After nearly ninety years as a caster, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about cryptids in a single sentence: You cannot learn everything about cryptids.
Unlike many creatures in our world, cryptids have nearly no consistency among them. Ross Allen, the noted herpetologist, knew a great deal about alligators, enough so that one might even say he knew all there was to know. But when I met him in Florida many years ago to ask him some detailed questions about them, he said, “A sewer gator? A sewer gator might be a completely different species, for all I can tell you.” This answer came after he was done laughing.
I have been easily fooled by djinn—I could write another book entirely on their clever ways—and I have found Inks to be as mysterious as you might have heard. Yet the radioactive hornets of Nebraska are predictable in their irradiated and highly vengeful state, and I can hardly see any variation in the existences of the shmoos of Oregon.
This is all an old man’s defense of a young man who didn’t take Bloody Mary’s threat seriously.
From Aviemore, we moved on toward Inverness, which was refreshingly large compared to some of the stops along the way. Edinburgh had been many times its size, but Inverness’s more than twenty thousand residents gave the city a comforting anonymity when the Pavilions were not hosting customers.
While we were in Inverness, I played table skittles for the first time. Hugh the Magnetic Man went with me to a fairly quiet pub one night after Blake’s performance, which was braw—in addition to covering as many of his metallic trappings as he could, Hugh wrapped his face in bandages. Some lassie said he looked like Claude Rains, but neither of us knew what she meant, so I just smiled and nodded, and Hugh held up two fingers for pints. We played well into the night. This was also the first time I’d ever tasted Scotch whisky, four of them as I recall, which, it goes without saying, had a regrettable impact on my ability to play table skittles.
“Mon Dieu,” Hugh said, choking on his ale. “One day, when the Bòcan Pavilions reaches the continent, I will take you to Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris and the restaurant Les Deux Magots. There, we will have true drinks, oui? Not this régurgitation.”
“D’ye miss hame?” I asked. My accent returned the more blootered I got. I could remember quite literally eleven ways to say “drunk” in Scottish English but couldn’t think of the standard word in the King’s.
Hugh understood me just the same. “No. Now that I have a friend here, there is no longer a reason to return.”
It took me a bit, and at long last I asked, “Ye mean me, aye?”
“Aye.” He smiled inside his wrappings. “And you, my friend? You miss your home?”
At two, perhaps three, the Scotch whisky wouldn’t have made me cry. Four, however—“and but,” as we used to say to indicate we were done speaking. Enough said.
Hugh got me back to the Pavilions, half-carrying and half-dragging me. I bawled and cried for my mam all the way. I often thought of my brothers, my sister, and on occasion my da’, but it was my mother who had given me life to begin and life to continue. Missing home was the same thing as missing her.
“But I cannae ever go back to her with an empty book,” I said to Hugh. He, of course, knew nothing about mapping and cryptids.
“I understand.” He was wrestling me into my bunk and trying to get my shoes off; Blake was gone from our tent, presumably out and about sampling Inverness’s nightlife. “I’m sure you’ll write something soon.”
“Feckin’ Mary,” I said as I laid my head back and closed my eyes. I was out in seconds, Hugh told me later.
But the confluence of thinking about my mam and resenting Bloody Mary was as strong a mix as that of a caster’s essence and a cryptid’s—it created, for want of a better expression, a junction in my mind that was vulnerable to a spiteful cryptid’s intentions. And Bloody Mary was always among the more spiteful ones.
I dreamt of home, harvest season, and Da’ and Mam. It was hot under the sun—Hugh had tossed a blanket over me, but as I was still fully dressed and the tent was warm, reality and dreamscape melded—and my mother was standing too close to me as we watched my da’ working the threshing machine.
Then he screamed and jerked, twitching up and down as if rising and falling on the tips of his toes. The threshing machine was pulling one of his arms in, twisting it in one of the exposed whirring belts until the crushers ground his flesh to mince. Blood sprayed upward in a fine mist with thick patches of bruised flesh and fragmented bones patching it.
I surged forward, my own scream silent, but my mother caught my arm. Her fingernails cut me; I could feel the blood on my wrist. I turned in a daze toward her. Her red hair and gone black, long and stringy. Her skin had shriveled so tight like wax against her skull that the blood vessels stood out like ridges, and the gaps around her eyeballs had grown so wide that I imagined I could see the nerves holding them in their sockets.
“LET HIM DIE!” Bloody Mary screamed in my face. I could smell her breath—it was rotting fish in raw sewage.
