Where the World Ends Read online

  “But you canna,” said John. She jerked her head in the direction of Euan, gibbering and shivering and wretched. “Poor wee man. Does he no feel bad enough without you telling the men and the big boys he tried to do a miracle?”

  It was true. They could not tell what had happened without adding to Euan’s misery and humiliation – also without fetching down adult rage on everyone involved.

  So when they got back to the cave, they said that Euan had fallen in trying to pull some driftwood ashore for Mr Don’s raft, and Lachlan had jumped in and saved him. The surge of exclamations and whistles and murmurs of admiration drew eyes away from Euan and left him no need to say anything at all.

  They stripped both swimmers, and rubbed them warm with their woollen hats. An assortment of ragged clothing was temporarily loaned them by the other lads.

  “Minister” Cane stood up. “Let us give thanks to God,” he said in his gloomy, booming voice, as if he resented all the attention going to rag-a-boy Lachlan.

  Quilliam was still silly with relief. “Yes, but let’s give thanks to Lachlan, too!” he told the room at large. “I say he should be King Gannet now!” The room whooped in agreement. Cane glowered.

  There were usually furrows in Lachlan’s forehead, like a permanent frown, even when he smiled; it made him look like a little old man. Now his whole face shone, he gave a gurgling giggle and did a little dance (which was not simply to get warm). “By all the fishes in the sea, I love this place!” he said.

  It took a moment for Quill to realize that Lachlan meant the Stac. He meant Warrior Stac – this jet-black spike of dumb rock where they were trapped, like as not until the day they died; away from their people, away from their dogs, away from beds and porridge and rigs and everything joyful. And yet Lachlan of the permanent frown was as happy as anyone had ever seen him.

  The gannets were leaving. It was the gannets which had brought them to the Stac. Now, every day, more gannet families rose from the cliffs, like flakes of white paint peeling off a wall, and were blown out to sea. They did not return. Their winters were spent at sea. Unlike the fowlers, they could leave at will. The cliffs were blacker – bleaker – without them. The sight of them flying out to sea added to the feeling of being completely abandoned.

  Suddenly, every day was the Sabbath.

  The “Minister” said that everyone must stop fowling and give over each waking hour to prayer and hymn-singing and wringing their souls to see what dirty water dripped out. He personally undertook to lead them to salvation.

  Domhnall Don gave one of his rare, honking laughs and shook his head in disbelief. Mr Farriss groaned and turned his face to the wall. The boys, of course, greeted it as a kindness – not to have to leave the cave. The weather was no longer friendly. Outside the Bothy a cold wind was invariably lying in wait for them. Rain-sodden clothes did not dry so readily without a warm sun to dry them.

  They had begun to look like survivors of war or shipwreck, haggard and hollow-eyed. They would sit picking at the scabs on their knees, comparing bruises, rubbing bird oil into open cuts and grazes in the hope of keeping them from going bad.

  Is no one going to argue? thought Quill. It was insane. The birds would be gone soon. The party must keep fowling for as long as possible. There were cleits needed mending. There was Mr Don’s raft to build. He was right! Don was right! With a raft they could get to Boreray! There were a couple of derelict shepherds’ shelters there – and sheep! – and peat they could cut and burn to keep warm. It might be as empty of life as Warrior Stac, but its rounder contours promised ease and comfort in comparison with this bestial horn of a rock.

  The chief reason Quill recoiled from the thought of workless days stuffed with worship was the prospect of idleness. He leaned over and whispered to Murdo, “We need to keep busy, man. ’S important to stay busy, right?” They needed to pass the time, so that Time did pass. Otherwise…otherwise they would all slide to a stop and sit and be helpless, which is next to being dead. People are better for being busy. Murdina Galloway had said so.

  Quill stood up. “We ought to keep on doing.”

  Everyone turned to stare at him. Even Mr Farriss uncurled himself. Quill thrust his hands deep into his pockets, as if his hands had done the talking and were taking shelter. When nobody spoke, he felt obliged to plough on. “Why did God give us bird feet and make us ingenious if He wanted us just to sit about and do nothing? This is a test, maybe! Of our ingenui…tousness.” He paused again, soaked up the silence, and felt damper for it. “Anyway, we should keep busy. That’s what I think. The Devil makes work for idle hands, Ma says.”

