The Wild Hunt

by Emma Seckel

Genres: World War II; Literary Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

The islanders have only three rules: don't stick your nose where it's not wanted, don't mention the war, and never let your guard down during October.



Leigh Welles has not set foot in on the island in years, but when she finds herself called home from a disappointing life on the Scottish mainland by her father's unexpected death, she is determined to forget the sorrows of the past—her mother's abandonment, her brother's icy distance, the unspeakable tragedy of World War II—and start fresh. Fellow islander Iain MacTavish, a RAF veteran with his eyes on the sky and his head in the past, is also in desperate need of a new beginning. A young widower, Iain struggles to return to the normal life he knew before the war.



But this October is anything but normal. This October, the sluagh are restless. The ominous, bird-like creatures of Celtic legend—whispered to carry the souls of the dead—have haunted the islanders for decades, but in the war's wake, there are more wandering souls and more sluagh. When a local boy disappears, Leigh and Iain are thrown together to investigate the truth at the island's dark heart and reveal hidden secrets of their own.

Release date: August 2, 2022

Publisher: Tin House Books

Print pages: 359

Sample

1.

On the first of October they arrived. They gathered in places they could see the whole island, the rolling hills and the farmland. Sitting in trees and on curbs, on barns and along low pasture walls. Across from the church and atop the green moss-glow of the epitaph in the shadows of the high street. In October the crows always came in threes.

Dawn was about to break, and on the beach Leigh Welles watched her father burn. It was a small funeral party. A girl, a man, the minister, a border collie sitting dutifully next to them. A few others scattered across the beach. If Leigh had asked, probably more people would have shown up, but when the minister appeared at her door the day after she’d arrived, she made it clear that she didn’t want a lot of fuss.

The boat burned only with the help of a great deal of petrol, struggling against the incoming tide. A man waded into the water to attempt to push it back out to sea without displacing the shrouded figure nestled within. Leigh called to him to be careful, but the wind reclaimed her words into air.

This wind was indiscriminate in what it took and only fragments of the minister’s committal reached Leigh’s ears (“—the body of our brother, Graham—”), which had gone numb with the cold. The collie, Maisie, nudged her wet nose into Leigh’s palm and the sky slowly lightened, through indigo to violet to purple to pale mauve. Leigh watched her father’s body burn (“—dust to dust—”) and wondered if he cared how many of the islanders showed up. Likely not. If Leigh did not like a lot of fuss, she had learnt how from him. Besides, it didn’t matter how many people were there. Her brother, Sam, was not. The boat crested a wave and seemed finally to be on its way out, and the flames grew stronger, taller, brighter (“—in the sure and certain hope of resurrection—”), until they hurt Leigh’s eyes to look at. Above her and behind, the stone circle towered on the bluff. Perched on one of the stones, three crows, inky punctuation.

The man (Tom) waded back in to shore. Drenched from the top of his head to the hems of his trousers. He trudged up the beach, shoes squelching, and rejoined the little funeral party, patted Maisie once on the head, scrubbed the water from his hair, and turned to face the sea.

That morning Leigh had woken to the unreality of it all and had tiptoed through the house like a thief. There were the two bedrooms upstairs with neatly made beds and hers with a tangle of sheets like a burrow. There were the pans in the sink, the herbs hanging above the counter, the tiny diamantine droplets of condensation on the windows. Leigh let Maisie out to run circles in the yard, flinging up clumps of dirt as she went. The autumn air was stiff, and everything shrouded in the mist rolling down from the moors, dripping and crystalline.

She looked up at the Ben. Once she had thought it a mountain, until she went to the mainland and discovered it was barely more than a hill. This place, she thought. There was the dog in the yard and the goats in the barn but really it was just her, just her and this island, nobody else. Her mother had been the first to leave, disappearing one night when Leigh was ten, gone to the mainland for a better life. Her brother had been the next to go, and then in time Leigh had followed. For Sam there was a fancy school and a fancy degree—a terrible interlude for the war, of which he never spoke—and now a clean bright office in Edinburgh, clients coming in and out all day. For Leigh there had been a job as a secretary, a flat with two girls from work who were nice enough but interested mostly in each other. Two years of never knowing what to say or what to do, what to wear or where to go. Then, this: getting sacked and falling behind on her rent, her flatmates kicking her out, a series of increasingly decrepit flats. A fight with Sam and then another, an end to the lunches they had once gotten every other week. A dream about her mother and a bitterness lingering in her chest for days. (This is what you left us for? This dark and dirty city. These shops and this noise instead of us.)