I cried out and thrashed away from her grip, tangling myself in my blanket and rolling off my bunk, onto the tent’s floor. I came up shouting, banging my knees against the edge of my bed and falling down again. From across the tent, Blake barked with laughter. He was sitting up in his bunk, hair perfect.
“Oh, and the crowd can’t believe what they’re seeing. Dempsey is the loser in the long count,” he said. “We have a new champion.”
I managed to get back to my feet again, disoriented, and saw, in the poor light of our tent, that we weren’t alone. On a crate near Blake’s bed was Toby the dog boy’s makeup mirror—I thought he had returned it. Reflected in its surface was Bloody Mary’s furious face, just beginning to fade away.
“Farewell. You’ll be missed, Mary,” Blake said. He reached out and tipped the mirror face down. To me, he said, “Sleep with your spellbook close. You could have mapped her just now.”
“The only thing you’re teaching me,” I suddenly shouted, throwing off the blanket, “is to dislike you.”
The tent’s door flew open, then, and Whitnail ducked and roared inside. He rose to his full height, head against the ceiling, and hefted like a spear one of the long wooden stakes used to secure the Pavilions’ tents. His eyes were wide and bright.
“Simmer down,” Blake said. “No vampires here. Just Bloody Mary, come to terrorize our boy Arthur.”
Still poised, Whitnail looked down at me. “Are you all right, Abraham?”
“Maybe.” Shaking, I turned to Blake. “Did you let her do that?”
“No, my boy. You did. If you’d mapped her, she’d be on her way now to darken someone else’s towels. Until you do, you’re going to have a nocturnal visitor in your head from time to time.”
I must have groaned aloud because Whitnail put a hand on my shoulder, and Blake got up and came across the tent to gently punch me in the chest. “Okay, you don’t like me right now. But I promise you, if she rips your heart out by the roots, I’ll get it back for you.”
I would learn over time that Whitnail had more common sense than sense of humor, but he chuckled at this. He said, “And I will sew it back in for you.”
I could still smell her breath—though I suspected it was my own foul mouth after a night of drinking whisky and ale—but the vision was fading enough for me to shudder and send it away. I closed my eyes for a minute or two, aware of their body heat near me, and centered myself. When I opened them again, I first looked at Blake with an apology on my lips, but he waved it away with two fingers and a grin. Then I looked up at Whitnail.
“Are vampires real?” I asked.
***
In Inverness, we lost some acts and gained some others. Morgan the Mystic bowed out, saying he was weary of being challenged to read the minds of “middle-aged Philistines with thoughts like teenage boys.” (I asked Blake if Morgan could actually read minds, and Blake said, “We all can, if our subjects are stupid enough.”) In his stead, we added a Burmese woman named Nu whose neck was elongated by a series of brass rings around her throat, a dozen or so, extending her head a good thirty centimeters above her shoulders. She was billed as the Giraffe Girl, and though her English was difficult to follow, she was exceptionally pleasant company. She also had a voracious appetite and seemed to enjoy everything she put in her mouth.
“Wait until we get to London,” Hugh said to me. “After she tries English food, she might decide to go back home to Burma for good.”
I worked all over the Pavilions and, in time, got to know most everyone. I learned how to operate and repair the steam-powered popped corn machine that was a unique treat for our patrons—it was not yet commonplace in cinemas, whose owners feared food would distract from the films, so the Pavilions earned a pretty penny on the popped corn we served.
I also was given the role of ticket-taker for Blake the Black’s show in the grand tent. This made me the first and immediate witness to the casters with purple berets who arrived with grim faces, as if they were attending the Court of Session instead of a cryptid stage magic. Their displeasure showed in their mannerisms, and in many cases, I could make out the presence of spellbooks concealed beneath coats or hidden in handbags or briefcases. I watched them with increasing intensity night after night, and as I did, I began to form questions.
“Why do they wear those stupid hats?” I asked Whitnail during one show after the entry was closed and Blake was terrifying yet another crowd. A quarter of those in attendance sported purple berets. “Is it so they know who’s who here?”
Whitnail said, “No. They want Blake to see how many they are.”
“Sataboot?” I asked. Seeing Whitnail’s lips thin, corrected myself. “What’s that about?”
“They mean to scare him.”
“They’re daft. He’s got the intestinal fortitude of Lydia,” I said, referring to our sword swallower. “I hope they’re right with the heavens before they start anything. So, can they use the cryptids they’ve mapped to attack with them?”