  Col Cane was so shocked at being contradicted that he could find nothing to say, and settled for looking sickened: he had a face made for it. At last he choked out: “Lo! The boy Quilliam has spoken! In his BIG WORDS.”

  And Quill realized: Cane had no idea what “ingenious” meant – which was gratifying. It was the first time Quill had known something that a grown man did not: “ingenuity”. At the selfsame moment his fingers, nervously gripping a useless bent nail in his pocket, suggested the thing was not useless after all, and might make a good fish hook if they ran short of bird meat. An ingenious thought.

  Not that Quill’s opinion made the smallest difference. Nor did the opinions of Domhnall Don or Mr Farriss, who agreed with Quill and continued to go out on to the Stac every day, Don looking for flotsam, Farris trying to escape his worries, like a dog trying to flee his own fleas.

  “Well? Who’s coming to do his work?” growled Mr Don as he left the cave carrying rope and saddle. But the boys hung back. Col Cane had told them that every day was now the Sabbath on Warrior Stac, and if they worked on the Sabbath, it would be “on pain of eternal damnation”. The words were fearful enough to hold them in thrall to a pompous, ignorant man they neither liked nor respected. Quilliam made to stand up, but Murdo pulled him down again – maybe to save Quill from damnation but, more probably, to stop Quill betraying friends who preferred not to work.

  “We need to keep busy,” hissed Quill. “We need the birds! You wanta starve, man?”

  Kenneth overheard. “Ach, if we run outa food, I’ll turn to eating the small ones.” And he pointed his lop jaw at Davie, licked his lips and laughed.

  For a time, the “Minister” heard their “Confessions”, two by two, in front of the altar-cleit outside. When it got too cold for his liking, he turned everyone out of the cave and had them stand about in the raw wind, until he had finished interrogating each boy in turn. Working keeps you warm, but standing about is wicked chilling.

  Even when Don and Farriss came back from fowling, they soon enough went out again – no longer to share a pipe of tobacco, since their tobacco was all gone, but to be somewhere free of boys and somewhere they could avoid the sight of Cane.

  So neither man was there that evening when Col Cane unmasked the demon among them.

  “I hear we have one among us who does not believe,” he announced, while dinner bubbled in the pot, begging to be eaten.

  Euan raised his head off his knees, panic-stricken, but he was not the guilty party. It was not Euan’s failure to walk on water that had appalled Col Cane.

  “There is one here who does not believe the world has ended! One who has fallen into the black pit of wickedness and is full of lewd thoughts. One whose black soul is caked in witchery.”

  That grabbed everyone’s attention. Even Quilliam was riveted to know which of them had confessed to “witchery”.

  It never entered his head that it might be him.

  “Davie tells me he has seen this boy ‘talking with a sea-witch down by the water’,” brayed Col Cane.

  Davie’s mouth dropped open. He looked from Quill to the “Minister” and back again. “I only said… It was a fine thing! I only said, Quill – cross my heart and hope to die! I said it was a fine thing, the way the bird huddled up close!”

  “A fine thing, is it, child, to commune with phantoms and demons?” Cane intoned. Davi
e spluttered and stammered, trying to put right the misunderstanding, but the “Minister” was wielding his power, as a smith wields a hammer. He pointed at Quill. “There is more. Stand up, loutish boy. Not only have you consorted with the sea-witch, but Kenneth informs me that you have ‘done sins of the flesh’ with the niece of Mr Farriss.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  Some there gasped (chiefly at the fact that Cane was ready to repeat secrets told him in confidence). Kenneth sniggered.

  “And now you incite the lads to defy my commandments and work on the Sabbath!”

  Within the minute, Quill had been repainted as the very portrait of sin, disobedience and witchery.

  Quill thought everyone would laugh – that someone – anyone – would laugh. But nobody did. They just stared at him: fearful, incredulous.

  Then Kenneth picked up a sliver of shale and threw it at Quill. Murdo rose from his place in anger, but the “Minister” laid a blessing on Kenneth’s head, stroking his hair. “Yes, laddie. We canna let the witch foul our nest, nor sully our minds.” And picking up a pebble, Cane threw it – less accurately than Kenneth, but plainly inviting every boy there to let fly. Half-heartedly, uncertainly, the boys looked around them for pebbles. “That’s right, laddies. The Lord instructs us to cast out demons in His name. Let us cast this demon Quilliam into the Outer Darkness.”

