End of Season on Lesser Klattercup Island

Fiction - by James Van Pelt

It all ended with a yew spear, roughly fashioned, not really a work of art, but I’d shaped it. I held it steady when a steady hand was called for.

Timing is everything, they say. The tour boat from Portmagee Marina shut down for the season yesterday. If Audra and Sean had arrived at the ticket office forty-eight hours later, they’d be alive now. Instead, it took about an hour for me to weigh their stuff that would float, then push the evidence off the shelf into the Atlantic crashing into the rocks below. The seagulls, a bucket and mop cleaned up the rest.

The Irish coastguard officers stood on the dock above their boat that rocked in the ocean swell. Seagulls swooped over the waves behind them, rising high, turning, and diving again, and the air smelled of salt spray and fish. Waves receded off the short, black-stone beach with a hiss. Céasadh Cove was big enough to be named but offered small protection from the ocean.

“They were a young couple, Ms. Allen,” said Officer Walsh. His yellow safety vest couldn’t cover his ample belly.

“You can call me Barbara,” I said.

I kept my clenched hands in my pockets. Policemen of any kind set me on edge. They assume the worst about me. Even these innocuous Irish ones.

“Audra and Sean, from Montreal on a European vacation,” said his partner, Officer Collins, a slight woman who looked vastly more competent in her uniform than he did.

Walsh added, “They’d have visited two days ago with the morning tour group. Captain Aiden remembered them. Matching backpacks, purple they were. He didn’t do a headcount on the return trip, but he can’t say he recalled seeing them either.”

That didn’t surprise me. Captain Aiden looked as old and weathered as his boat.

Collins held up a photo of Audra and Sean, a windswept duo posing at the rail of a deck, overlooking a mountain lake. They smiled in the picture, she facing the camera, he turned towards her.

I said, “The tour comes in the morning, weather permitting—no more than twelve to a group—pose for pictures in front of the ruins, the lighthouse, and the caretaker’s cottage, then load and go. You can see the whole island from here.”

The officers looked beyond me. Lesser Klattercup was shaped something like a bowl with a side busted out. Everything climbed from the dock. A soggy swale in the middle turned into thin grass that ran to the stone ridge containing three quarters of the island. Behind me, to my right, rose a rough stone stairway to the caretaker’s cottage and barn with its windswept flower beds that I cared for, and to my left, a good walk up the slope, rested Skellig Uriel, the remnants of a monastic retreat founded in the 6th century, raided by Vikings several times, and then abandoned in the 14th century, although now they were mostly loose piles of slate and sandstone that if you squinted might have once been a pair of buildings and a wall. Only the raised cemetery, like a huge mattress edged with loose rock, seemed intact. Fallen gravestones lay hidden among grass, and heather just starting to bloom. An impressive yew tree, bent by the wind, rose from the cemetery’s middle. An eight-foot tall chain link fence protected the ruins.

Farthest away, topping the coastward side, the collapsed lighthouse, half as tall as it had been at its glory, stood behind a similar fence.

Lesser Klattercup Island was the size of twenty American football fields, a little under thirty acres. If you could walk along the ridge, a complete circumference wouldn’t take fifteen minutes.

They inspected the barn and caretaker’s cottage. All open storage in the barn. No place to hide. Only three rooms in the cottage, the entrance chamber, four feet wide and six feet long with its outer and inner door, the kitchen/living/sleeping area complete with stone fireplace, barred windows all the way around, and a tiny shower and toilet with a built-in septic tank in a corner. Except for the light fixtures and the solar panels on the roof installed last year by the National Monuments Service, the cottage looked much as it did in 1900 when it was built.

“You’re right about nowhere for them to wander,” observed Collins as we walked back to the dock. “Well, we had to check. Can’t have tourists disappearing.”

They made the transfer to their boat successfully. The swell raised and lowered it three feet. On the days the tourists came, more than one missed their step to the boat, falling hard or even landing in the sea. I’d say, “Don’t reach for it. Better you jump.”

