Nightfall - Clare O’Brien
Author’s note: “...the lines in italics on page 7 are a quotation from the traditional gaelic poem The Song of Amergin, in the translation by Robert Graves appearing in his book The White Goddess, Faber and Faber Limited, 24 Russell Square London WC1.”
Editor’s note: There is no “page 7” here, due to our formatting, but the italics begin with, “I am a tear the sun lets fall...”
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The water was impossibly warm, flowing over their bodies at blood-heat although the sky above them was clear and the air was cold. It was dark, the night lit only by teeming stars, reflected on the black water.
As she slipped below the surface, the sea refracted their brightness so it seemed that each point of light was the head of a tiny, wriggling silver snake. She threw back her head and laughed as she felt him swim beneath her and twist back into her arms, his skin as warm as the water that coursed over and between them.
“I’ll race you,” she said, and they both struck out along the surface, riding the swell, heading for the island. He was a fine swimmer, elegant and lean. She watched him as he began to gain on her, as he cut through the black ocean, barely making a sound. He would make land first, step out of the water like a god with his black curls hanging wet down his back, the waterweed still clinging to him. She would follow him across the sand and up onto the ridge and they would lie down together in the soft heather.
Suddenly pain exploded in the side of her head as she was thrown backwards in the thrashing water. It was the blow of a horse’s hoof, and there was blood in the sea as she turned to see the huge dark head raised above her, its lips drawn back to show its teeth. She looked helplessly into the azure eyes as it beat her down, pulled her under the surface, as its jaws closed on her.
Eilidh awoke with a cry, a blinding pain in her temple, every sinew screaming. Her heart was racing, her body was an agony of cramp. She pushed back the covers and swung her legs slowly over the side of the bed, her nightdress clinging to the cold sweat that ran down her back. She reached for the bedside lamp, remembering too late that she’d forgotten to put a new bulb in the thing. Instead, she reached for the bottle of Talisker whisky she kept on the table, pouring some into the water tumbler and taking a slow mouthful. It tastes of him, she thought, the taste of seaweed in his hair.
She was dreaming of this more and more these days, of death stalking the loch. Death in the shape of the each uisge, the murderous, shapeshifting water-horse who took the shape of a fine-looking young man and ensnared you. Her mother had told her that tale, long ago. But oh, on the shore the eyes of the each uisge had been so fatally beautiful, his hair as soft and as lustrous as silk when he lay down on the stones and put his head in her lap.
Eilidh looked down at her arthritic hands, the skin as thin as paper, loose and age-spotted over the frame of her bones. Who knows when a man will change and bite, she thought. When he’ll carry you to the deepest part of the loch and swallow you whole. Eilidh drained the last of her whisky and walked to the window, watched the loch heaving its way out to sea under a gentle south-westerly. No horses here, no faithless young men. Just her own windblown land, a croft she could no longer tend, and the loch and the changeless mountains behind. She sighed and drew the blind.
Other dreams troubled her as she slept fitfully until morning. Lately dreams were never very far from the surface. Asleep, she tossed restlessly, adrift on a sea of imagery that faded with consciousness. Awake, she seemed to sleepwalk through the day, looking at the world through a kind of memory filter. Walking on familiar roads, looking at the trees, rocks and hillsides she’d known all her life, the past was more real than the present. Walking with Christie along the beach, barefoot in the warm summer shallows, wearing the bracelet he’d brought back from the Middle East. Wandering in the woods, waiting for him to return from the long tours of duty, singing his songs to bring him nearer. Singing his songs in the silent house at night, picking out his tunes on the piano.
Christie’s songs, deep, rich, magnificent. He had been writing them since he was a little boy, though his dreams of success as a musician had never come to pass. Making his music was like wearing his clothes, picking a shirt out of the laundry basket because it still smelled of him, not washing the sheets after he’d left. Imagining the warmth of his body in the empty place where he’d slept. Never really knowing why the soldier in him had won out over the musician, over the husband, why he’d left her alone for so long, why in the end his voice had been snuffed out in the worthlessness of war.
Forty years was a long time to be alone and childless, she thought as she dragged her body through the morning’s chores, ate a bite of lunch in the thin autumn sunshine. Nothing much ever changed here.
She needed to keep active. Every instinct told her that. If she sat quiet for too long, the voices would start to fill her head. Random voices talking disconnected nonsense, isolated from each other and from her. She was a broken satellite dish, sucking scraps of other people’s lives out of the air. None of it was for her, none of it was any use. She started to walk, as briskly as her stiffened joints would allow, to the mouth of the loch where the water poured out into the open sea and the long horizon spoke of nothing but the Pole. The old defences from World War Two were still standing, the crumbling gun emplacements, the lookout posts scanning the sea wastes for German invaders. She skirted the deep sea cleft where the black water roared into the underground caves and the cormorants roosted on the rock ledges like schoolboys sharing a cigarette.
