The Blurred Lands

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  There was nothing seductive about the look she gave him then. It was the look of someone desperate. John knew that look well - he had seen it in the mirror many times during the past three years.

  She stood up and went to the window, speaking with her back turned towards him.

  "Stay tonight, John. Tomorrow you can leave if you wish. I will not hold you here any longer."

  What? he thought.

  "What?" he said.

  She half-turned. She wasn't looking at him, her gaze was on the carpet at her feet. Even then, John noticed, she couldn't help holding herself as if she might be about to begin the dance of the seven veils.

  "You may leave tomorrow."

  He thought of Gai. She anticipated his concern.

  "As for your noone, he will be found. The cage traps those who come too close, but the effect is temporary. He will be able to leave soon enough, as will those of my followers who were drawn here expecting my return. John?"

  "Yes?"

  "Sleep well. I will see you at dawn."

  John could trust nothing she said, but he couldn't see the point in her lying. What difference did it make?

  "Then I can leave?"

  Ash didn't smile, didn't flirt. "If you choose to."

  John held up the stone that contained the time cage, but Ash waved it away. "Keep it, put in in a drawer, throw it in the cellar. It cannot leave this place, and it cannot be destroyed. Believe me, I would know if either were possible."

  John stood up. It couldn't be this easy. Was she really giving up? What possible advantage could she hope to gain by this?

  "Ash," he said, then stopped. Like ears popping at a certain altitude on a flight, the atmosphere in the room altered. The walls were back to their freshly painted inoffensive shade of magnolia, the carpet had vanished. The bed was just a frame, rusting in places.

  John stood there for at least a minute until he was convinced that Ash had gone.

  There was no sign of her presence. It was just an old, rundown cottage in need of decorating.

  He got out of the bedroom, anyway. Just in case.

  Forty-Three

  John made himself a sandwich from the replenished loaf, washing it down with half a glass of wine.

  He checked his phone. Still no signal.

  There would be mobile reception at the road. Then again, if he could make it to the road, he could keep going, get in his car, drive away from all of this.

  John opened the back door, breathed the night air. In the distance, for the first time since he had got lost in Leigh Woods, he heard the muted sound of traffic, and saw a faint glow from the lights of the city to the west.

  He stepped outside.

  His foot wouldn't cross the threshold. It came back down on the floorboards. He tried twice more. He couldn't leave. Not yet, at least.

  The sky was ink-black and starless.

  He shut the door, put the stone on the mantelpiece and, draping his sleeping bag over him like a coat, he sat on the old, uncomfortable sofa.

  There was no way he was going to be able to sleep.

  It was springtime in Wimbledon, six in the morning on the first of May. The rising sun brought a pastel glow to the edges of the blinds. John watched the light insinuate itself into the room, the slats of the blinds evolving from abstraction, through a suggestion of form, to definite, hard-edged rectangles. John knew he was staring stupidly, that he should stand up, make a cup of tea, call someone. Maybe call Harry. What time would it be in Los Angeles? Eight hours behind was... his mind slid away from even so simple a calculation. He was looking at the blinds again. When he looked away, a negative image appeared on the wall, solid, definite and real for a moment before losing coherence as he blinked it away.

  Sarah had been dead for an hour.

  Birds sang in the garden. They had started at 4:15. Sarah had smiled at the sound, muted by the double-glazing. He had thought about asking her if she wanted the window open so she could hear them clearly, but he said nothing. She had squeezed his fingers. He had squeezed back. Sarah had known what he was going to ask, he had known her answer, and no words had been necessary.

  It was inexorable, that light. It was moving across the ceiling as the part of the planet on which southwest London was situated tilted itself towards the unimaginable energy of the nearest star, which was just one among trillions.

  The rage made itself known then, just a little. As if a heavy door had been rattled some distance away. John acknowledged this rage, he knew it was there. He imagined a small man in a pinstripe suit handing him a card. "If you should need us, Mr Aviemore. We are always available." There was no number on the card, just a swirling blackness with red sparks igniting and fading, a dull roar coming from within.

  Sarah had been dead for one hour and ten minutes.

  Smashing every item of furniture, every pane of glass, every piece of crockery was an option. He could start with that chair at the desk. That green leather, never-comfortable, overpriced piece of shit fucking chair. He could start with that, take a knife to it. Get the sledgehammer from the shed and finish the job.

  He looked back at the blinds. Perhaps he should open them. That was something he did every morning. This last week, Sarah had smiled every day when he'd let the light in, when she saw the trees again, the buds on the bushes, the ever-changing sky. But if he opened them now, it would be the first time he had done it without her.

  Everything would be a first from now on. Like babies. The first step. The first word. Except no one else would understand the significance of these tiny events. The first drink, the first bite of food. The first sunrise. The first sunset.

  There was a strange noise in the room. It was barely perceptible at first, but it got louder and louder until it was impossible to ignore. The central heating made a similar sound in winter, but the heating was off, and it was never this loud. The noise wasn't mechanical, either, it was more like an animal, like something trapped and in pain. When John's throat became sore, and he realised the noise was him, he coughed and took a few quick, desperate, breaths.