Collins said, “Will you come back next season?”

On the days they came, the tourists stayed less than two hours. The rest of the summer and fall I’d had the island to myself. A body can only stand so much penance. “I’ve had enough.”

She raised a hand in departure as their boat pulled away. I don’t suppose being a woman in the Irish coastguard is easy, any more than being a woman and the sole caretaker on an island not important enough to be in the travel brochures is easy. Still, with a background like mine, I was lucky to have the job. I thought the loneliness would suit me.

I climbed the slope to the monastery and its chain link to the little path that led to a rock platform sticking over the Atlantic a hundred feet below. It’s the only habitable spot of any size not visible from the docks. A beautiful place to camp, I suppose, if you don’t mind late-September wind. The ocean unfolded before me, a wrinkled plain of white-topped waves. It’s where, yesterday morning, being attracted to seagulls coming and going, I’d found the torn up tent, bloody sleeping bags, and slaughtered bodies of the couple I now knew once were Audra and Sean.

Now, from the ill-fated campers’ stone tent site, I could no longer see the coastguard’s boat, my last visitors. Ireland spread across the horizon to the east. A storm five-hundred miles away at sea created a healthy chop, and the tour company decided even the hardiest tourists wouldn’t have the stomach for the ninety-minute ride to the island.

End of the season work awaited me.

I muscled the first shutter from the barn onto a hand trolley, then rolled it over uneven ground to a window in the back of the cottage. It took a half hour to bolt it over the opening, and despite broken clouds rolling overhead and a brisk wind that smelled like angry winter crouched beyond the horizon, I wiped sweat off my forehead. Seven more shutters to go to winterize the cottage.

By mid-afternoon, the clouds cleared and the sun was low enough to shield me. I tried to bury my thoughts in the work, but all thoughts were of those two beautiful people hiding themselves on the island for an overnight adventure. Did they peek above the rocks as the other tourists filed onto the boat? We’re they excited by their tiny crime? Were they in love? That night, did they hear a padding of feet outside their tent? Did they have time to hold one another at the end? 

Visitors aren’t allowed to camp on the island. They’re not told this, but night’s the bad time, the dangerous time. In Galway, when I interviewed for the caretaker job, the former caretaker, an old man with an accent so thick he repeated his warning to me three times, said, “Stay inside ahr de faeries'll take you. Walk in de soehn.”

I learned he’d been the only caretaker since the island started taking tourists in 1968.

“Walk in the sun?” I said.

He nodded. “Dahn't be ooeht at night.”

After a summer working the island, I didn’t hear anyone’s accent anymore. I suspected I picked up a bit of one myself.

Bad luck is just a part of life. A year ago, in Chicago, if I hadn’t been demoted to a low-paying library tech job at the same time Cayenne advertised for a new roommate, we would have never met. “Welcome home,” she’d said as if I’d already agreed to move in when I went to see the apartment. “Your room is to the right.” She wore her hair tied into a ponytail, a Superstars Gym tee shirt and bike shorts. Bodybuilding and softball trophies filled a shelf by the door. I liked the way she smiled and her jaunty confidence. She pulled me into her bedroom the third night I was there.

My first day on the island, the ferry captain helped me unload supplies, then his boat chugged away while unboxed groceries waited in the main room, I sat by the front door and watched the sunset, one of those glorious displays where the sky changes every minute, and at the end the last oranges and pinks fade to purple in the clouds. Barely a breeze that evening. The early stars appeared while the horizon held a blueish dusk before true darkness fell. 

I thought about that fatal night in Cayenne’s apartment, sitting on the iron balcony overlooking the alley after I’d called the police but before they arrived, cigarette in my blood-streaked hand. Empty minded. No shaking. Later, in court, as I awaited the judge’s ruling on the manslaughter charge balanced against our self-defense argument, I trembled. A poster-sized picture of the crime scene still rested on the prosecution’s easel: Cayenne face down on the hook rug we’d chosen together. A kitchen knife she’d been holding nearby. At the image’s edge, a softball bat I didn’t remember swinging. I could barely look. Guilty as charged with special circumstances. Suspended sentence.

