There are eight of them, walking one behind the other down the cliff path, ordered smallest to tallest. Adam, the oldest, is nine. Corinne, the youngest, is six and tougher than any of them. She leads the way, she carries the stick, she takes two steps to everyone else’s one. Adam, at the back, carries the roses taken from Little Peg’s garden. His arms are scratched and the salty air stings them. The children walk to the rhythm of the lazy muscled wash of the waves and the tap of Corinne’s stick.
They reach, quickly, the mid-cliff hinterland that is a wide ledge of scrub grass clinging to blocks of stone, fine scuff sand trickling through the fine lines to the drop below. Here the cliff walls are pockmarked with shallow caves, whittled into the cliffs by the centuries-long pattern of licking waves around granite boulders. The sea no longer reaches the caves except on the highest century tides, like the one last year, which rose and stayed risen for months, and wiped the alcoves clean.
The small group traipses from cave to cave, torches raised and bobbing in the dark. In each alcove they leave a drawing in the sand, by a different hand each time. Corinne first, a complicated etching. Elizabeth, seven-nearly-eight, thinks for a while and stabs a series of holes in the sand, quickly, then slashes through them. Callum, aged seven (just), draws something geometric. At the fourth alcove, Corinne hands Adam the stick, but Jessimy, aged eight and three quarters, protests.
“It’s not fair!” she says. “I’m second oldest. I’m next.” As though drawing the picture is a game and not a plea.
Corinne shrugs and hands her the branch.
“Okay then.”
Adam sucks in his breath and Jessimy falls silent, tongue sticking out as she concentrates. Maybe she is drawing a flower—hard to say. The shape is wobbly, and a chunk of rock blocks the smooth sweep of the stick. Jessimy goes to move the rock, but a hiss from Corinne stops her. The rule is that they cannot touch the sand except with the stick.
At least, they think that’s one of the rules. They’ve pieced this ritual together from half-tales and dreams and what Corinne says she knows.
“Is that bad?” asks Jessimy. “If a rock was in the way?” as though they are playing hopscotch and she has mis-stepped. She means, “Will it be me?” though she doesn’t really believe it will be her. It will be Corinne, surely, who is chosen. Jessimy is just window-dressing—not something she is used to.
Corinne ignores her and walks on. Jessimy falls into her place in the line. She can feel Adam’s eyes on her back. His gaze feels like pity.
At the last alcove, it is Adam’s turn to draw. The sand there is almost pebbles, and he nearly drops the roses trying to pull the tip of the stick through them.
Then it’s a bare steep walk up back up the cliff and higher—through the heather and low-lying bilberries, white quartz and slate daubed thin through the green mosses, glowing up through the soil, the poor bones of the earth where its peaty flesh has been stripped harsh away. This, the longest night of the year, also feels the coldest. The children, all eight of them, are shivering and silent as they march. There is a road that crosses the hill, splits it in half with a tarmac scar. It is the line the sheep won’t cross. No one crosses it. No one stops their car on this road, and walks above it to the stone. A shepherd’s grave at worse, they have been told. A peat-cutters mark, maybe. A milestone for a route no longer taken.
Up here, the salt and wash scent fades, and instead there’s a smell on the air of the north and frost and driving rain and sheep shit.
“Here,” says Corinne. The standing stone is not high, no more than a foot. Carved but an inch or so from the top of it, a hole about as wide as a toilet roll tube, inner edges smoothed by God’s whistling. Chunks of the white-grey streaked rock like gristle are lumped around the base of it. There’s a flower. Just the one, with a clipped stem and trimmed thorns and so red that the muted palette of burgundies and browns and rubbed greens in shadow looks as a gob of blood from a broken mouth. The mouth is the hole in the standing stone.
It is all as it should be, according to the song the children know. Corinne sways a little; it runs through her head, the first three lines, again again.
There’s the red red rose
there’s the bare bare bones
draw close draw close and offer
The rose should have faded but it won’t, not until a new one is laid.
Other truths of this patch of land: the sheep won’t come near. Even the adults know the sheep don’t go near this stone. Nor do the birds.
Once upon a time, only Little Peg went near, every year on the winter solstice. Except last year, when Little Peg was dead and the winter became unending and the sea rose the highest it had in a century and licked a new alcove into the cliffs, and the wind uncovered the bones that were rocks, and the moon and clouds became an eye flickering open and closed and open closed.
The adults didn’t see it, but the children did, and Corinne most of all. Even littler then, with the nonsense and the noise passing high over her head, Corinne saw the things the adults did not, heard the things they didn’t. She never looked over the fence at Little Peg’s roses, but through the knotholes, which framed the roses, and framed the tale, and sometimes Little Peg looked back. All through the spring that never came, and the wet summer, long rotting in her grave in the churchyard, Little Peg’s steady eye looked back at Corinne’s watchful one, and one day it winked at her and turned so that Corinne could see Little Peg’s ear, with its long, beaded decoration. So she listened too.
