Light in the Blackhouse
by Matthew Richardson
Genre: Horror/Supernatural
Swearwords: None.
Description: A ghost story set on the Isle of Lewis in 1849.
Swearwords: None.
Description: A ghost story set on the Isle of Lewis in 1849.
1849
The frothing white horses had ridden two and a half thousand miles of Atlantic swell before driving home their charge against the rocky west coast of Lewis. Wind, rain, and sea had scoured the Scottish island of all but the most essential ingredients for life. Trees were conspicuous by their absence; frivolities that the land could do without. The soil was thin and leached, and any plant brave enough to raise its head more than a few inches from the ground was twisted into submission by the stiff breeze. Not for the islanders the smog and bustle of London. Not for them the public highways, gas-lit for over half a century. Nor the electric telegraph, the wonders of which had not reached the far flung isles.
Effie did not share the waves’ eagerness to reach journey's end, not with what awaited her at home. Not even with the west wind beginning to snatch at her skirts. She scrambled her way barefoot across the small beach south of the voe, humming as she went. Making her way east around the rock pools, she picked up the occasional limpet that the other children had missed as a waterlogged evening sun sank in the west. It was usually fun threading her small, slender arms through gaps in the beach rocks to twist the shells off. Fail first time and the limpet would cling to the rock with fervour. She was dextrous though and rarely failed to win her prize, something that had become increasingly important of late.
Today though, Effie was tired. She had spent most of the day cutting peat in the bogs south of Barvas. A task usually undertaken by fathers and brothers, this year Effie had tried to do it alone. Plagued by horseflies and midges, she had used her father’s caschrom to cut the thick sludge into bricks before stacking them to dry. Peat-cutting was usually a happy time spent in the bogs with the whole community. Not this year. Painfully slow and lacking in strength, she had been left to toil by herself as if loneliness was contagious.
Effie hauled her creel around her shoulders as she trudged back along the beach towards home. The wind was beginning to pick up and the tops of the waves heading into the voe were tinged with white. She thrashed a piece of seaweed against her black dress as she walked, picturing the scene she was returning to.
Her father, Dohmnall, would be sitting at the fire in their blackhouse, prodding the smouldering peat that reflected in his dark, shadow-rimmed eyes. Blue smoke would be curling its way around the blackened timbers of the house and slowly seeping into the thatch above. The cow and sheep would be huddled at one end of the building as though seeking shelter from the man’s sadness.
It didn’t used to be like this. Her father used to launch his boat from the pebble beach with the other men from the village and return with cod and ling for the table; always smiling, always with a kind word and a pat on the head for his daughter. Dohmnall’s ability to tell a story meant that his fireside was rarely empty of a night and Effie had spent many happy evenings listening to her father weave tales in the peat smoke whilst the men nodded sagely and the women spun yarn. He used to carry her on his shoulders across the very beach on which she was now walking, him pretending to stumble and fall under her tiny frame and her feigning to scream in fear, both of them breathless with laughter.
Then came the winter when mother had died shivering and vomiting from the fever, taking with her what happiness they had managed to eke out for themselves. Father had sunk into himself since then. He sat at the fire deep into the night with the leaking roof dripping syrupy black liquid around him, perhaps in place of the tears that his fellow crofters had expected. Grunts and mumbles replaced conversation. Worst of all were the looks of unguarded hope in his eyes when Effie returned from feeding the chickens or collecting water. The sea breeze blew into the stale house and Dohmnall looked around sharply only for the light in his eyes to dim as he realised that it was not his wife come home to him.
The family would have been hard pressed even with Father working. The potato blight had made its way over from Ireland, ruining the crop and starving hundreds. To compound matters the croft rent had been raised once again. Evictions had been in progress with crofters sent like beasts in damp and disease-ridden ships across to Canada.
A half-remembered song of her mother’s came to the girl as she walked.
A wand from the wood, taken at will,
A fish from the stream, a deer from the hill.
The problem being that there was no-one left to hunt or fish. Effie simply could not plug the hole left by her father. They would have to bleed the cow for food again this winter, and even that might not be enough.
Effie climbed a ridge and was met with a view of her father’s blackhouse across the bay. The building stood lonely underneath the hills and the darkling sky. Although two-hundred yards away as the cormorant flew, the walk usually took her another half-hour as she skirted the beaches at the end of the voe.
