Or so Abby translated. More or less.
Every other word couched in bursts of soft static.
Bile began bubbling up from her tummy.
Hot and sticky in the back of her throat.
“Are you drinking?” she subsequently said.
Her own words sharp. Accusatory.
Her husband went silent for a beat.
As if there were a delay between them.
She thought perhaps he’d not heard her.
That perhaps her voice was fading in and out.
At least from his faraway perspective.
At the far side of that narrow metallic tunnel.
“Not really. No,” he eventually said.
She bit down hard on her bottom lip. Disquieted. He tried to add something in his defense, but that wind gusted again outside, producing a harsh string of static, drowning out his voice.
Meanwhile, the cottage lights blinked heavily.
And for a moment she found herself in a complete darkness. It was only a moment, no more than a half a second, but it seized her heart. That heavy darkness falling down on her. It seemed to have weight. That darkness. A heavy black tidal wave of weight.
She blinked with the return of the light.
Her rounding pupils constricting back tightly.
Making her dizzy head ache with the effort.
Disorienting her. Briefly blinding her.
Only to find the lights duller than before.
But that was not what preoccupied her.
“For shit sakes,” she said with a groan.
“That isn’t necessary,” she thought he said.
Thinking she was still admonishing him.
“It’s just a silly welcoming party,” he managed.
She was no longer listening. She was moving across the room. The beastly television had distorted again. Gone pixelated.
Abby punched at the TV remote.
But it didn’t do a damn bit of good.
No matter how hard she hit the buttons.
Blurred lines. Jumping up and down.
Warped and murky. Undulating.
That messy scramble of a jigsaw puzzle.
“Blimey bastard,” she squawked.
“Abby!” she heard him object.
The sound was badly distorted, too.
Like a record playing at the wrong speed.
Fuzzy and stretched and hollow.
Like his distant voice over the phone.
Just then the wind rose again. Screaming.
And those lights oscillated. Strobing.
For several beats more than half a second.
Abby glanced warily at the lights after they’d stopped flashing. They seemed somehow even duller still than before. Her heart rabbity in her chest (Come little rabbit, come with me -- How happy we will be), she found herself ducking behind the TV, the phone still pressed tightly against her ear as her other hand played with the nest of colorful wires moving in all kinds of tangled directions back there.
“Abby--? Still there?” he said.
Sounding put out. Maybe concerned.
As she stretched and groped for the furthest wire connections, a sudden burst of thunder bellowed outside. A most horrible cracking noise like the entire sky was fracturing open above her.
It startled her right back to her feet.
Into a half-standing position.
She faltered there. Knees bent.
Frozen there in mid-space.
Her eyes now level with the television and her nose only mere inches from the LED screen -- and her eyes immediately widening with shock as that haze of pixels began to slowly reorient, forming what appeared to be the vague ghostly outline of a small hand in the middle of all that dreadful undulating jigsaw of blurry static.
Reaching. Stretching.
Groping. For her.
She cried out. Fell backward.
Away from that small groping hand.
Only to have the featureless countenance of a young boy suddenly morph inside that befuddling, jumping, spinning snowstorm. His ghostly visage only too quickly filling the entire fifty inch Toshiba television screen.
Rising. Moving toward her seemingly.
As if trying to escape the confining box.
If not simply gaze beyond its murky frontier.
Squinting as if unable to see her clearly, either.
That small hand still trying to break the barrier.
Still trying to locate her. Touch her.
Before-- BOOM! More thunder.
Louder. Even more monstrous.
The cottage lights blinked off simultaneously and this time for good. The TV pixels collapsing to a single point of pale light before it, too, blinked out, and the television went to utter black.
Abby found herself seated on the cold stone floor -- the heavy weight of that darkness pinning her down there, only broken by the soft flickering orange glow of the woodstove in the corner of the room -- gawking at the dark TV screen. Uncertain if she’d just seen what she thought she’d just seen there or if it could have been only a corrupted TV signal. Only that and nothing more sinister.
“Oliver? …Oliver?” she said.
Her voice a dry, hoarse whisper.
But the phone now dead.
8.
OLIVER STOOD BENEATH an awning outside a small pub in central Peel. He’d made the silly mistake of leaving his coat inside the pub and felt the heavy wet sinking deep down into his clothing and into his very bones. Despite the awning. And despite turning his back to the dark miserable weather. It was not unlike turning one’s back to the sea and he imagined he would look much like a drowned mutt when he finally re-entered the pub. Assuming he bothered to go back for the coat and didn’t just rush off into the dark miserable weather and leave it behind. Then again, he couldn’t very well do that, now could he? His bloody keys were still in one of the coat’s pockets. Still inside the bloody pub.
He sighed. Tried his phone again.
Huddling deeper in a shallow corner.
But getting the same message as before.
The this call can’t be completed message.
He imagined Abby on the other end.
