Aria Remains
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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Aria stood beside a disused, ruined church. Vegetation grew formidably over and around it, clinging to the stonework, replaceing purchase in the chevron patterns of the walls and then on into the windows, into the cold and empty cavern which had once held congregations who had made wishes and sung worshipful songs to a celestial being who had long since become deafened by their relentless pleas. The grass of the grounds that encircled it was sparse and sad, as though it had suffered more footfall than it could bear and had finally, many years before, given up all hope of thriving, had come to accept its lot, merely existing with neither plans nor dreams. Overhead the skies were thick with bright white clouds, while the air was laced with a taut, nipping chill. She shivered, noticing for the first time that she was wearing only black and white polka dot pyjama bottoms and one of the thin, threadbare tee shirts she always wore in which to sleep, then looked around, wondering where she was and how she had come to be at this forsaken place.

The longer she was there, the stronger the sensation became that there was danger above her, that something would fall onto her, would become dislodged and then crash to the ground without reflection upon what might be underneath it, yet she found herself unable to leave. She looked up again but still saw nothing other than the chipped, curving edge of a large cylindrical pillar, then turned to see if there was anything, or anyone, else around. The entire area seemed deserted, with abandoned buildings, huts and barns that may well have found their situations after being dropped idly and carelessly from the sky, scattered around and between muddy pathways that spread out in all directions. She had the impression that it had only been a few days since it had been a vibrant, bustling village and that something had happened, that some kind of emergency had compelled everyone to suddenly depart, while at the same time it seemed much, much older and that no one had been there for hundreds of years, in the way that a person’s aspirations can, at one time, appear to be of the most important and fundamental nature while, as the days and months stretch and revolve, they suddenly seem the most trivial of diversions, as though nothing more than the imperfect wishes of children.

Finally she began to walk away from the church, uncertain whether something had let her leave or if, instead, it was she who had been restraining herself, loitering without intent. Regardless, she had spotted a wooden signpost, standing at an odd angle perhaps thirty yards away. Just as she reached the edge of the churchyard, its border marked by a low and decrepit brick wall, squinting to make out what was written on the sign, she heard a tremendous crash behind her and, turning quickly to see what had happened, she saw a large block of stone on the ground, exactly where she had been standing only moments before.

As she looked at the block, the section of column that had dropped form above, doing all it could to kill her or, perhaps, just trying to gain her attention, it seemed to shift, to change shape before her eyes, silently twisting and growing until it had become the ruptured base of a monument, its top apparently lost to the ravages of antiquity. Aria returned to it, her bare feet slipping against the damp, muddy ground, wanting to know what it commemorated and, looking at it closely, she noticed that it bore a simple carved inscription amongst the powdery algae and carpeting moss.

The world is a fine place indeed.

She became aware, although she did not know how, that the church had been built shortly after the Norman conquest and had been used throughout the following five centuries before lapsing into deterioration, left and forgotten as another church was constructed less than a mile away. It had been a building of interest for sightseers and, later, once the sightseers had grown bored of it, since it hardly ever changed, a playground for local children, hiding and seeking and running and jumping around and through its arches and crevices until there had been a terrible accident in which a young boy had been killed, crushed by falling masonry. The authorities had then decreed it to be out of bounds and, such was the respect once held for those in power by those who had barely none at all, no other person ever dared come within twenty feet of it. Apart, that is, from a young priest who had travelled from Portofino having performed the town’s first successful exorcism for nine years, sent to lay the spirit of the young boy to rest because the local minister had, like all the local ministers before him, been besieged by terrifying visions and had suffered a calamitous crisis of faith which saw him declare the world to be flat and Mesozoic creatures to be hiding in plain sight amongst the community. ‘They come from the tunnels,’ he had insisted, though no tunnel had ever been found.

It was at some point in the 1600s, Aria now understood, that the village was deserted without warning, that something had occurred that caused its populace to depart almost overnight, leaving the area untenanted. No record remained of what exactly had happened or where the villagers had gone, and there was no sign of there having been any other settlement close by until the establishment of Thresham and its newly built church, which continued into modernity without being disturbed by the shadow of death and had provided the venue for the nuptials of a descendant of the young priest from Portofino, who had very quickly fallen in love with an exquisite but godless Romanichal girl and abandoned his faith when the siren exhibited to him attestations of heavenly ecstasy he had never previously imagined.

Aria looked around again, already forgetting the slew of historical knowledge she had unwittingly acquired, and saw that the signpost was gone, just as the monument had now gone, returned to its proper place, a place it had been standing for many centuries and still stood now, erected in celebration of the return of an elderly and gratified gentleman who had once been youthful and filled with dreams of sunsets, and that, in its place, stood a small, narrow Victorian house that was once part of a terrace but now found itself isolated, severed from its sisters, transplanted from its foundations. It had a thin stream of slate-grey smoke streaming from its chimney and a pale incandescence glimmering around it.

Could there be someone inside? she wondered, carefully picking her way through the soggy ground towards it, the mud and grime oozing between her toes and adhering to the bottom of her pyjamas. But where did it come from? Why wasn’t it here, just a few moments ago?

