The following is a sample story from Witches Sail in Eggshells by Chloe Turner. You can read about the background behind the story here.
Hagstone by Chloe Turner
Leda lifted the necklace from the mirror’s shoulder, letting the knotted stones tumble across the back of her hand. She’d thrown off last night’s childish panic; had woken calm, absolved, a greedy hunger in her belly. The answer would come from the stones. She sat a moment longer, drawing the square-cut leather thong around the base of her thumb, letting one smooth pebble after another trace the lines of her palm.
But if she were looking for resolution, it would not be these dumb flints to provide it. Workhorses: so commonplace on the beaches where she’d collected them, she had half a shoebox more under her bed. Enough for a half a dozen more necklaces like this one. Some were sea-polished to poor man’s gemstones, but many had kept their chalky outer coat, or were warped and bulging, or pitted like skin wracked by some wretched disease. All had the hole in their heart. She rolled them in the scoop of her palm now, skimming their surface with her fingertips, closing her eyes to feel the voids hollowed from their cores by the sea. There was pleasure in their eroded silkiness, but no magic there.
No, the answer would lie in what was knotted into the
thong alongside the fastening, so that it lay hidden under Leda’s hair unless the necklace slipped or was pulled. It was the only stone she hadn’t found herself: something foreign, something strange. At the surface, this lump of buffed up Mecklenburg shingle was grey-blue like many of the flints, but other colours swam beneath: strata of green, clouded patches, fleurs-de-lis of violet and brown. They shifted in Leda’s memory so that the effect was subtly different every day.
With the necklace on, she liked to slide her index finger inside her collar, to feel the slippery cool of the stone against her skin. She reached there now, closed her eyes again. Smiled; yes, this was right. Walking down the stairs, hand still at her neck, she tucked the polished mass into the crook of her finger joint, better to sense its power.
*
They’d been on the beach in Dorset. She’d been twelve, thirteen maybe, but tall, so that her jeans always left a cold stripe of skin at her ankle. Her father, a vague man in baggy grey slacks, used to call her his beanpole. Her sister, Sage, the right height for sixteen, said that Leda’s long, plimsolled feet made her look like a letter L or a small-town clown.
It was their mother—never able to sit still for long—who had suggested the sailing that afternoon, cheeks already pinking with enthusiasm and lukewarm rosé as she hustled Leda from her beach towel. There was a quiet but consistent breeze, and the next family along the estuary shore had two lightweight dinghies they were happy to lend. Leda’s mother took the larger. Her outsized sunglasses flashed unknowable signals as she tacked across the channel with confidence, leaving Leda to fold herself into the cramped hull of the second boat, the boy twins from the other family along for the ride. Leda’s father was elsewhere—fixing something, probably—so it was the father of the twins who launched them from the sand. Sage smirked from the picnic blanket, guarding the basket against passing dogs, she claimed.
‘I don’t know what I’m doing. You’ll have to help.’
The boys had been staring from the far side of the boom as Leda fumbled, but now they took over the ropes, silent but not unfriendly in their relief. She sat back, trailing her fingertips through the water, glimpsing the pale blooms of jellyfish in the churn. She watched her mother’s skilful passage out to the mouth of the estuary.
‘What’s that?’ She’d noticed a string of something at the prow, mossy with petal weed.
‘Hagstones,’ one twin said.
‘Some old rubbish,’ said the other.
‘Dad says they kept boats safe, in the old days.’
The first nagged at his nostril rim with a fingernail while his brother worked the tiller.
‘What are they?’
‘Just stones, with a hole. The sea digs it out. Or the river.
Dad’s always on at us to collect them.’
They were approaching the line of breakers at the river’s mouth, and the water was suddenly cold. Leda retrieved her hand, tucked it into the fleece of her sleeve.
Hagstones. Adder stones. Glain Neidr. Serpent’s eggs.
She started collecting them herself that summer. Brought enough home to line the windowsill, until her mother— dusting with barely contained anger, as was her way—swept them into the bin and away.
So the next summer she began again. The Gower this time. Sage, kicking sand with frustration at the lack of mobile reception, offered to help, and Leda let her, though her pleasure was in the finding. Picking her way around the sharp rocks at the river’s edge, feeling the slip of weed and fin, eyes trained on the pebbles for the distinctive void at the heart of the hag. By the end of the week, the shoebox was full.
The year after, when Sage returned from a month in Germany, complete with tattoo and the lust of a Greifswald swimming instructor, she’d brought back a gift for Leda. A polished stone with a hole in its heart, tossed onto her dresser with the wrap of hashish which had spent the flight in the underside of her bra. But their mother had thrown the hash in the fire, and the argument had burned for days, so the present was forgotten, ungiven. Not long after, Sage had left again, for university in Berlin. Visiting her room from time to time, Leda lingered over the stone. Running her fingertips over its swell, even then, she’d felt its lure.
