Wyl Menmuir - The Many

The house has not been cleared , the agent had said to him from behind a wide empty expanse of desk, and the words come back to him as he lies back in the bath. Timothy gets out of the bath quickly and wraps a towel around himself, and not bothering to dry off, he goes down to the kitchen. With a growing puddle of water gathering around his feet, he stands in front of the kitchen units and takes the handles of the cupboards nearest to him in both hands, opening both units simultaneously. There is the briefest moment in which he feels the open cupboards retain their darkness for a fraction longer than they should before they allow the light in. Both cupboards are empty, and so too are the drawers in the kitchen and the small pantry cupboard by the fridge. All he finds is yellowed newspaper lining the bottoms of all the drawers and shelves. He takes some of the paper out of one of the drawers and, on the paper that is still legible and that does not disintegrate as he pulls it up, he sees the articles are written in a language he does not recognise and the pictures that accompany the articles are blurred, as though the hand that took the photographs was shaking at the time they were taken. Going through all the rooms he finds the small items of furniture that have been there all along and the items he has brought to the house himself, but no sign of any clothes that were there before he arrived, no personal belongings. His search becomes more and more frantic but he finds nothing that could give him any clue about the previous owner, as though all evidence of who he was has been erased.

When Timothy has been all through the house, he dresses quickly and walks out through the kitchen door and around the side of the house to the smaller garden at the back. He searches the garden, turning over stones and moving his hands through the long grass where he thinks he sees objects below the grass line, but comes up with nothing. He walks round to the front and stands for a while by the tree beneath which he had buried the fish, and looks down the garden. At the bottom of the garden, the strips of paper caught on the thorns in the bare hedge hang like the markers of a roadside shrine, limp without the breeze and colourless in the fading light of evening.

He looks back towards the house, which is now a dark shadow against a darkening sky, and tries to picture Perran, but there is nothing of him to grasp, nothing to reveal him or suggest him to Timothy.

Perran is a shifting sand.

Timothy looks up at the upstairs windows and tries to imagine his wife, his children perhaps there too, looking back at him through those windows on a summer morning at some point a few years from now. His wife shouting down at him, asking would he like her to bring him tea in the garden. But he cannot transplant her face onto the scene, nor bring to mind now what the house itself looks like in the light.

How long he stands like this he does not know, but eventually the chill of the evening drives him indoors, where he sees, even by the bare bulb in the kitchen, the scale of the work there is still do.

Timothy realises he is hungry, and finds he cannot remember the last time he ate any proper food. Perhaps it was before he last went out on the water with Ethan, and he is not sure how many days and nights have passed since then. He picks up the empty bottle of gin from the table and throws it into the bin and investigates the fridge. He assembles what food has not already started to rot, turns the kitchen light off, and sits at the table to eat in the dark. Once he has eaten, he stacks the dirty plate with the others he has piled up by the sink and makes his way back up towards the bedroom. Though the darkness is almost complete, he does not turn on any more lights, wanting to avoid having to confront the unfamiliarity of this place. He feels his way across the bedroom, shuffling his bare feet forward to avoid colliding with anything in the room, and climbs into bed, and when he closes his eyes the feeling of unfamiliarity follows him into his own head and he lies still and waits for sleep to come, though it is a long time in coming. He lies still and listens to the sounds in the house and wonders what more he will find changed in the morning, what more will be unfamiliar to him.

When morning comes, he still feels weak, but Timothy feels the need to move, to rid himself of the cold that had seeped into his bones somewhere out on the water and that he has been unable to shake for however many days his illness has taken up. He pulls on his running clothes and, jogging and walking alternately for a few yards at a time, makes his way out slowly along the coast road, and the feeling that has grown in him overnight starts to shift and fade. It takes him a long time to warm himself through and he is way beyond the village by the time he is warm enough to stop and wait for his breathing and his heart to slow. When he stops, he looks down from the road at the waves breaking over the rocks and remembers Ethan’s warning. He wonders whether the illness through which he has now passed was related to his earlier swim, some prolonged incubation period of a waterborne virus, or brought on purely by the effects of exposure to the cold and the waves. At this point, a mile or so after the houses have thinned out, the landscape becomes more and more featureless. To one side of the road the water and the rocks and the white foam that separates the rocks from the sea, to the other side fields, surrounded by walls made up of tightly packed stones, and the further he runs, the less he finds he is able to judge time and distance in this landscape that repeats itself over and again.

There is a thin mist on the ground in the fields beyond the low wall that separates them from the road, and through it the uneven ground looks like it too could be water from the way it dips, rolls and peaks. For a moment the road feels more like a narrow bridge across an expanse of sea, a long ribbon connecting an island to the mainland.

Some of the fields contain, within them, large clumps of trees or large stones around which the farmers must navigate their tractors to plough or harvest the field. At least a couple of the fields are host to stone structures and, from where he stands now, Timothy sees the one in the field closest contains an opening into the earth. As he looks closer he can make out the arch of a door, with a lintel stone above the entrance. He turns towards it, climbs the wall, and lowers himself carefully over into the field. He jogs over to the structure and stands looking down into the opening between the stones. The lintel stone casts a shadow, even in the half-light of early morning and what light there is does not reach far down through the opening. There is a steep step down from the field level into the cave and he can see nothing beyond the patch of earth directly beneath the lintel stone, worn smooth and grassless. He steps towards the doorway in order to see further in and stands just shy of the shadow it casts. Unable to see further, he lowers himself down into the darkness to see better what lies beyond. He feels the cold rising up from the ground as he descends and it brings to mind a memory of lowering himself into the burning cold of the sea. The floor is deeper than it had looked originally and when his feet touch the floor he is in the shadow, unable to see anything in front of him. He edges forward, waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness. There is a rustling in front of him and two heavy bodies hurtle out of the darkness and Timothy is knocked back sharply onto the smooth floor. Thin feet jab at his head and he raises his hands to protect his face, gripped by a panic that threatens to overwhelm him and he flails his legs and keeps his hands and arms up over his face and ears as the assault continues. A heavy body lands on him and he struggles to breathe beneath its smothering weight, and the scrabbling resumes. He feels something sharp connect with his mouth and there is a sudden pressure on his chest and then there is silence. He tries to bring his breathing under control and tries to fight the feeling he needs to run from this place and forces himself to lie still. Lying on his back in the darkness, he feels the weakness his fever has left him with start to spread through his body.