Category: fiction

He tells the teacher he cannot miss the chance to see her again.  To rescue her.

“To make the last few years of your life mean something,” the teacher says.  “And what if you’re wrong?  What then?”

He has no answer, because the question is meaningless to him.

The teacher studies the man in front of him carefully, as if calculating the sum of the man.  Eventually, the teacher’s shoulders drop.

“Let me explain one thing, son.  Out there?  It’s all going to hell.  Every mistake we made as a society in the last eighty years is coming back for us with fire and knives.  All the things that you and I thought were good and beautiful, others thought were poison.  And the things we thought of as poison were food for the joy of others.  It turns out that there are more of them than there are of us, and there always was.  The arc of the universe bends towards those who can hate better, and that’s all there is to it.  Your wife knew that.  That’s why she agreed to move out here with you.  To find some peace.  But now the poison and the fure and knives have finally arrived here, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.  In conclusion, it has, as we used to say, all gone a bit Pete Tong.”

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He invites the teacher in, finds a second glass, blows the dust out of it and pours his visitor a dose of mead.  He and his wife met the teacher during their first months in the house.  He taught mathematics in the town but his passion was local history.

The teacher sucks his teeth after taking his dose, as if trying to discover if they had any enamel left after sinking the drink.  “That’ll descale the pipes,” he smiles.  The teacher always talks with a smile.  “Thus fortified, we must away.  Shit’s going down, the balloon’s going up, it’s all gone pear-shaped and whatever other transformative metaphors you like.  Off through the magic door we must go.”

He asks if the teacher means the fogou.  The teacher laughs.

“God, no.  Your front door.  I could not in all conscience leave you here alone to face the oncoming storm.  We’re heading north.  My family has a house in Wales with plenty of room.  Light a couple more candles and I’ll help you pack a go-bag.  My car’s at the top of the road.  I put it in the trees to cover it.  Can’t be too careful.  Now then.  On with you.”

He tells the teacher he cannot leave.  Shows the teacher his calculations. 

“Son,” the teacher says.  “Even if you were right and your fogou is due to reopen.  Even if your wife really did disappear through it, and you still think it will wake up one day and let her back out.  She is better off where she is.  If she comes back to what’s coming, she’ll wish she hadn’t.  Your best hope is that she’ll stick her head out, say ‘fuck this’ and climb back into Annwn.”

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Power cut.

He waits for his eyes to adjust, and then walks into the kitchen to find the candles where he left them.  Shakes the box of matches: fewer in there than he would like.  Carefully rasps one down the striker, husbands the flame and lights three candles.

Husbands the flame, he thinks to himself.  This is what I do now.

He walks the candles back to the kitchen table and resumes work by old light.  Sips his mead.  The numbers become elusive by candlelight.  They were clear under new electric glow, but uncertain in ancient flame.   Still, he is certain. 

There’s a knock at the door.  One he knows.  Bap bapabapbap bap-bap.  Tired smile.  First smile of the day?  It makes his face ache in a surprising way, muscles that have been asleep for a while.  That idiot always knocks the same way.

At the door, the teacher holds his little wind-up torch under his face.  “What a night for the lights to go out, eh?  You need to come with me now.”

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It has to make sense, he tells himself.  As he tells himself every night.  In the ancient world, all monuments and structures were tools intended to work with the alignment of skies and seasons. Their operations were calendrical.  They meshed with the landscape and the environment.  Therefore, conditions around the fogou on the night his wife disappeared had to happen again one day.  There was nothing special about that day – no eclipse, no meteor shower, no unique event he has been able to pinpoint.

And so, every night: the tables, the maps, the notes, the constant futile attempt to puzzle out the locks of a door he cannot even see. 

But, as the dark creeps up on him, he sees numbers, lines and asterisms closer together than before.

He paces around the table.  Looks again.  Pours himself a cup of homemade blackberry mead, circles the table as he drinks, looks again and again.  Wondering if he’s fooled himself.  Wondering if he’s made a mistake, or has just convinced himself something is there when it’s really just a madman’s mess of scribbled spells.

He decides, tentatively, that the numbers are right.  There is a clear convergence.

Even if he’d believed the detective?  There was no way he could leave now.

And that is when the lights go out.

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