Serialised Story: The Hagstone Promise
This fantasy story was posted to the original version of this website in two parts across August 2022. Both parts are included here for your reading convenience
Part One
Original Description: Another piece of writing based on a writing prompt, this one from user U/The_Transginger on Reddit (which can be found here ).
This story has two parts, the second of which will be out soon.
For most of the year there was precious little to do in the place where the land met the sea. The tourists took the fun with them when they went home, leaving us nothing but traces. Browning grass on the village green where the funfair had stood. Picnic litter strewn across the dunes. Shutters drawn low on sleeping amusement arcades as they dreamt through all the grey days yet to come.
As a young girl, I lived with my mother in the rooms above a fish and chip shop. I can’t remember if the chip shop belonged to her or if she just worked there, but it took up almost all her waking hours. The role of father was played by a carousel of dubious local men, but they all blur together in my head. The whiff of beer and cigarette smoke. Faded blue and green and red etched into leathered skin. The warm pink sting of being struck, and then the white hot of raised voices.
I was unwanted and I knew it. But there was a freedom in that; the freedom to pass through a place totally unregarded. I was a scruffy little feral girl, roaming as far afield as my legs could carry me and living an elaborate fantasy life. In one direction I could walk for miles through farmer’s fields, muttering to the fairies only I could see. In the other was the beach, and my hours of combing on my hands and knees for sea glass and hagstones.
The beach was my favourite, in the end. My friend played with me there.
We first met on a cold January afternoon, just as the sun was setting. I had climbed up onto one of the wooden groynes and had tried to tiptoe all the way along it, but I had started to stumble. I had gotten so caught with maintaining my balance that I didn’t notice I’d walked fifty feet out to sea, and when I fell, I didn’t know that the water was deeper than I was tall. But I’d fumbled desperately with my little hands, and barely managed grab onto one of the wooden beams.
I wrapped both of my arms round the crumbling wood and squeezed my eyes shut. The ocean gnawed at an open gash on my ankle, and I felt a scream bubbling up in my throat, but my teeth remained anchored into my bottom lip.
Then I felt a prickle around my ankle. The pinch of fingernails. Pulling. Sudden, immense strength. Before I knew it, I was under. My mouth threw open and I was screaming, but it made no sound. Water burned in my throat, the salt like fire.
I thrashed because I knew I was drowning, but then I stopped, limp as a ragdoll. Made peace with what was happening. The ocean would take me, I thought. I would never need to go home again.
But then there was sand. Air, cold and bitter. Bleary eyes blinking out into the shadows. I screamed out between hurried, shallow breaths.
Then she slithered into view, leering down over me. Grey skin. Round black eyes. Hair like strands of seaweed. A body like mine on the top, but long and serpentine on the bottom, slippery like an eel.
She gave an uncertain, guttural sound.
I screamed again, but she tried to silence me, jabbing a bony finger into my upper lip.
“You shhh,” she said. “Shhh. Quiet now.”
But I couldn’t be calmed. I continued to wail.
“No no. No more drowning. Safe here. Safe,” the creature continued, voice hushed, smothering my mouth with the oily palm of her hand.
Her eyes seemed to glimmer, then. Just for a moment. I realised I could recognise something in them. Something familiar. There was no need to be afraid because she was also a child like me. I took in a sharp intake of breath through my nose and stifled my tears. Once she was sure that I would be quiet, she retracted her hand, and I tried my best to get my bearings.
We were on the beach, under the great, algae-streaked legs of the pier that loomed above us. It was cold and dank and shady, the gaps between the boards casting thin snakes of light onto the sand. It was not a particularly pleasant place to be, and I was starting to shiver. My little winter coat was completely waterlogged.
“You smell like fish,” I said.
“You were going to drown,” she replied. “Why were you so far out?”
“I was trying to climb the… The uh… The big wooden things.”
She tilted her head quizzically. “Why?”
“I… I dunno.”
“That’s stupid.”
There was a pause then. She blinked deliberately.