A menacing bank of dark grey cloud was building above the skyline, as though awaiting its chance to rush down and envelop the house. Shadows towered beneath the hills, born of the last feeble rays of sunlight and stretching out like greedy fingers. The wind was gusting now, and salt spray landed on the girl’s face as she looked down upon her cottage from the ridge. She shivered. Her father’s tales of ghosts on the moors returned to her. Stories of creatures creeping down to hamlets and villages and spiriting children away from their parents. This evening’s keening winds and heavy skies provided a suitable setting for such legends.
Sidestepping down to the shore, Effie adjusted the creel on her shoulders. The Lord knew she had tried to remain cheery in the face of a loss that she felt just as keenly as her father. She had invited friends and family around and begged him to take her to the village ceilidhs. She had gamely tried to take on her father’s share of the work but the efforts of a hungry, skinny young girl were not nearly enough. He had to be made to see that she could not cope by herself, that they could not survive. That a father still had a duty to his daughter. He had to be made to see.
When Effie returned home after the sun had set she always looked for her father standing at the window of the house holding a crusie lamp. Despite his misery Dohmnall still roused himself for this tradition. The flickering light told her that home and hearth were in sight once more.
A glow issued from one window. Her father. She could just make out his crouched shadow in the gloom across the water, staring forlornly out. He looked diminished; smaller and frail. Again her mother’s island brogue rose unbidden into Effie’s mind.
Water to water, for good or ill; if the sea doesn’t get you, the river will.
Effie took a deep breath. Her fingers found the peat bricks that she had sown into her dress. Beach rocks in the creel weighed down her thin shoulders. Her father had to be made to see. She placed one bare foot into the sea and gasped. The cold coiled up around her leg like a snake, making her bones ache. Looking down, she saw the black water swallow her foot so that it was lost just below the surface. She hitched up her skirts before realising how ridiculous such a gesture was. Sharp pebbles gave way to pliant mud as she waded further in.
The first wave of rain brushed against the surface of the loch. Looking up at the window, Effie saw that her father had not yet moved. Daylight was fading quickly now and the wind was driving waves that snatched at the peat bricks in her dress. Perhaps he could not see her properly in the gloaming. Staring at his featureless face in the night, Effie willed him to notice her.
She took another few steps in and the sea rose to her waist. Rain fell freely about her now. Her breath seemed to freeze in her chest and the peat began to drink in water, pulling her down. She glanced up again at the window. Still there was no movement. The figure stood behind the lamp, motionless. A choked cry issued from Effie. Why wasn’t he coming out to her? Surely he still had love enough that he would not wish her drowned little more than a hundred yards in front of him?
Something wasn’t right.
The wind, which had been gusting and driving the waves now lapping at her chest, suddenly dropped. An icy chill that had nothing to do with the sea stole across the landscape, and the stone-grey sky frowned darkly. Effie felt as though she had a foot in two worlds.
A figure appeared behind her father in the window. The shadowy outline of a woman was approaching the man, indistinct and sinister. Effie blinked. The shape remained, clearer now as it moved inexorably towards its victim. Dohmnall seemed none the wiser. He appeared fixated on the loch, yet made no effort to intervene in his daughter’s apparent madness.
Effie tried to shout but felt as though her lungs were cast in lead. A whine issued from her lips, floating lightly into the night air but never reaching close to the blackhouse. Surely her father had to sense another being behind him. The woman’s breathing in the quiet night air? The flickering of the wick due to another presence? The stories her father used to tell returned to her with renewed urgency. Of selkies, the souls of dead mariners come back to haunt the living. Of faceless creatures that came in the night and killed everyone in a house stone dead. Of ghost ships rowed by the damned, looking for crew members amongst the living.
She was afraid of the face belonging to the shadow-woman. Afraid that it might be a twisted and ruined form of her mother stalking the house in which she had spent her last, laboured, rasping breath. Had she, not content with taking Dohmnall’s lust for life, awakened once more to steal away her husband and leave Effie utterly alone?
The figure stalked relentlessly closer to her father, silent and certain, black against grey in the gloom. Could he not hear the soft fall of the feet behind him? Surely one of the animals must cry out at a strange presence in the room; at an other-worldly being amidst them?
So fixated on the blackhouse was she that her own predicament had ceased to be of importance to her. The fjords and lochs of Lewis, however, are no place for the living at night and no more so when the dead are abroad. A panicked step forwards was all it took for Effie to lose her footing. Water poured into the top of her creel, pulling her backwards and down. The peat bricks, thirsty for saltwater, strained to join the mud at the bottom of the loch.