Sam had never set foot in her flat, but he had sent a cheque or two to keep her afloat. Neither of them wanted to worry their father. The last time Leigh turned up at Sam’s office to ask him to get lunch, he’d been furious. (“Interrupting my work, Leigh. And dressed like that?”) And then a telephone call from Tom McAllister: “Come home. Your father’s been in an accident. We can’t get hold of Sam.”

And her last banknote spent on the ferry ride home, and everyone’s eyes on her threadbare coat, and the whispers that swirled around her like a breeze when she walked through town. Yesterday Leigh had been trying to patch one of the dozen holes in the barn roof, and as she stood on the shingles she looked up at the hills and down at the grass and wondered whether it might be all right to fall.

The boat disappeared into the grey morning. There’d been a dream, Leigh realised as she watched it go, and that was what had woken her with cheeks cold and damp from tears she didn’t remember crying. A dream she’d had before. The sea. A blurry, smudgy figure wading into the waves. Three crows perched on the rocky shore. Nothing but a series of discrete and half-formed images.

The minister dropped her off at home in the sleek green car that Leigh had always thought he looked too tall for. After the funeral Kate McClare had taken Leigh by the elbow and asked her to come for breakfast but Leigh shook her head, she wanted to be alone. When they arrived, the minister patted her hand kindly and said, “Come to church, Leigh, it’ll be good for you,” and then Leigh clambered into the cold air again, and Maisie leapt from the back, and the minister pulled away down the driveway, gravel crunching beneath the wheels.

Leigh watched the light dance on the glossy car as it departed. Her father had always eyed it jealously, curious hands itching to bury themselves in the engine, wrap themselves around the steering wheel. In the corner of the yard Graham’s car sat rusting under canvas. Leigh couldn’t bring herself to drive it. Graham had taught her how when she was fourteen (“I’ll take you out where the only thing you could hurt are sheep. Just you and me. It’ll be fun. Your brother was always a terrible driver. Don’t tell him I said that”), by which time she had already been able to take apart the engine and reassemble it with her eyes closed. It wasn’t the same car she had learnt on, not anymore. The year after she’d moved away, Graham had sold that first car and bought a new one, a terrible extravagance that he never managed to explain.

She went inside to make tea. The floorboards had always creaked, but now they sang discordantly. The corners had always been dark and shadowy, but now it seemed that something might be lurking in them. A thick dust coated the counter, broken by the jetsam of desiccated herbs that had fallen from the bunches hanging from the ceiling. This room did not look like a room that anyone lived in. This room looked abandoned, and dirty, and sad. And all of it hers now. Presumably. Leigh put out her hand to the wall to steady herself. Maisie circled around Leigh’s feet, whining plaintively, big eyes looking up at her with reproach as though to say, Pull yourself together. Leigh placed a hand on the dog’s head.

“You’re right,” she said to Maisie. “Let’s go.”

Moving was better. The pumping of her legs and the pedals, the whipping of the wind against her cheeks, the panting of Maisie’s breath as she bounded beside the bicycle. Sea mist hung in the air, dusting Leigh’s face and collecting in her eyelashes. Soon the grass and grazing sheep gave way to smoother pavement and a low stone wall, the church spire reaching towards the sky in the distance.

A row of three crows on the uneven stone wall along the road, jet black. Leigh squeezed the brakes hard, stuttering to a stop. Maisie stopped, too, and her tail dropped between her legs. Leigh got off her bicycle and walked past the crows, walked until they were safely behind her before swinging back onto her bicycle and riding off again.

She had forgotten what it felt like, seeing them for the first time. It had been years since she had been on-island in October and she’d forgotten what it felt like. Her heart fluttering. The press of every damp, chill particle of air against her skin. The wheels of her bicycle spun her towards town. It was the first of October, and the sluagh had arrived. The sluagh always came in threes.

