Feeling a need to ask her.
Perhaps she nodded. His wife.
Perhaps he only imagined it.
The boat ramp jostled beneath them as they disembarked the ferry, offering a somewhat disquieting clunking sound. Her grip on the door rest tightened, stealing the blood from her fingers.
Oliver sighed. Settled behind the wheel of their Audi Q5 with its pompous London plates, dragging a rattling U-MOVE IT trailer behind them, the rachitic trailer’s every bolt and spring threatening to come undone and dump their remaining belongings into the sea. He negotiated off the boat, then through the light Douglas traffic. The windshield wipers set on intermittent, lazily sweeping away the gray drizzly rain as they passed beneath a line-up of red Triskelion flags snapping stiffly in the breeze. The odd flags depicted the motif of the Isle of Man. Three bent armored legs joined at the upper thigh, running clockwise. Known as the Three Legs of Man.
Or The Running Man of Manx.
The triskelion an ancient symbol.
Ascribed to the Mycenaeans.
A people lost to the Dark Ages.
No one knew why the isle had adopted it.
Or even precisely when, frankly.
Secrets confined here to this place.
Behind the obvious tourist trappings.
Behind the façade of this promenade.
The welcoming hotels and restaurants.
Meanwhile, as if it were all only a pretense and nothing more, they only too quickly passed through the capital town and slipped into the green hills rising behind it. The isle interior was predominantly grassland. A small-scale patchwork of farmland and livestock pasture roughly demarcated with stone walls and hedgerows. The stone walls were dry. The individual stones selected to balance and sit into the larger wall without the need for mortar, producing long rugged puzzles offering narrow winks of gray daylight between the craggy rocks. The reasoning behind using the stones to inter-divide the fertile countryside was a rather elementary one. The indigenous fields were naturally stony and had to be cleared of the stones anyway before legitimate farming or grazing could begin. And because there was no simple method for getting rid of the stones, the most obvious conclusion was to build the boundary walls with the materials close at hand. The more stones to be cleared from an area of land, the more walls were built, and the smaller the fields. The dry walls, by their nature, however, tended to be less stable than mortar walls, causing serious leans and the occasional collapse. The hedgerows, on the other hand, offered a more substantial barrier for livestock and, in many cases, more recognizable divisions between private landowners and parishes. The high hedgerows were composed of an intermingling of tree species and thick shrubs, including hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, oak, and ash, and interwoven with knotted tangles of climbers like traveller’s joy and honeysuckle with tiny red berries, providing sanctuary for wildlife, most particularly rabbits, hedgehogs, dormice, and large dark-colored butterflies.
The hedgerows were impenetrable.
Like soft snarls of barbed wire.
The stone walls pleasantly quaint.
Rising and falling with the undulating hills.
Some very old. Centuries, perhaps.
Revealing an even more peculiar antiquity.
If one were looking just hard enough.
Just beyond these long rugged puzzles.
Almost hidden in the high grass shadows.
Stone circles. Stone tombs. Dolmens.
Relic graves of the long-ago dead.
From a long-ago time. Long-ago lost.
With only these ghostly reminders.
It put Oliver in a frame of mind and he spoke of the Romans. The Romans had called this place Insula Manavia, though it was unknown if they’d ever conquered it. A large migration from Ireland during the fifth century propagated Gaelicisation, giving rise to Manx language and culture. Marauding Vikings arrived for the Dark Ages. Very little was known about this lost chapter in time, though mythical legend suggested the bloodthirsty Vikings may have never conquered the small isle, either. Afterward, it shifted from Norsemen rule to Scot to English, and back and forth again, every ruling empire struggling to maintain any real enduring authority. The isle was now considered a British crown dependency. Not a part of the UK itself, precisely, but rather a direct possession of the Queen.
Self-governing. Stony-hearted.
This lost isle in the middle of the sea.
This distant and mysterious place.
Somehow existing in the here and now.
And in the mists of forgotten history.
If one were looking just hard enough.
As if time perhaps did not exist here.
As if time was somehow unknown to it.
Abby nodded. Pretending to listen.
She was used to his historical enthusiasms.
His fanciful wanderings of the mind.
His lectures about things long-ago past.
Like stories taken from dusty books.
But she said little to nothing at all.
Not wishing to encourage him.
Gradually Oliver fell quiet.
His voice gone weary.
Along with the rest of him.
And finally, he just observed.
Observed the passing landscape.
The well-defined river valleys.
The deep dales and shallow glens.
Bubbling brooks. Dark cold lakes.
And the dark wooded bits.
A steep rise eventually took them to moorland uplands showcasing a thick carpet of violet-hued heather stretching across a treeless and rock-strewn plateau. From atop this elevated rise, and facing due-west, a stubborn mist could be seen lingering over a low-lying hamlet below, the low-lying hamlet only revealed by a church spire and the white cupola of a barn piercing the murk, the barn’s rusted weathervane spinning this way, and then that way.
Otherwise the hamlet was hidden.
Almost as if being slowly erased.
Slowly erased from existence.