Little Peg had sea shells knotted to her fence with wire: cockles and muscles and razors and limpets and whelks. The wind rushing through the knotholes and round the shells was the sound of the sea in one of the big shells, but amplified. It was thunderous, to Corinne. Outside Little Peg’s garden she could only hear the sea, and see the truth of Little Peg. But the sea shells sang that song and she followed it into the garden and she picked the roses, ready.
September rolled on, and Corinne, shy Corinne, Corinne who clung to her mother every morning outside school and had a heart drawn on the palm of her hand, became a magnet for the other children in her class. When the teacher looked away, as they drew, as they did exercises, Corinne whispered, and her classmates listened. She didn’t speak loudly, but she spoke beyond her years.
Even the loudest children became quiet—huddled away from Corinne, what she knows seeping from mouth to ear, in pieces, in wonderment, in translation. In front of adults, mouths were sealed, but at school, amongst themselves, the knowledge spread like an infection, wetly, in pieces, growing where the fragments fell. And then, weeks rolling, after some days, or maybe weeks, or who could tell, most of the children forgot, and the ones who didn’t found themselves pinched and sneered at, or avoided, and they clung to Corinne most of all. Different ages, different classes, in the flood of curiosity or fear, or perhaps believing themselves in some way marked by Little Peg’s eye, they came to Corinne in the corner of the playground where she sat, as she knew they would, and she told them the plan.
Corinne stops in front of the standing stone, and doesn’t move for some time. Behind her, Callum, second youngest and known hell-raiser, studies the back of her head. Some of her wispy hair is blowing from under her hood. He’s tempted to pull it, and even a week ago he would have, but now it’s unthinkable.
He has the creeping idea that breaking the order of their group would be offering himself up to the ritual, and he doesn’t want to be the one chosen. He never even saw Little Peg—he lives on the other side of town and right now, this moment, he is supposed to be at a sleepover at Nile’s, who is stood behind him. He only agreed to come because it sounded like an adventure.
He’d asked his mother about Little Peg, and his mother had said that Little Peg had been Little Peg even when she was a girl, really, and her mother, too, and had always looked so young and ageless. A hormonal thing, she thought. And then Callum had asked what hormones were, and his mother had said that was a question for a different day—which, Callum knew, meant she needed to Google the explanation.
Still, they’ve been standing for a while now, and he is cold.
“Corinne,” he whispers, and the wind snatches her name from his tongue and throws it across the side of the hill in a frenzied dance, whispering it back and back and then carrying it down to the sea. Corinne turns and looks at him—her eyes are shining in the shadow of her face.
“Now we all have to say our names,” she says. She thinks for a second. “We say our names in a circle, and choose a rose.” She gestures to Adam, and he places the roses on a clean-looking patch of wind-scuffed quartz, relieved not to be holding them anymore—his arms were aching, and the ground is treacherous, and he’s nearly fallen more than once.
They chant. They choose.
Elizabeth, second oldest, stares doubtfully at her chosen rose. All the roses are from Peg’s garden, Corinne assured them, though she didn’t say how or when she’d been able to pick them. Roses, by rights, shouldn’t be flowering now, this time of year—but you’d need to be older to know that. These roses are there when you need them. Elizabeth’s has leaves nibbled by insects, and the red-to-white petals are browning around the edges and curling in on themselves, like blood dipped and dried. It gives her a curdling feeling in her stomach, like the time she had fizzy water once and threw up all over the car.
“Can I swap?” she says. Margaret, who has joined the troupe with her twin brother Trey, flinches as though Elizabeth has broken some sort of rule. Corinne says,
“Yes, if you want.”
Elizabeth looks mutely around the circle. Jessimy clings to her rose—a pale pink, flouncy thing, perfect—and her pale eyes are flat in the grey night, like a doll.
Adam says, “I will.” They all know the song, and he thinks these—these rainbow roses in pink and yellow hues, dashed with white—they’re nothing. It is the red rose that matters. He takes Elizabeth’s poor wilted thing, and hands her the yellow rose he’d picked up without thinking too much about it. He has a feeling that it’s not them who decide who will take the red rose. He’s not sure what is doing the deciding or what, even, is being decided. His rose is not wilted when he hands it to Elizabeth, but Elizabeth, on taking it, feels it lacking somehow, and wishes she had kept hers.
“Now we stand in a line,” says Corinne.
“What order?” demands Challin.
“Any,” says Corinne. “But I’ll go last.”
It has all been so steady, all been so easy to follow until now, but the slightest freedom and the playground rule descends. Callum is calling names and stamping, Jessimy’s lips are quivering. Elizabeth rolls her eyes at these babies arguing, but is unwilling, herself, to go first. It is left to Adam, slow, solemn, shy.
“I’ll go,” he says. He glances at Corinne as if for permission. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “And then Elizabeth. Tallest to smallest.”
He approaches the standing stone before anyone can argue, and without ceremony he shoves his rose through the hole, roughly—the rose then his hand, up to the wrist. The rose stalk bends and cracks but doesn’t break, and a few wilted petals float loose. The wind holds its breath and Adam holds his pose for a second, just a second. He waits for the stone to close round his wrist, maybe. For some feeling of something—but there’s only the cold stark night glaring off the stone onto his skin. He drops his rose. He bows. He steps away.
