a few pages.

Catriona is missing. They came to my door. I told them what I could, and what I could not. I sat with my tea afterwards, watched the bay from the kitchen window, and waited for him to come to the rocks. But he didn’t. He hasn’t come for three nights. He knows I know it was him.

I flip forward. 1981. The year of the white horse painting.

I have tried the binding seventeen times. The thing my grandmother told my mother about, the piece of the horse hide. I cannot do it alone. He will not give it to me. The bargain only takes the form he can keep.