Hard Water

Summer was over. The future lay before me, bleak, cold and menacing. We had to stay on the island, whether we liked it or not, naturally. The police had made the journey through the rough waves overnight - a feat which impressed me - and had officially began their investigation. They came like a swarm off the boat, their loud commands and shouts drifting from the dock. There were only about six of them, but their presence was enough for the elderly folk of the island to draw their curtains and barricade their doors, not wanting to know or accept what was happening in their picturesque haven.

A bulky and balding middle-aged officer from Aberdeen named Harris obnoxiously slung his arm around my shoulders as he bellowed questions at me, questions that I had no way or intention of answering.

"Was he drugged up? Was he? Yeah, probably. They always are."

They'd already taken Adam in, although he had practically handed himself to them with Callum's hand rested on one shoulder and myself embracing his arm on the other side. His chest had stopped heaving but his hands still quivered pitifully by his sides, and the officers took him away with equal gentleness. He was being detained in the sole police officer of the island's makeshift office, which was basically a desk area and a small barred space. It was his job to guard Adam; he'd obviously pulled the short straw. "Leave it up to the big guns to do the investigating, eh?" Harris grinned down at me patronisingly. I stayed silent.

A small woman whose gaze had previously been fixated off into the distance - maybe dreaming of somewhere else she'd rather be - suddenly turned her attention to me and looked me dead in the eyes. Hers were almost as dark as mine, but her skin was pale and her hair fine and brown, pulled back into a high ponytail. She took out a notebook and a pen.

"What's your name?" she asked quietly.

"Mona. Mona Davenport."

"How old are you, Mona?"

"Twenty-three." I replied. I waited for her to write it down and repeat the same set of questions towards Callum before saying, "I'm sorry, but I really can't help you. I honestly have no idea what happened. I don't even know him. All he told me was that his name was Adam and he was scared." I looked to Callum for assurance - I knew it wouldn't be long before they started having their suspicions about me - but he refused to look back at me, his mouth pressed in a hard line.

"He looked crazy," he muttered.

"How so?" the detective enquired.

"There was a manic look about him. Wild," Callum sniffed, running a hand through his dark hair, and I realised he was shaken up about it. When he had arrived Adam had pushed him away, garbled words spilling out of his mouth in a foreign language that neither of us could understand. It had taken some effort to keep hold of him, to keep him from running back to the cliff edge. "It's not that difficult to believe that he did what he did. He was in a bad state-"

"You don't know that he did anything," I said defensively.

"You're suggesting suicide?" the woman asked curiously before Callum could turn on me, glancing over her shoulder at Harris, who was directing the other officers. She pulled her thick woollen coat tighter, and I was envious of the warm fabric as I shivered in my thin jacket.

I shrugged. "Like I said, I didn't know either of them. We don't live here."

Her presence was obviously beginning to annoy Callum. I could tell by the way his arm descended around my shoulders and gripped me tightly: it was a warning. He was angry that I had run away from him, but I didn't really blame him for that. Sometimes I didn't make the best decisions.

The woman sighed and handed me a slip of paper with a phone number written on it. "Call me if you remember anything else. The name is Detective Heller, by the way, but you can call me Francine. Have a nice day." She fixed her odd gaze on Callum for a few seconds, almost long enough so that it began to feel vaguely uncomfortable, nodded her head slightly and turned on her heel and walked back over to Harris.

"That was weird." I commented when her small frame was far enough out of earshot.

"What was weird?"

"The way she looked at you just then. Do you know her or something?"

"Of course I don't. You're reading too much into things, as per usual," Callum took my hand as we began to walk back to the hotel. "Talking of reading too much into things, why didn't you just tell her that you saw him push her? We would be able to get out of here a lot quicker. Now they'll want to do a whole investigation. We won't be able to leave for days."

"Because unlike you, I actually have morals-"

Callum scoffed. "I have morals."

"Whatever. They would do a whole investigation anyway. It's suspicious death, and that guy was clearly having a lot of fun playing CSI."

As I looked at the landscape around me, it was difficult to believe such a place of peace could also be a place of death and hate. There was something intensely soothing about the golden sky, the tendrils of mist that settled around us in the early evening like clouds, the quiet rustling of the long grass. It was almost silent save for our footsteps on the stone path. My hands had finally stopped shaking, replaced by an overwhelming heaviness on my entire body.

"I'm sorry I brought you out here." Callum said suddenly. He sounded genuinely apologetic.

I was taken aback. "It's not your fault."

"I know you don't want to be here," he continued quietly, "with me, I mean. But I do love you. I've loved you for a long time."

It must have affected him more than I realised. There was fear in his blue eyes, rather than ice. I took both of his hands in mine. I looked at the contrast between his skin and my own - mine were unchanged, but his had turned bright red from the cold. "I wouldn't have come here if I didn't want to," I said, carefully treading the line. "They'll take our statements and then we can go home. Sound good?"

"Yeah." I balanced on my tiptoes and reached up to kiss him but the wind knocked me forward so I ended up pecking him on the nose. He laughed, and the noise seemed so foreign to my ears, and I nearly felt delirious when he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me so tightly against him I could feel his heartbeat against mine. He kissed me properly this time, passionately. Without malice. It almost felt right. Almost.

-

She was watching from the window.

If they looked up, they would see a ghostly face, demon-like, with ragged skin drawn over mismatched bones. She lifted her crooked old hand to the window - one finger at a time - and slowly dragged each nail down the glass pane with a blood-curdling scrape.

The old woman leant back in her rocking chair and observed, her hands joined on her lap on top of the dusty black fabric of her dress. The floorboards creaked beneath her. Nothing in this house had been replaced for centuries. She had sat here for years on end. The spiders had woven her a shawl of cobwebs across her shoulders, and time had granted her skin like a rock formation, cracked and shifted and ridged, and deathly pale.

She looked down and felt the warmth radiating from the girl on the ground outside even through the stone wall of the house. The island's warmth had been lost with Elena, but now there was a new substitute. The girl had dark skin: it would make her a target among the island people who had never seen anything apart from their own kind. She felt the urge to protect her.

The boy, however; she shivered in disgust. She'd been watching them for a long time, and would have no qualms about destroying him as quickly as possible. She no longer had anything to fear, and this world had nothing else to offer her. Death had come for her already, and she was lost in a serene state of being, somewhere between heaven and Earth, to watch over her ill husband.

Sara Garrison had been dead for ten years, and purgatory was becoming unbearable. It was time to start protecting the angels, and start sending the demons - she looked back at the young man lovingly embracing his girlfriend, and smirked - straight to the fiery depths of Hell.