Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

“You go ahead, for God’s sake!” she said as Jay circled back to give helpful advice. “You’re making me nervous.”

But he stayed close.

“And to think the Eskimos hunt whales in these things,” she shouted.

“Inuit,” he said.

She looked at him, thinking maybe he was giving advice.

“They’re not Eskimos; they’re Inuit.”

Well, she certainly wasn’t Inuit.

“Don’t worry, Ms. Cooper,” she said to no one. “You will always be my favorite mode of transportation.”

He had first left her alone on Friday night. He was meeting up with some friend who was in town.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. Get! Scoot!”

She had waved him off down the snye, standing barefoot in the shallow water as he glided off into the gloaming. He had to lie back on the kayak to pass under the arch of the bridge.

“Have a good trip, honey,” she called after him. It was meant to be a joke. Jay laughed. Good.

But the truth was she did feel like some hausfrau waving her hubby off to work. Then, as soon as he was out of sight, she returned to the little house, locked the doors, and checked the panic room. She hoisted up her mattress, opened the trapdoor, and dropped down to the earthen room, then shimmied along the tunnel with her flashlight in her teeth until she came to the door that led to the outside. Jay had put a good hefty hasp on it and padlocked it. So there were just the windows to worry about. She had gone to sleep the first couple of nights to the imagined tinkling of broken glass.

But there was no broken glass and there were no dead birds or snake skins or messages of any kind.

She had worried about the car, too, wished she could bring it closer, in sight of the house. Jay had suggested laying some boards down over the broken expanse of bridge-only a few feet, after all. But she couldn’t quite imagine driving on such a makeshift overpass. Worse still was the thought of having to escape the house and finding the planks gone! So she checked the car first thing every morning when she went out for her run. She checked the ground around it for signs of footsteps. For a week now, there had been nothing more serious than dew to contend with. Dew and the odd petal of a flowering tree.

And once deer tracks.

She imagined some deer peering into the Mini looking for whatever it was deer ate. Jelly beans? Cedar-flavored jelly beans.

And so, bit by bit, she let the magic place settle down around her. She got into a kind of rhythm that was comforting and stimulating at the same time in ways she had never imagined possible. Up at seven, a jog down the Upper Valentine Road to where it ended at the river, a shower, breakfast, and sitting at her laptop by eight or so. Lunch at noon, like any working Joe. A little nap just for the luxury of it, a little reading, work until five, and treat yourself to a glass of wine. She found a video store in town and rented DVDs to play on her computer. What more could a girl want?

EXT. TULLOCH-NIGHT

FAIRY LIEUTENANT

So what do you think, sir? Do we take her tonight?

KING OF THE FAIRIES sips from a glass of mead. Stares at the little moonlit house.

KING (Nodding)

Alert the voles, the moths, the bats. Tonight we move in.

Yikes! Maybe the aloneness was getting to her. Her script would not behave. She stared out the window at the hill in the meadow. No sign of fairy troops. Still, she wished Jay were here.

It had been great to have him around. He had worked on his music a lot. Compared to him, she felt like a fraud. Writing a film script, yeah, right! He’s four years older than you, she told herself. But it was more than that. There was this commitment toward his art she didn’t feel, not in the same way. Then again, she wasn’t sure if he was always this conscientious or whether he was making some kind of a point.

He worked with headphones, so it was almost as if no one was there except for the squeaking of his chair. Then he’d come down and ask if it was all right if he played or listened to something out loud. So polite. And what could she say? If she was writing, she’d close the door to her bedroom and work with her laptop on her lap and her iPod playing music she could tune out. She couldn’t tune out Jay’s music. Couldn’t tune him out, either.

Apart from her morning run along the road, she explored the island, her mace in her pocket, though it seemed absurd in the light of day. She explored but not too far. Never into the Dark Forest. And never to the end of the snye, where the wetlands took over. The land down where the snye met the river was owned by mosquitoes that seemed to have a thing for her virgin New York flesh.

It had been strange to watch Jay from her “office window,” arriving at the little house, pulling his kayak up onto the bank. She had felt like a voyeur watching him strip off his flotation device. Odd the feeling she felt to look at him, the fluttering inside. Don’t go there, girl, she warned herself.

And now there was Iris. This would help to settle things down-batten down the hatches on any unwarranted flights of fantasy. She would have to decide to like Iris.

Distance was a funny thing.

Cramer was twelve when Mavis found the little yellow house overlooking Butchard’s Creek. It was so near to Chester’s Corner, she didn’t even have to change her phone number when they moved there. The school bus that picked him up at the foot of the drive took under fifteen minutes to get him to the school in the village, Eden Elementary. The bus trundled west along the Upper Valentine over the old bridge, and they were there, just like that.

Then in ’96, the bridge was closed down.

The county seemed to take forever settling on what to do with it, deciding, at last, that it was underused and too expensive to rebuild. So it was condemned. And because it was unsafe to leave standing, it was torn down. All that was left now were two sets of crumbling concrete pylons in the middle of the river and the yellow-and-black barricades with DANGER written all over them, where the Upper Valentine Road ended. From the barricade, you could see the township works garage on the edge of the village. In winter when the foliage was off the trees, you could even see his old middle school. You didn’t have to have much of an arm to hurl a stone most of the way across the Eden from where the road ended. But the bus that picked Cramer up after they tore down the bridge took over forty-five minutes to get him to school each morning. Chester’s Corner, where he and his mother had lived since his birth-with its little wooden-floored grocery store and post office and the garage where she had bought the Taurus, second-hand-might as well have been the moon.

Distance was a funny thing.

His second year at Ladybank Collegiate, Cramer realized he could get to town quicker by river than road. It took him just over half an hour if he put some muscle into it. He didn’t know back then who lived in the striking low house of window and yellow stone on the outskirts of town, the house with the sweeping lawns and the little jetty out onto the Eden. He passed it every good-weather morning and again as he returned in the afternoon without knowing that Marc Soto had lived there. And he didn’t know about the snye, farther upriver, the secret stream that led to the little house that had been Soto’s studio. When he had followed Jay there last fall, it was the first time he had laid eyes upon the place, but he guessed right off what it was-what it had been-and he took it all in, in its every detail. This, he knew, was the house in which he must have been conceived. The little bridge leading to it was crumbling. He noticed that as well. All these bridges that used to lead somewhere and no longer did.