Years ago at around this time a tourist came through town. She was tall and willowy and glamorous and entirely out of place, and the whole time she was here the only thing anyone talked about was why. She wasn’t a naturalist, a bird-watcher come to gawk at the many species that still survived only on this island’s craggy shores. She wasn’t anyone’s relative, not even a distant one. She wore a white coat with fur around the collar and her hair was the colour of hot chocolate. Leigh wondered at the time whether maybe she’d been a movie star, though Sam had scoffed at the idea. She’d stumbled across Leigh helping some of the McAllister boys hang bunting outside the pub. Across the street the MacEwans were setting up their stall. The festival was just days away.

“What’s all this?” the woman asked in a slick and bright accent. (“American,” Sam said knowingly when Leigh mentioned the woman’s funny voice later.)

“We’re decorating for the festival,” Leigh said, teetering on her stool. Her shoelaces dangled dangerously towards the ground. She hadn’t learnt to tie them yet and her mother had been busy as she’d raced out the door, so Sam had done them. Possibly he’d done them wrong on purpose.

“Hallowe’en?” the woman asked, and Leigh tilted her head, confused. She glanced back at the McAllister boys, but they looked just as confused as she felt.

“What’s Hallowe’en?”

“It’s Bonfire Night,” the woman’s companion said. His accent was more familiar but still wrong, clipped. (“English, you know English people,” Sam snapped when Leigh mentioned the man’s funny voice later.) The boys behind Leigh snickered.

“Nah,” said the eldest McAllister, Liam. “It’s not that either.”

“What’s your festival for?”

“To keep away the sluagh,” Leigh said. The middle McAllister boy, Neill, swore and elbowed her in the ribs. “Don’t say it.”

Leigh rolled her eyes. “People say it all the time,” she said. “That part’s fake.” She looked up at the woman and said, helpfully, “But you really shouldn’t run. The sluagh like a chase. And don’t go out alone after dark.”

“The—sloo-ah?” the woman echoed back, and Leigh nodded approvingly.

“They come every October,” she said. “They look like crows but they carry the dead’s souls. My dad says they used to kill animals in the night, but they haven’t in ages. If you leave your west windows open, they’ll come and take you away to be one of them.”

“They can show you things, too,” Liam said. “Trick you into thinking that you’re seeing ghosts or something, to try to lure you to your death.”

The woman looked aghast, her eyes darting back and forth between Leigh and the McAllister boys, as if waiting for one of them to leap up and declare it all a great joke. “It’s true,” Neill said. “Our great-great-great-grandfather got taken. It hasn’t happened in ages, but you can’t be too careful.”

They’d finished with their bunting. “Come on,” Liam said, and Leigh hopped off her stool and tripped after the boys.

The only thing different about today, Leigh thought as she swung onto the high street, was that the tall and glamorous tourist was nowhere to be found. Mrs. McCafferty shooed her cats inside to safety. The youngest McAllister, Fraser, teetered on a stool with a soapy bucket in one hand and a sponge in the other, scrubbing the windows till they shone. He waved at Leigh as she passed. Maisie ran over to him for a pet before bounding to catch up with Leigh again.

It was alarming, actually, how little the village had changed since the last time she had seen it. The houses were crying out for new paint, their once brightly coloured doors drab and peeling. The street signs had not been returned to the corners, and though the hour had just changed, the church bells were silent. It was like stepping back in time. It was like the war had never ended at all. She glided round the corner as a woman flung open the shutters of an upstairs window and three crows took flight off the roof. The woman’s voice carried down to the street as she scolded an unseen companion: “It’s time to get up.”

2.

It’s time to get up.

Light streamed into the room. Iain pressed his face deeper into the pillow, the blankets pulled up over his head like the great stone slabs interring poets and princes at Westminster Abbey. Not that he was a poet or a prince. He had been a pilot once, but now he was just a man.

“It’s time to get up,” Mrs. Cavanagh said again, and she whipped away the sheets. “They’ve arrived, and I need you to do the windows.” Her footsteps retreated towards the door, and he wondered if she was taking the blankets with her. Despite the light streaming in like summer, the room was October-chilled. “Five years,” she said, her voice a sighing fall from somewhere near the door. “Five years, and it feels like it was yesterday. Doesn’t it?”

Iain turned his head to the side to free his mouth. For a moment when he tried to speak he couldn’t, only air coming out. At last: “Yes,” he said. “Yesterday.”

