The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

19 : Blaire

B L A I R E

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I can't stop thinking about Temperance Key.

Ever since Sukie told me about how Anchor Lake got its name, how it used to be Loch Iuchair until suspiciously soon after Temperance's death, I've felt more hopeless than ever and I don't know why. All of this happened over four centuries ago. It doesn't do me any good to grieve for a woman who died three hundred and eighty years before I was born, not when I have so much else to weep over, but I can't help but feel that she was thwarted.

She was a successful woman. If Sukie's theory is right, and there was a connection between her last name and the name of the town, then she was powerful. But I guess power didn't matter in 1619, not if you had a child out of wedlock and spent your days using nature's remedies to cure people's pain. She was branded a witch, everything stripped from her before she was burned at the stake.

Days later, I fall asleep thinking about her. At one o'clock on Wednesday morning, I jerk awake in the midst of a nightmare to a pain so raw and real that it pins me down. My chest is tight, my back damp, my lungs constricted and my pulse roaring; a cloud of existential dread clouds my vision, lurking at the back of my head and creeping over my eyes.

Hours pass, I'm sure. Hours of fear and panic and crushing dread, all wrapped up in a parcel of messy grief, tied too tight with a noose of a bow.

But when the worst of it subsides and I can breathe properly, it has been less than thirty minutes. I'm disorientated and exhausted and scared and I scramble from my bed as though it's the source of the panic attack I woke up to, as though the sorrow I surround myself with has nothing to do with it.

I can't go straight back to bed. I can't sleep right now. My head's a knotted tangle of crossed wires and my heartbeat is far from regular and my gut is twisting with nausea, my mind crippled by the kind of desperate sadness that will bring me crashing to my knees if I don't keep moving.

So I keep moving. I pull on a dressing gown and scrape my hair, in need of a wash, off my face. The house is sinister after dark, full of shadows and creaks and groans and a lingering sense of something ominous; my skin crawls as I feel my way along the wall in the pitch black, until I find the curve of the bannister and tread softly down the stairs.

The creak on the eighth step can't be avoided, no matter how quietly I try to descend; neither can the moan of the second floorboard in the hallway. I'm halfway to the kitchen, craving ice-cold water and the reassuring light from the inside of the fridge when I notice that the sitting room isn't in darkness. It isn't fully illuminated, but there's a glow emanating from the room, and I can't resist the morbid urge to walk towards the light.

There's a dying fire in the hearth, one last log gently crackling, burning orange. In the corner is an old-fashioned table lamp with a warm, dim yellow bulb that casts a soft halo of light around Elizabeth.

At first, I think she's asleep. She's so still. But then she takes a sip from a mug of tea, a curl of steam rising up and catching the light. There's a quiet clink when she puts the mug down on the coffee table, unfurling herself from the blanket she's wrapped in, and she replaces the tea with a pen. In her other hand is a book.

I hold my breath, peering around the door frame as she thumbs through the pages of a battered novel, red pen in hand, and writes something near the back. The book is all white, the front and back covers creased and discoloured, and it's only when she rearranges her position on the sofa that I see exactly which book it is.

The Key to Anchor Lake.

She's holding it; it's real, this book I keep hearing about, the one I've been desperate to get my hands on. Elizabeth has it. And she's defacing it with every flick of her red pen, a sight that makes my eyes burn.