“What… What are you?” I asked.
“Mmm… Uh,” she fumbled. “I am… I am from the sea.”
“Like a mermaid?”
“Mer-maid?” She said, drawing out the word like she was testing it out for the first time.
“Yeah, like… Half human and half fish. From a picture book.”
“No, I’m not half of anything. I’m all me.”
“Why did you save me?”
She drew back from me, just a little bit. Her gigantic tail slithered, a torn dorsal fin unfurling like a fan.
“You were in danger,” she said. “And it was the right thing to do.”
From that moment on we were bonded. We played games, though she almost always won. She was remarkably agile on land, a sort of predatory precision to her every motion, and I was glad we had met as friends and not foes. Though she couldn’t remain on land forever, and had to slink back into the ocean every few minutes to wet her gills.
I stumbled home at gone ten o’ clock to an angry mother and a stodgy dinner in the fridge.
“Little cow. You’ve been out nicking, haven’t you? Social services’ll take you, and I’ll let em’.”
I didn’t respond. It didn’t hurt me anymore. I had a friend.
The days were so much brighter. I got up with the dawn and raced to meet her, and she was always waiting. I would paddle, uncaring that it was winter, and she would swim alongside me. Then we would climb up on the rocks, and I didn’t worry about falling because I knew she’d save me. She’d comb my hair with her spindly fingers and we’d talk. I didn’t have much to talk about because I didn’t have much of a life, but she did, and my questions were endless.
One answer at a time, she unravelled the mysteries of the North Sea.
The animals I only knew fried and battered she devoured raw. Plaice like brown disks, silvery little mackerel, and great knobbly sturgeon. She’d smile as she spoke of them, her cunning black snake of a tongue peeking out across the thorny landscape of her teeth.
She had a mother, some great ocean war-queen, and more sisters than she could count. Up until recently, they had hunted together. Seals were their favourite quarry. The very same seals that the tourists paid a small fortune to see, glimpsing them only through binoculars.
Her family hunted them in a complicated dance, carefully separating one from the group in a flurry of coordinated motions so they could kill them. The best meat was the organs, which went to the greatest of them, and the lowly got the marrow from their tough old bones. She had been great, once; dining on kidney and stomach, but never liver or heart. She had been told by an ancient witch that when she was grown, she would be strong enough to challenge her mother, so her sisters had driven her away. She had taken to prowling the shores until she was large enough to sieze power. The day was approaching, slowly but surely.
“So, you’re all alone now?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “Not anymore.”
“Do you miss them?”
A contemplative rattle emerged from the back of her throat. “No.”
“You’re so lucky. I wish I could leave my stupid family and never go back.”
She tilted her head. “Why don’t you?”
“It’s not that easy.”
We sat in silence for a moment, watching the grey lull of the waves. Then she smiled and started to laugh. She rose from her sitting position, stretching out her coils so she stood tall. “I’ll take you! When I’m all grown up and I’ve killed my mother I’ll take you as my queen and we’ll be free together forever.”
“What?”
“I’ll give you everything. Hearts. Livers. Gold. Do you like gold?”
I fumbled to my feet, raising my hands into the air and almost slipping down the rockface. “I can’t swim! I can’t hunt seals, I’ll drown!”
“The witch,” she said. “She has a spell for that, I’m sure of it.”
“What?”
I lost my footing and stumbled. I yelped in surprise, but my friend caught me in one smooth motion.
When I got home that night, there was an unfamiliar car outside of the fish and chip shop. A nice car. Expensive. It would surely be robbed, I thought.
There was a woman in a neat felt coat on the sofa. Her blonde hair was grey at the root, curls held in place with so much hairspray that I could smell it from half the room away. She smiled at me; her teeth too white by far. Too straight.
“Ah, it’s you,” she said. “Take a seat. I won’t bite.”
The aura of self-righteousness was unmistakable. It was a social worker.
Then my mother appeared at the kitchen doorway, dabbing her eyes with a balled-up tissue.
