Never Follow a Light You Did Not Light

I do not remember climbing the cellar stair. I remember the hand, and I remember being in the kitchen with the door shut and my back against it and every light I owned burning, and the distance between those two things is gone, eaten, the way a roll of film comes back with frames missing and you never learn what was on them.

The hand had been small. That is the part my clinical self kept reaching for, all that long night, the way the tongue goes back to the gap where the tooth was. Small, and pale, the fingers opening slowly, palm up, out of the place my torch would not go and into the place it would, so the light lay on the back of it like frost. I had said a name I had not let into my mouth in thirty-five years, and the singing had stopped, and the hand had come.

I did not take it. I stood at the top of the stair with my heart slamming and I did the only thing my body knew how to do, which was step back into the light and shut the dark behind a slab of pine two hundred years too thin.

"That is not Esther," I said to the kitchen, out loud, because the sound of my own voice is a light of a kind. "Esther is in Handsworth in the ground. That down there is wiring and damp and a brain that has been told no good light for too long." I knew the science of it. The eye starved of light does not give up. It turns the gain up and up until the noise itself looks like signal, until the rod cells fire on nothing and the mind, which would rather see a wolf than admit it cannot see, builds a wolf out of the static. Look harder in the dark and you see worse, not better. That is not a saying. That is anatomy.

I said all of it aloud and I believed about a third of it, which on Maren Skerry was a good night.

I did not sleep. I sat with the lamp and two candles and the wind-up torch on the table like a weapon, and waited for the daylight the way you wait for a bus in the rain, certain it has forgotten you, and at last the window went from black to the colour of a bruise and then to grey, and I think for a while I wept, the way you cry when there is no one to perform it for.

The radio only works in daylight. I got Calum on the second try, his voice coming through the weather like a stone through gravy, and I did not tell him about the hand. I asked when the next boat was, and he was quiet long enough that I checked the set was still live, and then he said the weather was coming and he would bring the supplies across now or not for a week.

I should have said no. Calum on the rock when the weather closed in meant Calum on the rock overnight, and a man on the rock overnight is a man you cannot get rid of when the dark comes. I said yes anyway, because the truth I will not dress up is that I wanted another living person between me and the night so badly I would have welcomed a stranger with a knife.

He came across in a sea that had no business carrying a boat, and behind him Eorsay sat low and grey on the water with every house already showing a light, and it was not yet noon.

We got the boxes up between us, paraffin and tinned things and gas for the ring, and a sack of candles I did not ask for and he did not explain, just set inside the door with the care of a man bringing something to a grave. By the time we had it stowed the sky had come down like a lid and the boat was banging itself stupid against the slip, and Calum looked at it and looked at the sky and said, not to me, "Aye, that is me here, then." He did not seem unhappy. He seemed like a man who had decided something long ago and was relieved to be made to do it.

We sat in the kitchen as the light failed, which on the shortest days happens in the early afternoon, a slow theft you can watch through the glass. I lit the lamp and both candles and put the kettle on the new gas, and Calum produced from inside his coat a bottle of something amber and unlabelled, the way men of that island do, and poured two, and I did not stop him pouring mine, and we drank it, and it was very good and very rough and tasted of smoke and the inside of a barrel.

For a while we talked about nothing, the generator, the price of fuel, his knees. But the bottle went down and the dark came up the windows like water filling a tank, and his nothing developed a current, and I let it carry me.

"You keep the lamp room lit," he said. Not a question.

"There is no lamp," I said. "It is decommissioned. There is a beacon on the gallery now, a wee LED that runs itself."

He looked at me as if I had said something obscene in church. "The beacon," he said, and made a sound in his throat. "Aye. The beacon." His hands are enormous and ruined, a boatman's hands, and they did not look steady on the glass. "You keep a light burning up the top of the night. Not the beacon. A light you have lit yourself, with your own hand, and you stay by it." He looked at me. "Do not be in this house with no light you lit yourself, Imani. Not for a minute. Not to go to the privy. You keep one in your hand."

The fear came first, before I had a thought to hang it on, a cold drop down the centre of me, because he meant it the way you mean a thing you have paid for. Then my shoulders went up and my hand found the warm glass without my telling it to. Then the clinical part, late as always, said, this is a frightened old man passing on a frightened old superstition, this is folklore, the same as not putting new shoes on the table, and I held on to that the way I had held on to the kitchen door.

"Why," I said.

