What the Dark Is Owed

I do not know how I got the night through. I sat in the corridor where Priya's voice had come up out of the dark to tell me there was a light here after all, come and see, and I did not go, and not going was the hardest thing my body has ever refused to do. I talked to her all night the way you talk to a patient going under, Priya, you are alright, stay with me, and she did not answer again, and that was worse than if she had.

When the window went grey I found I had bitten through the inside of my own cheek and not felt it. There was blood in my mouth, warm and bright and mine, the only warm thing on the rock, and I held it on my tongue before I spat it out, because pain at least is a fact, and I was short of facts.

The radio only works in daylight. I waited for the grey to thicken into something the set would call day, and I called Eorsay with a voice I made come out level by an act of will I did not know I still owned.

I wanted Calum. I got Effie Aonghas.

Her voice came through the weather clean, thin and dry and precise, every word set down like a stitch, the voice that has led the unaccompanied psalms on that island for sixty years and never once needed the note given to her.

"You are still on the rock," she said. Not a question. A thing confirmed.

A cold drop went straight down the middle of me before I had a thought to pin it on, because she said it like a woman reading off a figure that had come out right. My free hand made a fist on my thigh without my telling it to. Then the late clinical part came up behind and said, give her nothing, get what you need. And under all of it, lower than thought, a thing I could not stop knowing: that her being glad I was still here was the most terrible sentence anyone had spoken to me yet.

"The engineer is gone," I said. "Dr Sundaram. She walked into the dark last night and I could not reach her. She is in the cellar dark. I heard her in it. She thinks there is a light down there." I kept it a handover. Patient lost at such an hour, cause as follows.

There was a silence on the line, and it was not the silence of a woman taking in bad news. It was the silence of a woman fitting a fact into a place she had kept ready for it.

"Aye," Effie said. "It will have wanted her quick, a stranger, to clear the ground. It is you it is keeping for."

I shut my eyes. The grey of my dead right eye and the grey of the morning were the same grey now, and I could not have told you, with my eyes shut, which half of me was blind.

"You are going to tell me what this is," I said. "I have buried a woman in the dark this night who came here to read a meter. You are going to stop singing round it. What is on this rock."

And she told me. That is the thing I will carry. She told me the truth straight out, in the plain stern words of her faith, and there was no cruelty in her voice and no warmth either, and it was the absence of both that put the cold in me.

"There is a dark under the lit world," she said, "the way there is sea under the boat. It was there before the light, and nothing puts it out, the light only holds it off, presses it back to the edges. There is one place where it comes up close under the surface of the world, the way a rock comes up under shallow water, and that place is the skerry you are standing on. The lamp was built to hold it there. Not for the ships. For Eorsay, for the weans in their beds. Two hundred year the light was kept and never let fail, and that holding has a price. A held thing is owed. Now and again it reaches for one, and it is given the one, and it stays held. The keepers did not choose who. They lit the lamp and did not interfere on the nights it took its own, and they wrote it in the book as weather, and the mainland slept."

My breath had gone shallow and quiet. "And the watch is broken," I said.

"They put the lamp out," she said, and something moved under the dryness at last, an old contempt worn smooth. "Men with a clipboard. A cold flash with no soul behind it. An unkept light is no light at all to that thing, child, it needs the watcher, the waking mind that refuses it, the same as the lamp needs a hand to trim it. Three year now, no watcher, and it has crept back toward us, hungry. And it has reached for the ones it had already touched. The ones who stood once in a true dark and felt it take someone out of their hand."

The blood came back into my mouth where I had bitten it again without feeling it.

"You found me," I said. My voice did not come out level that time. "You found the one woman in Britain whose sister the dark took off a black stair when she was nine. Because a woman it has already marked will not run. And because." I could not say the rest. She said it for me, which was unbearable.

"Because it will take you, and be satisfied, and stay held, and Eorsay will keep its bairns. You were not assigned the watch, Imani Beckford. You were offered to it. The few for the many. It is a covenant and it is a mercy and I will not pretend it is anything kinder, because you are owed the truth now, you have earned it. The island will not come for you. We will light our houses, and we will be sorry, and we will be alive."

I have delivered a death sentence in the soft words we are taught, there is nothing more we can do. I had never heard one delivered like a hymn, in tune, with the conviction of a woman who has decided the tune is true.

And then, behind her, far off the mouthpiece, a door, boots, Calum's voice rising, saying Effie, no, give it here, a scuffle of an old man taking the set from an older woman, and then he was on the line, close and broken, and he said my name twice like a man finding someone in a crowd.

"Imani. Imani, lass. Are you whole."

"I am whole," I said, which was a word, only a word. "Calum. She has told me. All of it. You can stop carrying it now."

He made a sound I will not try to write. And then it came out of him all at once, the thing he had been holding under the whisky and the rules since the first day on the slip.