A sound like the catching of breath, and then she went.

He dreamt about flying.

After the initial shock wore off, almost all the eligible boys on the island enlisted. Alexander Brodie, Angus Gordon, the two Hendrix boys, Sam Welles. Nearly an entire generation off to fight for a country they’d barely thought of until now. Fewer of the men, because “this island can’t just run itself, you know,” and the men could not be spared.

The Hendrixes were fishermen, so the Hendrix boys joined the navy. Alex’s and Angus’s grandfathers had fought in France in the Great War, so Alex and Angus joined the army. Sam Welles wanted to join the army, too, but his father wouldn’t hear of it, so Sam joined the medical corps, something of a compromise. And Iain had always dreamt of the sky, so Iain joined the RAF.

It had been four years since he had flown, but it was still everything. He dreamt about flying. Sometimes just of the silence and the peace of it, the endless blue and the patchwork land beneath him, those days before his war had really started. While he soared over the provinces of Canada, his counterparts across the Atlantic bombed the German fleet, dropped propaganda leaflets, flew and crashed and died. He joined them soon enough. Sometimes the dreams were fierier, and over the roar of the engine he could hear the falling wail and then the explosion of a bomb. The screams of the people he crushed beneath the heel of his boot. He dreamt of flying but also of the landing, the empty bunks in the Nissen huts after each sortie, the dozens of boys left lying beneath the grey waves of the North Sea.

The Hendrix boys did not come back, except for their names on two identical telegrams. Alex Brodie came back but was a different man than he had been before, and three days after the sluagh appeared that first October he bought a one-way ticket for the mainland and disappeared. No word from him until two years later, when a telegram arrived informing his parents that their son had leapt in front of a train in the Underground at Clapham Common. Most of Angus came back, except for the leg he left in Italy, and he lasted a little longer: not quite one year back on-island, walking past the old memorial on the way to church every Sunday, sitting in Iain’s front room during October, drinking Iain’s whisky. Until Angus, too, had enough, and showed up on Iain’s doorstep with all his things packed into a kit bag. “I’ve got a cousin in Canada,” Angus said. A burst of fondness for the blue, the peace, the patchwork fields. “There’s opportunity there. More than just fishing and farming, and none of those god-awful crows. You’re welcome any time, pal.”

The Hendrix boys, Alex Brodie, Angus Gordon. Sam Welles had not even tried to come back.

Others had also gone. Matthew McClare was the only other island boy to join the RAF right at the start, and his and Iain’s wars had shared alarmingly parallel paths, until one day they hadn’t. Many of the younger boys joined up late in the war, in time for the landings in France. No word from them since.

“All those boys,” Caroline had said as they were sitting in a café in Kensington, one of Iain’s few days of leave. This was maybe a year, eighteen months before it ended. Bomber Command wasn’t trying to cripple Germany anymore so much as completely obliterate it. Caroline started to say something else but lost her words, and instead just sighed again, “All those boys.”

All those boys, and only Iain MacTavish came back to stay.

Mrs. Cavanagh yanked away the top pillow. Iain rolled onto his back. “It’s been days,” she said. Caroline used to tease him about refusing to call her mother by her given name. Perhaps he would, he retorted, if her mother had been invited to the wedding, if Caroline hadn’t dragged him into the register office on a whim. “Come on,” Mrs. Cavanagh said. “We haven’t all got all day to lie around.” Iain thought she was being particularly mean to him. He did not particularly think he deserved it.

He stood. The floor was cold on his bare feet. He swayed a little as the blood rushed to his head; he’d been lying down for so long he thought maybe he was not made to stand anymore. “There,” Mrs. Cavanagh said. “That wasn’t so hard. Now, you’re going to go take a bath, and if you aren’t clean and dressed in half an hour, I swear to sweet Christ I will come in there and scrub you myself, and I’d bet good money that neither of us wants that for our Saturdays.”