Around the same time, their father left too, though with
less commotion. On the walls, photographs in which he featured gradually lessened in number, or just lost his likeness as if he had never been there at all. Afterwards, Leda and her mother stalked each other through empty rooms. Her mother’s housework, ever-indignant, began to wreak casualties. Plates, of course, and whisky glasses. A Willow pattern milk jug. A chair smashed over the kitchen table. The windowsill of stones in Leda’s room disappeared again one day, shipped off to the tip with any last vestiges of her father from the garage. Leda had kept silent—the gulf between them was so great now, to engage her mother would feel like defeat.
Instead, she fished the shoebox out from under her bed,
leaving a bare, accusing rectangle behind in the matted dust. There had been no trips away since Sage had left, so these stones were the last of it, and she wanted them close.
Leda had already laced the rest—double knotted, as she recalled the string on that sailing boat years back—when she remembered Sage’s ungiven gift. Gathering it up that dark afternoon, she lifted it to her cheek to feel its chill. She traced the outline of her bottom lip, slipping it inside and over the wet inner places of her mouth. She might not have been the one to find it, but there was something about this stone.
From the very first day she wore the necklace, there was a shift. Tiny things: two slices of bread left of the loaf, just enough for her sandwich, and the bus rounding the corner just as she reached the stop. The old guy in her preferred seat had to stand to stretch his back. A free period after first break because Miss Vine had gone home with cramps.
Then, in the canteen queue, Alice’s boyfriend, Robbie, broke away from Alice’s hooked arm to ask if Leda might go over Death of a Salesman with him sometime. Robbie was slow, dumb as a flint himself—what did he have to offer on the American Dream? But his arms tested the seams of his suit jacket, and his lips were plumped, with only the lightest down above the upper. Leda remembered that stone against her own lip, wondered how it would feel to be pressed up against Robbie, teasing him with that delicious cool along his full mouth.
Last week she’d have made some excuse, afraid of the repercussions. But she found herself shrugging ‘sure, what time?’ When Alice was angry, she bit her own lower lip—thin, under her rabbity teeth—and looked uglier than she deserved.
Nothing happened with Robbie that day, though his fingers grazed her forearm as he said goodbye. But the next day, the bus was on time again—unheard of—and the woman in Leda’s seat jumped up at the first stop to see to her crying child. Later, at college, Leda came first in the Spanish mocks, because Faisel—always top—was suspended for cheating. Robbie said ‘alright’ to her on the way out, Alice bristling a few paces behind, and his friend Pete gave him a dig in the ribs which meant something.
Walking to the bus, she heard that Rachel Harris (bane of Leda’s life back at St Mark’s Primary) had slipped over nothing in the canteen, breaking her nose on a table leg, just as Leda had long imagined she might. When she got home, her mother was out. There was pizza, within date, in the fridge. While she ate, she twisted the necklace’s thong into a knot, so that the edge of that stone pinched the skin at the back of her neck.
On the third day, lifting the necklace to her throat, the stone looked darker, the clouds denser. When she fastened the knot, the thong was tight against her flesh, as if her neck had swelled overnight.
Her mother appeared in tears while Leda was eating cornflakes, spouting about neglect and regret, spilling twenty-quid notes from her purse like it was Christmas. Then, on the bus, Leda’s seat came up again: the Indian guy who always carried a Bible started clutching his head before they’d even reached Park Road, getting off three stops earlier than usual. Through the bus’s back window, Leda watched him grabbing for a tree trunk—one of those flimsy maples with the peeling bark—staggering like a man at sea.
Robbie was waiting at the gates, and he walked right up to campus with her, his hand in the small of her back. Later, she asked around about Alice, but people were vague, or dismissive. When Robbie invited her down Alma Road for a smoke at break, they ended up in the alleyway by the chip shop, his fat fingers probing the bent underwire of her bra. She felt the knot in the necklace thong rolling against the brickwork as he lifted her, grunting as he did so, and the stone was warm against her neck as his lips parted the collar of her flimsy school shirt.
It might have gone further if Mr Beales hadn’t walked past the end of the alleyway, and Leda hadn’t got spooked and insisted they walk back to college. On the way back across the playing field, she spotted a wrap of notes in an elastic band: £100 in crisp twenties, right behind the football goal. She split it with Robbie, which brought back his stupid grin.
Then, just before the final bell, watching him dig a hole in the desk edge with a biro, came the uncompromising blast of the fire alarm. Real smoke, spilling down the sides of the design and tech building like a grey coverlet with edges you couldn’t make out. Robbie stood beside her in the arts block courtyard, his big hand wrapped round hers, while students—twenty, fifty, they kept coming—fell coughing from the double doors, until the flow thinned out and the doors swung shut.
‘Where’s Hutton?’
‘Fuck knows. He probably lit the thing.’
People around them started to look for the thin, angry man who wielded tools like weapons at the top of the DT block. He’d been Leda’s tutor last year. Had taken it upon himself to remove her brand-new piercings by hand: the second stud in her lobe; the silver barbell rook through the cartilage in her upper ear; and, most painful of all, the spiral through three holes in her helix.