  There are times for arguing, explaining, protesting: this was not one. Quill was out of there without even stooping to pick up his hat.

  No one with a morsel of sense moves about the cliffs at night. But Quill did. He slid and scrambled downwards, hoping to meet with Farriss or Don and plead for help. But they were nowhere in sight. The sky was seeded with birds – some furtive, fearful breed that only flew home after sunset. They sped inshore so fast that they seemed to hurl themselves into extinction against solid rock. Three or four times, one passed so close by that Quill thought it had collided with him, the thrum of wings was so loud against his ear.

  Just as furtive and fearful, Quill made for a burrow of his own – made for Lower Bothy, to be out of sight of the moon, though all he could make out of Night’s geography was the jagged metal floor of the sea far below. Everything else was a black mass of nothingness. He could not even see the rock face he was climbing down – what jags and snags were inflicting so many grazes, bruises and cuts.

  It was madness to think he could find Lower Bothy in the dark. Within minutes he was lost. Within the hour, he had so over-strained his arm muscles that his hands were jumping like frogs; he lay flat along a ledge, feeling them twitch and cramp and scrape against dried spikes of bird lime, and could not think they were his hands at all. Nothing was in his control, not his hands, not anything. Somehow he had become Quill the Witch, possessed by demons. In fact he could feel the demons inside him, like burning turf in his guts: Rage, Loathing, the longing to clap Col Cane inside his own church bell and hit it with a peat spade over and over and over until Cane’s teeth fell from his mouth, the tartan from his plaid and the smugness from his miserable, sagging jowls…

  Quill wished he had not left behind his woollen cap: there was nowhere smooth to lay his face. He started to wonder what else he had left behind, and the last and worst fear that came was that he had left Murdina.

  In the Bothy, she had come to his sleeping place at his bidding, but if she came tonight, Quill would not be there. And she was not a witch, not a witch, not a witch, not any kind of witch! There are men who can make a rabbit out of a knotted handkerchief, to make their babbies laugh. Quill could make Murdina out of memories and imagination and the softness of a rolled-up jacket. But now he was banished and hated and alone. Perhaps even Murdina would shun him, persuaded by Col Cane’s sanctimonious lies. At least God was out of earshot here on the Stac. God would not be taken in by the man’s drivelling malice.

  Quill knew now how Fearnach Mor, the sheep-stealer, had felt, condemned to marooning; carried out by boat to live till he died, alone on the Stac. Now Quill knew what had made the thief hurl himself into the sea and swim after the boat, pleading for mercy.

  The moon was setting. Its wake of moonshine dwindled towards the horizon. Soon Quill would be plunged into utter blackness. And he, too, wanted to yell at the moon: Wait! Don’t go! I’ll change! I’ll mend my ways! I’ve done nothing! Next he knew, he was drowning in dark.

  At first light, he woke, stiff as a plank of flotsam, his ribcage so rigid with cold that he could barely breathe. In the dark he had strayed a mile round the Stac. Finding the Lower Bothy cost him hours of climbing. More than once, blackbacks came after him, beaks like filleting knives. The wind shifted, and rain gathered on the horizon, like stooks of mildewed rye.

  “I’ve done nothing! I did nothing!” he shouted at the beleaguering storm clouds. There came no reply but for the first drops of rain, falling on him like spittle.

  Even the sea was hostile to witchy Quilliam: the waves hissed. The temperature plummeted. The rain doused the embers of anger scorching Quill’s guts, but he was not grateful: Rage was all that had been keeping him going.

  By the time he found Lower Bothy, his flesh was jumping with cold. Dead red jellyfish lay rotting in a row across the doorway: his particular horror come to greet him. Theirs was the only colour anywhere, in any direction, as far as the edge of the world.

  Hour after hour he watched the downpour hammering the sea flat. Noon was dark. Midnight was Stygian.