Effie slapped at the surface of the water desperately, an eddy on the surface of the great Atlantic, but she was too cold and her dress too heavy. Her nostrils filled with water and her eyes stung with salt as she strained towards the sky for precious air. The last thing that Effie saw before she was pulled under was a figure slowly, far too slowly, making for the door of the blackhouse.
* * *
“Christ! You made me jump, Moira!” cursed Allan, swivelling around to see his wife holding their infant child in one hand and an empty plastic milk bottle in the other. The door stood open behind him, framing the yawning vacuum of the loch below.
“Shh!” whispered Moira, her hair pinned back inelegantly and her eyes red. “You’ll wake the baby! I thought you came through for candles?”
“I did”, murmured Allan, gesturing to one guttering in his hand. Its flame provided the only light in the room, glinting off the glasses askew on his face. In the glow he could see the head of his sleeping son nestled into his wife’s neck.
“And you thought you’d find some out there?” Moira’s voice was tight with forbearance.
There was silence for a moment. Allan tousled his hair before pulling the chord of his dressing gown, tightening the knot around his waist.
“I thought I saw something, that’s all”.
“What was it?” asked Moira, sighing and stepping towards the door.
“Nothing”, replied Allan sharply. He moved as if to block her before catching himself. “It was nothing. Probably just a fox. Come on, let’s get the baby back to bed.”
“A fox! But Allan the chickens…”
“Safe in their coop”, he placated, gently taking his wife by her shoulders and steering her back towards the bedroom. “Now you get back to bed where it’s warm. I’ll get the candles. Odds are the power will be back on by morning anyway.”
Moira turned to go, but then faced her husband once more. Her voice was smaller when she spoke.
“You told me how isolated this would be when we chose this life, but it didn’t really prepare me, not really. Not for the cold, or for the loneliness, or for such a complete and utter lack of people. I never thought that I would actually miss speaking with your sister!” Moira laughed weakly.
“Hmm?” replied Allan, looking as if he was surfacing from a dream. “The loneliness? It’s just you coming to terms with getting rid of all the clutter that we used to have in our life, that’s all. It’ll pass. Go on, I’ll lock up in here.”
Allan’s fingers drummed against his housecoat as he gave his wife a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. He craned his head to watch as she strode away in her dressing gown up the hallway, the baby still asleep despite its head bobbing to her gait. Turning away, he took one last look at the marble-smooth loch before closing the wooden door. Searching the surface, he saw nothing but reflected sky.
She had been there again. He was sure of it. In his mind’s eye he could still see her lank dark hair curtaining pleading eyes; face pale from the cold.
His grandfather had met his death in that very same piece of water, drowned while out fishing. The weather that day had been calm and his boat had been found floating out to sea, his lines still in the hull and only the quiet, rhythmic creak of the boat disturbing the evening. The croft had then passed to Allan’s father who had inherited the blackhouse with reluctance. The place had seemed to weigh heavily on him, wasting his flesh and drawing out his sorrow. After his stroke all the old man had wanted to do was sit at his window, staring out at the sea. He never communicated again other than to point out at the voe, eyes wide with a message his lips could not frame.
The croft was why Allan was here. He wanted to support his small family off the land as his forefathers had done before him and to spend the long winter evenings writing his poetry. For a moment though, seeing the girl chest-deep in the still, cold water, there was nothing more important to him than going out to her. Through the gloom Allan thought that the girl’s eyes had carried the same look of mute pleading as he had seen in his father’s.
The first time he had seen her, only weeks after his father had died, Allan had tried to explain what he had witnessed to his wife but Moira had laughed at him, telling him that it was the whisky talking. There was something about the girl though that tugged at his memory. Something in her high brow and dark hair. It was as though each wave that lapped gently at the beach issued from her; a fading call from beyond, desperate and insistent. He felt compelled by guilt each time she appeared; incapable of ignoring a bond the girl so obviously felt. What he could never tell Moira was that he would without doubt go out to her in the darkness. One day his wife would not be there to stop him approaching that figure in the black dress.
Perhaps he could persuade Moira to go and stay with her parents awhile, until he understood things better. He would have the time to devote himself to the girl. He could go out to her, hold her, protect her.
Dark and true and tender is the north, wrote Tennyson, but such darkness has a price, one which Allan knew that he would pay. Out on the lake, the wind dropped for a moment.
The baby stirred in his cot.