Whitnail looked puzzled. “What else would you do with them?”
That was the very first time it had occurred to me that I didn’t know why casters mapped cryptids. When I broached the subject with Blake over the morning meal one day, he scoffed.
“Is that the limit of your thinking? Don’t you recognize what I’m doing with them?”
I was confused. “Making money?”
“Educating the world. Humans are so arrogant—even after Copernicus, we still believe the universe revolves around us. Western belief in the arcane goes no further than the duck-billed platypus.”
I assumed this was a cryptid I’d not yet encountered.
“But we’re not alone,” he went on. “You know that. I know that. And in time, everyone else will know it, too, if I have a say in it.”
I looked around the meal tent at Toby the dog boy and Clara the contortionist and the twins, Grace and Greta, joined at the torso. I’d not had any sense that any of them thought of Blake’s mapped cryptids as anything more than trickery, illusions. Like charity, I would have assumed clarity began at home.
“You could write a book,” I said.
“No. Show, don’t tell,” Blake said. “I leave writing books to tired old men. But the eye doesn’t lie. When we get to London, I’ll book the Cambridge Theater—it seats over a thousand people. And once the word spreads, the world is our oyster. Paris, Rome, Berlin.”
“Okay then,” I said. “But if I’m not on a crusade?”
Blake was often unreadable; I could not tell if he was pleased or annoyed that I didn’t embrace his philosophy, if that was, in fact, what it was. He went back to his bread and beans. “Labor. Guards. Entertainment. You can treat them as companions, if you like.”
“Who in their right mind would want Bloody Mary for a companion?” I said.
“Maybe someone not in their right mind.”
I glanced across the tent at Whitnail, and Blake caught my gesture. He grinned. “No, Arthur. Though he might be amused that you even considered that he might be a cryptid. And if he were, then this entire tent would be full of casters since only casters can see cryptids, you know.”
I wanted to circle back to my original question about using mapped cryptids to attack others, but Blake bid me good morning and got up, ending the conversation.
The Pavilions stayed in Inverness longer than I would have expected, and the crowds were surprisingly consistent. I’d had nearly no time in Edinburgh, so this was the first time I’d had the run of a sizable city since leaving the farm. Hugh accompanied me, always swaddled to hide all his pins and needles, and we explored as much as we could. At one point, we found a dance marathon, where the dancers had already been at it for eleven straight hours, and we got into a wager pool with some other young men, trying to predict which couples would fall down from exhaustion first. Some of them were close to dropping, one partner suspending the other, dragging them in circles to at least provide a semblance of dancing. Nurses hovered nearby; there were hospital cots set up to accommodate those who collapsed.
One of the other men we were betting with couldn’t take his eyes off of Hugh. He said, “Whit, you rank under there? You disgusting to look at?”
When the others started in as well, it became obvious their curiosity was going to turn invasive.
“Give us a peek,” the biggest one said to Hugh, and it wasn’t a request.
So, we took our leave, surrendering our bets, and retreated to the Pavilions. Hugh didn’t come out with me for three days after that. We never did learn who won the marathon.
Alone, I found the Clach na Cudainn, the charter stone of Inverness, which supposedly ensured the city’s prosperity. It was beneath a sizable cross in front of the Inverness Town House, and nobody walking by on the sidewalk seemed to notice it: a flat, misshapen rock, about three feet by two-and-a-half, embedded in granite with a small black engraving that didn’t encourage you to read it. Yet the stone made me uncomfortable—I had a feeling there were cryptids near, watching me, daring me to touch the stone, waiting for some signal to reveal themselves. I didn’t wait to see what that was.
In the last days of our time in Inverness, I spotted a purple beret in a crowd on a street corner well in sight of the castle, which I had stopped to look at. I didn’t know my Shakespeare, but Hugh had told me how the play Macbeth begins there, in that castle, when Macbeth—at the behest of his wife, Lady Macbeth—betrays and kills King Duncan of Scotland. I was thinking, I bet that’s where all the cryptids in Sneck meet, when the beret bobbed up in my line of sight.
“Haw,” I said, then corrected it from my accent. “Hello.”
She glanced back at me, and I recognized her as the older woman I’d seen in the audience for Blake the Black’s last performance in Edinburgh many weeks earlier. Her specs had thick black rims that distracted from the rest of her features. She was tall; I had to look up a bit to meet her angry stare.
“I know you,” I said. “I’ve seen you before.”