A week after the case ended, while I sat at the kitchen table in the apartment near the spot on the hardwood floor the hook rug used to cover where Cayenne died, my hand rested on the laptop keyboard. I’d opened the browser to a job search site, but I’d stopped at the questionnaire that wanted to know what job title I was looking for. That was all the farther I’d gotten the day before, and the way things were going, this was about it for me for this session. 

Finding a job where every questionnaire asked, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony,” proved nearly impossible. Even keeping the apartment became hard. Snagging an island caretaking job thousands of miles away saved me.

High tide on the first evening after sunset’s colors faded, from a stool outside the cottage’s door, I still looked out to sea. The water almost covered the short dock when a dark form pulled itself from the ocean onto the beach. In the calm of the failing day, I wasn’t disturbed. A seal, I thought. Another one joined it and then others flopped onto the gravel and the dock, horizontal shadows splayed across the lighter surfaces. They stayed still as night fell, and then one on the dock impossibly arose in the starlight, standing in the day’s last remnant. A man-seal with long flippers that ended in spiky nails or talons, ominous as spearpoints. Its sleek seal face glared at me, forceful, aggressive and somehow hate-filled, a hatred of water things for land things. I backed into the cottage, shut the heavy outer door and dropped the bar into place. Later I learned names: merrow, finfolk, siren, selkie, morgen. Nothing human in the figure’s aspect. Nothing sympathetic. 

Also, not the only deadly denizens on the island.

Cayenne slapped me the first time a month after we hooked up. She dropped a piece of toast on the floor at breakfast, and I laughed. The flatness in her eyes revealed nothing. I didn’t see it coming. The side of my face exploded into fireworks, then her arms were around me. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

That night, when we were in bed, she told me, “My father laughed when he hit me. The hurt wasn’t so bad. You can think past pain, but I remember the laughing.”

The dead couple haunted me as I installed the second and third shutter. I might have been talking to myself—I often did when the silence grew too long—“They had lives in front of them. They were kids!” Finally, a bolt broke away from the rock and the wrench flew from my hands. I caught the shutter as it tilted from the window, banging my forehead, but it didn’t crash to the ground. My breath came in gasps. 

I opened the cottage’s door to the entranceway. The westering light poured in, Audra and Sean in mind, I jammed a rock against the door to keep it from moving, than attached the block and tackle I’d retrieved from the barn to the iron hoop protruding from the heavy beam above, attached the hook to the recessed handle in the floor, removed the locking blocks that pinned the floor down, then pulled on the hauling rope. The floor creaked, opened slowly from the hinges on the inner door’s wall. An unhealthy exhalation that reeked of long-stagnant seawater and nasty mucous rose from the cave mouth beneath. The light only revealed two feet of black rock and nothing of the depths. 

The hidden thing growled from the darkness, mostly animal, but words mixed in. I hadn’t understood them when I discovered the false floor at the beginning of the summer. Gaelic I supposed, or maybe something older, but I heard the threat within the strange language. I heard the message. Reading the books the old caretaker left told me what it was.

You’re not safe, it said to me. I have fed, and I am strong.

My hand rested on the elevated floor’s edge. In 1900 someone had built the cottage to cover the cave. They must have lived here for a time. Who had trapped the creature? Had the being been picking at the rock in the dark all the years, starving and weak but relentless, a pebble at a time until it broke through somewhere in the cliffs, or had it always had a way out? 

That’s the problem with caves. You never know where they lead.

“You don’t scare me,” I yelled into the darkness. This wasn’t the first time I’d faced a threat. “You don’t scare me. I’ll protect myself. I can hurt you.” Nothing from the cave’s emptiness. Just the wash of foul air. “I know where you sleep,” I said, then lowered the heavy floor into place.