The frothing white horses had ridden two and a half thousand miles of Atlantic swell before driving home their charge against the rocky west coast of Lewis. Wind, rain, and sea had scoured the Scottish island of all but the most essential ingredients for life. Trees were conspicuous by their absence; frivolities that the land could do without. The soil was thin and leached, and any plant brave enough to raise its head more than a few inches from the ground was twisted into submission by the stiff breeze. Not for the islanders the smog and bustle of London. Not for them the public highways, gas-lit for over half a century. Nor the electric telegraph, the wonders of which had not reached the far flung isles.
Effie did not share the waves’ eagerness to reach journey's end, not with what awaited her at home. Not even with the west wind beginning to snatch at her skirts. She scrambled her way barefoot across the small beach south of the voe, humming as she went. Making her way east around the rock pools, she picked up the occasional limpet that the other children had missed as a waterlogged evening sun sank in the west. It was usually fun threading her small, slender arms through gaps in the beach rocks to twist the shells off. Fail first time and the limpet would cling to the rock with fervour. She was dextrous though and rarely failed to win her prize, something that had become increasingly important of late.
Today though, Effie was tired. She had spent most of the day cutting peat in the bogs south of Barvas. A task usually undertaken by fathers and brothers, this year Effie had tried to do it alone. Plagued by horseflies and midges, she had used her father’s caschrom to cut the thick sludge into bricks before stacking them to dry. Peat-cutting was usually a happy time spent in the bogs with the whole community. Not this year. Painfully slow and lacking in strength, she had been left to toil by herself as if loneliness was contagious.
Effie hauled her creel around her shoulders as she trudged back along the beach towards home. The wind was beginning to pick up and the tops of the waves heading into the voe were tinged with white. She thrashed a piece of seaweed against her black dress as she walked, picturing the scene she was returning to.
Her father, Dohmnall, would be sitting at the fire in their blackhouse, prodding the smouldering peat that reflected in his dark, shadow-rimmed eyes. Blue smoke would be curling its way around the blackened timbers of the house and slowly seeping into the thatch above. The cow and sheep would be huddled at one end of the building as though seeking shelter from the man’s sadness.
It didn’t used to be like this. Her father used to launch his boat from the pebble beach with the other men from the village and return with cod and ling for the table; always smiling, always with a kind word and a pat on the head for his daughter. Dohmnall’s ability to tell a story meant that his fireside was rarely empty of a night and Effie had spent many happy evenings listening to her father weave tales in the peat smoke whilst the men nodded sagely and the women spun yarn. He used to carry her on his shoulders across the very beach on which she was now walking, him pretending to stumble and fall under her tiny frame and her feigning to scream in fear, both of them breathless with laughter.
Then came the winter when mother had died shivering and vomiting from the fever, taking with her what happiness they had managed to eke out for themselves. Father had sunk into himself since then. He sat at the fire deep into the night with the leaking roof dripping syrupy black liquid around him, perhaps in place of the tears that his fellow crofters had expected. Grunts and mumbles replaced conversation. Worst of all were the looks of unguarded hope in his eyes when Effie returned from feeding the chickens or collecting water. The sea breeze blew into the stale house and Dohmnall looked around sharply only for the light in his eyes to dim as he realised that it was not his wife come home to him.
The family would have been hard pressed even with Father working. The potato blight had made its way over from Ireland, ruining the crop and starving hundreds. To compound matters the croft rent had been raised once again. Evictions had been in progress with crofters sent like beasts in damp and disease-ridden ships across to Canada.
A half-remembered song of her mother’s came to the girl as she walked.
A wand from the wood, taken at will,
A fish from the stream, a deer from the hill.
The problem being that there was no-one left to hunt or fish. Effie simply could not plug the hole left by her father. They would have to bleed the cow for food again this winter, and even that might not be enough.
Effie climbed a ridge and was met with a view of her father’s blackhouse across the bay. The building stood lonely underneath the hills and the darkling sky. Although two-hundred yards away as the cormorant flew, the walk usually took her another half-hour as she skirted the beaches at the end of the voe.
A menacing bank of dark grey cloud was building above the skyline, as though awaiting its chance to rush down and envelop the house. Shadows towered beneath the hills, born of the last feeble rays of sunlight and stretching out like greedy fingers. The wind was gusting now, and salt spray landed on the girl’s face as she looked down upon her cottage from the ridge. She shivered. Her father’s tales of ghosts on the moors returned to her. Stories of creatures creeping down to hamlets and villages and spiriting children away from their parents. This evening’s keening winds and heavy skies provided a suitable setting for such legends.
