Dr. Elena Cairns arrived on North Uist in the second week of October, when the light had already gone flat and the roads were beginning to smell of peat and the sea in equal measure. She had been awarded a research fellowship to document surviving Gaelic song traditions in the Western Isles, with a particular focus on “protective and apotropaic verse forms” — the category of song whose purpose was not entertainment or commemoration but function. Songs that were meant to do something.
She had done this kind of work before. She knew how to sit in someone’s front room and drink tea and be patient. She knew how to wait while an elderly person decided whether she was trustworthy. She had spent three seasons in County Clare, two in the Faroe Islands, one difficult winter in the Carpathians. She understood that what a community chose not to show her was often more interesting than what it offered freely, and she had learned to attend to absence with the same care she brought to presence.
Mrs. Mackinnon lived at the end of a single-track road four miles from the main settlement. Elena had been given her name by two separate people, independently, both of whom had hesitated before providing it and then given it anyway, as though they had decided something in the pause. She drove out on a grey Thursday afternoon, knocked, and was given tea and shortbread and an appraising look that lasted rather longer than was comfortable.
“You’re here about the songs,” Mrs. Mackinnon said. It was not a question.
“I am.”
“Which ones.”
“Any that you’d be willing to share.”
There was a long pause. Outside, the wind came off the machair in a low sustained note that Elena recognised from experience as peculiar to this coast — a sound almost at the threshold of hearing, felt as much as heard.
“There is one,” Mrs. Mackinnon said, “that I will show you the words of. I won’t sing it for you. I won’t sing it at all, and I’d ask you not to either, not while you’re here.”
Elena said that she understood.
“I don’t think you do,” Mrs. Mackinnon said, not unkindly. “But I’ll show you the words anyway, and you can decide what you want to do with them. That’s always been the way of it.”
The notebook was small and old, its covers worn soft as cloth. Mrs. Mackinnon placed it on the table between them and opened it to a page near the middle. The writing was in Gaelic, in a hand that was not Mrs. Mackinnon’s — an older hand, Elena judged, perhaps two generations back. Seven verses, each of four lines. The metre was consistent with the waulking-song tradition but the content was not waulking-song content: waulking songs were work songs, sung to accompany the rhythmic beating of cloth, communal and often bawdy. This was something else. The Gaelic Elena read in the notebook was precise and formal, the kind of elevated register used in prayer or legal formula.
She photographed the page with Mrs. Mackinnon’s permission. Then she asked about the history.
“Four people have sung it in full since my grandmother wrote it down,” Mrs. Mackinnon said. “My grandmother had it from her grandmother, who had it from further back than that. It’s old. It might be very old. The four who sang it —” She stopped. “The first was a man from Benbecula who was a folklorist, something like yourself. He collected it in 1974. He recorded himself singing it, and when he played the recording back, there was a second voice on it that wasn’t his, singing the same melody with different words. He documented it carefully. He published the paper. He died the following year, which may or may not be relevant.”
Elena wrote this down.
“The second was a young woman from the mainland who came here in the eighties. She sang it at a ceilidh, for a joke, because she didn’t believe in it. She stopped speaking for nine days afterward. Not from choice — the words simply weren’t available to her. On the tenth day she spoke perfectly well and never discussed it again.”
“The third?”
“Left the island. Never came back. Sent a letter saying she was well. We have the letter.”
“And the fourth?”
Mrs. Mackinnon looked out the window at the grey machair. “Finished it in the hospital. Couldn’t explain how she got there. It was a different island. She was fine, eventually. She’s in Canada now.”
Elena drove back to her rented cottage in the settlement and sat with her field recorder and the transcription she had made of the notebook’s pages. She was a trained ethnomusicologist. She did not believe in binding spells. She believed in the power of community belief, in the self-fulfilling structures of prohibition and fear, in the documented psychological effects of expectation. She had read the literature on folk-curse compliance. She understood what she was dealing with.
She opened her laptop and worked through a rough translation of the seven verses. The song, as far as she could determine, was an address to something unnamed — not a deity, not a spirit exactly, but a force of some kind, something the Gaelic referred to as an rud a ghluaiseas fo’n uisge, which translated approximately as “the thing that moves beneath the water.” Each verse made a different kind of offer. The first verse offered silence. The second offered memory. The third through sixth offered things Elena struggled to render in English, terms that sat at the intersection of breath and intent and something her dictionary listed as “the moment before speech.”
The seventh verse she could not fully translate. Several of its key terms did not appear in any Gaelic dictionary she had access to. They might be archaic. They might be purposely obscure. They might be something else.
She set up her field recorder on the kitchen table. She checked the levels. She noted the date and time in her research log: North Uist, 14 October, 21:47. She had a glass of water on the table beside her and the transcription in front of her and the window behind her with its view of the dark machair and the darker Atlantic beyond.
She sang the first six verses.
Her Gaelic was functional rather than fluent, and she was not a trained singer, but she had a reliable sense of pitch and she followed the metre of the waulking-song model as best she could. The melody came to her as she sang, as melodies sometimes do — as though it had been waiting to be found rather than invented. She sang all six verses without stopping. Her voice sounded ordinary in the small kitchen. The wind outside was ordinary wind. Nothing happened.
She stopped before the seventh verse. She sat for a moment. Then she pressed stop on the recorder and played back from the beginning.
Her voice. The kitchen acoustics. The faint ambient note of the wind through the window seal.
And something else.
Very faint, and not quite in the same register as her own voice, and using words she had not used because they were from the seventh verse, the one she had not sung: a second voice, female or something that modulated like a female voice, singing along with her in a near-perfect unison that parted, in the last line of the sixth verse, into a harmony she did not have the theory to describe.
The second voice knew the seventh verse. Elena could hear it beginning, very quietly, on the recording. Waiting.
She sat in the kitchen for a long time with the recorder in her hands.
Then she opened her mouth.