  "Shit." His voice sounded wrong. It was the first word he had spoken. So that was his first word in this new world, the world without Sarah.

  If he kept his eyes on the blinds and didn't think about the unstoppable light filling the room, he could lapse into the fugue state, which was almost bearable. But when his awareness drifted out of it, the crying began. John didn't know how to cry. He had no experience of it, no way of knowing how to control it. Sarah was different, she could cry while listening to music, or reading a book, easily, without embarrassment. John's experience was more like being possessed. The crying took hold of him, scraped along his throat, shoved fluid through his eyes and nose, tied his lungs into a knot, punched him in the stomach. The physical intensity of it shocked him, and, when one episode had passed, he would spend a few seconds thinking he had regained control before it would overwhelm him again.

  Sarah had been dead for one hour and fifty-five minutes.

  John was still holding her hand. After she had taken her last, long breath—the final exhalation more of a sigh—he had watched her face. One moment she was Sarah, the next he was looking at a body that bore some resemblance to the woman he loved. It wasn't her. How twee, that the blandest of cliches should be so accurate.

  When it was clear that there would be no more breaths, not now, not ever, he had turned away and looked at the blind, Sarah's fingers gradually losing their warmth as he stroked her palm with his thumb.

  He was sitting in a garden chair with a padded cushion. He had tried using the green chair when he had first set up the bed in his office, but it was too high, too heavy, too uncomfortable.

  John had been sleeping next to her when her breathing changed. He had become attuned to the tiny sounds and movements she made, knowing when the pain came, when she drifted into sleep, when she moved from unconsciousness into wakefulness. He had gone to get her a glass of water. Her eyes had been open when he c
ame back, her head turned towards the open door. He knew then. She was waiting for him. He had sat down in the chair, taken her hand and smiled at her for the last time.

  It was only when he looked away from the blinds and lay Sarah's hand on the bed with all the gentleness of a parent transferring a sleeping baby from their arms to a cot, that John noticed the separation in his own mind.

  He was watching himself, from three years in the future. He was in the Leigh Woods cottage, but it was also the day Sarah died. He could change nothing, but he could live through every exquisite moment of pain exactly as he had experienced them the first time.

  It was seven o'clock on the first of May. John looked at Sarah's face. He almost said her name, almost told her he loved her, but the room was so full of her absence that, in the end, he did neither.

  The final test results had come through, and John and Sarah had been given the last appointment on a dark, Tuesday evening in October.

  In a long relationship rich with all the subtleties that arise over decades of growth, misunderstandings, compromises, and hope, John and Sarah had often portrayed themselves to others in terms simpler than the more nuanced truth.

  "John's the pessimist, I'm the optimist. We meet somewhere in the middle."

  John would grumble about being a realist rather than a pessimist, Sarah would tease him about self-fulfilling prophecies, and friends and acquaintances would happily help them preserve their roles.

  Now, when the worst news imaginable might be about to be delivered by a tired, overworked oncologist on the other side of a blue door in a deserted NHS hospital waiting room, Sarah was the one in bleak humour.

  "You know what this appointment time means, right?"

  John shrugged. "It means it was the first available slot once your results came back."

  "Nah. They always keep the last appointment of the day free. That way, if they need to tell someone they're dying, they don't have to keep an eye on the clock, and there's no one in the waiting room to see what kind of state they're in when they leave."

  This was a side of Sarah that John had only ever witnessed at home, in the middle of the night, on the rare occasions when she had suffered a bout of existentialist terror. She would make tea, whatever time it was, bring it up to bed and talk about the brevity of life and its utter lack of meaning. John would counter her argument with talk of children, art, love, and the miracle that anyone was aware of anything at all. She would kiss him, turn out the light and go back to sleep, leaving him staring into the darkness, silently agreeing with her.

  "No, no," he said, putting down a leaflet on statins and rustling up an unconvincing smile. "You're wrong. That's a bit dark, isn't it? Where did you get that idea from?"

  Then the blue door opened, and Doctor Archer beckoned them in. Their names had always appeared on the screen before. Not today.

  Suddenly, John didn't want to stand up and take those few steps from the row of chairs to the office. Couldn't they stay here, in the empty waiting room, with the piles of magazines and the posters about free health checks and Macmillan coffee mornings on the wall? It was a waiting room, after all. Couldn't they wait? Waiting was okay. He had thought he didn't like waiting, but now that he was thinking clearly about it, waiting was fine. Waiting implied there was something coming next, something they were waiting for. Couldn't they wait forever? His hand was on Sarah's leg, and it slid away as she stood up and took two steps before turning. And, of course, he stood up and walked towards the blue door because that's what you do when you've been sitting in a waiting room and the waiting is over; when an oncologist with a long list of patients who survived their brush with cancer calls your wife in to tell her she's on the other list.