It was then that she felt the tingling at the back of her neck. The air was thin here, the spaces between its molecules wide enough to let a blade of some other reality slide between. For a moment there was confusion, a crackling inside her head like fire taking hold, and then she turned her head and saw them; a line of men along the ridge, still, waiting, watching for something, their bodies held in readiness for combat. Fighting men.
She froze, as she always did; she had never got used to this. They seemed indistinct, so that she couldn’t tell if they were modern soldiers or something else, some warrior echo from further back in the place’s history. Suddenly, a man near the end of the line seemed to see her, pointed and shouted something that was carried away from Eilidh by the wind. Several of the men seemed to tense, turn toward her, one of them raising what looked like a gun. On an impulse she whipped off the scarf that covered her head, letting her white hair tumble down around her ears, and continued to pick her way over the rough ground. She felt as well as saw the men relax, and one of them started to laugh. Och, it’s just some old woman. And when she turned back to the ridge, there was nothing but the bare gorse and the uneven ground pockmarked by rabbit holes.
As she wandered homewards, she tried to remember Christie’s face and failed. Lately there were so many faces jumbled together in her mind, and like the voices, most of them didn’t seem to belong there. But there was one face she could remember with the crystal clarity of youth, the face of the gille dubh, the strange dark boy who kept women safe on the hill, looked after them until the mists lifted and the morning came. He was just a local legend, something for the tourists; everyone knew that. There was even a café named after him in the village.
But that hadn’t stopped her meeting him on the mountainside just before her twentieth birthday. “What’s your name?” she had asked, but he had never properly answered. “I look after people,” he’d told her. “Lasses like you, who lose themselves up here alone. I make you safe again.” He’d always been there, he said, and what had passed between them - what she thought had passed between them, because the recollection of that night seemed more like one of her dreams than the steady accretion of ordinary memory - had altered the course of her life.
Real or not, the gille dubh had saved her. After that, she hadn’t been afraid to take what she wanted. Fight for a life, believe in her own right to happiness. She’d gone out and got herself an education, seen something of the world before returning to become a schoolteacher here, where she’d been needed, where the land and the loch called her. And when Christie had blown in on the wind, bright and beautiful and only in the village for a weekend house party, she’d given it everything she’d got. Gone home with him that first night, both of them slightly drunk as they’d wandered along the glen road in the dark, giving in to desire before they’d even reached his cousin’s cottage. Both of them careless of the mud and the insects and the rustle of nameless night creatures in the reeds. They’d been married by Christmas. And then the shadow of the war had come to block out the sun.
Eilidh took a deep breath and reached back into her mind, calling the ghost of her young husband, but all she could find in her memory was a green cave with a great fire burning, the scent of peat mingling with the earthy smell of moss and heather. The place the dark boy had brought her when she’d been wandering exhausted on the hill in the mists, the darkness descending. Suddenly she was there, her body lithe and young again, the remains of a trout supper on the rough wooden table. And in her ears was a high, insistent note that gently resolved into music, into words, the soft Gaelic of her childhood overlaid by the English she’d spoken for years. The voice of the gille dubh, of the dark boy in his home in the hill. I am a tear the sun lets fall, I am a hawk above the cliff, I am a thorn beneath the nail, I am a wonder among flowers. In her mind she moved around the cave, looking for him, remembering his touch, the boy who kept you safe, who was always there if you were lost, if you were lonely. I am a salmon in a pool, I am a lure from paradise, I am a hill where poets walk. The note grew higher, a string drawn tighter and tighter. I am a spear that roars for blood, I am a boar, ruthless and red. Eilidh started to cry. Why wasn’t he here? He had told her he was always here. That she could always find him if she looked, if she waited. She grew desperate. I am a breaker threatening doom, I am a tide that drags to death. Why were her legs so cold?
She opened her eyes and saw that she was standing up to her knees in the burn, fast-flowing down the side of the creag on its way to the loch. The cave had gone, the music was silenced, and there was only the sun dipping quietly behind the hill as the midges gathered in the shadows. You senile old bitch, Eilidh cursed herself as she stumbled up onto the bank. She still had more than a mile to go to her fireside, and she’d be feeling these bruises in the morning for sure.
