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‘D UNDERESTIMATED THE work required to dig the hole. My arms and back ached and sweat dripped off me. But listening to her prattle into her smartphone was worse. Indeed, I suspected it’d triggered the latest pain throbbing in my brow.
‘Hello again, people. Mary speaking. Welcome back to my domain of Maryland. As you can see behind me, the oldest citizen of Maryland—my dad—is hard at work preparing to launch our capsule deep into the gulfs of… No, not space. Time. Future time!’
I restrained myself. I didn’t turn around and bellow at her to shut up.
‘He’s been digging for ages. In fact, he’s such an old dude I’m worried he’ll pass away before he finishes. Hee-hee! Two feet, he says, we have to bury it two feet deep to be sure it stays there safely… But wait…! Something’s up. Well, something’s down, in the ground. Let’s see what it is…’
The shovel-blade had encountered something. I scraped some earth aside and discovered a wooden surface. A gnarly tree-root grew across the top of it, indicating it’d been buried a long time. Forgetting Mary was filming, I said, ‘Fuck! This is unexpected.’
I looked at her. ‘Don’t put that on your project’s soundtrack.’
‘Oh, I won’t put it on the soundtrack, dad. But unless you’re extra nice to me, I’ll play it to mum.’
Her cocksure tone increased my irritation and, seemingly, my headache. When I’d been her age, I didn’t speak to my dad like that. He’d have given me hell, maybe clouted me, for being cheeky. However, I kept calm and said, ‘Let’s see what we’ve found.’
With the root in the way, removing it from the ground took effort. But eventually it sat on the grass next to the hole, a square box made of slabs of wood, possibly oak like the tree above us. It had iron components too, a curved, bucket-type handle at the top, a hinge at the end of its lid, a panel with a hoop on the side below. The hinge contained a hole and fitted around the hoop, but there was no padlock to hold it in place.
Mary still filmed. ‘Open it.’
‘This isn’t part of the project.’
‘It is. It’s the project taking a weird turn.’
The lid lifted easily. Mouldering cloth filled its interior. In the cloth’s folds I found four items: a varnished stick, short and straight, with notches along it that suggested tiny carvings; a vessel shaped like and not much bigger than an eggcup, made of copper but corroded a dull blue green; a clay dish with a faint pattern; and a dagger with a rusted blade.
After I’d put these on the grass, my hands smelt both smoky and leathery. Perhaps the cloth had been treated with a substance that protected the things cocooned in it against decay.
Mary said, ‘It’s a time capsule.’
So cocky and yet so stupid. ‘How can it be a time capsule?’ I indicated her stainless-steel container, sealed in a clear polyurethane bag, which had been ordered from Amazon for an extortionate sum. My wife had insisted—anything to keep the girl happy. ‘Firstly, the odds of us finding someone else’s time capsule while we bury our own one are astronomical. Plus, this box is old. It was buried long ago. And back then, there wasn’t any fad for time capsules. People had… better things to do.’
But then I stopped arguing and tried to sound kind and obliging. Maybe this would speed up the process, for I longed to return to the cottage, swallow some paracetamol, and take a shower. ‘Come on, I’ll film you giving your speech. Then we’ll stick this in the ground.’
It worked. A vain little creature, she handed me the phone, picked up the container, and looked at me regally. As she cleared her throat, I noticed a gleam on her lips where she’d applied a smidgeon of her mother’s make-up.
The tramp, I thought.
‘So, visitors to Maryland, here’s my first choice. A phone. Not my smartphone of course, but one I used before that, the stupid-phone I called it. My dad owned it originally, then gave it to me before he let me have a smartphone. My parents sometimes talk about the days before everyone had mobile phones. They say those phones caused a revolution, not just in communications but in how people socialise. Actually, the future people who find my capsule might think it weird we used phones at all. Maybe they’ll have little communication devices implanted in their heads. Or they’ll have evolved and become telepathic…’
Mary didn’t speak into her smartphone. Her voice came from a clip she was editing on the computer in an adjacent room. I stood with Jane in the cottage’s main room, surveying the box and its contents, which were arranged on sheets of newspaper on the table. My wife asked, ‘Do you think these legally belong to Pete? You found them in his field.’
‘I don’t know. Isn’t there a law requiring finds like this to be handed over to the local coroner? We should check online.’
‘They might be valuable.’
‘You think so? A rusty knife? A faded plate? A stick?’