Sidestepping down to the shore, Effie adjusted the creel on her shoulders. The Lord knew she had tried to remain cheery in the face of a loss that she felt just as keenly as her father. She had invited friends and family around and begged him to take her to the village ceilidhs. She had gamely tried to take on her father’s share of the work but the efforts of a hungry, skinny young girl were not nearly enough. He had to be made to see that she could not cope by herself, that they could not survive. That a father still had a duty to his daughter. He had to be made to see.
When Effie returned home after the sun had set she always looked for her father standing at the window of the house holding a crusie lamp. Despite his misery Dohmnall still roused himself for this tradition. The flickering light told her that home and hearth were in sight once more.
A glow issued from one window. Her father. She could just make out his crouched shadow in the gloom across the water, staring forlornly out. He looked diminished; smaller and frail. Again her mother’s island brogue rose unbidden into Effie’s mind.
Water to water, for good or ill; if the sea doesn’t get you, the river will.
Effie took a deep breath. Her fingers found the peat bricks that she had sown into her dress. Beach rocks in the creel weighed down her thin shoulders. Her father had to be made to see. She placed one bare foot into the sea and gasped. The cold coiled up around her leg like a snake, making her bones ache. Looking down, she saw the black water swallow her foot so that it was lost just below the surface. She hitched up her skirts before realising how ridiculous such a gesture was. Sharp pebbles gave way to pliant mud as she waded further in.
The first wave of rain brushed against the surface of the loch. Looking up at the window, Effie saw that her father had not yet moved. Daylight was fading quickly now and the wind was driving waves that snatched at the peat bricks in her dress. Perhaps he could not see her properly in the gloaming. Staring at his featureless face in the night, Effie willed him to notice her.
She took another few steps in and the sea rose to her waist. Rain fell freely about her now. Her breath seemed to freeze in her chest and the peat began to drink in water, pulling her down. She glanced up again at the window. Still there was no movement. The figure stood behind the lamp, motionless. A choked cry issued from Effie. Why wasn’t he coming out to her? Surely he still had love enough that he would not wish her drowned little more than a hundred yards in front of him?
Something wasn’t right.
The wind, which had been gusting and driving the waves now lapping at her chest, suddenly dropped. An icy chill that had nothing to do with the sea stole across the landscape, and the stone-grey sky frowned darkly. Effie felt as though she had a foot in two worlds.
A figure appeared behind her father in the window. The shadowy outline of a woman was approaching the man, indistinct and sinister. Effie blinked. The shape remained, clearer now as it moved inexorably towards its victim. Dohmnall seemed none the wiser. He appeared fixated on the loch, yet made no effort to intervene in his daughter’s apparent madness.
Effie tried to shout but felt as though her lungs were cast in lead. A whine issued from her lips, floating lightly into the night air but never reaching close to the blackhouse. Surely her father had to sense another being behind him. The woman’s breathing in the quiet night air? The flickering of the wick due to another presence? The stories her father used to tell returned to her with renewed urgency. Of selkies, the souls of dead mariners come back to haunt the living. Of faceless creatures that came in the night and killed everyone in a house stone dead. Of ghost ships rowed by the damned, looking for crew members amongst the living.
She was afraid of the face belonging to the shadow-woman. Afraid that it might be a twisted and ruined form of her mother stalking the house in which she had spent her last, laboured, rasping breath. Had she, not content with taking Dohmnall’s lust for life, awakened once more to steal away her husband and leave Effie utterly alone?
The figure stalked relentlessly closer to her father, silent and certain, black against grey in the gloom. Could he not hear the soft fall of the feet behind him? Surely one of the animals must cry out at a strange presence in the room; at an other-worldly being amidst them?
So fixated on the blackhouse was she that her own predicament had ceased to be of importance to her. The fjords and lochs of Lewis, however, are no place for the living at night and no more so when the dead are abroad. A panicked step forwards was all it took for Effie to lose her footing. Water poured into the top of her creel, pulling her backwards and down. The peat bricks, thirsty for saltwater, strained to join the mud at the bottom of the loch.
Effie slapped at the surface of the water desperately, an eddy on the surface of the great Atlantic, but she was too cold and her dress too heavy. Her nostrils filled with water and her eyes stung with salt as she strained towards the sky for precious air. The last thing that Effie saw before she was pulled under was a figure slowly, far too slowly, making for the door of the blackhouse.