How the days ran together. Perhaps it would be better if he could find something to turn his mind to. His father had died mid-war and left Iain with more money than he cared to have. After Angus left, Iain decamped for London once more, rented a little flat but couldn’t find a job to hold his attention. He went on a walking holiday in the Peak District but spent most of the time standing outside his bed and breakfast staring at the hills he was supposed to be climbing and smoking endlessly. He thought about travelling Europe but found he had little desire to return to the continent he had just spent four years dutifully attempting to obliterate. He considered returning to school but he did not particularly want to be a lawyer anymore, or a banker, or whatever it was he had been planning to do, before. His inheritance turned out to be a curse disguised as a blessing. Without the need to work for a living the rest of Iain’s life spread out before him boundlessly.

He forced himself to walk towards the door on legs that felt mechanical, detached from his body. Mrs. Cavanagh put a hand on his cheek, bearded only out of inattentiveness, her palm soft and smelling of rose lotion. The same lotion that Caroline had used. “Oh, love,” she said. “You go get washed up, and shave. Tomorrow, we’re going to church.”

3.

It was, apparently, quite a beautiful island. A postage stamp of grass and rock and heather floating in the middle of the sea. The seasons came rough and strong, rushing down the moors and leaving various calling cards in their wake. Wildflowers, flooding, frost. The skies turned from minty blue to charcoal grey in an instant, peeled back for the aurora in winter and cracked wide open for much of the summer. If one had asked Graham Welles, he would have said that this island had some of the most magnificent sea cliffs in the country, tumbling down from the farmland to the waves. It was a place made for arriving.

Which Hugo McClare wouldn’t know, because he had never left. His only arrival here an unremembered February morning seventeen years earlier, come squalling into the world. One of the ferrymen had once told him that a person hadn’t seen this island until he’d seen it from the sea. Coming over from the big island through the rocky waves, watching the cliffs appear as if by magic out of the fog. “Like something out of a fairy tale,” the ferryman said. Hugo had turned around and considered the harbour and the village behind him. “Like stepping back in time.” It didn’t seem like anything out of a fairy tale, it just seemed like home.

He had thought about leaving often. At first more in pas­sing, to know what it was like to arrive. Today he was ready to do it, as he sat in the room he shared with his brother George (“I’m not thrilled with the arrangement either,” George had said the last time Hugo complained) and listened to George fighting with their sister, Kate, downstairs. The house was always full with the swelling and ebbing of some argument. Hugo placed a cigarette between his lips, lit up, did not inhale. He was new to smoking and didn’t care for it much, but it felt like a grown-up thing to do. He’d been rummaging around in the attic a few months ago and found an old lighter, a nice one, heavy brass. He wasn’t sure where it had come from, perhaps it had been his grandfather’s. Now he carried it everywhere.

He flipped a page in his book. One ear open in case George should decide to come upstairs. There was another room down the hall, but neither George nor Hugo dared suggest the other’s eviction. Once, Hugo had eased open the door while everyone else was at chores and tiptoed into the mausoleum quiet. The layer of dust was even and complete, proof that nothing had been disturbed since the room’s occupant packed a rucksack and left on the ferry one fine November morning a decade prior. Hugo had sat on his eldest brother’s bed and tried to remember the boy who’d once slept there. He found he barely could. He had been only seven when Matthew left for the war. He had lived with his brother’s ghost longer than he’d lived with his brother himself.

Everyone else remembered. Hugo clattered downstairs one morning to find everyone sombre and silent, all day received nothing but tight-lipped disapproval from his mother, until Kate reminded him that it was Matthew’s birthday. Hugo found some old comic books in the attic and lounged in the yard reading until George told him to put them away—Matthew had collected them. Hugo looked up from the wireless one golden evening to find his father staring at him, dazed. Apparently he was growing up to be the spitting image of his lost brother.

Sometimes it filled him like a tide. The unfairness of it. The senselessness, that it should fill him like a tide at all. Sometimes he stared at his face in the cracked mirror above the bathroom sink and looked for Matthew in his features. He saw only himself. Sometimes he listened to the aftershocks of George’s bad humour and thought that the war had taken the wrong brother. Then went downstairs and faced George over dinner and hated himself for thinking it at all.

So home was a sore spot, and Hugo spent as little time inside it as he could. It wasn’t hard to avoid. Hugo had cultivated a list of the best chores, the ones that kept him outside in the brisk air with the sheep and the sky as long as possible. He stayed out late with his friends, and his parents never asked where he’d been or when he was coming home. The boys would drink themselves silly in some unused field or barn and blunder home in the early morning light just in time for chores. ...