“Tell Blake that, boy.” She had a Welsh accent, though I didn’t know that was what it was—I just knew she wasn’t Scottish. “Tell him to stop what he’s doing or we’ll stop it for him.”
“Here now, you can’t—”
“You’re better listening than talking, Sonny Jim,” she said. “We’ve been a mite kinder to you than you deserve, if you’re going to stand by that charlatan. You’re just a boy, but we’ll bring the Pavilions down around your ears too, if you don’t take heed.”
People moved around us, some of them glancing our way, wondering what they were witnessing. No one interfered, though. I said, “Are you threatening me?”
She leaned closer to me; I could smell her perfume, something mixed with vanilla, that momentarily choked me. She whispered, “If it walks like a snipe and swims like a snipe and quacks like a snipe…”
She was just another version of Bloody Mary—nasty and threatening.
“You,” I stammered—I was trembling like a leaf fighting the wind. “You are not nice.”
“Is that so? Well, I’ll be even less nice the next time you see me,” she warned. With that, she was done with me. She crossed the street against the traffic, ignoring honking horns and shouts, and was gone.
***
While I would miss its busy streets, I was not sorry to put Inverness behind us. I told Whitnail how a country lad could feel pressed in by so much city life, and he nodded. But I knew he didn’t believe me—I wasn’t a very good liar.
I wanted to leave Inverness because bad things were coming, and with all the cars and the horses and the people, we weren’t going to be able to see it until it got us.
We had less than 150 kilometers to travel northwest to reach The Minch, the stretch of water between the mainland and the Outer Hebrides islands, where Blake had arranged for a boat to meet us. We would pack up the Bòcan Pavilions and crate everything we owned for travel, and then we would navigate the sea for hundreds of kilometers, from The Minch headed south past the Isle of Man until we reached Liverpool, England. It was a heady prospect—I didn’t know how to swim, so the idea of being afloat for so long and so far from shore struck a respectable note of fear in me.
“I would sink like a stone,” Hugh told me, “and I do know how to swim.”
We made nearly no stops along the way, only for a few of us to go into a village or town for supplies, and I heard a host of reasons why. The weather had turned unexpectedly, and it rained most days. The smaller villages would require us to unload, set up, and break down again for the sake of only a few shows, so the harvesting wasn’t worth the crop, as Blake put it (“This is in your language, Arthur,” he pointed out). No one said it might be because our last audience in Inverness had been a restless one, made all the more uneasy by the whispering among those who were wearing purple berets.
So, our caravan pulled up stakes and left the last Scottish settlement I would see for years.
One night, halfway to The Minch, it happened again.
I was driving our battered Morris Commercial truck, the one with the loose driver’s side door. It was almost dusk. Blake and Whitnail were riding with me, though they had both dozed off; I was concerned that Whitnail would fall out of the vehicle if he fell asleep leaning against the passenger door, but I didn’t want to wake him up for no good reason other than my paranoia. The road was wet, which also made me nervous.
Twenty meters ahead of us, one of the other trucks, this one pulling a trailer with the grand tent packed on it, suddenly braked. The trailer fishtailed, and just as quickly, Lydia the Sword-Swallowing Bonnie Lass from London fell from it. She landed on the pavement face down. As I slammed on my own brakes, she stumbled back to her feet, facing us. It was incredibly fast. I could see her eyes go wide, and her mouth dropped open to scream. Then she was close enough to my windscreen that I could lean forward and touch her.
Her head lurched backward on impact, a horrible wet sound, and she disappeared beneath the front of the truck. We bounced hard and jostled over her.
I was wailing as I brought the truck to a bone-jarring halt and barreled out of the cab. One of her arms, thrust over her head, extended out from beneath the truck’s front. I shot a glance at Blake and Whitnail as I dropped down low to pull her free.
“Come on!” I shouted at them. “You have to help me.”
As I grabbed hold of Lydia’s wrist and pulled, I realized neither of them had moved. Their eyes were still closed. I didn’t understand how they’d slept through the entire accident, but then I stopped wondering about anything else except survival. As Lydia’s corpse emerged from beneath the truck, her skin changed, becoming pale and desiccated, her accentuated veins crisscrossing like a roadmap. When her head appeared, twisted beyond the angle of survival, her hair had gone jet-black, and her lips had pulled back in a ghastly grin.
“NO ONE CAN SAVE YOU!” Bloody Mary shrieked. Her other hand emerged from beneath the truck, clutching a sword that was already slick with blood.
