It’s Saint Hook’s Eve, but this year nobody from my village has brought gifts. I am the only one on the beach. The only one watching the light-house where the Sisters once hived, the broken pale rock of it. I told Papa I’d be back in an hour, pretending to myself and him that I’m only looking for limpets. He pretended to believe me.
The Sisters can’t give us what we long for. They don’t grant wishes on Saint Hook’s Eve. They don’t protect us. They are gone. If it was ever true, if we ever had some sort of understanding with them, last year’s storm broke it. Still, it doesn’t feel right to be here on Saint Hook’s Eve without offering a gift.
I cannot do it properly. I brought no honey, no fishhook to pierce my palm. I can’t sing the song-of-the-currents alone; my voice is too thin, and there is nobody to chant the undertow. I place my basket of limpets at the water’s edge anyway. The tide tastes, then drags the basket towards itself.
Then I see it.
Only when I look askance, like a ripple in glass. Shimmering at the edge of my sight. A flaw in the world between the highest and lowest reaches of the tide, the size and shape of a coffin standing on its end. A door.
For an agonising, blissful moment I can’t breathe. I know, I know, why the door is here. What will come through it, back to me. What I most long for. I’m so certain my arms are already lifting in welcome.
But it’s not you.
Before the storm, the village came down to the cove every Saint Hook’s Eve and toss gifts into the waves. We never prayed; it wasn’t like that. We sang. We offered oak gall, beeswax, soap. Figurines of the Sisters carved from wood, inlaid shell for scales and teeth. Until last year, we still gave to the Sisters our milk teeth, as our great-great-grandmothers once did. Our best fish-hooks, our sharpest knives.
In the calm evening, the door frames a storm. A clean-edged seething of water and air. Water snarls; waves explode against the lighthouse rock and batter its windows. The sky is yellow-black. Even where I’m standing the wind lashes my face.
I should be afraid, should be pinching myself to see if I’m dreaming. But I’m hit by disappointment so strong I crumple to my knees in the sand.
The Sisters aren’t giving me what I long for. They’re showing me only what I desperately want to leave behind.
I know this storm. Of course it still rages somewhere: it never truly left. Whenever I close my eyes I see it; I hear ceaselessly in my head the rain and the thunder. And the knocking. Sometimes loud, sometimes almost drowned out.
In the aftermath of the storm last year, I couldn’t understand how the oystercatchers could pipe along the water’s edge again, the sea as calm as milk; how the moon could rise and swell like bread as if nothing had happened. It would have been less jarring if the sea had fallen away, and the sky had cracked like a plate.
A century storm, they called it. Like the one that took the Sisters.
It should have been no mystery, what happened. Everything was wet with seawater; the waves overwhelmed the lighthouse tower, pouring through the windows and collapsing the roof. The staircase led onto empty sky and seawater ran down it. But on every step and in every room the candles were burning. The air smelt of beeswax. Even now, those who row out to the ruins smell mirror polish, fish-blood and smoke.
That part’s true.
You never visited the lighthouse, Elma, although you spoke of it wistfully, and listened to the pilgrims’ talk. You were too young to go alone. And I, five years older, never had time to row you out.
You were always following me, trying to keep up.
My throat is tight. I blink until my eyes clear. Then, through the storm, I see the lighthouse beam. The sight of it jolts me. The lamp has been blind for a century, put out like a sinner’s eye. The door isn’t showing me the storm that’s haunted me for a year. It’s another storm altogether. Older. Unmoored in time. Pierced by dead light.
My mouth is dry but I don’t look away. Papa won’t be waiting for the limpets; I come back empty-handed half the time. He understands. He misses you too, Elma.
The stars shine brightly here: our skies are swept clean by sea-breezes, and we are far away from the lights of bigger towns. Once, Papa told us how the starlight can still reach us even after a star has burnt out. Do you remember that, Elma? It unsettled me, all those dead things shining.
Like the lighthouse beam shines now.
The storm brings it all back. Grief is a bell, my father says. Once chimed always ringing. It is like plunging back into the depths, into those sleepless weeks after you died, Elma. A year ago today.