Battling with her own phone.
Trying ever so futilely to reach him.
She’d sounded nervy. His wife.
Of course, she’d been nervy for months.
Maybe it was just best not to give in to it.
Not to entertain her collywobbles any longer.
Let her settle into a new routine.
It was part of the reason they’d come.
At least he thought it was part of the reason.
Perhaps he’d just been lying to himself.
Perhaps not for the first time, unfortunately.
Of course, the weather couldn’t be helping.
And he imagined her out there all alone.
In that isolated little stone cottage by the sea.
A clap of thunder punctuated his unease.
At least he would be home for the weekend, this being Friday. It had almost seemed pointless to begin his employment at the very end of the week, but it allowed him to take care of all the outstanding administrative stuff and proceed through his orientation.
Not much in the way of tickles and laughs. That.
The school headmaster being a mole-like man.
A wheezy voice and a drowsy disposition.
His tiny office as dark as if underground.
Not surprising given the drawn shades.
Altogether moldy-smelling, too.
Oliver had been allowed to meet his afternoon class at the end of the day, relishing the short walk across the grounds and the cool fresh air despite the wind and rain. School had started a few weeks ago and he’d be jumping right into things Monday. He’d, therefore, been eager to meet the students and found them polite if unusually reserved and quiet. Regarding him with an audience of rather taciturn unblinking eyes like he might possibly be dangerous.
/> Like he might suddenly just lash out.
Tear them apart with fistfuls of claws.
He’d offered a lame joke to ease their angst.
How do you know when the moon has had enough to eat?
When it’s full… he’d announced to them.
This had been met with more of that silence.
As if they were uncertain he’d meant it to be funny.
The mole-like headmaster observing from the hall.
Without the hint of humor in his expression.
Hunched-over in a dark slant of shadow.
Watching with unblinking eyes of his own.
Large drowsy and unblinking eyes.
Oliver sighed again. Ducked back into the warm pub. Intending to simply grab his coat and keys and head right back out again into the ill-weather and find his way back to his new home.
It was getting rather late after all.
And the weather proving unchastened.
He drifted past an alcove where several of his new colleagues were playing a sporting game of darts, drinking and making merry. A pleasant chap who taught science and mathematics tried to wave him over, but Oliver politely demurred, pushing into the main pub, and sliding into a corner booth across from Charlotte.
Her eyes twinkled with drink. Playful.
“Want a nipple for that?” she said.
Nodding at his lager. Barely touched.
He smiled accommodatingly at her.
Before glancing back at his phone.
He’d placed it on the booth table.
And thought maybe it had vibrated.
But the screen stared back at him blankly.
Dotted with an assembly of raindrops.
The raindrops seeming to pool together.
As if drawn by the phone’s magnets.
Charlotte groaned. Head shaking.
“Right, then,” she said. “You need to leave. Tell you what, old boy, finish that pint I bought you, then you go. Fair enough?”
Her eyes twinkled more brightly.
Those unnaturally golden orbs.
Abby had thought her eyes cat-like.
She’d said so with derision in her voice.
Intimating it was not a compliment.
Oliver thought maybe she was right.
About them appearing cat-like at least.
And suddenly felt like a ball of string.
A round dimple made an appearance.
Concaving her pale left cheek.
“I’m married, Charlotte,” he said.
“Of course, you are,” she replied.
“Married married,” he clarified.
“You’re stuttering,” she said, her mahogany head tilting slightly, studying him even more intently with those amber-colored eyes, reminding him even more of a cat and he less that ball of string and more like an injured bird. Perhaps one with a broken wing. Bouncing about. Quite unable in the end to escape her attention.
“Charlotte, please--” he said.
“Just want to finish our conversation,” she sighed, head shaking again. “Didn’t ask if I could sit on your face, now did I?”
Oliver guffawed at her boldness, then thought to glance over his shoulder to make sure she’d not been overheard. But their colleagues, the sozzled blokes, were still occupied by darts.
The round dimple did a vanishing act.
Along with the precipice of a Cheshire grin.
Her golden eyes never dulled, however.
Perhaps they were simply incapable.
“Look, Oliver,” she continued, “the truth is I want to discuss what happened between us at that symposium over the summer. It cannot be allowed to interfere with our new arrangement. A couple of snoggered lunatics, we were. We mustn’t let it fester.”
Oliver studied her for sarcasm.
Or at least facetiousness.
“Shit, you’re disappointed,” she said.
“No. Relieved, actually,” he said.
She cocked a thick eyebrow.
“Hm. Not sure I believe you,” she decided, those narrow eyes flashing a final time. “You’ve come such a long way to hear me say that. I could have dissuaded you from coming at all, frankly.”
“We’ve come only for a fresh start,” he said.
To this Charlotte replied flatly: “Hm.”
“Abby and I. Just that,” he insisted.