I dropped her arm and turned to flee, but her fingers wrapped around my ankle, and I fell. When my face struck the pavement, it felt more like wood.
I opened my eyes to the darkness of our tent, my blanket knotted around one of my ankles. I was sprawled on the floor, screaming like a child as hands grabbed me by both shoulders and forcibly flipped me over. I was awake and staring up at Blake’s face.
“On your feet, lad,” he said, pulling me up with one hand while shoving my open spellbook at me with the other. “Hurry up.”
He let go of the book; I managed to snag it out of the air, turning it so I could see the blank space it was open to. I put my hand on it.
Before me, Blake had a grip on Bloody Mary’s wrists, pulling her out of Toby’s makeup mirror in a scene that would have been comical—a figure the size of a human emerging from an object the size of a book—had it not already been terrifying. She lashed in his grip like an enormous fish, her head raised and her eyes fixed with loathing on him. Her jaw hung open as if she intended to bite him, should she get close enough. The scream that came from her was like a mallet slamming into my chest.
“Pay attention,” Blake yelled at me, snapping my focus to him. “On the mirror!”
Attached to the top of the mirror’s frame was a blank card from my spellbook. When I saw it, a crystal-clear white edge outlined it for me, and when I concentrated, it expanded. I pressed my open palm so firmly against the page of my spellbook that my wrist ached. I willed the gate to open. The outline extended diagonally from its center, holding its shape, until it rose like a doorway with Bloody Mary between us.
With a mental twitch, I called the open gate to me. As it moved, Blake let go of Mary and bolted to the side; the gate passed so quickly over her and then over me that I was only certain it had succeeded when I felt a tingling up and down my frame. It was the fleeting prickling of every limb falling asleep rapidly, one after another, and a numbness in my face and chest. My lips dried so quickly that a spot of blood ran down my chin.
“I HATE YOU!” she screamed. I couldn’t tell which of us she was addressing.
“We’ll miss you, too,” Blake said, and a moment later, she was gone.
Toby’s mirror had a crack in it now. Blake detached my card from it, handed it to me, and then ran his finger along that crack. “We should get him another one when we reach Liverpool.”
I sat down hard on my bunk, licking my bloody lower lip, staring down into my spellbook as I put the card back. Bloody Mary stared up at me from it, her essence and mine mixed in an invisible concoction that translated to a mapped cryptid. I felt no different for the sacrifice of some amount of my own essence, but I felt like a completely different man for the success.
Now I was a caster.
I asked in a quavering voice, “So, are they all going to be that intense?”
Blake shook his head. “No, no. Some of them are going to be scary.”
***
The shores of northwest Scotland, those that formed the southern edges of The Minch, were rocky and often unnavigable due to tall bluffs and inaccessible bays. When they first came into sight, I had no idea what plan could possibly allow that we would be able to board a boat—one that was seaworthy, no less—and make our way out to open waters. I voiced this to Whitnail.
“You are not a sailor,” he said. “Trust others.”
Of course, he was right. We were met by a much smaller vessel, a North Company’s decommissioned ferry stripped of its passenger accommodations, that used low-water buoy markers to come close enough to shore during high tide for us to load it through the use of an extended loading ramp. It would need to make four trips to take all the Pavilions’ equipment out to deeper waters and the ship, the Caraid, waiting for us. I knew nothing about tides, so I had to be educated as to why we had to stop and start twice a day and why it wasn’t at the same times each day.
When we first reached the shores, however, we were days early, and neither the ferry nor the Caraid had arrived yet. It was unexpectedly chilly, the sky was in a constant state of metallic gray, and the waters came ashore so hard at times that my fear of drowning would manifest if I were a hundred meters inland. The overcast skies and damp air brought about a silent, depressed withdrawal in the entire Bòcan Pavilions community. We went about setting up only the absolutely necessary tents and opted for cold meals instead of establishing the cooking or dining tents. The sound of the waves, down a hill from where we made base, served as an orchestral backdrop for everything we did.
Blake was on edge, presumably with impatience to get underway, so I stayed away from our tent much of the time. I’d never been invited to Whitnail’s quarters, so I passed the afternoons when I wasn’t working playing chess with Hugh in his tent. He had a very small wood-burning stove, so compared to my own tent, his was uncomfortably cool.
The second afternoon we were waiting, I won my first and only game against Hugh. It was a chance win, a deadly knight fork that he overlooked and I spotted just before I was about to move a different piece, but a mate is a mate. I took my victory without a shred of grace or humility.