“I can’t cope with the little monster,” she sniffed, voice dripping with melodrama. “She’s feral. Doesn’t even go to school, she goes out nicking and scratching up cars.”
The social worker’s synthetic smile widened. “Is this true?”
I turned tail and ran.
They both tried to chase me, but neither could match my pace.
I tried to go back down to the beach, but the tide had almost gone in, so I hid in the darkness under the pier where the water was only ankle-deep. I put my face in my hands and howled, my anguish echoing off the weather-beaten timbers. My days of freedom were over. I would be taken away.
Once, a children's charity collector had put a leaflet through our letterbox. It had said that hitting was wrong, and it had a phone number to call, so I told myself that I’d call it. But when my mother found the leaflet hidden under my pillow, she’d torn it up into a hundred tiny pieces and shouted.
“They take away naughty children,” she said. “Children that cause problems for their mums. Give em’ electric shocks, and dope em’ up on pills so they can never be happy again. If you go airing out our dirty laundry to these people, then you’ll really have something to cry about.”
And I really was crying now. Everything was salt, my tears and the sea. Everything hurt. Everything was over.
But then came her hand. My friend’s cold grey hand on my shoulder.
She frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re taking me away!” I blubbed. “I’ve been bad, and now they’re taking me away to the place for naughty children!”
“The what?!”
I grabbed her forearms and looked deeply into her beady black eyes. “Take me with you. Take me to the witch. I want to be with you!”
“I… I can’t go back. Not ‘til I’m strong enough.”
I fell to my knees, the tide drawing in and lapping at my sodden jeans. She shielded me from the water with her tail and moved in close.
“Listen to me,” she whispered, her hissing voice barely audible over the roar of the waves. “They will take you, I can’t help that. But I’ll come for you when I’m grown. I’ll take you away, and together we will crush all of our enemies.”
I sniffed the salt from my nose. “Do you promise?”
Her hand clasped mine. She forced something hard and wet into my palm.
“I promise.”
I pulled my hand away and squinted at the object in the darkness. It was a milky white hagstone, the hole placed perfectly in the centre like a doughnut. By the time I looked up to ask her why she had given it to me she was nowhere to be found.
I gripped the stone tightly and took a deep breath of night air. Tears burned in my eyes, but my body wouldn’t let me cry anymore.
I returned, sodden and sandy and shaking with fear, to the house. The social worker was there, and a policeman.
They took me away. Far away from where the land met the sea.
Part Two
Original Description: Here it is, part two of The Hagstone Promise! This has proven to be quite a lot harder to perfect than the first part, and I'm not as happy with it as I was with the first half.
Still, I'd hate to leave you all hanging for too long. I hope you enjoy it.
For years I mourned the simplicity of the village. The empty seafront. The days when I could wander freely. I mourned her, too.
But, as much as I loathe to admit it, being taken away by social services was not nearly as awful as my mum told me it would be. There were no raised voices, and I was not struck. But there was an eerie liminal fakeness to it all, living the better part of a decade in a bedroom with a fire safety notice on the door and locks on all the windows. I was safe, but not a lot else.
Then, when I came of age, my life was upturned once more. I moved up in the world, but only slightly. From a bedroom with locks on the windows in a children’s home, to a bedsit with locks on the windows in a council building.
My first job was in a kebab shop. It was simple busywork, really. I knew everything I was supposed to do from watching my mother when I was a child. But that barely kept a roof over my head, so I kept my eye out for something better.
I became a cleaner, which suited me better, and earned me just enough for a true place of my own. Soon, I was the proud renter of my very own little house. My first true home.
My life seemed to settle into routine after that. The little feral girl was no more. I was tamed.
But there was still something in the back of my head. Something that gnawed at me. My friend.
Once, in the childrens’ home, I’d had a big emotional outburst about her. I’d told an older boy who bullied me that she was coming for him when she was strong enough, and then the woman with the straight white teeth had taken me to the office to “talk about my feelings.”