‘Have you studied that stick? It’s fancy. Symbols carved along it. Could be a wand.’
I held it up. While Mary talked about mobile phones next door, I waved the wand like Harry Potter casting a spell. Now what spells could I cast?
Easy. Abracadabra! Money, lots of money. Enough to rescue my bookshop from the ructions caused by this horrible fucking pandemic. Or…
Hocus Pocus! Wind time back a year. Magic all virus-carrying bats, pangolins, whatever, into non-existence so that none of this shit ever happened. Or…
Shazam! Transport me to a different timeline where I hadn’t thought selling books for a living was a good idea…
Jane looked past, then turned her head towards me and silently mouthed a name: ‘Pete.’
Embarrassed, I returned the wand to the table and went to the window to speak to him. We’d moved into my cousin’s holiday-cottage because its summer bookings had been cancelled, and its rent was less than what we’d paid for the apartment above our bookshop. Like every evening when he came to check on us, Pete and I talked briefly. The discovery at the oak tree added only a few extra sentences to the conversation. Pete had always been taciturn and these days, preoccupied by the pandemic’s impact on his farm, he was even less communicative. At least there was enough left of his business, enough room for hope, for him just to be preoccupied. With my business, I’d tipped over into despair.
When I asked about the oak tree where we’d buried one container and found another, I gleaned one thing from him: ‘It’s called the Forzier Tree.’ He didn’t shout but was naturally slobbery and specks of spit hit the far side of the glass. I was glad we were following the rules about family bubbles and social distancing.
‘The Forzier Tree? Why?’
‘Sorry. No idea.’
After he’d gone back to the farmhouse, I kept gazing out of the window. I could see the top of the mysteriously named Forzier Tree over the roofs of his sheds. The sun was setting behind it, streaking the sky with red. Those streaks looked like bloody scratches made by the ends of the tree’s branches.
‘I take it,’ said Jane, ‘there was a mark on the ground, something that made you dig there?’
‘There wasn’t. I chose the spot at random.’
She echoed what I’d told Mary at the tree. ‘But the odds must be huge. Digging a hole for one container, discovering another already buried.’
‘True… Though people beat huge odds all the time. Someone wins the lottery regularly. I’d have preferred beating those odds, in the lottery…’
A twitch inside my skull announced the arrival of another headache. These had bedevilled me recently, caused no doubt by my stress. I put a hand against my forehead. From my palm I discerned the smoky, leathery smell of the cloth the objects had been wrapped in.
‘Perfume…’ Mary said distantly.
While she narrated another film-clip, I picked up the discoloured copper goblet. Something made me put it to my nose and sniff inside it.
‘…boys, you can switch off for a minute. Ladies, keep listening, you’ll understand this. You know what we have to do to keep the species going…’ She giggled. ‘…but to reach that stage, you got to have romance, and to have romance, you got to attract someone. Which for ladies means things like perfume. So, the next choice for the capsule is my mum’s Estée Lauder Bronze Goddess. Don’t worry, it’s an empty bottle. She’d kill me if I buried a full one. There’s a teensy-weensy bit left at the bottom, though, so I can smell it…’ She snorted exaggeratedly. ‘Phew! She says it smells of tropical beaches. I disagree! Anyway, what will future humans think of us? This fuss about perfumes, so we can attract guys and…’ More giggling. ‘…make babies? Probably in 2120 or 2220 or whenever, they’ll grow babies in machines, from cells, and life will be easier. Hey, maybe we ladies will have taken over! We won’t need men any more to keep humanity going…’
Jane was listening to her too. ‘She’s put everything into this summer project. But she’s finishing it off and we’re not even at the end of July. Isolating in this God-forsaken place… What’s she going to do now?’
I set the goblet back on the table and almost suggested we ask the school to assign her another project. I managed to stop myself. Ninety percent of the help Mary got with this project had come from me, and it’d driven me crazy.
Meanwhile, the light was fading. As well as draining from the sky outside, it drained from the cottage’s interior, so that the room felt smaller and more claustrophobic. The cottage’s squarish rooms were uncomfortably box-like. The feeling was worse at night when, in the empty, unlit countryside, the darkness became black and dense. I imagined that darkness weighing on the other side of the rooms’ stone walls and on top of their low, raftered ceilings… Packed against them like soil.
Then, those cottage-rooms made me feel I was buried—deep in a hole.