The lighthouse hosts relics of the Sisters. Relics and gifts. That’s true, too. I’ve seen them. A sliver of a jaw on a makeshift shrine. Old honey, never spoiling. The milk teeth gifted by our great-great grandmothers, kept in glass fishermen’s floats, hanging on braided twines and in hammocks of old fishing nets. Gleaming through the blues and greens like stars reflected in the sea. When the wind blows through, teeth chime against the glass.
And there’s a quill. A torn piece of net. A bloody oyster shell. Splinters from a storm-smashed oar. Remnants of the stories that we tell about the Sisters: the rescue of the fisherman’s child, the knife from the heart of the sea; the bleeding of the navy-men; the untangling of the whale-god Herself.
That’s why some people call them saints. And that’s why some people don’t.
You died, but afterwards you walked through the storm. Sam Keeny swears he saw you on the mudflats just after midnight. And they got the lifeboat out—although they were busy enough with the wrecks—because the lifeboatmen, the watchers, saw a young girl on Jessam Rocks around four in the morning, only they found nobody and no body washed up, and the watchers couldn’t explain it; hadn’t taken their eyes off her. And Papa thought he saw you just before dawn, going to feed the goats. He rapped on the window and called for you to come back inside; the weather was still too dangerous. But there was something changed about your face, he said. He told himself he must be dreaming and went back to sleep and thought nothing more of it until the sun rose and you didn’t appear for breakfast, and he checked your bed and found it empty. Until we opened the door, and found you.
Papa blames himself. But he wasn’t the one who heard you knocking.
After our storm, we moored our boats high in the dunes, perched like dark birds out of the tide’s reach. I drag Papa’s row-boat down through marram grass and sand to the water’s edge. I nose it into the waves. It lurches and bucks. Salt-spray lashes my face, and for a moment, the storm is all around me.
I step back onto dry sand, out of the storm. Heart thumping, mooring rope knotted in my hand. My arms are goose-pimpled with cold. Everything falls still.
Papa said it was impossible, what Sam Keeny and the wreckmen said. He said they were liars. It couldn’t have been you, he said, the timing wasn’t right. We pieced together what happened, and you never had time to stray that far, and why would you have been walking anyway?
I know it’s true, because you’re walking still.
#
You knew the stories. But the Sisters don’t grant wishes. And the dead don’t long for anything, even on Saint Hook’s Eve.
I grip the sides of the rowing boat. I check Papa’s oar is safely in place. It bobs, waiting. My mouth’s dry, my stomach churns. I leave the boat, walk a little way back up the beach, and turn my head this way and that to get the measure of the door.
I don’t know what our side of the bargain with the Sisters was, or whether we upheld it. Whether with the breaking of the lighthouse it was fulfilled, or broken, or whether it ever existed. I’ve heard different things: that the Sisters kept the lighthouse in exchange for the tenancy of the rock, or that our meat and honey, eggs and goat milk, were all they asked of us.
The Sisters saved the drowning and gathered in the dead. And they did other things.
They would have sheltered you, if only you could have reached them.
I don’t know what they’d do to me.
I was scared, Elma; that’s why I didn’t let you in. The spring rain had turned to ice; the lambs were dying in the fields. Papa went out with the other shepherds, to save what they could. When the knocking started, childishly I feared a ghost, a murderer, something terrible out of the salt marsh.
We had no idea you’d slipped out. You’d gone to help with the sheep, and turned back when the weather was too much, and found the door locked. No key in your nightgown pocket.
I huddled under the covers and shut my eyes, to make the storm and fear and knocking go away. I convinced myself there was no voice, only the howling wind. You died on the doorstep—your doorstep—pressed under the meagre shelter of the eaves. Close enough to smell the woodsmoke.
Trapped on the threshold. Like I have been ever since.
This time’s different, Elma.
This time I step over the threshold. Your quiet footsteps pause, then cross the sand after me, following me as they have these past twelve months.
I walk from one world into another in the deep cold of your presence. The hairs on my forearms and neck rise, but I am used to that.
The storm holds its breath. I push the little row-boat out, and I shut my eyes as tight as I can, and I hold the boat steady for you. The cold brushes past me, into the boat. The rowboat shifts a little under your weight; not much, no more than a gull alighting on the stern.
The lighthouse isn’t far. Its beam cuts through the dark century like starlight. It doesn’t matter that it’s already dead. The Sisters will receive you.
I hope I will come back, especially for Papa’s sake, but that isn’t what matters now. I take the oars, and row.