“Now now,” she had said. “You’re a big girl. You know that there’s no such thing as mermaids.”
But I’d refused to forsake her. It took a barrage of pills to get me to recant and parrot the lines they’d told me, and even then only barely.
She wasn’t like the fairies I saw in the fields because I knew deep down that they were just my imagination. I wanted to believe in them, to see them flutter and frolic, so I forced myself to until it was so. But she was different. I could not have dreamed up her fingers in my hair. The stories she told me. She was real, I knew it in my bones. And besides, I had the hagstone.
I wore it every day on a cord around my neck. And then, when the cord disintegrated, I put it on a silver chain.
I’d given up hope of her ever coming back. She wouldn’t be able to find me here, so many miles from the sea. But I still liked to think of her.
Once, in the spring, I took the hour-long bus trip back to the village and stayed in a cheap B&B. I couldn’t find her through a whole weekend of searching. I thought that she must’ve forgotten me. It was so many years ago, and we were children after all. I went home emptyhanded. Broken-hearted.
But then there came a knock on the door at gone midnight one night, waking me from my sleep. I groaned, stirring in my bed. A house call at this time could not be good news, I thought.
The knock came again, in loud thumps this time. Then there was a metallic clatter, the sound of the letter box being pushed open, and a voice.
“Hey!”
It was her, I was sure of it. My heart jumped into my throat.
I sprung from the bed and ran to the door, throwing it open wide. And there she was, all grown up. And boy had she grown. She had to stoop to get through the door, and her tail trailed for metres down the corridor.
She was gasping for air, her gills bone dry. And her body was covered in scars, slashes of silvery white on her dark grey hide. But it didn’t seem to bother her. She looked down at me and smiled.
“You came back!” I said.
“I’m sorry I took so long, but you were rather hard to find.”
“Are you.... Can you breathe right now?”
A dry crackle emerged from the back of her throat. “Uhh. No.”
I rushed her into the kitchen, running a tea towel under the cold tap until it was saturated. She crouched obligingly, and I pressed it against her gills, leaving the towel hanging across her shoulders like a scarf.
She inhaled deeply. “That’s… That’s better. Thank you.”
I stood on tiptoes, cupping her cold face in my hands. It was such a nice face, even covered in scars. “So, you did it?” I asked. “You’ve overthrown your mother?”
She smiled, revealing a mouthful of teeth now yellowed and chipped. “Her and many others beside. My rule is now total and unquestioned, and you can be my queen. Come, the witch is waiting.”
Ah. I’d rather forgotten that bit. When I was that broken little girl, it had sounded like the greatest life in the world. But now I was grown. I had a job. A house. I was no longer troubled by pains so great that I felt I needed to escape them so totally.
I was a poor swimmer, and I’d grown a distaste for fish. But I was still so lonely…
She could see the hesitation in my eyes.
“Are… are we still doing that?”
She swallowed hard. “You can say no. I… I’m still glad to see you.”
She took my hand and squeezed it tightly, her curved claws digging slightly into my palm. Why was I doubting? I had wanted this for so long. I couldn’t quite meet her gaze.
“Can’t you just… Can’t we just spend the night together? Talk about it?”
I felt her pat me on the back with her other hand. “We can talk, but I need to be in water. The cloth isn’t working very well anymore.”
I had a bathtub in my little rented house, but not a big one. It barely fit me, so it had an ice cube’s chance in hell of fitting her. Still, we tried. If she laid just right, the top third of her could fit so that her gills were under the water (freezing cold, at her request). The bottom two-thirds, her serpentine tail, hung over the edge in a vast coil on the ground.
“I’m comfortable,” she insisted, teeth gritted.
“Are you sure? I have a garden hose out back if…”
She raised her hand and pointed at my neck. “You still have the stone!”
I touched it, wrapping my finger around the chain and smiling warmly. “I’ve worn it every day since you gave it to me. Was the only proof I had that you were real. I got bullied a lot at the home and…”
“I’ll have to crush all your enemies, too. But it isn’t hard to kill humans. It won’t take long.”