Rust coated a saw in the barn, but it cut through a thick, straight branch on the yew tree with effort. A gravestone made a convenient sawhorse to strip the smaller branches off, and then to trim it to six feet. I put the rough shaft in the house before returning outside.

The sun didn’t really set so much as the clouds on the horizon absorbed it. I stood on the dock, my coat buttoned to my chin, a steady, cutting, salt-spray wind in my face. In two days the ferry would take me back to the mainland where I’d arranged a position for the winter at Gleninagh House, cleaning rooms in the inn and working as tour guide at the castle.

A whale spouted hundreds of yards to sea, while three low-flying gannets with their huge wingspans rode the wind. Seals appeared and disappeared in the waves beyond the cove, close enough to see their black-marble eyes. One popped up only twenty feet away and studied me. I held myself tight. Night was falling and I needed to be inside.

Gas flames guttered on in the fireplace with a switch. Last year’s upgrades, when the original caretaker left, like electric lights and solar panels, included gas for the fireplace and stove. A radio, my only contact with the mainland, sat on the dining table. The original caretaker spent decades with oil lamps and warmed himself burning wood brought over on the ferry. His cast-iron pots and pans still hung from the wall. I imagined him sitting at the table at night, a flickering oil lamp providing the only light for him to read by. Outside, the inconstant wind whistled in the eaves, and always the ocean growled against the rocks, a groaning reminder, like a muttering leviathan.

The caretaker must have spent much of his time thinking about monsters and deities. He’d left his books: a Bible, Bullfinch’s Mythology, Koch and Carey’s The Celtic Heroic Age, Gantz’s Early Irish Myths and Sagas, all modern editions. More interesting were the four leatherbound volumes from Abhean Press, only one in English, by Dáibhí de Barra (translated), Hills, Forests, Lakes and the Sea: Creatures of Old Érie. The rest were in Gaelic, and like Creatures of Old Érie, illustrated with disturbing woodcuts. The only book I’d brought to the island was one my therapist recommended: Surviving Domestic Violence: Stories of Women Who Broke Free. So I read the caretaker’s books and thought a lot about gods too.

I picked the English-edition de Barra as I had many nights before, which the caretaker bookmarked. His cramped handwriting crowded the margins.

A pounding vibrated the floor. I closed my eyes for a moment, then put the book down.

I opened the inner door. The entranceway had no light of its own. My shadow fell across the outer door. Silence except for the sea’s unstoppable voice. I jumped when the pounding erupted again from the wood beneath my feet. Wham! Wham! Wham!

The creature had grown strong. Occasionally, early in the season, I heard scratching under the floor. I’d thought it might have been rats at first, before the island’s nature came clearer to me, as I discovered Lesser Klattercup’s . . . natives. 

I stomped on the floor in reply.

Nothing in return. The wind moaned and the sea lamented.

Three weeks after I arrived I found a freshly butchered baby seal in the marshy grass in the middle of the island, as far from the sea as I could be. Neck snapped, its head hung loosely from the body, held only by a band of muscle and skin. Seals never came farther ashore than the beach or dock. I guessed it weighed thirty to forty pounds when alive. Too big for a bird to carry. My knees cracked when I stood. I’d been studying the pathetic corpse for longer than I’d thought.

Ireland ’s thick with myth and legendary creatures: the headless horseman Dullahan, and kelpies, and banshees, and the Far Darrig, and the Fear Gorta, and pookas. Most Americans think of Irish leprechauns and garden fairies, as if the Emerald Isle was a mythological petting zoo, a place to bring the kids, but those Americans never stayed on the western coast. They’ve never spent a summer on an Irish island where many a time is a “grand soft day,” as foggy gray surrounds you. Everything drips. An umbrella is useless. You live with rains and mists and blustery winds, and nights where clouds rush across the moon like wraiths, and yes, times when the sun shines out and the hills are green and beautiful, and the sea stretches like a blue-green sheet, gently undulating. Then you see flowers blooming on the hills and imagine laying in the heather where the bees hum melodies around you.