As she drew closer to the house, the cold of the air causing her to hunch her shoulders in a stiff shiver, she titled her head, certain she could hear someone talking.

‘Finally, being unable to stand no more,’ a man’s voice said, disjointed and electrical, ‘and seeing an opportunity, as her husband had left for the morning, she took her escape and ran, without looking back, through the town and out towards the ocean.’

Aria came to the front door and leaned closer to it, the faint and noxious redolence of dampened fire, of blackened embers and acrid smoke suspended briefly in the air.

’She ran into the water and almost drowned, so strong was the current, so tired did she feel. The years of abuse, the years she had been mistreated by the man she had once loved more than she had ever loved anything, who had made her laugh and tremble and gasp, who had made light dance within her soul and brought her the accompaniment of sweet music wherever she went, had taken a great toll upon her and, as she struggled and thrashed against the power of the ocean, she came very close to allowing the tide to take her, to bring her the peace she had long desired.

‘Yet, she could not do it. Even though the child she carried was the result of her marriage to such a brute, still she knew that it was also her child, her baby, and she could not allow anything to cause it harm. And so, as she became used to the water, as she learned that she was able to sink beneath its surface and still be able to breathe, she decided that this would be where she made her home, where she would live and raise her child in tranquility.’

What was this? Aria wondered, placing her hand at the edge of the door and opening it a few inches so she might be able to see inside, since there was no vantage to be gained through the musty windows and their languid net curtains. Who could be talking, who could be living out here amongst all this nothingness?

She blinked and then, without knowing how, she was suddenly inside the house, in its cosy, comfortable living room. A couple sat facing one another, listening to a large, old-fashioned wireless set upon a heavy, dark-wood Georgian table that filled the space between them without lending any room to breathe, its thick legs the very last quartet carved by a talented carpenter whose name no one had ever known. They were, Aria thought, dressed as though it were the 1940s or 1950s, he wearing a beige cardigan and navy slacks, absentmindedly holding a brown pipe close to his freckled face, while the woman wore a plum, silk shirtwaist dress, her blonde hair falling in soft waves across her shoulders. She looked something like Carole Landis, Aria thought sadly, the star who was born and shone her light onto several million servicemen but then lost it all in the wake of a man who would later learn to converse with animals.

’She worked through the days and nights,’ the man on the radio continued, ’to build herself a beautiful home, a home that would not have looked out of place amongst those she passed as she ran for her life, a home that would have looked just like those which housed the many people she had been to over the years, asking for their help, for their protection, and who had all in turn refused her and sent her away.

‘As the spring arrived she gave birth to a son, a strong-willed boy who, from the very first, terrified her. He was brutish and rough, he spoke to her without respect and did all he could to make her life unhappy. But, as the years passed, the boy began to soften, to understand all his mother had done for him, the risks she had taken to be able to provide him with this opportunity to grow up in safety.’

‘Don’t you think this is a bit of a peculiar tale?’ the woman asked the man.

He rattled his pipe against his teeth and looked over to her.

‘Yes, it is rather, but wouldn’t you like to know how it ends?’

The woman smiled, but it seemed a smile without joy, a smile of preoccupation.

‘Darling,’ she said.

‘Hmmm?’ He was looking at the newspaper folded in his lap. ‘Soviets Begin Blockade of West Berlin’, the headline declared. Aria noticed it, too, and frowned.

‘I think,’ the woman said, sounding unsure, as though she almost didn’t want to say what she was about to say. ‘I think I heard it again this afternoon, before you came home. There were sounds in here, sounds as if something were being moved, that the chairs were being shifted, yet when I came in to see, everything was as it should be.’

‘Hmmm?’ the man said again, now turning his face towards the radio.

‘Her son pleaded with her to allow him to go to the surface, wanting, he said, to know more of life, to know what lay beyond the boundaries of the ocean. At last his mother agreed, but only if he would do something for her. She wanted him to visit the people who had refused to help her when she needed them most, telling him to look as angry as he could so that they would know how much pain they had caused her, so they they would feel bad about turning her away.’

‘And then,’ the woman continued, raising her voice slightly, ‘there were sounds at the front door, as if something were trying to come inside. Oh, Edward, what on earth do you think it might be?’

‘Oh, now listen, Connie, I’m sure it’s nothing,’ Edward said, looking at her and sucking his pipe before gesturing with it as he continued. ‘Perhaps it might be a mouse, perhaps it was the wind. I just don’t want you to worry, don’t want you to carry on with these silly thoughts of ghosts and ghouls. You know there isn’t any such thing.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Connie said, looking downhearted, frustrated that he wasn’t really listening, that he didn’t believe her.

She knew it wasn’t a mouse, just as plainly as she knew it wasn’t the wind. There was something, she was sure of it. Something, or someone, who was in the house with them, living amongst them, watching them. Even, she often thought, trying to communicate with them.