“No! I don’t want you to kill anyone! They were just kids. Kids in a rough situation,” I said. “Kids just like me.”
She gave a drawn-out sigh, slipping backwards in the tub so that her head was underwater. bubbles emerged from her parted lips.
“You can take the social worker if you want though,” I added quietly. “I’ll just look the other way while you’re doing it.”
She smiled, face distorted under the movement of the water.
“And maybe the boss from my first job. You can take him.”
Then, with a great splash, she rose from the water. She gripped the side of the bathtub and looked at me, her eyes wide.
“Is it a good life?” she asked. “Being a human?”
I sighed thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s a lot less free than what you’re used to. A lot less independent. You’ve always got to jump through someone else’s hoop, so to speak. But it’s a safe life. There’s pretty much always enough food to eat, and you never really get into fights, or at least not bad ones.”
She took a lock of her oily black hair and wound it around her finger. “I was thinking. If the witch can turn a human into someone like me, then… Then perhaps she could turn me into a human. Just for a while.”
“Do you want to be a human?”
“I’d like to see what it feels like.”
That was how the whole night was spent, and much of the next day as well; her struggling to sit comfortably in that little bathtub, and me on the floor beside her. We did talk, but she had grown so tired that much of it was of no real consequence.
By the time the afternoon came around, we were planning our leave. But I was still undecided. I cursed the sense of adult practicality I had gained, because she was all I had ever wanted since I was small, but I could no longer imagine a life out at sea.
But she was willing to try out being human. It seemed an awful shame, though; to take a creature so wild and beautiful and make her into just another work-a-day so-and-so. Could she ever be happy that way? Living a life of grey days with nothing to be fought for or plundered?
But she would be safe. I had seen the scars on her tail. The jagged chips in her teeth. A great tear in her leathery dorsal fin. If she was human, nothing would hurt her.
When she explained to me the lengthy route she had taken from the village, I wondered how she’d made it all on her own without suffocating. But this time we had my car, and it would only take an hour.
Though it was difficult to cram her into the back seat, and there was no way she could wear a seatbelt with a bucket of water on her lap to wet her gills with, the concept of a car seemed to rather excite her.
“This is so useful. I’ve never moved so quickly in my life,” she said, open-mouthed with awe, about twenty minutes into the journey. “Does it work underwater?”
"No. It’d break underwater.”
“Why?”
“I dunno, it just would,” I replied. “What you’re wanting is a submarine, and those are very expensive.”
She gave a downhearted sigh. “Oh.”
Once we were out of the city, we reached the miles and miles of open fields. The very same fields I’d haunted like a restless ghost when I was young. I couldn’t help but smile. The afternoon sun lit them up like gold, and they were just as beautiful as they were in my dreams.
But she had something else on her mind. I heard a wet squeal as she prodded the window with her finger.
“I noticed this earlier. All the plants here are in lines, and all the same. Why would someone do this?”
Between the stunning view and her constant questioning, it had gotten rather hard to keep my eyes on the road.
“That’s a field. I told you about fields when I was younger. Do you remember?”
“The place where the fairies live?”
“No. No, I made that up,” I replied. “Food grows in fields.”
“Most of the time we don’t even pick them, we get them from the supermarket.”
“I’d like to pick food from the ground. It sounds peaceful, like the old stories that the witch tells.”
I smiled. “I have a pot of strawberries in my garden, and a tomato plant in a little plastic greenhouse. Then there are blackberries, they’ll be in season soon, but I don’t like them very much.”
“You’re so lucky,” she sighed.
“You think so?”
“Yeah…”
We caught our first glimpse of the sea soon after; a little grey-green bar on the horizon that quickly burst into full view as we approached. Then there was the old pier, its legs long and blackened and skeletal. Gulls wheeling in the sky. The colourful flash of the amusement arcades. The distant whiff of deep fat fryers. The village, alive for the summer.
“Home,” she whispered.