She studied him for sarcasm now.
Or at least a thinly veiled facetiousness.
“Truly,” he implored her, blinking.
She finally nodded. Leaned back.
“Good for you. She is sweet, your Abby,” she said. And then added as if it were only an afterthought: “Perfect really.”
This final quip bemused Oliver.
Perhaps because it sounded patronizing.
Perhaps because it sounded sincere.
“Perfect, my Abby? How so?” he said.
Charlotte slowly rose. Deflecting.
“No matter,” she said. “Just be careful.”
He frowned at this. Just be careful.
What the bloody hell did that mean?
“Rummaging in our souls--” she then quoted, as if it all rehearsed, “we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”
“Jesus,” he said, guffawing again, though a bit more hollowly. “I’ve said nothing about us, if that’s what you’re implying.”
Charlotte offered him a sour face.
Like she hadn’t been implying any such thing.
And that he might be the prurient one.
“Tolstoy?” he then said, trying to recover.
“Aye,” she said. “The cheeky bastard.”
With that, Charlotte offered him a rueful wink before heading over to the dart board, her own pint in hand. It wasn’t long before the fetching English teacher was laughing and flirting with her sozzled cluster of male counterparts who looked rather pleased for her attention. Rather looking too much like pining schoolboys.
Oliver quietly made his exit.
It went unnoticed by the others.
It was just as well really.
No explanations or excuses needed.
As if any should be required.
As he was pulling out of the parking lot in the Q5, he noticed through all the black rain smattering the back window the mole-like headmaster exiting a dark gray sedan in the corner of the lot.
His name was Simon Tibbets.
The mole-like school headmaster.
Affectionately known as Tibbs.
By the students and faculty alike.
And for a childish paranoid moment, the Q5 idling before the dark A4 road, Oliver had the most insane idea the dark gray sedan had been hiding there in the corner lot shadows a long quarter hour, or so, ago when he’d been standing beneath that inefficient awning with his back to the wind and rain talking to his wife on the phone. Moreover, that good old Tibbs had been hunched-over inside that dark gray sedan while he’d been on the phone with Abby and that maybe, as demented as it sounded, that good old Tibbs had been waiting for him to leave the pub before entering it himself. This most insane idea dovetailed perversely with another preposterous idea that had been slithering (skittering, rustling) beneath his skin the entire day. That despite their invitation for an after-work drink, despite their display of friendly smiles, the faculty, his new colleagues, were keeping him at an arm’s length. He’d been the new teacher at a school before, of course, and it had always required a period of adjustment to settle in, but this just seemed different somehow. And it wasn’t just their accents or occasional slips into Gaelic tongue, words and phrases presumably common enough amongst them, but foreign as fucking Aramaic to him. It was in their polite, if unblinking eyes.
Not unlike his mute students, perhaps.
Those eyes not reflecting their friendly smiles.
Those eyes all rather blank in the end.
The politeness a misreading on his part.
Those blank eyes only refle
cting him.
And his very own eagerness to please.
Making their friendly smiles imposter.
Hiding a more complicated truth.
He watched Tibbs pushing through the ill-weather for the pub and thought his drowsy, unblinking eyes suddenly appeared anything but drowsy, if still unblinking. Rather, now shiny and curious.
Perhaps it was only the parking lot lights.
Perhaps it was nothing more than that.
Still, Tibbs seemed to actually scurry now.
Perhaps that was only the ill-weather.
The ill-weather making him seem more alive.
More alive here in the dark and the wet.
If more like a hunched-over mole than ever.
Scurrying through the wind and rain to the pub.
Now that Oliver had finally made his exit.
Oliver sighed. Cursed his crazy notions.
Nutty things he might’ve attributed to Abby.
But stupidly plagued by them all the same.
Feeling like an outsider. Like a stranger.
Like he might just never belong here.
Perhaps it was normal to feel such things.
To feel such isolation in a new place.
Especially such an isolated place as this.
The pub noise swelled as Tibbs scurried into the bar. The pub sounding much louder in Oliver’s absence. Because of it.
Oliver cursed himself again.
And got moving on the dark A4.
And tried to divorce himself of this inane thinking as he negotiated the wind and rain back to the stone cottage, the winding A4 road seeming very dark, indeed, at this time of the night.
Darker and more winding than he recalled.
As if attempting to lead him astray.
He finally arrived back at the stone cottage, the muddy driveway a slick and swampy mess tonight, pooling with large puddles of black water, to find his wife, his Abby, standing outside the cottage in the wind and rain just like Ethan, their real estate agent, the other day. Standing in quite nearly the exact same spot, in fact.
Just outside the mud room door.
Her back to the stone cottage.
Soaked. Shivering in her pink galoshes.
Her face pale. Her own eyes blank.
Perhaps blankness was a state of mind here.
And not at all a clever mask to hide things.
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