  Next morning he passed the time piling up rocks across the cave’s entrance, to keep out the wind. Without fire, he knew full well he would die quite soon. The fulmars were flying out to sea. The gannets had gone. Kilda’s larder was dwindling. The Warrior would soon have no crumbs left in his pocket to feed the children of Hirta. But, for now, there was a half-full cleit within reach from which he fetched back half a dozen birds. He thought fright and anger must have shrunk his stomach, but hunger crept into him again, under cover of hard work. He ate his first dried puffin as though it was Cane’s right arm and he was tearing the flesh off it with his teeth. He ate the second, and savoured every bite.

  Somewhere within the rock, the shearwaters began their unearthly chatter. It made for an eerie music. “Like fairies spinning gold underground,” Murdina had said when she first heard it. He repeated the words out loud – “Fairies spinning gold underground!” – and found he could breathe again. The cave was so cold that his breath made white mist as it came out of his mouth.

  He was thirsty, and sucked at his wet clothes for the sake of the rainwater in them, wondering how he would catch enough to drink without any kind of pot to collect it in. Would he have to leave some piece of clothing out to soak up rainwater, then suck it dry? No, he could not spare a single item of clothing. If he was ever warm again (he told himself) it would be with lung fever or a direct lightning strike between the shoulder blades.

  There were hollows and indentations in the terrace of rock outside, but he dared not drink from them in case the sea and not the rain had filled them. Salt water would only increase his thirst. Salt water could pickle his brains and turn him into a mad thing. In thinking it, a kind of hysteria trickled like salt water over his brain pan and made his vision blur, his head spin. He feared he was mad already.

  With a flat-splatting noise, and bulk enough to block out a lot of daylight, something moved across the mouth of the cave. Quill scrabbled backwards, deeper into the cave, the heels of his hands leaning down on grit and sea slugs. What was it? A merman slapping his scaly tail on the smooth rocks? The blue-green men made of blue-green seawater, slopping sweat-salty onto the landing place and solidifying into flesh? His head banged the low rock roof at the back of the cave.

  He was so scared that his eyes were slow to focus on the garefowl as she waddled by. She stopped – looked in – waddled on. A startling sight – but not fearful – that child-sized penguin, hunched and bulky-black. She roused Quill out of his trance. He felt less alone and less afraid for seeing her.

  Lower Bothy seemed
huge without the men, the other boys, the piles of sacks and nets and ropes and egg baskets that had filled it on their arrival on Warrior Stac. He could have his choice of sleeping places. And yet nowhere seemed either dry or inviting, and the light was so much less than back in those summer days. Also, there was an unspeakable, sickening stench. Either he could live with it or he could hunt down the source and be rid of it.

  The smell seemed to emanate from the darkest, lowest corner of the cave – a fissure too low to crawl under. So he lay on his stomach and groped at the darkness until his hands encountered…flesh.

  The flesh disintegrated and oozed through his fingers, and left him holding bone. When he drew it out, the bone had teeth attached to it. Quill’s stomach turned itself inside out so quickly and so violently that he was left sprawled in the mouth of the cave fighting for breath. He beat his stinking hand in the puddles of water – salt or fresh, he could never drink from them now – until he could rid himself of the smell.

  There was fur, too: coarse, short hair.

  He would go back up to Midway. He would tell them that some merman, some drowned sailor – Fearnach Mor, maybe – had died in the cave, and they would be so – what? – intrigued? sympathetic? – that they would let him stay. Or he would find some other cave to shelter in. But he had just raised himself to his hands and knees, shuddering and whimpering, when he saw three people watching him from the water.

  So he was mad, after all. Desperation and cold had stolen his wits, and he had tumbled from Midway Bothy into a nightmare of horror and delusion.

  “Arff,” said one of the three. “Arff, arff.”

  Seals.

  The noise that came out of Quill (though it was quite seal-like) scared the creatures away. They submerged and disappeared. Their sire, their grandsire, perhaps, had dragged himself into Lower Bothy to die. Or perhaps it had been washed ashore by a heavy swell, already dead, and become wedged in the very gullet of the cave. Quill laughed out loud that he could have thought anything else. The relief kept him going all the while he was excavating the rotting carcass from the back of the Bothy and returning it to the ocean. He kept as many of the bones as possible, in case they came in useful. “Keep a thing seven year,” his mother had said, “and you shall find a use for it.” Such a Kildan philosophy.