‘Against the rules,’ he’d said, each word timed to coincide with a twist of the handle, as he crushed the delicate piercings afterwards in the worktop vice.
‘You don’t think he’s still up there?’ She’d not seen Robbie worried before. The sandy freckles on the side of his neck had turned pink, and he was pinching his lip, manipulating the plump flesh.
Leda shrugged, and Robbie’s eyebrows dipped in a frown of surprise. The smoke was thicker now, touchably thick, leaking from the top floor windows. Leda imagined the searing heat up there, felt the stone at her neck pulse with it. Through the archway, they heard the fire engine scream into the car park. Fire officers in bulky kit spilled across the courtyard: shouting, pointing, hoisting hoses that unrolled like giant tapeworms across the thin grass.
All around her there were hands to mouths. Girls embracing. Alice was there, on the ceramics studio steps, staring across towards Robbie like she’d seen a ghost. Stuart Mann, last to emerge, was vomiting against the backup generator. The puke was reddish: Ribena or blood. Leda didn’t care. She was remembering the crack of the helix spiral, which had cost all the money she had, and £5 stolen from her mother’s purse. How Mr Hutton’s nostrils had flared as he held the bench with one hand and twisted the vice handle with the other. The heat was pricking sweat across her forehead.
Staff were hustling the crowd back now. Leda resisted,
wanting to see.
‘Out the front, main drive. The fire brigade need this space now.’ All cleavage and tie-dye, Mrs Barratt was swollen with sudden importance.
It was Robbie who led Leda away, her eyes still trained on the double doors at the foot of the building. At her neck, the stone was scorching. She rubbed under her collar, expecting her flesh to be sticky with burn, but there was nothing. She didn’t have to look at the stone to know that the clouds inside it would have darkened to black.
Guilt did come, but only when the body was disgorged from the staircase on a stretcher forced through the double doors, a fire officer at head and foot. Hutton was covered, but his face was exposed.
‘He’s alright, then,’ Robbie said, fist pumping. ‘Alive, anyway.’
At last, remorse. It seemed to ooze from the other stones at her neck, seeping across her clavicles, down her sternum, fanning across her ribs. With its whooping siren, an ambulance took the corner at pace.
‘Come back to mine,’ Robbie said. ‘This stuff, I can’t explain it. It’s made me feel horny.’
His hand was on her waistband, bitten down fingers already pinging the elastic of her tights. But she wriggled away, easing the necklace’s thong from the skin of her neck at the same time. She wanted to be free of them both.
‘No,’ she said, and ‘Mum needs me at home,’ remembering the tears and cash disgorged at the breakfast table.
‘Suit yourself,’ Robbie shrugged, but the fabric around his biceps tightened, and he didn’t smile as he turned away.
Leda started down the drive, a screw of fear in her belly. She’d give the bus a miss tonight. She needed fresh air and somewhere to dump this thing. She’d walk the park route; all sorts got chucked in that lake. But as she was passing the stop, the bus pulled up alongside her. And when she ignored it, the driver tooted and waved, so she felt like she had no choice. Her seat was free, of course, though every other one was taken, and a man in a suit was slumping on a hand-pull just inside the rear door. She pulled her knees together, closed her eyes.
At the other end, Leda planned to sling the necklace in the skip outside Number 32, but there was no sign of the huge yellow carton which had sat there for months. She would have thrown it in the wheelie bin at home, but her mother was already there on the doorstep, ushering her in. She was wearing the daisy dress Leda’s dad used to love, and the tears had been replaced with a smile that almost reached her eyes.
The first chance she got, Leda ran to her room, catching the waxy flesh of her neck in the three mirrors of her dressing table as she yanked the thong away from her skin. The knot was reluctant to give. When she’d worked it loose at last, there were red marks where the stones had been, and a pinpoint of stiffness at the back of her neck.
In her palm, the stone was dull now, the clouds close-set and surly. She thought of Hutton: the blackened flesh around his hairline, the limp way his arm had begun to slip from the side of the stretcher before the medic tucked it away. Bile surged in her throat, and her breath felt shallow and unreliable. It couldn’t have been, surely? She was tired suddenly, spent. Could it? But the tiredness, it was seeping up under her eyelids, weighting them, blurring her thoughts so that she could only think of sleep. The morning, then. She’d unlace the stones, walk the park way, throw the lot of them into the depths of the pond. Burn the thong on the caretaker’s bonfire, if that’s what it took. But tomorrow… She didn’t make it under the duvet, and as she slipped towards sleep fully clothed, she dreamed of a hand moving through oil-dark water. Of cellophane jellyfish. Of glowing stones sinking through the grimy depths. At the foot of her bed, the necklace lay draped across the dressing table where she had left it, reflected in all three mirrors so that the sodium glow filtering through the curtains from the street seemed to collect upon it. The hagstone waited.
by Chloe Turner from Witches Sail in Eggshells (£8.99)