  They were at a wedding in Suffolk. A friend of Sarah's she had kept in touch with after university. Sarah had only recently stopped breast feeding, and Harry was staying with her parents overnight. Desserts had come and gone an hour ago, and the speeches had begun. The father of the bride, having tackled his fear of public speaking with a bottle-and-a-half of merlot, was deep into his fourth anecdote about his daughter's childhood. He'd been speaking for twenty minutes, and the good-natured laughter at his sometimes-intentional jokes was already becoming more sporadic as his audience lost interest. John was mulling over an idea for a prediction routine using wedding invitations when a foot appeared in his lap, the toes sliding along the chair, then flexing upwards to make contact with his testicles.

  "Woah!" he said, brought back from his imaginary trick to the real world, where his wife's foot was now massaging his crotch. The other five people at the table turned towards him, so he tried to make the involuntary noise sound like a laugh. Too late, he rewound the speech in his head to the point just before the unexpected appearance of the foot, finding to his horror that the current anecdote was about the death of the bride's mother.

  He tried to turn the laugh into a cough, which turned into a genuine fit of choking when he took a gulp of wine, his cheeks red. Most of the guests had turned to look by now, and the bride's father had paused his soliloquy.

  "He all right?"

  Sarah answered. "He'll be okay. You carry on." John, a napkin held to his mouth, saw the amusement in her eyes, and the arousal. She came round to his side of the table and took his arm to lead him away. John was glad the coughing fit gave him an excuse to bend over as he hobbled away, his erection making it impossible to walk normally.

  Sarah pushed him into the disabled toilet and peeled her knickers off from under the obligatory little black dress.

  "Trousers off," she ordered. "The way he's going, we might do it twice before he's finished."

  Forty-Four

  John woke in the early hours. It was dark. He was smiling. His lips, his fingers, his whole body remembered Sarah as if he'd just been in that toilet at the wedding five minutes ago. He sat up, reaching for the glass of water by the sofa.

  The knowledge that Sarah was three years dead crawled back into his consciousness, and his smile faded as he remembered where he was, and what was happening. He put the glass down and lay back, closing his eyes. He was terrified he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep, back where Sarah waited for him.

  "Please," he whispered, trying to relax, to stop his grief overwhelming him again. "Please..."

  Sleep claimed him, and he greedily embraced the dreams it brought.

  As near-death experiences go, it wasn't particularly exciting. No injuries were sustained, and although it was dramatic enough to have made a good story to tell at parties, it was soon forgotten. But it was real, and it had happened to Sarah, and it stopped John making a huge mistake.

  Human beings, John had always believed, are complex, highly evolved organisms who are capable of rising above their basic animal nature. Therefore, it came as an enormous shock to him when he almost succumbed to a potentially marriage-wrecking surge of lust one Christmas.

  The festive season was always busy at the Charleston Hotel, and Marco booked John for an extra two evenings a week. More guests meant temporary staff, and Monique was one of three new faces working in the bar while John amazed his audience. She often paused what she was doing at crucial moments of John's performance, breaking into delighted applause. She loved the moment when a signed card appeared in an impossible new location: a spectator's pocket, rolled up inside the neck of a champagne bottle, or—on one occasion—on the sole of Monique's shoe.

  Her shift finished an hour before John was done, so she usually hung around to watch him work. As with any magician, John was a little wary at letting someone see an effect multiple times. But, unlike most magicians, the unique touches he brought to his craft meant Monique never saw what she wasn't supposed to see. She gasped just as loudly each time she saw him spill a drop of blood onto a single leaf, only for it to transform into a rose.

  John always gave the rose to a female guest. One night, a few days before Christmas Eve, he threw it to Monique. She held his gaze longer than should have been comfortable. Later, i
n bed with Sarah, he almost told her but talked himself out of it. Tell her what, exactly? That he had flirted with a bartender at the hotel? Sarah would have said, "So what?" and poked him in the ribs, teasing him that he could barely keep up with her, let alone a young floozy. He could hardly tell her that it had meant more than that, or explain how his stomach had fluttered when, as she left, Monique had blown him a kiss.

  She would be gone in a week, once the season was over. And he wasn't going to do anything stupid. That's what he told himself.

  So when Monique handed him her phone number the following night, leaning over him as she did so, one hand resting lightly, but deliberately on his thigh, whispering, "Call me," he knew he should throw the number away. Somehow, though, the piece of paper ended up folded into a small square, tucked into the back of his wallet.

  When he left the Charleston that night, Sarah was standing on the far side of the street. His immediate reaction was to break into a cold sweat of guilt and think how does she know? Then he reminded himself that he hadn't done anything to be ashamed of. Yet.

  He waved to Sarah. Occasionally, she would come out to meet him at the end of the show. "One day, we'll have kids, and I'll be stuck at home, fat and miserable, so we should make the most of our freedom while we have it."

  She saw him and smiled, waving back. In that instant, he stopped thinking about Monique, although he was very aware of the exact position of his wallet, the angle at which it was tucked into his trouser pocket.

  "Bar still open?" she called.

  "Yes."

  She pressed the button on the pedestrian crossing, waited for a second, then set off anyway. She was almost exactly halfway across when the Ford Fiesta screeched around the corner and accelerated towards her. The driver lost control as it clipped the kerb and the rear twitched, then jackknifed.