“Congratulations, Abe,” he said to me, standing up and shaking my hand. He casually unbuttoned his flannel work shirt to display all the metallic pieces attached to his flesh. “You can have one for a trophy, if you like.”
Without hesitation, I scanned his chest, his belly, even his face—I was flush with pride. He had a silver brooch in the shape of a dog clipped to the skin beneath his chin, though neither of us knew much of anything about breeds. It didn’t matter—I liked it, and he liked giving it to me. It was my prize, my trophy.
As dusk rolled in and the gray sky turned to black, I delivered a toasted roll with sliced beef to Lydia the sword swallower. Since my nightmare about running her over in the truck, I’d made a point of periodically checking in on her. I hadn’t dreamed of Bloody Mary since, and though I suspected it was simply because I’d mapped Mary and she’d thus moved on from me, I liked to think kindness to Lydia bought me some peace of mind as well.
“Beware the kelpies tonight,” Lydia said in a sing-song voice as I was turning away from her tent.
“How’s that?”
She pointed out in the direction of The Minch, which was invisible now in the darkness. “The blue men. The legend? They say they’re like water kelpies, that they try to sink ships and drown sailors. It’s a story from around The Minch. My father was a sailor around these parts.”
I told her I’d beware, that I hoped she’d enjoy the food, and then nearly sprinted back to our tent to ask Blake about the kelpies.
His disposition hadn’t changed much in the days we’d been at the coast. He was lying on his bunk in a strong lamplight when I came into the tent, chattering about the blue men.
“They’re not real,” he said, not looking up from the book he was scanning.
I didn’t know how to respond to that except stupidly—I expected Blake to be an authority on the subject of cryptids, so I had no reason to question the veracity of anything he told me about them. But his dismissive tone struck a nerve in me.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Am I—? Yes. I’m sure, Arthur.”
“Abraham.” I crossed my arms. “We’ve talked about this.”
Now he looked up from his book, but instead of stepping up to the confrontation, he grinned at me, Errol Flynn. Perhaps it was meant to be charming; I only found it patronizing. “I’m sorry. Let me say it a different way. They’re. Not. Real.”
I was no longer thinking about kelpies; instead, I was thinking about my brothers, Isaac and Elijah, and how I never won an argument with either of them and how those arguments always ended the same way—just as it ended with Blake. “You’re such a bloody arsehole.”
I missed his retort as I stormed out of our tent—I heard him say “satiated,” but I didn’t know what it meant, so it didn’t land. I was sure it was condescending, though, so I tried to slam the tent’s door to punctuate my departure. It wasn’t a satisfying slam.
I encountered Whitnail almost immediately in the darkness outside. It was as if he were a palace guard, waiting for a moment like this.
He put one hand on top of my head and turned me, like a toddler, in the direction of The Minch. When we were out of the immediate camp for the Bòcan Pavilions, where the night was the darkest, he parked me on a rock the size of a small chair and towered over me protectively. Given his extraordinary height, he was quite the tower.
“He’s lying to me,” I said.
“Yes.”
Taken aback, I started to stand up. “Well, then, I’m going to—”
“No. I will tell you why.”
When I sat again, he said, “You are not his first protégé. The kelpies killed the one before you.”
As with Blake before, I didn’t know how to react except stupidly. “What happened?”
“The kelpies killed him.”
“Yes, but—all right, I get it. Were they mapping a kelpie or something?”
“Yes. And the kelpies took him.”
There wasn’t much else to say. I stared out at the blackness over the bay, listening to the waves washing ashore and retreating, and I imagined the ways it might have happened. They all ended with a dead boy deep in the waters of the sea, floating and spinning where the light from above no longer reached the corpse.
“What was his name?” I ultimately asked.
“Arthur.”
“No, I mean his real name.”
“Ah. I understand.” Whitnail nodded, then said, “Arthur.”
I sat in the darkness for a few minutes more, and when I was ready to stand up, Whitnail reached out a pale white hand and helped me to my feet. I thanked him for talking to me, told him good night, and left him standing, staring either at my back as I returned to the camp or at the sea that kept its secrets.
***
The next night, the last one we’d spend on Scottish soil before loading up the Caraid and heading south to England, I woke up after midnight to a hideous smell.
At first, I thought it was in the tent with us. I sat up and squinted in the dark; Blake was asleep on his bunk across the way, on his back, his arms crossed as if he lay in a coffin. I thought of vampires again and that the smell must be Blake’s rotting corpse, but he always slept like that—I’d seen it many times before—and the smell was actually coming from outside.
