The Burden

Miriam Vane had not always known what she was.

The understanding had come gradually, assembled from evidence she'd spent thirty years trying to explain away: the car accident in 1994 that had killed her boyfriend and no one else. The building fire in 2003 in which six people had been hospitalised and she had walked out with a bruised wrist. The flooding in her street in 2011 that had destroyed twelve homes and stopped, inexplicably, at her gate.

She was not superstitious. She was not religious. She was, by profession, an actuarial consultant, and she understood probability better than most people, and she had spent a great deal of time applying actuarial reasoning to her own life and had reached the same conclusion every time.

She was a statistical impossibility.

The literature, such as it was, called people like her jonahs. She preferred the clinical term that she'd found in a parapsychology paper from 1987: disaster vector. It was more precise. It was less burdened with Biblical implication. It described what she was without suggesting what she deserved.

What she was, she had concluded at the age of forty-seven, was dangerous.

Not intentionally. Not through any action she consciously took. She was dangerous the way a faulty power line was dangerous — the danger was not malice, not decision, not something that could be corrected. It simply was. It simply radiated. And people in proximity to it got hurt.

She had moved to the island to solve for proximity.

Eilean Mòr Beag was not on most maps. It appeared on Admiralty charts and on the Ordnance Survey at a scale that made it roughly the size of a thumbnail, sitting in the Sound of Harris with a population of twenty-three people, a post office that operated on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a ferry connection to the mainland that depended entirely on the weather and the ferryman's opinion of the weather, which were frequently different things.

Miriam had rented the cottage for six months and then, when the six months ended without incident, had bought it.

Three years on the island. Nothing catastrophic. A boat had lost its engine in the Sound in her first summer, but the coastguard had been quick and no one was hurt. An elderly resident had fallen on the coastal path and broken her wrist, but she had been eighty-one and the path was steep and these things happened. Miriam had run the actuary's calculation at the end of each year — comparing the island's incident rate against comparable communities, against the statistical baseline for communities of this size and demographic — and the numbers were, if anything, slightly better than average.

She allowed herself to believe, cautiously and provisionally, that distance had worked.

Then the fishing boats stopped coming back.

The first one was in October. The Màiri Bheag, crewed by Donald MacAulay and his son Euan, out for a routine lobster run in weather that was rough but manageable, that both men knew and had worked in dozens of times. They were due back at five. At seven, when the light was going, Donald's wife called the coastguard.

The boat was found four miles east of where it should have been, engine running, nets out, both men absent. No distress call. No sign of struggle. The life raft was still lashed to the deck.

The sea in the area was searched for three days.

Donald and Euan MacAulay were not found.

Miriam sat with this for two weeks, running the numbers, refusing the conclusion the numbers were pointing toward. One incident. One terrible, inexplicable incident. Boats were lost. Men were lost. The sea was the sea.

The second boat went in November.

Different crew, different conditions, different location. Same result: boat found drifting, crew absent, no distress call, no bodies.

The island contracted in the way small communities contracted around grief — the pub quieter, conversations shorter, the few remaining working-age men making decisions that their wives could see in their faces before they had said anything.

Miriam contributed to the coastguard fund. She attended the memorial service. She did what a resident did, feeling the whole time what she always felt in the aftermath of things — the cold actuarial weight of her own probability.

She recalculated. She ran the numbers again.

The results were unambiguous.

She had been on the island for three years. In those three years, the incident rate had been: normal. And then she had allowed herself to believe that normal was her new condition, and whatever that belief had changed in her — whatever relaxation of some unconscious vigilance it had permitted — something had noticed.

She sat at the kitchen table on a night in late November with the wind off the Sound against the windows and the calculation in front of her, and she understood that she had two options.

She could leave.

Or she could find out what, in three years of proximity, she had brought to this island — what she had fed, or woken, or given permission to — and whether any of it could be undone.

She was an actuarial consultant. She understood risk. She understood the mathematics of choosing between a known danger and an unknown one.

She also understood that the two men who were not coming home had families on this island. That she knew those families now. That she had sat in the pub with Donald MacAulay in September and heard him talk about Euan's plans to go to university in Glasgow, and how he was proud of this and also could not quite imagine it.

She folded up the calculation.

She was not going to leave.

She got her coat and walked out into the November dark, down to the harbour, and stood on the jetty looking at the black water of the Sound. The wind was from the east, carrying something she couldn't identify — a smell, very faint, that did not belong to the island. Not the sea. Not the heather or the peat. Something older. Something that had been waiting, she understood suddenly, for her to stop being careful.

Something that had been using the time to get ready.

"All right," she said to the water. She said it quietly, matter-of-factly, the way she would open a risk assessment. "Let's see what you are."

The Sound gave no answer. But the smell got stronger.

And somewhere out in the dark, something changed direction.

To be continued — Chapter Two coming soon