An hour later, I sat in a chair in the same room. The main light was off, but the luminosity of a nearby floor-lamp surrounded me. My latest headache was receding. Mary, despite the time, persevered with her project in the other room and I realised I could listen to her now without becoming irritated.
I couldn’t tell if she was recording something new or playing something she’d recorded. ‘…why did I include old, ordinary and, well, smelly things like my first-ever pair of trainers? It was my dad’s suggestion. Yeah, he’s grumpy and complains all the time, but I agree with him on this. He says trainers symbolise how crazy our world has got. Some people are so poor they can’t afford to buy shoes. Yet other people buy designer trainers that cost thousands of pounds and wear them not because they want something comfortable to walk in, but to show off how rich they are. It’s crazy. Cra-zeeee! When future-folk look back at us, what will they think…?’
Wow. She agreed with me on something? That made me feel guilty about the hostility I’d felt towards her that afternoon.
I sat nursing the clay dish from the box. Lines were marked on it but seemed incomplete. I ran a finger over its surface, feeling for additional lines that were no longer visible but whose grooves remained. I detected a pattern—a cross enclosed in a circle. Then, as my fingertip followed a line from the cross’s centre to the circle’s circumference, Mary’s voice changed. I heard it say:
‘Earth… I entrust to the box my patine-plate, fashioned like one that holds the Eucharistic bread consumed by the Papists. Though—ha!—the bread consumed off this plate did contain more sanguine ingredients. And I foresee for this the reward of two shoes of the finest wear. Shoes that while they tread upon the earth, my feet within, shall mark me as a lady of full purse and fair aspect…’
My finger returned to the plate’s centre, then went along another line.
‘Air… My wand of ash that many a time commanded spirits of the air. But for which I foresee a prize a thousand times more wondrous. A thousand-times greater wand summoning all the airy spirits across the orb! Their voices at my beck, awaiting my impositions! Aye, and a wand that’s a marvellous engine too, doing duties of horologe and calendar, compass and astrolabe, map and table-book…’
Now I didn’t just hear something strange. I saw it. I observed a grassy field whose edges were concealed by mist. The mist glimmered palely with light, suggesting the sun had recently risen. Ahead, a creature crouched amid the grass. As my finger explored the dish’s pattern, I saw the creature more closely. It was as if the pattern was a control on a viewing device allowing me to zoom in.
‘Water… My chalice, symbol of the womb.’ The voice, though low and raspy, acquired a rueful tone. ‘Aye, that I know too well, being quick with child. He did fulsomely take me and ravish me. And though I burned castoreum and immersed me in its funk, till clothes, hair, skin reek of it, the charm affects no un-childing. Still the bairn survives within me. Oh, when they know of this, twill be my death. They’ll reckon, with one as stigmatic as I, that the hag-seed be no man’s but the devil’s…’ The voice became defiant. ‘But I’ll trick all yet. And for my chalice I foresee a fragranced balm, one so powerful twill cast a glamour o’er any man that looks my way. No drab then I’ll be. Nay, I’ll be a queen, a metaphysical queen of men!’
It squatted behind a hole. Gnarled, soiled hands on the ends of stick-thin arms rested at the hole’s edge. Matted hair hung down and hid the creature’s face. Verminous-looking rags covered its body. On one side of the hole, a mound of black earth flattened the grass. On its other side sat the box we’d dug up that afternoon, unsullied by dirt.
‘And fire… My artavus, blade warm with blood from many a beast—fox. hare, coney, paddock—drawn during the business of my accitings and impositionings. How I long to plant this dudgeon in the meat of my enemies, all who misthink and hate and jade me! But no, to the box I entrust it too… And in return, I foresee a littler knife, blunt and feeble of blade, but with wondrous power. With this knife, I shall cut walls of stone. And out of those gashes, into my hands, shall pour riches!’
The creature seized the box and dumped it in the hole. A sneer came from the filthy hair: ‘Poor Parson Drakeford. Twill be a hoo-bub indeed when he finds some scroyle has thieved his precious alms box. And here shall it be graved, for discovery by no man of this age.’ Then the creature twisted towards the mound of earth and its hands started scrabbling at it, scooping it into the hole in top of the box. It worked with almost supernatural speed. Hands and arms flurried until they became a blur.
