When they turned onto the narrow track leading to the cottage, Mary felt an odd lurching sensation within her chest, as if her heart had shuddered, or perhaps stuttered on a single beat.
“There it is,” said Tom. “Just up ahead.”
She peered through the windscreen, squinting her eyes against the oncoming twilight, and just about made out the small, squat building through the surrounding trees. It had a thatched roof, and the windows looked tiny, even from this distance.
“It seems a bit shabby,” she said.
He laughed softly as he switched down a gear to negotiate a pothole in the decrepit road surface. “The website described it as “traditional,” which I guess means small, dark, and dusty.”
They continued for a while in silence. Before long, the trees parted, and the house came fully into view.
“Oh, it’s actually rather cute,” she said, hoping that it would reassure him.
He kept looking straight ahead, not even glancing in her direction.
He isn’t ignoring me, she thought. He just needs to concentrate. Keep his focus on the road.
Tom pulled up near the front door, the car’s tyres crunching like broken teeth on the gravel drive. He turned off the engine and stared at the cottage. Then, without saying anything, he opened the door, climbed out of the car, and went around to the rear to open the boot.
Claire closed her eyes for a moment, trying to ground herself. Trying not to overthink his silence. There was nothing wrong; he was just tired after the long drive. They both were.
She followed him across the drive. He was carrying both the suitcase and her rucksack and had to put them down on the ground to find the key in his pocket and open the front door.
“This looks nice,” she said, catching sight of the interior as the door slowly opened: varnished bare boards on the floor, bright wallpaper on the walls, surprisingly modern furniture.
“See. I told you it would be okay, didn’t I?” he leaned in and briefly kissed her cheek before picking up the bags and pushing inside.
“I’ll put these bags upstairs while you check out the downstairs. I’ll just be a second”
As Tom climbed the narrow staircase, struggling a little with both bags, she drifted away towards the kitchen. It was compact but fitted out with high-end appliances—a Smeg fridge, a Neff oven and electric hob, a microwave that looked too neat and compact to fit a dinner plate inside, a shiny kettle.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Not bad.”
“I’m knackered,” said Tom from the doorway behind her, making her twitch. “Fancy a beer?”
She smiled. Nodded.
“I’ll get the chiller from the car. Hopefully they’ll still be at least colder than room temperature.”
“Okay. I’ll go up and unpack. If I don’t, we’ll only leave it until the morning.”
Tom nodded, ducked behind the doorframe.
As she left the kitchen, Claire felt a slight chill at her back, as if someone had opened a door or a window. She looked over her shoulder, but the window was shut, the back door was locked. The window showed her how quickly the night was coming on; the sky was low and dark, as if a trapdoor were being lowered over the world.
Upstairs, the main bedroom was neat and cosy. Tastefully decorated, with a couple of obviously amateur landscape paintings hanging on the wall. The bed was a small double, so even as thin as she was, they’d have to sleep tight up against each other. She didn’t mind. The forced proximity might be good for them.
As she put away their clothes, hanging them in the wardrobe and sliding their undergarments into drawers, she caught sight of herself in the mirror in the corner. It caught her out before she had the presence of mind to look away. Her baggy clothing did nothing to conceal stick-thin arms, legs like pipe cleaners, a face as pale and gaunt as that of a comic book phantom. Sticks and stones and broken bones; hollow eyes and sunken cheeks.
Gritting her teeth, she closed the suitcase and pushed it under the bed. Then, avoiding the mirror, she straightened and left the room.
Downstairs, Tom was already drinking a beer. He’d switched on the television and was surfing through channels with the remote control.
“The Wi-Fi seems a bit spotty,” he said.
“I thought you might have checked that out by now. I know how you struggle to be disconnected from your online pals.” She meant it as a joke, but it didn’t come out like one.
Tom tensed visibly but didn’t respond.
“I’ll get myself a beer,” she said, turning and moving towards the kitchen.
As she entered the kitchen, she had the sense of something outside moving away from the window. A quick, furtive twitching, as if someone feared discovery. She leaned over the sink and pressed her nose lightly to the glass, her breath misting the window. There was nobody there. Of course there wasn’t.
She grabbed a lukewarm beer from the fridge and went back through to join Tom.