An instinct told me to bring my spellbook. I’d not yet had reason to draw out Bloody Mary, my sole mapped cryptid, from her card, but if the stink were something I’d rather not deal with, I’d most certainly let Mary do so. She would undoubtedly scream at me the entire time.
It took just moments for me to locate the stench. A figure crept between the tents, pausing as if listening or sniffing at the nearest buttoned-up tent flaps. It was cold outside, and I could see my breath. I could not see the same in the figure. Rainclouds blocked the moon, so there were no shadows at first, but when those clouds briefly parted, allowing a sliver of moonlight to escape, I saw the creature illuminated: its face was long, as were its arms, and scraps of seaweed clung to its flesh like parasites. Most telling, that flesh was the murky blue of the sea.
I expected fear, but what came was exhilaration.
I ducked around a tall pallet of equipment with a canvas tarp secured over it. I couldn’t see what I was doing, but by feel, I opened my spellbook and found a card, careful to avoid where Mary’s was. Once I was sure I had a blank, I slipped away from the pallet and followed the putrid fish odor.
The kelpie crept alongside the pallets that stored the grand tent. I went around the other side and raced the length of the pallets to intercept it at the far end. I slapped my card against the last pallet, hoping the wetness would adhere it long enough, and then I moved across to a rocky formation that marked the edge of our encampment. I opened my spellbook and waited.
It never even saw me. When it passed between me, crouching by the rocks, and my card dangling from the pallet’s edge, I mentally opened the gate. The process moved in an exaggerated slow motion for me, but in fact, it was so fast that even another caster might not notice it. When the kelpie turned and ventured back into the depths of our camp, I retrieved the card, and there it was: a kelpie, a blue man, my second mapped cryptid.
I headed back to my tent. Blake needed to know that an imaginary kelpie was creeping around the camp and that this creature he insisted didn’t exist seemed to be looking to cause trouble.
The stink of the kelpie still hung in the night air. When I opened our tent’s door, the blast of that foulness nearly smothered me.
I stepped into the darkness and collided with a wet, fetid shape. Under my feet, our floorboards were slick with sludge; I lost my balance and toppled. As I went down on my back, I shouted Blake’s name and scissored the shape’s legs with my own. It fell away from me, making a squelching sound as it collapsed against my bunk. Blake’s lamp came on.
The kelpie was back on its feet with incredible speed. Its elongated head whipped in my direction first, then back the other way to focus on Blake. It moved toward him again, and though I could see no weapons, when it reached out for him with an unnaturally long arm, I knew he was in danger.
“Stand down, boy,” Blake said, throwing off his blanket.
He wasn’t talking to me. The kelpie muttered indecipherable words, sounds like gurgling water in the back of its throat, and closed in on him. I rolled over on my stomach, reaching out to grasp it by its ankle, momentarily anchoring it. It slapped down at me. A wet rag of fingers snapped my head to one side.
The door banged open again, and Whitnail rushed into the tent, wearing nothing but his drawers, his chin tucked and his blue eyes narrowed beneath white eyebrows. I was stunned by his state of dress but more so by his decisiveness. He grabbed the kelpie by its upper arms, turning a full circle with it and shoving it past me toward the door. The albino placed himself directly between Blake and the kelpie, stopping Blake from charging around him.
“Go home, Arthur,” Whitnail said.
The kelpie made a desperate bubbling noise and fell out of our tent and into the night. As the door swung shut, I caught a parting glance of it waving its hands high above its head as it fled.
“He’s going to call the others,” Blake said, turning and snatching up his own spellbook. The stone that decorated its cover was black. “We’re going to have to kill him, Whitnail.”
“We are already too late,” Whitnail answered.
The three of us hastened out into the beginning of a storm. The wind was picking up speed at an unnatural pace, and the first marble-sized drops of rain were battering down. I chased after Blake and Whitnail into the night, through our encampment and out to its border, to the hillside overlooking the shore of The Minch below. Thunder rumbled, long and slow. Blake climbed atop a rock and stared down at the sea below. Whitnail caught me as I stumbled forward, securing me from behind in his arms so I wouldn’t tumble down the hill.