The road turned narrower as it descended, nervously venturing away from the hamlet as if not wanting to tempt the gods.
They worked their way further west, slipping past more isolated farmland and livestock pasture, passing a flock of Manx Loaghtan sheep. A native breed of the isle. The large strange animals silently contemplating their intrusion. Dark curious eyes, dark brown wool, the males with their very distinctive sets of curved horns, the curved horns numbering four to six appendages per beast.
The road became narrower still.
The Q5 navigation stopped working.
The farms and grazing land fell away.
Replaced by a thick woods.
The woods encroached the narrowing road, stealing the last of the gray light and creating a tunnel of deepening darkness with only teasing snatches of what appeared to be marshy fenland and coarse meadows of thorny mustard-yellow gorse scrub beyond it.
Then those snatches were gone.
And the deepening darkness fell heavily.
As if intending to erase them, too.
Not unlike that tiny hamlet in the mist.
Abby’s hand went pale again.
Tightly clutching that door rest.
Fingers turning bone-white.
They dipped into a hollow.
Passed over a spate river. A river that magically appeared and disappeared at the whim of the weather. Dark sluggish water pushing over windborne bits. Leaves, twigs, dust, loose soil.
The road twisted. Turned.
Arriving them at a queer crossroads.
A random junction with no signs.
Oliver felt his heart skip a beat and found himself ridiculously striking the uncooperative navigation display with his wedding ring, producing a hollow rapping noise. This place discombobulating the insufferable computer, rendering it dizzy and utterly useless.
Rather like himself, he gathered.
He sighed. Offered Abby a smile.
She was rub
bing off on him, he thought.
Of course, she was. Sullen as she was.
Oliver considered each direction.
Each direction offered more darkness.
In the end, he pushed further west.
Or what he perceived to be further west.
Despite it offering the heaviest darkness.
It seemed the sensible thing to do.
The isle was only fourteen miles wide.
Sooner or later they’d hit the opposite sea.
That also seemed rather sensible.
Perhaps even too sensible at that.
Refusing to admit he was maybe lost.
Refusing to admit he should’ve take the A3.
And not this silly shortcut excursion.
But eventually he could smell the sea.
For all this and for all that.
The woods began to thin before giving way to more farmland and livestock pasture. The fields lush and an emerald green and he heard his wife audibly exhale, her grip relaxing on the door rest, the blood returning to her fingers, filling them with soft color.
There were shepherds in the fields.
Men in flat caps hiking with walking sticks.
The men paused to watch them pass.
Faces hidden in the shadow of their caps.
But their eyes watchful and curious.
Not unlike their strange sheep.
The road was now one-lane.
The stone walls pushing-in on them.
Along with the dense hedgerows.
Oliver was forced to back into a rather shallow turn-out when a rusted truck with a bed of fresh manure appeared on a rise, and, without hesitation, shuddered down the hill toward them.
“For heaven sakes,” he griped, cringing, suddenly quite certain the road was too narrow, the shallow turn-out woefully insufficient. “Who has the right-of-way? How does one even know?”
The Audi Q5 was only a month old.
Bought in the aftermath of the house sale.
During a flurry of packed suitcases.
Their old trusty hatchback on life-support.
As if knowing the journey too long.
Spilling dark oil from its intestines.
Like blood from a dying thing.
The noise of the rusted manure truck was deafening, filling his ears like a dark spate creek swollen by pounding rain amid wailing wind, shaking the Q5 like a wind-up toy and nudging it dangerously toward a ditch as it, the manure truck, rumbled past, missing them by mere inches seemingly, black exhaust swirling behind it.
Abby blinked. A heavy blink.
Then said with complete deadpan:
“Something tells me, honey, that a truck loaded with fresh excrement at the top of a hill always has the right-of-way.”
“Bloody hell,” he agreed, grumbling.
A quarter hour later they stumbled onto the A4.
They headed north on the two-lane road.
Pushing past sheer coastal cliffs of black slate.
Over narrow beaches of more black slate.
A long jawline of black jagged teeth.
With more rolling-hilled green pastures above.
And more isolated arable farming land.
But the farmhouses few and far between.
Or, as often, not to be seen at all.
And then, quite suddenly, appearing from just beyond a mist-cloaked copse of trees, and from behind a colorful hedgerow in red and orange bloom, and just inside a crumbling stone wall blanketed in a fuzzy layer of dark moss, was a small stone cottage, a thin curl of dark gray smoke rising from an old white chimney stack.
And almost quite as suddenly--
An unpaved driveway materialized.
Along with a hand-painted wooden sign.
The wooden sign badly faded.
Reading: SIORGHA COTTAGE.
At least that was what it appeared to read.
It was more of an educated guess really.
The faded writing nearly illegible.
Oliver pumped the brakes hard.
The Q5 tires skidding on the road.
The trailer bumping up into them.
With a heavy and disgruntled shove.
Rattling and clanging. Things jostling.
He’d almost missed the abrupt turn-off.
The sign hidden in the drizzle as it was.