She began to shiver as she stumbled down the road in the gathering twilight. The nights are drawing in, she thought. She picked up her pace, feeling unaccountably afraid. Hoofbeats, galloping on the road behind, a wild cry. No, no. Eilidh pressed her hands to her ears, did not dare turn around. The sounds in her head faded. She needed a brew, some hot tea, a piece of toast.
She pushed open her front door and for a moment she thought she saw a swift feathered shadow pass across the window, flitting like a black wisp of cloud over the deepening blue of the sky. She shook her head and put the kettle on, warmed her mother’s blue-and-white china teapot and spooned the tea into its comfortably stained interior. Her hands were clumsy and she nearly dropped the tray. The fire she’d lit that afternoon was almost out, a few embers blooming half-heartedly through the grey wood-ash. Damn, there were no more logs in the basket. She’d have to drag out a heater. The central heating system hadn’t worked for years.
God, she was cold. Her hands were cold. Like his hands, the last time she saw him, felt him. His hands cold as silver. Whose hands? Whose? Ice gripped at the base of Eilidh’s brain as she tried to catch the memory. Whose hands were they? What’s your name?
Christie had held her close at the airport gate, that last leavetaking. Warm, he was, warm and comforting, though a bitter resolve dazzled her in his bright, determined eyes. No, no. It was the boy, the gille dubh. His hands had been ice cold from the water where he’d bathed. He had held her naked in his two hands and kissed her. One final kiss, and then he’d been gone. And she’d walked back down the mountain in the morning sunshine, away from old stories, away into her life.
She sat in the window and sipped her tea as the moon came up blood-red over the mountain. Fire on the water. She should go outside, bathe in the cold flame. She looked at the photograph of Christie, handsome and self-possessed, wearing his uniform, his hair and moustache closely trimmed, his summer-blue eyes bright and confident. What had she done wrong? Why had he stopped singing, stopped writing songs? Had she asked too many questions, tried to come too close? What took him? What silenced him, what blocked out the sun, like a flitting feathered shadow?
The television reproached her with its blank grey face; she’d never bothered to get that repaired. She preferred the pictures in her head. She shivered again, reached over to turn on the radio. White noise. She twitched the tuner, looking for warmth. Something which spoke of heat, of dry relentless sun, somewhere far from here and the gathering winter cold and damp. Something which spoke of earth baked by the sun to a harsh desert crust. But there was nothing.
Eilidh’s tea had grown cold. It was dark. With a slow sigh, she turned off the radio and climbed the stairs to her bed.
Dappled light scattered itself across the forest floor as she ran, following the dark grey shape still just in sight. Branches caught at her clothes, roughness bit into her bare feet and her breathing was uneven, the cold air rasping at her throat as she forced her muscles to work harder. Her heart hammered at her chest under the thin nightgown. Why was she wearing her nightgown? Her long red hair streamed out behind her like a flag in the wind. With her hands tightened into fists she made herself run faster, make more effort, gain on the great beast that loped on ahead, his long stride easy and effortless, his breath leaving plumes of vapour on the frosty air. She was gaining on him now, getting closer; she could almost touch the rough grey back, hear the rhythmic panting as he moved. The trees were a blur, the scattered moonlight nothing but a smudged milky glow as she reached forward, made one last effort, throwing herself down hard on the path. Her hands closed on the animal’s rough pelt and she held on tight, letting herself be dragged along a few paces, then colliding with a stump and crying out in pain as he twisted, growling, out of her hands and was gone. Face down in the fungus and the leaf mould, the rotten stumps of last year’s fallen trees, her body feebly convulsed as great racking sobs tore through her bruised chest, her right hand closed tight over a single handful of coarse grey wolf’s fur.
Her eyes opened. The sheets were tangled, the covers half on the floor. Her nightgown was soaked in sweat. This can’t go on, she thought as she fought for breath against the gale of weeping. These dreams. These visions. Overheated and bedraggled as she was, she climbed from her bed and went downstairs to the front porch, stuck her bare feet into Wellington boots.
Opening the door, she walked out into the night’s chill, past the pine wood, down the track and through the meadow to the loch beyond. She walked to the water’s edge and the still surface was like glass, a dark mirror reflecting a world of thirst, of dreadful thirst amidst plenty.