As Aria watched and listened, wondering who these people were and where she could possibly be, she shifted her position slightly so that she wasn’t standing quite so rigidly, so she could shift her weight to her other foot and, as she did, her arm grazed a small table beside her, causing it to move. Connie immediately looked in her direction.

‘Edward,’ she whispered, ‘Edward, did you hear that?’

‘Hmmm?’ Edward said, leaning closer to the radio.

‘Did you hear that? That sound, over there.’

She pointed in Aria’s direction, squinting her eyes as she looked towards the corner. Aria was standing in shadow, the only lamp being on the table by the radio, barely casting enough of its golden light to reach the centre of the room.

’No,’ Edward said without interest, his brow furrowed as he strained to hear the narrator of the strange story.

‘There’s definitely something there,’ Connie said, standing and edging towards Aria.

Not knowing what to do, although certain neither Connie nor Edward were able to see her, Aria stood as still as she could. Connie brought herself so close to her that they were almost touching, so close that Aria felt sure Connie would be able to feel her breath on her face, but having looked straight at her for a few moments she returned to her seat, looking both alarmed and disappointed.

‘It was with a look so angry, so terrifying, that the son rose from the water, strode along the beach and headed towards the town. He knocked upon the first door he came to, as his mother had told him which of the houses he should visit and it was this one, with its bright red paint and freshly dug flowerbeds, that he knew must be his first stop. Upon opening the door, the woman stared at him for several seconds, the colour draining from her cheeks, her mouth agape…’

‘I just know there’s someone in here with us,’ Connie said, looking still towards the corner of the room in which Aria stood.

‘Connie,’ Edward hissed.

Aria saw the exasperation in Edward’s face and, as he stood, letting the newspaper fall from his lap onto the carpet of blues and whites, he raised his hand to Connie as if about to strike her, Aria immediately pushed hard against the table beside her, sending it crashing to the ground, snowdrops scattering from the small glass vase that had stood upon it and that now shattered into a hundred pieces. Edward stopped, half-hunched over his wife, and stared at the table, while Connie screamed, pushing her chair away and stepping back.

‘Edward,’ she shouted, ‘Edward, what’s there?’

Unable to speak, unable to move, Edward merely focused on the table, his raised hand shaking, his pipe falling from the other, tobacco scattering across the carpet. Aria, too, held her position, wondering what would happen next, if there was something else she should do. A heavy, sombre atmosphere filled the room and an almost imperceivable mist began to form just a few inches from the ceiling above them.

‘We hope you enjoyed this evening’s presentation’, a different voice from the radio was saying. ‘Please stay tuned for the news.’

The radio beeped five, perhaps six times, then crackled and hissed, the lamplight flickered and then, quite unexpectedly, the entire room fell into an ominous, silent blackness. It seemed to stay this way for an indeterminate amount of time and Aria began to feel that she was in fact no longer in the quaint, old-fashioned house but was, instead, drifting across an open plain of nothingness, that she was being taken somewhere she had never been but knew as well as she knew her own home.

Very briefly, lasting no more than a few seconds, she saw flashes of light, caught glimpses of a small dog running happily across a field towards her, a strange, isolated hut and then, as the light disappeared, words began to form before her, individual letters twisting in the blackness, each one aflame, each twisting haphazardly as they fell into place.

Find the past, they slowly spelled. Return to the future.

The words seemed to sear into the skin of her arm as if branding her, but she felt no pain. Instead she was suddenly standing by water, surrounded by people busily wandering up and down what seemed to be a small stone dock.

‘Talk of a plague, there be,’ she heard one man say to another. Both were dressed in tunics, caps askew on their heads. ‘Many have already met their end.’

The men were carrying baskets filled with fish while, all around, people were discussing prices, bartering with goods, some holding bags of vegetables while others carried heavy skins and furs.

‘Where didst thou hear such a thing?’ the second man asked the first.

’T’was while I be away to the far end of things, along West Wales. They spoke of terrible things, great pain, great upset.’

‘Then we must light our candles and be at prayer so that we are not so cursed,’ the second man said, a look of great concern crossing his face.

Aria suddenly felt a sharp burning sensation on her arm and, looking down, she realised that the letters she had seen in the darkness were now scarred onto her arm, risen from her skin. She closed her eyes, wincing at the discomfort, and then saw that she was standing in front of a door. A heavy, wooden door, with a black, iron latch and thick hinges. It seemed to her to be very old. The ironwork was scratched, parts of it rusting, while the wood was stained and damaged with grooves, some dark, some lighter. She tried the handle but it was stuck, rigidly sealed in place and, try as she might, she was not able to move it. I have to get through this door, she thought. I must replace a way in, to the room beyond.

Summoning all her strength she grabbed the handle tightly, closed her eyes and tried to prise it loose, ignoring the soreness in her hands, leaning back as far as she could. It was then she realised there was something covering her, something soft and, as she opened her eyes again, she saw that she was in her bed, the sunlight of early morning streaming through her window. She instinctively pushed the duvet away and looked down at her arm, but saw nothing.

She reached for her phone on the bedside table, found Ruby’s number and connected a call.