Later, as she lay on the hard mattress staring up at the cracked ceiling, she wondered why Tom hadn’t held her when they came to bed. As they’d climbed beneath the covers, he’d seemed to contort his body in such a way as to avoid touching her. Even now, as he slept, he appeared to have curled in on himself, balancing his body on the very edge of the mattress.
They hadn’t made love in weeks, but until recently, he’d been happy enough to give her a cuddle, or hold her hand. She didn’t know what had changed—what was still changing—and the confusion was making her feel as if the world she’d always known was operating by different rules.
She wanted to say his name, to call out to him in the dark, but was afraid that he’d ignore her. So instead, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut and prayed for the blunt edges of sleep to come quickly and bludgeon away all thought.
Just as she was drifting away, she felt a hand touch her arm. Lightly. Gently. A subtle benediction. As the blackness flooded in, she turned her head on the pillow to glance at Tom. He wasn’t there. Instead, he was standing at the window, looking out into the night. The hand was still resting on her arm. It was cold and thin, like bone. Then sleep claimed her; it dragged her down, smothering her.
When she opened her eyes in the morning, Tom was no longer in bed. She sat up and stretched, yawning. Sunlight came through the window and made blade-like patterns on the floor and the bed covers. Smiling, she put out her hand and let the light play over her skin, trying to catch it with her bony fingers. Last night’s nightmare was little more than a dim memory.
She rose and walked naked to the window, looking out at the daylight, the trees and the sky, the world that waited for her, fierce and hungry.
Holding back a shudder, she turned away and went looking for something to wear.
Downstairs, Tom had made breakfast. He was sitting at the dining table in the main room with a hopeful expression on his face.
“Eggs,” he said, gesturing towards the plates. “Poached, just how you used to like them . . . ” The moment felt charged with energy.
She took the chair directly opposite and looked into his eyes. There was such a depth of emotion there, held back behind the blue of his irises and the black of his pupils. “I’ll try,” she said.
There were only two eggs on her plate. Surely, she could manage to eat them? For him. She picked up a fork and prodded one of the eggs, bursting the yolk. The yellow oozed out onto the plate, like rancid bodily fluid. Scooping a small piece of egg onto the fork, she raised it to her lips. Opened her mouth. Waited.
There was no hunger, no desire to consume this food.
She lowered the fork. “I’m sorry. I . . . I’m just not hungry.”
The light went out of his eyes. They looked empty, devoid of anything even resembling emotion. Flat and dead, like the eyes of a shark.
“Please, eat yours. I’ll sit here and drink my coffee.”
Slowly and mechanically, he began to eat. She watched his jaw tense and then relax, the flash of white teeth, the slick, wet creature she knew was his tongue. The whole action of consuming food seemed alien to her now. It had been so long since she’d eaten anything except protein shakes that she’d begun to forget what eating meant, what purpose it served.
The coffee tasted of nothing. It was like ash in her throat. She couldn’t even feel the wetness of the liquid as she swallowed it down.
Tom finished his breakfast in silence. He took her plate without looking at her and carried the dishes through into the kitchen. She heard him scraping the food she’d left uneaten into the bin; the sound was louder and more aggressive that it needed to be.
She stood and walked to the window. It was sunny outside, but the sky was streaked with grey clouds, like stains on a canvas. Tom was still in the kitchen. She felt a tension in the air, filling the cottage. Soon it might create enough pressure to crush her.
“I’m going for a walk,” she called.
Tom didn’t respond.
She grabbed her hoodie from the back of the chair where she’d left it last night and pulled it on, opening the front door, and stepped out into the day. Birdsong. The sound of a gentle breeze tickling the undergrowth. Animal sounds—scurrying, digging, pushing through gaps in fences. Zipping up her sweatshirt, she strode away from the cottage, along the driveway, and crossed a wooden stile to enter the adjacent field. As she leapt from the stile’s stubby, uneven platform, the hem of her skirt caught on the barbed wire running across the top bar of the fence. She reached down and tugged it free. The material tore, making a loose flap of material.
It was only a cheap skirt but for some reason she felt a moment of loss, as if the tiny incident meant so much more than it indicated. A ripping of material, a loose hem: something felt damaged in her greater existence.
Shaking loose the thought, she strode into the field. Up ahead, near the fence on the opposite side, a small group of scruffy looking sheep was grazing. As she got closer to them, the sheep began to walk slowly along the fence line, as if they were trying to avoid her.