I nodded, but something burned inside me. It all came back to me in an instant. Men with tattoos and cigarettes. Plates of stodgy leftovers. Knowing full well I was unwanted by the person who should’ve wanted me most of all. Being filled with emotions more intense than my little body could hold. But then there were the early mornings. Dirt caked into the treads of my trainers. Cold seawater rushing around my ankles. Basking on the rocks. Knowing her. The fateful night we made our promise.
“Home,” I agreed.
I parked on a quiet road where I knew she wouldn’t be seen, and we headed for the beach. The tide was drawing in and the tourists had left, so we realised that there was no real need for discretion, but we headed for the shadowy darkness under the pier regardless.
We sat in the sand, watching the slow back and forth of the waves. Then, she turned to leave.
“Stay here,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“To call the witch.”
I saw her slither across the beach and disappear into the water, and then I was all alone. I took a deep breath, the air thick with the scent of salt and damp wood. Reaching a hand behind my neck, I unclasped the silver chain so I could hold the hagstone in my hand.
It was such a familiar object; the last thing I saw every night when I took it off, and the first thing I saw in the morning. But here, in the place it had first originated, it seemed brand new again. I slipped it off the chain and clenched it tightly.
She was taking a long time. Had she left me? Had she had a change of heart?
I unclenched my hand and examined the stone again. I held it up to my eye and looked through it, before slipping the hole onto one of my fingers. To my surprise, it fit perfectly. It had been a ring this whole time.
I was so busy admiring it that I almost didn’t notice the great grey behemoth crawling its way towards me. It was the witch, all fifty feet of them. They were too heavy to stand upright, so they crawled, their webbed hands twisted into feet to drag them through the sands. Their hair was a matted tangle, their eyes featureless white pearls.
“So, this is the little morsel that I’ve heard so much about,” the witch said, every word a growl. “Hmmm. They’re a strange looking thing, but they’ll make it as one of us right enough.”
My friend shot the witch a look.
The great beast drew back in surprise. “Oh. It’s going to be that way, is it?”
My friend bit her bottom lip. It was strange. Fear was such a foreign emotion on her face. “Will it be permanent?”
“No,” said the witch. “For a lesser witch it might be, but I’ve been around long enough to know what I’m doing. It will be perfectly reversible.”
“Wait, what’s going on?” I asked.
My friend took my hand. “I was thinking. I can give you hearts and livers and gold, but I can’t give you magical ground food, or… Or houses that move you to wherever you want. But maybe I could stay with you, to keep you safe from things that hurt. I want to be like you, just for a little while. And then, when we want to, the witch can make us like me, and we can hunt.”
“I… I think… I think that might work.”
“So,” asked the witch. “This is really what you want?”
She nodded.
There was a flash of white light. The smell of burning filled the air for just a moment. The witch was gone, and my friend was human.
She was short. Well-built, with squared shoulders and calloused hands. Her skin was pink and raw from the sting of the seawater. She looked at me, dark eyes wide, confused but utterly delighted.
“It worked,” she said, before promptly falling flat on her face.
I crouched down and helped her to her feet. She clung to my shoulders, legs shaking like a newborn fawn.
“How do you work these things?”
“You’ll get the hang of it,” I replied.
I drove her home, wrapped in my jacket, and our life together began.
I can’t say that it was all plain sailing to begin with. She did not take naturally to domesticity, no matter how hard she tried. It was the simple things, mainly.
Cooking food: how much heat was too much, and how much heat was not enough. After her third bout of food poisoning, I taught her how to order takeaway instead. Clothing, and how it absolutely must be worn outside. And property, which confused her for the longest time. Just because it could be taken, that doesn’t mean she could take it.
But once she hit her stride, our lives became complete. The two feral girls; finally tamed and reunited.
When summer comes, and I get a few precious days off work, we go back to the village to fulfil the promise exactly as we made it all those years ago. The witch changes us, and we swim. She hunts, and she gives me hearts and livers and gold.