Category: fiction

The light dies bloody and he goes inside.

He lives with the electric lights.  He needs to work, and he works all night every night.

The big kitchen table they both loved: more than a hundred years old, rich with the patina of ten thousand meals, a million knife-marks, a billion human touches.  It was the first piece of furniture they bought together for the house.  It was hard to look at now.

Now he spreads out his maps and charts, as he does every night.  He takes his notebook from his pocket, built from leather, twine, thread and paper he makes himself from old scraps and rags.  His constant task.  Reconstructing the exact properties of the night she disappeared through the fogou.  Comparing the measurements of the day to the elements in play that night.  Looking for some approaching conjunction, some combination of stars and pressure that opened the fogou that one night and never yet again.

If he can find the conditions that caused it to open and take her away, and recognize those conditions when they come close again, he has a chance to reach through it to Annwn and bring her home.

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“No.”

“Your wife was an intelligent woman with resources of her own.  If she left, then she left completely.  Left this life with you and started again somewhere else.  Unseen.  Here’s my thing.  You’re not well.  You weren’t well when I first came here, and you’re not well now.  If you weren’t well before she left.  Then maybe she left for a good reason.  And if you’re not well, you shouldn’t be out here on your own.  So I came out here to tell you it’s over, and to ask you to come back where it’s safe.”

He says nothing.

After a moment, the detective nods and says, “Think about it.  You won’t be seeing me again.  Good luck.”

She leaves, picking her way across the field.  He watches the tip of her plastic boot hunt for grass to touch on, navigating around the pools of wet bare mud.  A careful escape from a place she doesn’t belong to.

He stands there until he hears her car start.  The car he didn’t see arrive.  He didn’t ask her if the drones were hers.  He feels like he didn’t have to.

Alone, he thinks.  He hasn’t been alone since the day they moved here, he thinks.

The wind picks up, as if in answer.  The mouth of the fogou rings.

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“The other thing,” she says.

He just looks at her.  Her plastic clothes and plastic boots.  Wrong boots for this ground.  She’d be scraping them on the tyre of her car in a little while.  Prising them off at her front door and rubbing them with plastic wipes.  Her plastic little eyes looking for the new plastic shine.

“Have you been following the news?”  she asks.

“No.”

“The other thing I wanted to do.  I thought about this when I was closing the case file.  You’re in an exposed position out here.  I get that it’s a lovely place.  Though it must have some sadness for you now.  But I wanted to come and tell you in person.  Because I know we upended your life and caused you more grief and stress.  But also because I was worried about you.”

She’s shifting from side to side as she says it to him.  Wants him to think it’s because of the damp cold.  But she’s nervous.  Uncomfortable.  Perhaps a little embarrassed. 

“Worried,” he says, his voice kept flat.

“Yes.  With all the changes.  I just thought that you’d be safer in town.  Or even in the city.  With what’s coming, with what might come, I’d hate to think of you out here on your own.” 

He looks around.  At the standing stones, at the fogou, and thinks, On my own?

The silence dawdles awkwardly.

“Did you kill your wife?” she asks.

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He hears the voice, then, speaking his name.  The woman’s voice.  But it comes from behind him.

He turns to see the detective from the town, hands in her jacket against the cold, studying him.

He considers her face, the micro-expressions of a woman who wants to say, “returning to the scene of the crime?” 

Instead, she says his name again, and looks around at the grounds.  “This really is a wonderful place. I’m not surprised you decided to stay.”

He speaks.  His voice comes out dry.  It gets little exercise these days.  He asks her what she wants.

“I’m here to tell you we’ve closed your wife’s case.  Therefore, the case we developed against you.  It’s over.”

Nothing’s over, he thinks.  He looks back at the fogou. 

“It’ll be a few years before you can apply for a declaration of death certificate.  After that, you can ask for a certificate of presumed death and start probate and all that.  We’re satisfied that…”  She pauses, follows his gaze to the fogou.

“Satisfied?”  he says.

“Well.  Some of us aren’t satisfied as such.  But we find no evidence linking you to your wife’s disappearance.  Even after we dug that place out.  Sorry about that, by the way.”

“It survived,” he says.  “It always survives.”

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He gathers up all his notes and books, attempts to impose some kind of order on the sheaf, and then stacks them in a box that slid under his bed.  He had stopped keeping them there, because he couldn’t sleep knowing her traces were buried under the bed, but he told himself it was only until his impending visitor had come and gone.

He spends the rest of the morning waiting by the window in the front room, where the house faced the distant town and city.  Waits for them to come for him again.

Noon passes, and the clouds give up some thin sour sunlight.  Nobody is coming.  He can feel the pull of the fogou.  He tries to remain settled by the windows, but his fingers twitch and his feet grow restless. 

He finds himself at the back door, fighting his boots back on. He doesn’t remember leaving the window. 

He finds himself trudging across the grounds, and doesn’t remember leaving the house.

The sunlight is yellow.

He approaches the fogou.

All the birds begin to scream at him.

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