When she reached the fence, she couldn’t at first see a way through, but eventually she caught sight of a gap a few yards from where she was standing. Another wooden stile, meant for hikers. When she placed her foot on it, the stile rocked slightly—it was badly maintained, a loose screw or a missing nail. Bracing herself against the fence post, she pushed and cleared the boundary.
The trees closed in above her, shutting out some of the light. It was cool in here and calming. The shadows played around her feet like eager puppies. The birdsong was muted but still beautiful.
She walked on, deeper into the trees, reaching out a hand to brush against the low branches and the thickest of the trunks. Pausing for a moment, she examined the bark of one of the trees. There was a line of black ants climbing the trunk, possibly looking for food. She watched them for a while, wondering what it would be like to abandon her individuality and become simply a small part of a greater consciousness. The ants were so close together they looked like a black rent in the bark that was somehow moving steadily upwards. For a moment, it looked as if someone had torn a hole in the surface of reality to expose the festering darkness beneath.
Something broke her concentration: the snapping of twigs, as if someone was walking nearby. She spun around and squinted, trying to see into the deeper shadows between the trees.
There was a subtle movement, almost the suggestion of something shifting close to the ground. Was it an animal? A bird that had fallen from its nest, or an injured mouse or squirrel?
She took a step towards the spot, feeling as if she were intruding upon some sacred moment, caught unannounced in a place where she should not be, where she was not welcome.
Sound and movement: a sinuous stirring, the rustling of leaves on the ground. A long shadow unfolded from the wide base of a tree, thin and angular and twitchy: an agitation of darkness. It pressed itself against an adjacent tree trunk, and was slowly absorbed by the ancient wood, losing itself in the low-hanging branches. Like the ants she’d been observing, this felt as if it might be a glimpse of something bigger and darker than her worldview could possibly encompass. A hidden thing made visible for a moment, only for her.
Claire held her breath, not wanting to break the moment. But the moment was already gone. Instantly, she began to question if she had seen anything at all, if there had been anything there other than the strange shadows and her imagination. When she reached the tree, she doubted that it was even the correct one—they all looked the same, and there was no visible evidence of anything having disturbed the undergrowth or the loose, leaf-strewn earth.
Squatting, she reached out a hand and pushed her fingers into the soft loam, almost expecting to feel something hard and cold beneath. Her fingers dug in; she was shocked at how pale they looked against the dark earth, and when she wriggled them, they resembled pallid worms. The earth began to thrum, as if from the beating of drums somewhere deep underground.
“It’s close,” she whispered. But she had no idea what that meant.
She straightened up and looked towards the sky, feeling small and alone and untethered from everything she had once known. Cast adrift upon an unknown sea in a vessel too fragile to cope with the oncoming storm.
Back at the cottage, Tom was lounging on the sofa. As she entered, he briskly shut down his phone and pushed it beneath the sofa cushion. There was something secretive—furtive—about his actions.
He’s texting her, thought Claire. It’s started again.
“How was your walk?” he was smiling but it didn’t look genuine; there was nothing beneath it.
“It was nice. It’s beautiful round here, such a gorgeous spot. I think I could live here.”
He nodded. “I know what you mean. Maybe when we retire, eh? A nice little house in the country . . . with a couple of grown-up kids to come and visit us every now and then to break the monotony.”
It was only after she’d stared at him for a minute that he realised what he’d said.
“Oh, shit . . . I . . . I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Claire realised that she was clutching her stomach. She looked down at her hand. Her flat belly. She remembered the blood, and the lumpen shape within in. Flushing the waste down the toilet. Standing in the shower cubicle for an hour and still not feeling clean.”
Tom was on his feet. He grabbed her, trying to pull her close.
She pulled away. “Who were you texting?”
He looked at the floor, the walls; anywhere but at her face.
“Tom?”
“Just work. I know I promised I wouldn’t, but I wanted to check that we’d sent out all the documentation for that deadline. You know I don’t trust anybody to do things when I’m not there.”
He still wouldn’t look her directly in the eye.
“Are you sure?”
Finally, he locked his gaze upon hers. “I promise,” he said. “I promise that’s all it was.”
She smiled. Walked away and sat down at the table. She picked up an empty glass—he must’ve left it there. She stared at the smears of fingerprints on the glass. Thinking nothing. He loved her. She was sure he did. The problem was that she didn’t love herself.
