The Whitsun Figure

It was the first Sunday after Trinity, in the year of the great drought, and I was not yet eight. My mother’s people had all come to my aunt Elspeth’s farm, a low stone house crouched at the foot of a hill that rose like a green whale’s back against the pale June sky. The house was old, and the land around it was old, and the well at the edge of the yard had run dry that spring, leaving a cracked circle of mud. After the midday meal, the women had hidden painted eggs in the orchard, and we children had scoured the long grass and the gnarled apple trees until our baskets were full. Now the others were running toward the barn, laughing, to collect their prizes—little net bags of sweets and shiny foreign coins. I stopped. I stopped because I saw something among the elderberry bushes that fringed the bottom of the hill.

The bushes were not yet in full flower, but the green clusters were just beginning to show white. The sun was low, around four in the afternoon, casting long shadows that reached toward the house. As I stared, a shape began to form among the leaves. It was white—not the white of cloth or paper, but a kind of luminous whiteness, like the moon behind a thin cloud. It spun slowly, expanding and contracting as if it were breathing, and it had no definite edges. I felt no fear at first, only a strange curiosity, as if I were watching a trick of the light. But then I became aware of a presence behind me, very tall, and so close that I could feel its warmth on the back of my neck. It was like standing near a stone wall that had been baking in the sun. I tried to turn, but my legs would not obey. I wanted to call out to my cousins, but the sound stuck in my throat.

The white shape in the elderberries grew more solid, and for a moment I thought I saw a face within it—not a human face, but something with too many eyes, too many folds of skin. Then the presence behind me spoke, or rather, I felt a voice in my mind, not with words but with a pressure of meaning. It said: ‘You see it too, don’t you? Then you are chosen.’

I must have screamed, or at least made some sound, because suddenly my uncle Matthew was there, shaking me, asking what was wrong. The white shape was gone. The presence was gone. The hill was just a hill, the elderberries just bushes. I tried to tell them, but they laughed, saying I had imagined it. But my grandmother, who had come limping from the house, looked at me with a serious face. She said nothing, only stared at the hillside for a long time, and then she took my hand and led me inside. She did not give me my prize. She gave me a cup of warm milk and told me to sit by the fire until my hands stopped shaking.

That night, I could not sleep. The room was filled with the breathing of my cousins and the creak of the old house. I lay in the dark, thinking about the white shape and the presence behind me. And then I heard it again—a low hum, like a bee trapped in a jar, coming from the direction of the hill. I got out of bed and went to the window. The moon was up, and the hill was silver. And there, at the edge of the elderberries, was a figure. It was tall, far taller than any man, and it was made of the same white substance as the shape, but now it had a form: a long body, long arms, and no head. It stood perfectly still, facing the house. I watched it for what felt like hours, and then it slowly raised one arm, as if beckoning. I do not know how, but I knew it was beckoning to me.

I crept downstairs and out the back door, my bare feet silent on the cold stone. The grass was wet with dew, and the air smelled of earth and something else—something like rust. As I walked toward the hill, the figure did not move, but the white shape reappeared in the elderberries, spinning faster now. The presence was beside me, walking with me, and I felt its warmth envelop me like a blanket. It whispered, again without words: ‘You have come. That is good. The first one in forty years.’

I stopped at the edge of the bushes, just a few feet from the tall figure. It was not hostile, I felt, but it was not friendly either. It was like something from a world where our ideas of friend and enemy did not exist. The white shape moved out of the elderberries and merged with the tall figure, and suddenly the figure grew even taller, and a mass of faces appeared in its surface—faces that looked like my mother’s, my grandmother’s, my own, but twisted and empty. The presence behind me said: ‘We have been waiting. The world forgets, but we remember. We come for the ones who can see.’

And then I understood. My grandmother had seen. She had seen on this hill when she was a child, and she had spent her whole life pretending she had not. That was why she had not spoken until we were alone, and why she had given me the milk. She had been protecting me. But protection is not enough, not once they have found you.

The tall figure reached down, and I felt no fear, only a terrible calm. It touched my forehead with a hand that was soft and cold, and I felt something enter me—a memory that was not mine, a memory of a thousand years ago, when the hill was a burial mound and the people who lived here danced in the summer. The presence said: ‘Now you are part of us. You will carry our story. You will never be alone.’

When I woke, I was back in my bed, and the sun was streaming through the window. My grandmother was sitting beside me, her hand on my head. She looked old, older than I had ever seen her. She said: ‘You went to them, didn’t you?’ I nodded. She sighed, and her eyes were wet. ‘Then there is a price to pay. They will come back when you are older, when the drought returns, and they will ask you to bring another.’

I did not understand then what she meant. But I understand now. I am forty years old, and my grandmother is long dead. The farm was sold, and I have moved far away. But tonight, as the sun sets, I see it in the garden—the white shape spinning in the hedgerow, and I feel the tall presence behind me, warm as a summer’s day. And I know there is a child among my neighbors who will stop and stare, and I will have to choose. That is the price I pay for seeing. That is the gift I was given on the day of the drought, when the elderberries bloomed out of season, and the figure came down from the hill.