Tag: nt/FOGOU

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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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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He makes tea that he’d grown, steam and oven-dried himself, and drinks it black and bitter.

He wonders about the brief cloud of airborne plastic eyes, and whether or not he would be visited today.  He wants no visitors today.  There were times, in every endless month, where he found he craved a visitor.  Sometimes he crammed himself down in the small space between the bed and the wall, just to feel something touching him.  Something holding him in space.  In place.  Sometimes he cried.  Unloving stone walls holding him in space in place in hell.

He looks at his kitchen table.  Once they had considered it weathered, used, loved.  These days it just looked scarred.  A dead body put on stilts and laid out on the flagstones.  It was snowed with his notes and calculations.  His endless drawings and measurements of the fogou, that he and his wife had carefully sliced into and that the police had carelessly shoveled up.

If they were watching him again, and if they were coming back, he could not let them see the notes on the place they were all so convinced he had buried her.

The place where he was convinced she left from.

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