Don’t try it, the laying in the heather, I mean. It’s prickly, like much of Ireland. Beautiful, but hard underneath. They build fences here from stone, dry-set and standing between fields because Irish farmers had to pry them from the ground and put them somewhere so they could plant crops.

A bookmarked chapter fell open to Abhartach who was a dwarf, tyrant, and evil magician, or so the story goes. He treated his subjects cruelly, and was a jealous husband. Suspecting his wife was cheating on him, he climbed to her window to spy, but he fell and died. He was buried (without much grieving, I would guess), but appeared later, demanding his subjects provide him with blood. Another story, though, said a neighboring chieftain, maybe the hero Fionn Mac Cumhail, killed Abhartach. Either way, he came back. After this unwanted resurrection, the chieftain killed him again and reburied him, but Abhartach still returned, more bloodthirsty than before. The chieftain met with a druid who said Abhartach was one of the neamh-mairbh, the walking dead, who could only be killed with a yew sword through the heart, and that he should be buried upside down with a large stone over his grave.

I wouldn’t sleep tonight, my second to last night on Lesser Klattercup—I couldn’t. I studied the Dáibhí de Barra book. I reread the multiple stories about Abhartach. That’s who I thought lived below the house, or something akin. Killing him seemed impossible, but every tale involved a sword made from a yew tree, and then trapping the creature in a grave. How many years had the creature been caught beneath the caretaker’s cottage before he found a way out? Still, I imagined him, alive, in the blackness beneath, but able to move and scheme, pecking away at his confines until he broke out, maybe through one of the cliffs. Forced to retreat to his prison at dawn.

But this is what caught me about the Abhartach chapter the first time I’d read it. The caretaker had written in the margin, “the first people surround us,” which echoed a term from the beginning.  I turned back to chapter one where de Barra talked about pre-mythology, the progenitor of all world myths, not only the Irish ones—he said before the Tuatha dé Danann, the first people existed by themselves on an unshaped stage, but they sounded more like giants or gods than people, powerful figures awash in magic, who held the universal fabric as clay in their hands. No other beings existed. For eons they mingled peacefully, but time changed them until differences arose, conflicts between sovereigns so potent their whims manifested reality. These first people fought, every battle ending when the winner cursed the defeated with, “Henceforth you’ll be nothing but a...” and then named a living thing from our world, like a bear or oak tree or sparrow. The defeated became that creature. The victorious god continued their curse; for a snail, they might say, “From now on you will crawl in slime, trapped in a shell,” or for a rose “Thorns shall wrap your beauty for all time, untouchable and as brief as summer.” So the world became populated with defeated gods, every creature and plant around us a mere shade of their mighty beginnings. Even humans. Even me.

Some people argue that Bram Stoker started thinking about vampires because he’d heard the Abhartach story. Dracula may have come from Transylvania in the book, but Stoker grew up in Ireland.

I don’t know what lurked under the house. Abhartach? Vampire? Whatever. Monsters aren’t labeled. I’d seen it or him (later I thought of it as a him) on a moon-washed night creeping down from the ridge by the lighthouse. A short, two-legged shadow, like a brutish child, bent, its hands near the ground. Long ropy hair. It didn’t look my way as it scuttled to a rock overlooking the beach. The seals there sensed it and humped themselves into the ocean, escaping that time. How often had it plucked baby seals off the beach? I wondered if the mer-people hated it.