He drank, and looked at the black window, where the beacon's sweep came round every ten seconds and lit nothing, only proved how dark the gaps between were. "My brother kept this rock," he said. "After they switched it off. They sent a man with a clipboard and said the satellite would do it now, no keeper needed, and they took Donald's wage and his post and Donald, he just. Stayed. Kept it lit out of his own pocket, twenty year nearly, because." He stopped. "Because you do not let the light go out on this rock. He knew that. Da knew it. Da's da."

"What happened to him," I said, though I knew, the way you know the end of a story when the teller's voice goes the way Calum's had gone.

"He went out," Calum said. "A moonless night, three winter back. I brought the boat over the morning and the cottage was empty and the lamp cold and his bed not slept in. We never found him. The sea took him, the inquest said." He laughed, a terrible small sound with no humour in it. "The sea did not take him. He took him. He went out to it because it." His mouth worked. "It is owed," he said, very low, as if the words might be overheard, and on Maren Skerry I no longer believed they could not be. "The skerry is owed. The light holds it back off the mainland, off my own grandweans in their beds, but it does not kill the thing, you understand, it only holds it, presses it back to the edge, and a thing held like that, year on year, it." He shut his eyes. "It is owed. And it takes its own. It chooses. We just keep the light and do not interfere on the nights it." He opened his eyes and they were wet and furious. "He calls it him. Donald did, in the end, in the book. I should not. It is not a him. It is not anything you have a word for."

The hair on my arms had stood up the way it does in a cold theatre when the doors open. I did not move. I have learned, in low light, that you do not move fast, you find out where everything is first.

"Calum," I said. "What is in the cellar."

Something in his ruined face shut like a door in a draught, and I understood I had asked the one thing he had promised someone he would not answer, and that the someone was Effie Aonghas, who had looked at me once on Eorsay the way a butcher looks at a hanging carcass, deciding the cuts.

"You leave the cellar," he said. "Keep the door shut and a light by it and leave it. And the other thing." He leaned across the table and gripped my wrist, his grip a vice, his voice dropping to almost nothing under the wind. "Whatever you see in the dark out here. A light. A window with a warm square in it. A torch coming up the slip. A face. Anybody's face. A wee lassie's face." His eyes went over mine and I felt the blood leave my own. "You do not go to it. You never follow a light you did not light yourself. Never. It will show you a light just ahead and a face you would die for, and the light will go back as you go to it, deeper in, and the face is not the face, it is the dark wearing the face that makes you stop being careful." His hand came off my wrist. "That is the only rule that matters. Do not follow a light you did not light. Do not go to the face."

I sat with my wrist throbbing, and I did not tell him that the night before a hand the size of a nine-year-old's had reached up out of the cellar into my torchlight, palm open, waiting, and that I had nearly leaned down to take it. But I think he saw it on me, because he poured me another and his own hand shook doing it, and he said, gently now, "Och, lass. They should not have sent you. Of all the ones to send." And he would not say what he meant, and I was too much of a coward, that night, to make him.

He slept by the fire with a candle at his head, and made me promise to do the same, and I did, and I lay in the kitchen with the lamp and listened to him snore, which was the most beautiful sound, another human animal alive in the dark beside me. Near the bottom of the night I made myself a second promise: that when the daylight came and Calum took his boat and his rules back to Eorsay, I would find whatever the keepers had left behind. Because a man does not guard a thing that hard unless there is a book that explains it, and I am, under everything, a woman who needs to read the chart before she will believe the patient is dying.

The storm did not lift in the morning. It backed off enough that Calum, grey and ashamed of the night, judged he could make the crossing, and he went, and I watched the boat get small and the light leave with it. Then I went up the spiral stair to the watch room below the gallery, which I had not properly searched, because some animal part of me had not wanted to be that high in the dark with the cellar that low beneath me.

The watch room was cold and round and smelled of brass and old oil. On a shelf sat a waterproof tin gone green at the seams, and I knew what was in it before I had the lid off, the way you know a coffin by its shape. The log. Two hundred years of it, or what was left, the early pages a brown that was nearly black, the ink only a memory of ink, weather and oil levels and the names of ships, and between the lines, when I made myself read between them, the other matter, the one they had buried in the grief of the wind.

I turned to the last hand, a shaking one, the letters fighting each other, the pen pressed so hard in places it had gone through, and the dates ran down to a single line three winters ago, the last words anyone had written on Maren Skerry before me, and I read them by the grey light through the salt-blind glass, and read them again, and the cold came in at the soles of my feet and into the long bones of my legs and made a home there.

The light is not enough, the last hand had written. It wants me to look. Do not look.