When the first bolt of lightning flashed, the night was daytime for a heartbeat, long enough to see the shore below us. Out in the churning waters, a series of figures bobbed up and down in the water, their faces turned toward the sky. Many looked like horses in the water, horses of an unnatural breed. Others were human in shape. Those each had a hand raised as if conducting an orchestra. Between us and them ran the kelpie from our tent, the one Whitnail had called Arthur, the one who had been Blake’s protégé before me, stumbling over the rocky shore, gurgling a shouted cry, headed back to sea. When the lightning boomed again, Arthur had returned to those who had taken him, joining them to conduct the storm they were calling down upon us.
“Batten the camp down,” Blake commanded as he turned away. His face was ashen. “Everyone needs to stay in their tents until the storm ends. Those kelpies can’t keep this up for long—we’ll outlast them, don’t worry.”
Thunder rolled, drowning out his next words. When it stopped, he said to Whitnail, “Go get your crossbow. Bring as many bolts as you can carry. And put some clothes on, for the love of decency.”
In a frenzy, Whitnail released me, aiming me in the direction of the camp, and proceeded ahead of me in great strides, his arms swinging as if he were running, his knees bent, naked and pale. For a heartbeat, I was terrified of him—being caught in their undergarments diminish some men, but not him. Never him. Some sort of power was suddenly revealed to me, and as I chased after him, deafened by the lightning and the thunder, I knew what it was.
“You saw him,” I shouted when I was close enough. “The kelpie in the tent—Arthur. You could see him. You’re a caster?”
He didn’t answer, just changed directions to go to his own tent. I caught a glimpse of his muscular figure as he vanished into the darkness, and then I was off the other way, shouting into tents as I ran.
The rain pounded down now. I wiped my eyes over and over again. My voice was becoming hoarse as I warned each tent’s occupants to stay inside or to secure their tents or both. The ground was muddy now—I wasn’t sure the tent stakes would hold. The canvases covering our equipment seemed tight enough as I ran past them, paying them nominal mind as I tried to determine if I’d been to every tent. I turned back toward the trucks and wagons, parked at the opposite camp perimeter of the sea. All around me, the air was heavier, hotter, and a bang of thunder half-deafened me. In the lightning flash, I saw someone was already at the trucks, securing their loads.
Hugh is a good man, I had time to think. Hugh is my friend.
No, Hugh.
I didn’t reach him before the lightning struck him. It outlined him in a flash of light, his arms thrown wide as if inviting the strike, and it seemed to ricochet all across his body, electrifying every pin, every needle, every button, every scrap of metal that the Magnetic Man wore. Even from where I stood, I felt the jolt through the earth. It knocked me off my feet and made every one of my limbs stiffen in pain. I cried out. The pain disappeared quickly, leaving behind the residual reminders of agony, but all I could think was what Hugh must be feeling.
When I finally reached him, though, he was feeling nothing. He was gone.
All of those pieces of metal were melted into his skin. Red blistered trails zig-zagged all across his flesh between pins, suggesting the path the electricity raging through his body had taken. His clothing was burned away. And his eyes were open, surprised, the pupils startingly bright, like those of a blind man. Raindrops battered his eyeballs, but he didn’t blink.
I wailed with grief I’d never experienced before. The storm’s intensity didn’t abate, but I no longer noticed it. A panic tore through me, as if I should do something to stop this, but I had no ability to do anything at all. I could not imagine how I would live tomorrow. How vast the emptiness suddenly was. I wouldn’t play chess with him anymore. I wouldn’t become excited at the prospect of seeing Paris with him one day. I wouldn’t have someone to—
***
I am sorry to stop here. Please forgive me. I know that I have led you to this moment as a reader, and I apologize that I cannot finish telling you about how Hugh died that night.
The storm ended; the material damage was repaired. The ferry came, and we loaded the Caraid, and we sailed south. I do not know if Whitnail or Blake or both of them found Arthur the storm kelpie and shot him dead with a crossbow bolt. I never asked, and neither of them ever offered an answer. Much, much later, I would hear that the blue men were never killed and rarely captured. If that is true, then Blake pursued meaningless retribution against his altered former protégé.
We buried Hugh at sea. I ensured that he had his chessboard with him.
Metal does not attract lightning, I’ve heard many times over the years. I would beg to differ, though scientists tell us this is so. I have seen it with my own two eyes, both of which I still had that night on the Scottish shore.
I will stop here and move on to the next chapter. And before that, I will dry the tear running down one of my cheeks. Eighty years later, I still miss Hugh the Magnetic Man of the Bòcan Pavilions, my very first friend. We should have grown old together. I still tell him goodbye every day.
Adieu, Hugh. I was glad to know you.