Until this point I thought I’d watched everything from my chair in the cottage. I’d seen and heard it without really being there. Now I realised I felt the mist’s chill on my face, which so alarmed me I gave an exclamation. The creature froze in the middle of its toil by the earth-heap. After a moment’s stillness, its tangled head turned towards me and for the first time I saw part of a face between its tresses. I saw eyes. One blazed a fierce blue while the other wore the grey hood of a cataract…
And then I was in my chair in the cottage, the dish still resting on my lap. I snatched my finger away from its half-hidden pattern.
I sat stunned for a time. What had just happened?
The sounds of the cottage finally registered. Water spattered in the bathroom where Jane was showering before going to bed and, of course, Mary still talked in the computer room.
I got up, switched on the main light, and returned the dish to the table. I moved like a shaky old man. Seeing the box on the table, I recalled the term the creature in my vision had used: alms box. I examined its lid and found in the middle of it a groove where a slot had been cut but then plugged with some material. I took a cutlery-knife from the kitchen, poked at it, and pushed out another piece, tightly folded, of the smoky, leathery-smelling cloth the four items had been wrapped in. With the piece of cloth removed, I saw the slot was wide enough to permit the passage of coins.
I wondered: have I found your stolen property, Parson Drakeford?
After that, I didn’t expect to sleep. Yet I did. I must have done, because while I lay in bed next to Jane I started dreaming.
I dreamt I was in the same field as before, looking at the same spot, though the grass had regrown where the hole had been dug and the alms box buried. Wildflowers garlanded the grass, suggesting it was spring or summer and several months had passed since my vision amid the icy mist.
The woman stood there—now I’d got over my initial shock, I could think of her as a woman, a human being, not a creature. Yes, time had passed. Her figure was rounder. She was in the late stages of pregnancy, the ‘childing’ she’d mentioned.
I saw more of her surroundings. Behind her rose an oak tree that, from its nearness to the burial-spot, I guessed was a younger version of the Forzier Tree. I remembered how several times she’d said, ‘I foresee…’ Had the Forzier Tree come from the Foreseer Tree?
I also made out a wooden stool, which she’d placed exactly where the box was interred. And above, a rope with its end in a noose hung from one of the Forzier Tree’s branches.
She mused: ‘Aye, I’m gast by what’s to come. Tis a fearful leap, into the vastidity between lighted life and nighted death. But should I stay, what then? Be slew by them, in their stilless hate and fear? Or have him come searching for his bantling, for which my sufferance be even worse? Nay, all be well. All be afore planned, all in place.’ She clambered onto the stool, stretched up, and wrestled the noose over her unruly, dirty tresses until the lowest part of the rope was under her jaw.
‘So, leap I must…
‘And leap I shall!’
She stepped off the stool, dropped as the branch above her bent, then just before her feet touched the ground was yanked up as it straightened again. She swung and her heels caught the seat of the stool and knocked it over.
My face felt the sun’s heat. I even smelled the scents of the wildflowers. I was physically present. Yet I didn’t run forward, grab her, and try to save her. I told myself it was pointless to intervene because this had happened already, long ago, and I could do nothing to change it. So, I held back. I tried not to admit the real reason for my failure to act, which was because her wretchedness, disfigurement, and poverty repulsed me.
She swung, flailed, gurgled. While her head thrashed, her mane of rancid hair flew up and I glimpsed her face again. Her blue eye bulged in agony, the grey eye was perversely blank and immobile. Her mouth gaped and expelled threads of spit, her tongue writhed between wrecked teeth. Her convulsions grew even more violent. I heard something splatter the ground and saw blood dribbling between her legs. But it wasn’t until a small, red bundle dropped and ended up hanging between those legs that I realised she’d miscarried. The umbilical cord kept the foetus suspended in a gruesome parody of the rope on which its mother dangled.
My instincts told me—I must do something. But I simply stood there, watching.
Her struggles ceased. As she became still, her hair dropped again over her face and all I saw of it was the grey, filmed eye peering between two tresses, no different in death than in life. Yet still I saw movement. The twisted, slimy foetus between her legs was twitching.
Staring at it, I realised the little thing already had hair. Not just on its head…
I was awake on the bed. My muscles were painfully tense. As if a drill-bit had started turning against my forehead, I felt a new headache.
Jane was awake too. Unaware of the state I was in, she muttered, ‘Do you hear? That girl’s still up. Go and tell her to get to bed.’
I was too traumatised to reply. Obliviously, Jane continued, ‘She never listens to me. But she sometimes does what you tell her. Sometimes.’