"Donald is down there," he said. "My brother. He did not drown, he is in the dark, eyes open, this whole three year, and some nights I take the boat out to the edge of the skerry water and I cut the engine and I hear him. I hear Donald asking is that a light, is that you, are you coming. And I cannot answer, because if I answer I will go in after him, and I have weans." His voice came apart. "I light a lamp and I row home and I leave my brother in the dark. Every keeper that rock ever lost is down there still. None of them ever saw the morning. That is what we are keeping watch over. Not a thing that kills you. A thing that keeps you, looking, forever, and never lets you see."

I sat on the cold floor of the watch room with the grey light on the salt-blind glass and I understood, finally, the shape of the thing I was inside, and the strange part is that the understanding steadied me. A diagnosis is a terrible thing and it is also a railing. You cannot fight a fog. You can fight a tumour. I have always needed to read the chart before I will believe the patient is dying.

"Calum," I said. "Is there a way to turn it. Not to outlast it. To turn it. A debt can be paid wrong as well as right. There is always a variable. Tell me the variable."

I heard Effie's voice come back, sharp, do not, Calum, there is no turning it, the covenant is the covenant. And then her voice closer, taking the set back, but slower, and what she said next she said almost to herself, the way you let slip the one true thing while you are busy guarding the others.

"There is a word in the old book," she said. "Donald wrote it near the end, and his father before him, and none of them understood it and neither do I. It does not want to kill, the book says, nor even company. It wants to be looked at. To be seen and known and made certain of, and it cannot be, because the least light that would let you see it drives it back out of seeing. So it takes minds into the dark to look at it forever and never quite, and that is the nearest it can come to being. The book says it can be turned aside only if it is given the one thing it wants more even than a witness." She stopped. "But I do not know what that could be, child, for witnessing is the whole of what it wants and the whole of what it cannot have. What do you give a thing that wants only to be seen, but eyes."

What do you give a thing that wants only to be seen but eyes. I have turned that sentence over and over since, the way I turned the last hand in the book, do not look. I did not have the answer. But a question you can hold in two hands is a thing, and I held it.

"The boat," Calum said suddenly, low and fast, while she breathed. "If the weather lifts the morn I will come for you. Whatever the sea does. Hold on one more night, lass."

I did not answer that. I have thought, since, that he knew I would not. He had weans, and there was a part of Calum Tasgall that had already learned, three winters ago, the exact weight of what he would do for a person in the dark, and we both loved each other a little for the lie.

"Aye," I said. "Come the morn."

And I turned the radio off before the daylight could fail and take it, and I made my decision, and it was the only one I had left.

I would not wait for it to come to me in some unlit corner the way it took Priya. I would not run, because there was nothing to run to, only the next dark place and the next, and it would follow me into every unlit room of the rest of my life the way it had followed me into this one. And I would not burn lamps and lose them one by one until the last candle drowned and I was given to it ragged and screaming.

I would go down into the deepest dark there is, the cellar, the throat in the rock where the light has never once reached, on the longest night of the year, three nights off, the solstice, and meet it on my own two feet, and find out what you give a thing that wants only to be seen, and I would either pay the debt wrong on purpose or I would not come up. I made my peace with not coming up the way you make your peace with anything, badly, out loud, talking to my mother who is dead and to my sister who is worse than dead.

That night, the first of the three, I did the thing the book says. I put my back to the wall and my hand flat over my good left eye, the way the keepers learned to, so that both halves of my sight were dark together and there was no good eye left to lie to me with light, and I listened.

And I heard them.

Not screaming. That is the thing I was not ready for. Whispering. Out of the dark below and the dark all round, soft and dry and patient and endless, two hundred years of voices, the keepers of Maren Skerry, all of them down there still with their eyes open in the black, asking, over and over, into a dark that answers only by coming closer, is that a light. Is that you. Are you coming. A river of it, layered back and back into the rock until the oldest were only a dry rustle under the rest, like leaves.

And among them, near, I heard Priya, who had read a meter on this rock two days ago. There is a light here after all, she whispered, somewhere just under my hand. Come and see. And further down, an old man's voice that had to be Donald, asking his ten-thousandth question into the dark, patient as the stone, is that you, brother, did you come.

And clearest and closest, climbing up out of the throat of the rock into the very rim of my hearing the way her hand had once climbed into the rim of my torchlight, a child's high clear voice, my own face's voice, going round and round the little circling tune our mother taught us for the dark, and stopping between the verses, and saying, not asking now but telling, glad, so terribly glad, the way you are glad when a long wait is finally over.

I have been looking for the light such a long time, Esther said, up out of the dark with my hand over my eye. I am so tired of looking. And you have come at last. You have come somewhere there is no switch to flip.