The moon watched silently from its gallery, as if waiting for a performance to begin. An imperceptible wind seemed barely to ruffle the surface of the blackness, but as she stumbled forward into the shallows the strange foreign voices began again, chattering, murmuring, overlaying each other, jostling for airspace, names, histories, scraps of untold story. Eilidh’s mind felt as though its walls were collapsing. The water was reflecting the moonlight like a prism, sending shards of brightness in all directions, like a meteor shower that knew no gravity. So many directions, so many names he had. Or could have had. For a brief moment the water seemed full of them, stories darting through the shallows like tiny fish, little sparks setting off great white-hot conflagrations that made the very loch blaze, fired up with possibility. Eilidh waded deeper, and the ripples rose over the tops of her boots and made the hem of her nightgown trail behind her as it soaked up the salt water. Burn me. Burn me away.
The bright fire faded. Suddenly she felt so tired, so heavy. Christie was long gone. The gille dubh was gone too from his green cave; she was old, he could not help her now. The voices babbled out of the past, or the future, or the unchosen. She wanted to sink into the water, let herself dissolve back into the sea of what was as yet undecided.
The voices tailed off and the water’s gentle lapping lapsed into noiselessness. The moment hung in the air, unhinged.
For pity’s sake come for me, she screamed at last, waist deep in the icy water, her voice cracking, her old eyes scanning the black water to the pale horizon. Whoever, whatever you are, for god’s sake, come back for me now.
For a long moment there was nothing but the gentle wisps of the night breeze across her face. I’m waiting. I’ve been waiting so long. Why don’t you come? Her heart began to wither into despair.
Then she felt the night stir like a beast waking from a long slumber. And at its heart was an invisible thing, an impossible thing; a monstrous creature made of dark matter, awakening, glistening with black light. Eilidh felt its face turning towards her, slowly, implacably, as though the mechanism that drove it was rusty, as though it hadn’t turned for a million years. Inside her mind she saw its eyes focus and glitter like shards of broken jet. Its huge hands tightened into fists, the dull silver of its rings glinting in the answering moonlight cascading down through the loch.
No-one had called him for so long, no-one had wanted him like this for millennia. Only a little of him ever came to shore, only a taste of what lay hidden ever inflamed the senses of the world to overcome its fear. His mind struggled into focus as his eyes opened, and the force of his black gaze shook the water. As he roused himself and moved towards the shore, Eilidh felt the sea swell in response. He was coming.
And she wasn’t afraid. Crouching on the shore, her nightgown soaked, her hair bedraggled, her boots lost in the sand and stones, she waited.
His beasts came first. Up through the loch’s surface came a bird, vast and feathered, its huge wings scything the air as it climbed and wheeled on the gathering wind. And out of the first breaking wave came a huge grey wolf, shaking its pelt free of the salt water, its yellow eyes bright as it loped to her side and sat quiet. And the loch boiled as the sea-snake lashed and writhed, its great tail slashing the swell. Eilidh waited, shivering, as wave after wave surged and broke on the stones.
And then he walked out of the sea naked, impossible, like a story in an unknown language. Immense he seemed, carved out of the rocks of the mountain, his limbs strong as the branches of trees, his hair wet and curling like black waterweed under the dull silver crown, his skin dark as the sea-depths and yet shining, throwing light towards the shore. A cry escaped Eilidh’s throat as she saw Christie in the lineaments of his face. And there was more; a face she had once seen shivering in silver on the surface of a pool, caught in the jagged geometry of the rock face just before the man had become a horse, and the each uisge had turned vision to nightmare. The gille dubh smiled through his crystalline eyes. There was music in his blood and the grace of the warrior in his bearing. They were all here.
Yet as the god of this place drew close to Eilidh she saw that he was only a man, just a little taller than she. And she smiled as she took his outstretched hand, cold and heavy, so heavy it seemed. Your hands, heavy with silver. And she did not protest as he lay down beside her, drowning her in the chill of his body, the scent of the sea; engulfing her until all the empty spaces were filled with him for ever.
Heavy, so heavy he seemed, his hands on her body so heavy, the weight of him crushing the air from her lungs as he sang softly in his wordless tongue, stroking her, soothing her like a baby as he fed her, quietened her, completed her.
There was only a brief moment of panic before she knew she didn’t need the air any more; the water slaked her terrible thirst at last, and the night took her and held her safe.
Originally published by Scottish literary journal Northwords Now, September 2015
Clare O’Brien lives in Wester Ross, where she is Poet In Residence at The National Trust For Scotland’s Inverewe Garden. Her speculative novelette ‘AIRLOC’ was published in 2024 with New York’s ELJ Editions; her ekphrastic poetry pamphlet ‘Who Am I Supposed To Be Driving?” responding to the music of David Bowie, came out in 2022 with Hedgehog Poetry Press in the UK. A second poetry pamphlet is due for publication with the UK’s Intergraphia Books later this year, and her fiction and poetry has appeared in various British and American journals and anthologies.