A little effort with a draw knife turned one end of the yew branch into a wicked point. I swept the bark and shavings from the floor before going to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. A whole season on Klattercup, and I never slept well. Stone walls, barred windows and a pair of heavy doors helped. Not like my Chicago apartment where the thin door had no lock. Late at night, the bed would creak, and Cayenne would be there, even after she began to terrify me, long after I’d admired her back muscles rippling when she toweled off after a shower, long after her low laugh thrilled me, and long before I began flinching when she moved my direction, before I second guessed everything I said.

Even a myth-haunted speck of an island alone off the Irish coast, where mer-people rose from the sea, where a bloodthirsty malignancy lived under the house and roamed free at night to kill baby seals or tear up a pair of illegal campers, felt safer than living in Chicago with Cayenne, but not so safe that I slept easily, not so safe that I didn’t imagine her standing in the darkened room, staring at me while I slept.

I undressed for bed, turned off the lights. The full moon leaked through the cottage windows, painting the room in shadows. I lay with my hands behind my head, studying the ceiling beams.

A week after the court chose not to jail me, I sat in my favorite coffee shop, sipping a strong, black blend. A familiar looking woman my age joined me at my table. I couldn’t place her. 

Her hands retreated into her sweater sleeves, and she didn’t look at me. “I read about your case,” she said.

My breath quickened. Was she Cayenne’s friend, a vengeful relative?

The tiny bell above the coffeeshop door rang as a policewoman came in, wearing a blue hajib that matched her uniform. She ordered chai tea. The shop cooked breakfast rolls this morning. Everything smelled of frosting and cinnamon.

“I pictured you, in that apartment.” The woman started crying. “I thought about you, and then I tried not thinking about you. Everything will be fine. It’s just me. You’ll be fine. It’s not my problem.”

None of that connected. The therapist at the community center had told me about PTSD fog. He called it “negative alterations in cognitions and mood.” I couldn’t always follow conversations. I didn’t know what to do with this crying person’s emotions.

“I shared the apartment with her before you did,” said the woman. “I knew you moved in with her. I saw you here, drinking coffee.”

Maybe that’s where I recognized her from.

She didn’t look at me. Didn’t meet my eyes. “You wore turtlenecks. Once your cheek was bruised.”

I gripped my coffee, afraid to move, afraid to speak. She could have saved me when I couldn’t save myself. How many times did I sit in that apartment, unable to walk away, believing somehow that Cayenne was the victim? No one likes to be laughed at. Cayenne’s a driven woman, seeking perfection. If I was a better person, I’d recognize that and not provoke her. For a long time during the trial, I believed the prosecution. My fault. My fault.

Facing danger, I blamed myself for it. If I would have left like this woman did, would I have had the courage to warn the next, or would I have moved away, stopped thinking about her, hoping the reality of her would vanish? In my mind no one would be cowering, no one would rinse her face gingerly at night, avoiding the tender spots, because I wouldn’t be thinking about what I’d left. We were cowards all, this woman and I. My last act with Cayenne wasn’t bravery. It must have been blind self-defense, an act of fear.

Ireland was as far away as I could flee.

I believe the woman in the coffee shop was relieved I didn’t speak. She hung her head, hair covering her eyes for a minute, then pushed away from the table.

She was a curse. She was a blessing. Like Lesser Klattercup Island and the tiny flowers growing in the cemetery. Like the merfolk and seals and ghosts—I’m sure there were ghosts—and huge-winged gannets diving into the sea, and wind blowing the tops off waves into frothy wisps, and Abhartach the bloody dwarf who was supposed to be trapped beneath my cottage but somehow freed himself, all blessings and curses, independent of me, but I lived there, among them, and they couldn’t be ignored. Tomorrow would be my last day and night. The rest of the shutters needed to be installed. Winter approached Lesser Klattercup. The season came to a close. I could get away.