Just about indecipherable as it was.
With an exhausted sigh, Oliver winked at Abby (who was desperately clutching at that door rest again, her fingers almost certainly imprinted in the leather) and turned into the driveway.
The Q5 rocking up and down.
Up and down on the uneven ground.
The trailer squeaking and such.
Jouncing about left and right.
Finally ending their long journey.
And beginning quite another.
3.
OLIVER PARKED THE Q5 beside a large pile of rotting firewood. Killed the engine. The Audi ticked noisily in the stillness as the gray drizzle settled down softly upon them, silently blowing sideways from a pasture sloping downward toward a cold gray sea beyond a long tumble-down split-rail fence.
A dusky gray weather-boarded barn with an empty hayloft and a hipped roof stood before a woodline, the barn’s old timbers leaning with the sideways-blowing drizzle and away from that cold gray sea as if it just might one day topple over into splinters.
The stone cottage sat in front of it.
Thick stone walls. Whitewashed and weather-beaten. A steeply-pitched thatched roof with abandoned bird nests and small lace-curtained windows with dark brown wooden borders.
As if pulled from a fairy tale.
Or a dark nursery rhyme, perhaps.
Or so Abby quietly ruminated to herself.
And with that thought there it was:
Whispering in the back of her head:
Something from her childhood:
An almost forgotten thing:
In a cottage in a wood,
A little old man at the window stood.
Saw a rabbit running by,
Knocking at the door.
‘Help me, help me please,’ he said.
‘Before that gunman shoots me dead!’
‘Come little rabbit, come with me.
How happy we will be.’
Parked in front of the cottage was a black sedan wrapped with local advertising. KNOCKSHARRY REAL ESTATE. It featured a large black and white photo of a smiling real estate agent.
The real estate agent in the black and white photo was standing outside the cottage at a back door in the misty rain. He was tall and thin with a nest of black hair and a gigantic Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down when he spoke, especially when he spoke too quickly, or so Abby would soon observe. His greeting smile quickly vanished when she stepped from the still-ticking vehicle and found her city shoes promptly stuck in the sticky driveway muck.
“Heavens, that won’t do,” he said.
And while scurrying to the back door--
“Don’t move another inch, love.”
Only it came out more like:
Hev-unhns, dat woan d’uh.
Doan muh’ve a-nudder ain’ch, luv.
His accent thick and strong.
Reminding her of a scouse accent.
Liverpool or Lancashire. Maybe.
But not really. Not really at all.
Not if you were really listening.
More agrarian somehow. Muckier.
She stayed put in the sludge while Oliver more carefully negotiated it as the tall and thin man disappeared through the back door into the nursery rhyme of a small stone cottage puffing out its thin curl of dark gray smoke from its old white chimney stack, returning but a moment later with a pair of large yellow galoshes.
“Bit roomy, perhaps,” the man said, long black lashes pushing aside the misty rain from large muddy brown eyes as he handed the yellow galoshes to her, easily traversing the sludge in his own black rubber galoshes. “But the
y’ll keep your feet dry, I wager.”
Bit rummy pear-aps.
Bet deel cape yer fayte dree, aye way-juh.
“Brilliant. Thank you,” she said.
His greeting smile returned.
Though it suddenly seemed a bit forced.
At least from this close vantage point.
A bit twittery at the edges, maybe.
Or so Abby further ruminated.
Her head swimming once more.
Even here safely on the shore.
As if the isle were moving beneath her.
As if she’d never gotten off that boat.
That bobbing cork of a ferry.
On that dark choppy sea.
And she found herself staring past him. Past his twittery smile and his long black lashes and large muddy brown eyes and strange scouse accent that just really wasn’t scouse at all. Past the old dilapidated barn slowly falling over in the misty rain. And found herself solemnly contemplating that abrupt woodline beyond it.
Lovely. Dark and deep.
Or so Robert Frost might’ve said.
On a snowy winter evening, perhaps.
With miles to go before he’d sleep.
Or so the silly poem insisted.
Something like that anyway.
Another thing almost forgotten.
Of course, lovely implied inviting, did it not? Welcoming. But Abby wasn’t so certain she’d want to enter those woods for all that with its heedful trees and pockets of shadow. This troubling revelation, as if spoken out loud, seemed to amuse the woods, its spidery limbs and dark jungle of leaves swaying and dancing in the drizzly rain, tempting her toward it despite her trepidation, but it’s playful eagerness belied by a dark and deep, if not lovely, patience.
She felt her throat thicken once again.
As if a stone were now stuck there.
She swallowed hard. Blinked.
Turned away from those woods.
Back to that twittery smile.
“Oliver. Abby. I’m Ethan Hanover,” the owner of that twittery smile said. “Ready for a tour, then? I suppose you’re eager. Don’t believe I’ve ever sold a property over the phone before.”
He glanced at their trailer.
“You didn’t bring much,” he said.
Sounding almost troubled.
As if they might not be staying.
Abby felt that stone sink deeper.
Deeper in her throat. Lodging there.
With the thought of staying here.
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