* * *
“Christ! You made me jump, Moira!” cursed Allan, swivelling around to see his wife holding their infant child in one hand and an empty plastic milk bottle in the other. The door stood open behind him, framing the yawning vacuum of the loch below.
“Shh!” whispered Moira, her hair pinned back inelegantly and her eyes red. “You’ll wake the baby! I thought you came through for candles?”
“I did”, murmured Allan, gesturing to one guttering in his hand. Its flame provided the only light in the room, glinting off the glasses askew on his face. In the glow he could see the head of his sleeping son nestled into his wife’s neck.
“And you thought you’d find some out there?” Moira’s voice was tight with forbearance.
There was silence for a moment. Allan tousled his hair before pulling the chord of his dressing gown, tightening the knot around his waist.
“I thought I saw something, that’s all”.
“What was it?” asked Moira, sighing and stepping towards the door.
“Nothing”, replied Allan sharply. He moved as if to block her before catching himself. “It was nothing. Probably just a fox. Come on, let’s get the baby back to bed.”
“A fox! But Allan the chickens…”
“Safe in their coop”, he placated, gently taking his wife by her shoulders and steering her back towards the bedroom. “Now you get back to bed where it’s warm. I’ll get the candles. Odds are the power will be back on by morning anyway.”
Moira turned to go, but then faced her husband once more. Her voice was smaller when she spoke.
“You told me how isolated this would be when we chose this life, but it didn’t really prepare me, not really. Not for the cold, or for the loneliness, or for such a complete and utter lack of people. I never thought that I would actually miss speaking with your sister!” Moira laughed weakly.
“Hmm?” replied Allan, looking as if he was surfacing from a dream. “The loneliness? It’s just you coming to terms with getting rid of all the clutter that we used to have in our life, that’s all. It’ll pass. Go on, I’ll lock up in here.”
Allan’s fingers drummed against his housecoat as he gave his wife a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. He craned his head to watch as she strode away in her dressing gown up the hallway, the baby still asleep despite its head bobbing to her gait. Turning away, he took one last look at the marble-smooth loch before closing the wooden door. Searching the surface, he saw nothing but reflected sky.
She had been there again. He was sure of it. In his mind’s eye he could still see her lank dark hair curtaining pleading eyes; face pale from the cold.
His grandfather had met his death in that very same piece of water, drowned while out fishing. The weather that day had been calm and his boat had been found floating out to sea, his lines still in the hull and only the quiet, rhythmic creak of the boat disturbing the evening. The croft had then passed to Allan’s father who had inherited the blackhouse with reluctance. The place had seemed to weigh heavily on him, wasting his flesh and drawing out his sorrow. After his stroke all the old man had wanted to do was sit at his window, staring out at the sea. He never communicated again other than to point out at the voe, eyes wide with a message his lips could not frame.
The croft was why Allan was here. He wanted to support his small family off the land as his forefathers had done before him and to spend the long winter evenings writing his poetry. For a moment though, seeing the girl chest-deep in the still, cold water, there was nothing more important to him than going out to her. Through the gloom Allan thought that the girl’s eyes had carried the same look of mute pleading as he had seen in his father’s.
The first time he had seen her, only weeks after his father had died, Allan had tried to explain what he had witnessed to his wife but Moira had laughed at him, telling him that it was the whisky talking. There was something about the girl though that tugged at his memory. Something in her high brow and dark hair. It was as though each wave that lapped gently at the beach issued from her; a fading call from beyond, desperate and insistent. He felt compelled by guilt each time she appeared; incapable of ignoring a bond the girl so obviously felt. What he could never tell Moira was that he would without doubt go out to her in the darkness. One day his wife would not be there to stop him approaching that figure in the black dress.
Perhaps he could persuade Moira to go and stay with her parents awhile, until he understood things better. He would have the time to devote himself to the girl. He could go out to her, hold her, protect her.
Dark and true and tender is the north, wrote Tennyson, but such darkness has a price, one which Allan knew that he would pay. Out on the lake, the wind dropped for a moment.
The baby stirred in his cot.
About the Author
Matthew Richardson is a thirty-two year old who lives in Stewarton, Scotland. He has a Masters degree in Leadership and Innovation. A lucky husband and proud father, he has previously been published in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Near to the Knuckle, and McStorytellers. He is a member of the Glasgow Writers Group and has studied Creative writing at the University of Glasgow. Matthew’s blog can be found at www.matthewjrichardson.com.