Sleep truly was impossible. I tossed the quilt aside, wrapped a shawl around my shoulders, then opened the cottage’s front door. The full moon rode high, a wide glow through the mist. Shapes danced across the waves, gargantuan forms at sea, smaller ones on the beach, writhing up the stairs that led to my door from the dock. Faces leered and dissolved. Hands formed with fingers yards long, swinging toward me in a slow motion slap until the fingers became tentacles and then nothing. I almost giggled at the immensity of it, the moon and fog-shrouded world, but I bit it back. Be careful what you laugh at, I said to myself. A damp breeze crossed my face, a slow reminder that the world I stood in was real, as solid as the cold stone step, as rough as the wool gripped in my hands, and that I could yet play a part. 

The morning sun blossomed on a calm, clear sky, casting long shadows. I bolted the last shutter across a window about noon. By then the wind had picked up, chasing clouds from the west. Shadow, sun, shadow, sun. One never gets used to Atlantic air traveling relentlessly, shimmering over grass and heather, plucking at collar and sleeve. During the afternoon I bagged trash and perishables that wouldn’t last the winter. Made sure the batteries were fully charged, then shut down the solar system. I filled a five-gallon water jug, drained the pipes and checked that water hadn’t pooled in low spots. Freezing temperatures were rare on Lesser Klattercup, but not impossible.

I should write a letter to the next caretaker.

The previous caretaker had said, “Dahn't be ooeht at night.” Barely a warning at all, but he was old, touched in the head. I could do better. 

An hour later, with crumpled pages at my feet, I gave up. Nothing I wrote explained what I’d seen. Nothing understandable. I’d made a decision about silence when I dropped Sean and Audra’s remains in the sea. Their shredded tent spun like a broken kite on the way down, splashed and sank. I acted without thinking, but even then I must have known no one would believe me. Only I could have killed them, and in a way, maybe, I did.

At sunset, I attached the block and tackle and cranked the entranceway floor open. I retreated down the stairs toward the dock, taking my yew spear with me. Black clouds loomed on the horizon, so no spectacular sunset displayed for my last evening. Gradually, light faded. I faced the house, a steady, biting wind at my back. For a moment, it rained, coating the cottage and stairs and slope with a glistening sheen.

Outdoors, it is almost never completely black, even on cloudy nights. The silhouette of the lighthouse and the ragged, rocky ridge of the island’s eastern side stood against the sky. Clouds faintly glowed, filled with moonlight behind, a flush of illumination. The caretaker’s cottage seemed larger, the open door like a gash in a face. Waves tumbled relentlessly on the stony beach, slapping the dock, hissing in retreat. Wind whispered across my jacket’s shoulders, tousled my hair, swept the grass and the back of my legs, cold and wet and wintery.

Everything primeval, like the time of the first people, raw nature unbound. Surely the earliest gods were about. Surely I stood upon a universe as sensitive as a raw wound, the world as it existed before McDonalds and Starbucks in Galway, a city with ATMs and cars and cute stores that sold tee-shirts proclaiming, “Kiss me, I’m Irish,” the world the postcards couldn’t capture. Is this what Audra and Sean sought when they boarded the boat in Portmagee, wrapped in raincoats against the sea?

Abhartach appeared at the cottage’s front door, barely visible, a short figure with bulky broad shoulders and arms that reached to his knees. Snaky, knotted hair. In the dark I couldn’t tell if he were clothed or furry. Surely the dankness of his cave had become part of him. His skin must be more mold than flesh. He turned his head left and right, then up. Did he hunt by scent? So many years trapped in the cave, he might have lost his sight, or didn’t trust it. 

I stood downwind, smelling of human blood, too late to run now. No seal could taste as sweet. What had Abhartach been before he was cursed? “From now on, you will be hated by men, afraid of the sun, long-lived and alone.” He must have been a small god.

Suddenly I was sweating. My fingers found the coat’s zipper and pulled it down, like baring my throat, turning my belly up, a defeated animal. 

His eyes turned toward me. I imagined a familiar unreadable flatness in them. If I dropped my coat, I’d be more vulnerable, a fitting sacrifice after Audra and Sean. They’d wonder about my body when the ship came to pick me up in the morning. They might guess a seal had attacked me, a rare occurrence, but seals can weigh over 800 pounds.