Behind him the other children hurriedly order themselves by height and Elizabeth steps up with her yellow offering. She moves more quickly than Adam, thrusting her hand in and back as though the standing stone will bite her. Her rose drops, lands head first with a soft fuff. She bows. She steps away.
And repeat.
It is the simplest part of the ritual, to a watcher. Far easier than the slog to the alcoves and up the hill. But to the children, it is the hardest. They have pieced this part together themselves through the medium of Corinne’s strange sure knowledge. It has involved thievery and nightmares. More than once, this week, parents have woken foggy in the night to their children’s moans, and comforted their dreams of this thing that the children cannot articulate.
Because the adults cannot help, not with this. Not with the rising. It is the children who must fix it. If they do not do this, winter will hold and the sea will come back. This much they know. The sea will refill those alcoves, and it will climb the hill, and the sheep will wash away, and the peat will grow too soggy to ever burn, and the bones will rise. This is what Corinne learned from the rustle of the wind and Little Peg’s eye. This is what she shared. The rising bones will keep rising.
Nile hopes the ritual will fail. The idea of bones rising is exciting. He isn’t watching Corinne, but the shadows on the white slashes of quartz in the hillside, wondering what great beast they came from, what dinosaurs would clatter from the soil.
Adam is shivering. He’s faintly ashamed of being here. The oldest, the tallest, he should know better, and if they are found it is he who will be in the most trouble. But he was pulled, himself, by a faint feeling of loyalty and protection for Corinne, whose mother is friends with his mother, and who he has often heard whispering of her worries for her daughter.
Corinne drops her rose, but she doesn’t snatch her hand away. She leaves it there, for a second, and feels the bracelet of freezing cold from the stone pinch kiss her skin. She steps back, but not far, and she stares at the hole. She is so little that the hole is level with her face. She doesn’t need to crouch.
On this, the longest night of the year, the eye will stare through. And it will select a rose to keep—a rose which will never wilt, never fade.
It should be her rose that is chosen. She is unsure what that means—she has a confused idea of a life behind the wooden fence. She has an understanding that it means more drawing in the sand and walking up the hill. But there had to be a choice.
She has offered a choice, and now they wait.
Seven of the children have wearied of standing. They are sitting on the ground, legs prickled by heather and chilled by stone. Only Corinne still stands, and wishes she could sit too. Finally, there is a shift in the wind, and the moon cuts past a sheaf of clouds, blinks at her through the hole. The eye blinks at her, she gasps. “I see!”
And she is caught. This eye is wise. It is old. It is pleased.
But they all must look.
Behind her the rest of the children move in a complication of surging towards, and running away, pulling at each other like threads in a knot. Some of the children close their eyes. Callum shoulders Corinne to the side to get his own look at the eye, and he see the yellow rage of a monster caught in the earth. Elizabeth, stumbling over Corinne, sees a pale ghost eye, sad and lost. Adam sees the moon.
Jessimy won’t look.
“You have to,” says Corinne. But Jessimy pushes back at her.
“I won’t!” she cries. “I want to go home!”
“It’s just the moon,” says Adam, comforting. “That’s all. Just take a quick look, otherwise this all will have been for nothing.”
Jesimy, comforted, crouches with her eyes closed and peeks once, and screams and screams and screams.
The wind screams with her and the roses scatter, and they are all red now, every single one, and the one still lying by the stone is glossy in the yellow moonlight as if it has only just been plucked. Jessimy’s screams die to a whimper and she is staring at her hand, which is streaked and cut. Corinne looks at her own hands, but they are clean—clean as if they had never carried a stick and drawn in the sand, or picked roses from Little Peg’s house.
“Jessimy,” she says, and when Jessimy looks at her, she finds she has to look away. Her own role finished now. The certainty of the past several months drops from her like a warm coat suddenly stripped away. Jessimy’s lips are still trembling.
“Do we go home now?” Jessimy asks.
“I think so,” says Corinne, but she sounds uncertain and there is a rustle of unrest from the other children.
“What did you see, Jess?” asks Nile.
But Jessimy only shakes her head.
The wind whips the clouds over the yellow eye of the moon and the darkness is suddenly absolute. The other children cry out, but Jessimy moans, a guttural whimper. She says, ‘my hand hurts,’. She licks at the bleeding and wipes the spit on her waterproof coat, where it rests, so she wipes it on the standing stone, and then the clouds move again and in the shifting light the stone shifts too, and the children grasp hands in the dark and decide as one that that’s enough it is time to go, and they go, stumbling now, not sedately marching, direct down the hill, no checking on their art, no checking on their roses.
Each is holding the hand of another and no one is leading and it is only when they get to the bottom of the hill, when they reach the edge of safety and stop to look at each other they realise there are only seven of them now.
They count again and again, and recite their own names and try to recall the eighth name. Then they forget how to count to eight. Then the oldest looks wearily on the youngest and thinks he must get the babies home, and the babiest of all, Corinne, clings to him and cries about eyes in the moon.
By the time they reach their beds they don’t remember leaving them in the first place, and when they wake, the sea is calm, spring has come.
There are daffodils edging the lawns. Little Peg’s roses are in bud.