Late in the afternoon, they went upstairs and made love. It happened naturally, without any preamble, as if there had never been any problem between them. It was over quickly, and Claire felt uncomfortable afterwards without knowing why. Had this show of passion been a diversion tactic, something to make her stop think about who he might have been texting earlier?
She lay with her back to Tom, wishing that he’d stop holding onto her so tightly from behind, and listened to his shallow breathing.
“I care so much about you,” he said, softly but forcefully. “I really do. I care about us. I just want you to get better, to be like you were . . . before.”
“Before,” she whispered.
Before what? The miscarriage? Tom’s infidelity? Her breakdown?
Before . . .
She thought again about the black ants on the tree, the soft, pliable earth beneath her fingers, the impossibly thin figure she’d imagined in the woodland. She thought about how thin the veneer of reality had seemed at that moment, and how it had felt as if she were on the cusp of some kind of revelation. She had almost glimpsed the truth behind the lie of the world.
“Before,” she said again, louder this time.
“Yes,” said Tom, drowsily. “Yes, before. When things were normal. When we were okay and our world felt safe.”
She almost laughed. Nothing had ever felt safe, not really: it had simply been a temporary respite from the horrors of existence, the boiling darkness that seethed away beneath the crust. Safety was an illusion. Worse still, it was a shared illusion, a consensual deceit.
One of the lies we tell each other to hide the truth.
When Tom started snoring lightly, she slid out of bed. Her legs were so thin; her kneecaps resembled the knots on the bole of one of the trees she’d seen earlier that morning. Her feet seemed elongated; her toes clawlike.
Outside, darkness was gathering; Claire felt that it was gathering inside, too.
She padded across the bare boards and stood in front of the mirror. She hated looking at herself but this time, she forced herself to stare. She was gaunt, almost disfigured by extreme weight loss. Nobody could get her to eat, not Tom, not the doctors or psychiatrists, and certainly not her aged parents who never seemed interested in any aspect of her life anyway now that she was with Tom.
Hunger was something she barely even remembered. It was no longer part of her lived experience.
The glass of the mirror rippled, a caul covering the skull of another world. As she watched, the reflection dimmed. Her frail outline bled into the darkness that was filling the frame, spreading outwards.
The figure stood within that darkness, a black shape upon a black background. She could make out its pencil-thin body, the limbs sharp, bladelike, and tapering to a point not unlike the tarsus of an insect. As she watched, more limbs began to spread out from the central mass, each of them thinner than her sense of reality.
Slowly, it turned its head towards her, the neck snaking like a black thread. There was no face to speak of, just more of that vivid blackness, but filled with convexities and concavities that put her in mind of features on the verge of forming: an inchoate mask to cover the emptiness beneath.
She lifted a bony hand to her skeletal face. Her fingertips had turned black. It was spreading down the back of her hands like a stain.
One of the dark thing’s limbs twitched in response to her movement, like an insect’s sensilla, the end hovering in front of its wobbling, attenuated skull. The air filled with a soft vibration, low in frequency yet oddly calming. She recognised the sound as one that had been lost deep inside her for her entire life, the song of her hidden self, the secret hymn of whatever it was she had always needed to be but never quite managed to become. Until now.
The moment stretched, becoming forever. Nothing else mattered but this.
The vibration reached some kind of peak, the frequency changing. The black glass cracked, a thin line horizontally bisecting the mirror. The crack widened; darkness oozed out like heavy fog and hung in the air like a miasma. The same vaporous black substance emerged from the ends of her fingers, slowly coiling like smoke to combine with the other: two exhaled black breaths mingling in the oppressive air of the room.
The thing in the mirror began to shudder, either because of exposure to the atmosphere on this side or the mirror, or out of sheer excitement.
This was it. Claire felt that her entire adult life had been leading towards this moment of revelation. Whatever came next, she would have no regrets. No shame. No guilt. She would never need to eat again, never need to ache or to cry or to rely on anyone. Everything was about to change. Finally, she would face the truth, however brutal it might be.
The darkening air churned. She smelled damp earth and tasted salt on her tongue. Her skin tingled as it hewed even tighter to the bone, as if her skeleton were being vacuum-packed.
Behind her, Tom groaned loudly in his sleep. He sounded distant, on the other side of the mirror.
Before, she thought. There is no before, there is only after . . .
She stepped forward; it stepped forward; they both stepped forward, preparing to cross between worlds and become as one.