I felt drunk with air. A wave of vertigo shifted the ground, and I swayed. Abhartach stepped from the door, advanced to the top of the stairs, only a dozen feet from me. If the people who discovered my body believed in ghosts, they might guess a spirit of a Viking invader killed me, as the Vikings had killed the monks when they raided Lesser Klattercup a thousand years earlier. I laughed out loud, laughed into the wind. Captain Aiden would know. He could not have come to the island for the decades he worked, the only person to talk regularly to the old caretaker, without learning the island’s secret. Aiden would look at my torn remains, the shreds of my coat. He might just say, “Yes, it cooehld 'ave been a seal” 

For all I know, Captain Aiden might arrive on the island alone, prepared to pick me up, see the open trap door, realize what happened, and destroy my remnants just as I removed Sean and Audra’s. I, certainly, would not be missed.

Abhartach crept toward me. I held my ridiculous yew spear at my waist, pointed toward the dark shape. When hecharged, he brushed the point aside, and leapt. I stepped back, missed the stair, and fell, holding onto my spear.  

My head banged hard as I slid, but the creature flew over me, landed several steps lower and snarled something Gaelic and primitive.

He charged toward me. Time slowed, becoming deliberate. I knew what I was doing. I made a decision, moved with purpose. On my back, I swung the spear around, jammed the butt of it against a stair. The shaft shuddered when Abhartach hit it, but he barely slowed, coming closer, reaching for me, smelling of rotted fish. He reached, nearly touched my face, then grabbed at the spear shaft that had pierced his chest. He fell to the side, yanked at it, hard at first, but he weakened.

I sat up. Watched. Abhartach tried to crawl, but the spear protruded a foot out his back and three feet from the front. Wounded like this, he didn’t seem as dangerous. He gurgled and growled, wordless now. The rain began again, lightly at first, and then harder. 

In the books, they buried Abhartach. He didn’t die, returning again and again. Even his tomb on Lesser Klattercup could not contain him. I could drag Abhartach back to the cottage, kick him into the hole, leave in the morning knowing I had faced him. But I didn’t believe that would be an end.

I grabbed the spear, pulled the dwarf around. He held onto the shaft. As he skidded down the slope, though, over the rain-slicked ground, toward the dock, it grabbed at the grass and stairs, kicking, digging his bony fingers into wet dirt. The thing couldn’t stand. He had no purchase.

Then I reached the dock, pulled Abhartach to the end. Waves lapped against the wood posts, splashing over the boards. I nearly slipped going back to shore. I retreated to the middle of the stairs, turned and sat. The rain passed as suddenly as it came, and then behind me, the clouds parted long enough for the moonlight to turn the scene into a creamy blue and white landscape. The sea marched toward me in a million black lines. Abhartach struggled at the end of the dock.

Then I saw them, a dozen black heads peeking from the ocean, diving from sight then appearing again, closer and closer to the dock. A shape rose from the water, stood over Abhartach, one of the mer-people I’d seen before, but huge, way larger than I remembered, like a great bear. It reached down and began to tear at the offering I’d left. One powerful swipe after another until it gathered Abhartach in its arms and dove into the waves.

For a moment, splashing, flippers and dark snouts joined in a frantic thrashing. I thought I glimpsed what was left of Abhartach in the flurry. Then the waves resumed their orderly progression. Nothing remained beyond wind and mists farther out. The clouds closed over the moon like curtains, drawing shade onto the sea.

Sometime later, maybe an hour, I pushed myself up and limped to the cottage. My hip ached where I landed on it. My head throbbed. I thought about tomorrow’s last chores.

When I returned to the mainland, I’d find out Sean and Audra’s addresses in Montreal. I didn’t know what I’d tell their families, if I located them, but something had to be said. I couldn’t just walk away.