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A seagull was screaming in the early-morning air. The bedroom window had blown open in the night and was banging in the wind. Shadow was lying on the top of his bed in his narrow hotel room. His skin was damp, perhaps with sweat.
Another cold day at the end of the summer had begun.
The hotel packed him a Tupperware box containing several chicken sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg, a small packet of cheese-and-onion crisps, and an apple. Gordon on the reception desk, who handed him the box, asked when he’d be back, explaining that if he was more than a couple of hours late they’d call out the rescue services, and asking for the number of Shadow’s mobile phone.
Shadow did not have a mobile phone.
He set off on the walk, heading toward the coast. It was beautiful, a desolate beauty that chimed and echoed with the empty places inside Shadow. He had imagined Scotland as being a soft place, all gentle heathery hills, but here on the North Coast everything seemed sharp and jutting, even the gray clouds that scudded across the pale blue sky. It was as if the bones of the world showed through. He followed the route in his book, across scrubby meadows and past splashing burns, up rocky hills and down.
Sometimes he imagined that he was standing still and the world was moving underneath him, that he was simply pushing it past with his legs.
The route was more tiring than he had expected. He had pla
He had thought himself alone.
She said, “Will you give me your apple?”
It was Je
“Hello Je
“So,” said Shadow, “from your accent, you must have come from Norway when you were a kid. I mean, you sound like a local to me.”
“Did I say that I came from Norway?”
“Well, didn’t you?”
She speared an apple slice, and ate it, fastidiously, from the tip of the knife blade, only touching it with her teeth. She glanced at him. “It was a long time ago.”
“Family?”
She moved her shoulders in a shrug, as if any answer she could give him was beneath her.
“So you like it here?”
She looked at him and shook her head. “I feel like a hulder.”
He’d heard the word before, in Norway. “Aren’t they a kind of troll?”
“No. They are mountain creatures, like the trolls, but they come from the woods, and they are very beautiful. Like me.” She gri
“Why?”
“Damned if I know,” she said. “But they do. Sometimes the farmer realizes that he is talking to a hulder woman, because she has a cow’s tail hanging down behind, or worse, sometimes from behind there is nothing there, she is just hollow and empty, like a shell. Then the farmer says a prayer or runs away, flees back to his mother or his farm.
“But sometimes the farmers do not run. Sometimes they throw a knife over her shoulder, or just smile, and they marry the hulder woman. Then her tail falls off. But she is still stronger than any human woman could ever be. And she still pines for her home in the forests and the mountains. She will never be truly happy. She will never be human.”
“What happens to her then?” asked Shadow. “Does she age and die with her farmer?”
She had sliced the apple down to the core. Now, with a flick of the wrist, she sent the apple core arcing off the side of the hill. “When her man dies…I think she goes back to the hills and the woods.” She stared out at the hillside. “There’s a story about one of them who was married to a farmer who didn’t treat her well. He shouted at her, wouldn’t help around the farm, he came home from the village drunk and angry. Sometimes he beat her.
“Now, one day she’s in the farmhouse, making up the morning’s fire, and he comes in and starts shouting at her, for his food is not ready, and he is angry, nothing she does is right, he doesn’t know why he married her, and she listens to him for a while, and then, saying nothing, she reaches down to the fireplace, and she picks up the poker. A heavy black iron jobbie. She takes that poker and, without an effort, she bends it into a perfect circle, just like her wedding ring. She doesn’t grunt or sweat, she just bends it, like you’d bend a reed. And her farmer sees this and he goes white as a sheet, and doesn’t say anything else about his breakfast. He’s seen what she did to the poker and he knows that at any time in the last five years she could have done the same to him. And until he died, he never laid another finger on her, never said one harsh word. Now, you tell me something, Mister everybody-calls-you-Shadow, if she could do that, why did she let him beat her in the first place? Why would she want to be with someone like that? You tell me.”
“Maybe,” said Shadow. “Maybe she was lonely.”
She wiped the blade of the knife on her jeans.
“Doctor Gaskell kept saying you were a monster,” she said. “Is it true?”
“I don’t think so,” said Shadow.
“Pity,” she said. “You know where you are with monsters, don’t you?”
“You do?”
“Absolutely. At the end of the day, you’re going to be di
“No.”
“Look. I’ll point. Follow the line of my finger.” She stood close to him, held out her hand and pointed to the side of a distant ridge. He could see the overhead sun glinting off something he supposed was a lake-or a loch, he corrected himself, he was in Scotland after all-and above that a gray outcropping on the side of a hill. He had taken it for rocks, but it was too regular to be anything but a building.
“That’s the castle?”
“I’d not call it that. Just a big house in the glen.”
“Have you been to one of the parties there?”
“They don’t invite locals,” she said. “And they wouldn’t ask me. You shouldn’t do it, anyway. You should say no.”
“They’re paying good money,” he told her.
She touched him then, for the first time, placed her pale fingers on the back of his dark hand. “And what good is money to a monster?” she asked, and smiled, and Shadow was damned if he didn’t think that maybe she was beautiful, at that.
And then she put down her hand and backed away. “Well?” she said. “Shouldn’t you be off on your walk? You’ve not got much longer before you’ll have to start heading back again. The light goes fast when it goes, this time of year.”
And she stood and watched him as he hefted his rucksack, and began to walk down the hill. He turned around when he reached the bottom and looked up. She was still looking at him. He waved, and she waved back.
The next time he looked back she was gone.
He took the little ferry across the kyle to the cape, and walked up to the lighthouse. There was a minibus from the lighthouse back to the ferry, and he took it.
He got back to the hotel at eight that night, exhausted but feeling satisfied. It had rained once, in the late afternoon, but he had taken shelter in a tumbledown bothy, and read a five-year-old newspaper while the rain drummed against the roof. It had ended after half an hour, but Shadow had been glad that he had good boots, for the earth had turned to mud.
He was starving. He went into the hotel restaurant. It was empty. Shadow said “Hello?”