It took huge willpower, but I overcame my paralysis, got up, and took my bathrobe off a hook on the bedroom door. I was glad of the darkness because my wife couldn’t see me shaking while I put the robe on.
I entered the main room. It was black, save for a wedge of light escaping past the slightly open door of the computer-room. From there, I heard Mary’s voice: ‘…don’t worry! I’m not sticking one of my dad’s current bank cards in the capsule! This one has expired. Anyway, it’s a good choice because it’ll show those future people how important money was in 2020. Important? We can’t live without it. We think about nothing else…’
The wedge of light fell across the box on the table. I approached it, wondering if, centuries before, blood from the woman’s womb had soaked through the soil to it. Did her DNA slather its wood?
Then in the darkness I thought I heard a different voice, a low, raspy one: ‘Ye were there, but ye did nowt!’
I banged against the table and my hand landed on another thing on it, the rusted dagger. The second voice didn’t speak again. Had it been a last, lingering trace of my dream? But it was impossible to think straight now. The new headache throbbed viciously in my forehead. It made my eyes secrete tears and my face was wet.
I continued to the computer-room’s door. At it, I heard Mary again: ‘…I’m saying this while my dad’s not around because I don’t want him to hear. But I know he’s worried about money. I know he’s scared the pandemic will put him out of business and we won’t have any money to live on…’
She knew! Despite the pretence by Jane and me that all was well, that after the pandemic we’d be back in our apartment and back selling our books, she knew everything was a mess! And she sounded concerned for me! I felt I was weeping genuine tears, not pain-induced ones.
I pushed open the door. The space beyond was surprisingly dim, even though it’d cast light into the main room. Indeed, its only illumination came from the computer-screen, which was filled by Mary’s face. The image was talking. Mary herself, barely discernible in the light of the phosphors, was asleep in the chair. She slumped forward, head on the desk, hair spilling over the keyboard. I reached forward and was about to say tenderly, ‘Mary, love, you need to be in bed…’
Only then did I realise I had the dagger in my hand. I’d unconsciously lifted it in the other room. Shuddering, I dumped it on the desk by the keyboard.
And a moment later, someone croaked, ‘Ye stood back, watched me swing, heard me yawp. Yet ye did nowt to aid me!’
Mary’s face remained on the screen but from her mouth came the sepulchral voice I’d heard in my visions. ‘Nor did ye make to aid the barn, newly belched from my womb!’ I lunged at the keyboard. ‘Aye, ye be as currish as all them others that revelled in my pain and sufferance…’ Among the tresses of Mary’s hair, one of my fingers found the power button and the screen blackened.
The room blackened too. For a time, I saw and heard nothing. My only sensation was my headache, emitting pain in the blackness like a quasar emitting radiation in the middle of deep space. Then I became aware of an odour. It evoked smoke and leather—castoreum, burned in the archaic belief its fumes would induce an abortion. And through the blackness and pain rasped that voice: ‘Yet, despite your wantonness, I be here. I live!’
It was true. She was here. The items she’d put in her box, their strange correlations with what Mary had chosen for her time capsule… Somehow, they were the occult mechanism by which she’d come forward in time…
My hand still rested on the keyboard, amid Mary’s strands of hair. I felt that hair move, suddenly greasy and knotted.
Something snarled and lurched up from the chair and a mass of rank hair and rags crashed against me. Hooked fingernails raked at my eyes. I screamed, fell back against the desk, and scrabbled at it until I found the blade again. I thrust it forward. My assailant seemed to see it in the darkness and one taloned hand caught my wrist and stopped the dagger in its course. I managed with my other hand to knock her backwards. The chair clattered over. She tripped on it and fell, her snarls becoming a shriek, and I fell too.
I landed on her. One of her hands still gripped my hand with the dagger, the other clawed up at my face. ‘Get out!’ I screamed. ‘Get out of here!’
The door crashed back against the wall. Someone found the switch for the ceiling-light and, as the room lit up, cried out in alarm.
A scream followed that cry—from Mary. My eyes focused in the light and I realised I was on top of her with the dagger positioned over her face. Then I looked towards the door, assuming Jane had run from the bedroom. But she wasn’t there. She’d retreated through the doorway.
Jane reappeared, carrying something in her arms. I opened my mouth to speak, though I knew my explanation would sound ludicrous because I’d pinned Mary to the floor and was trying to stab her.
Before I could say anything, my wife raised the oak-wood alms box and smashed it down on my head.
In the void, perhaps that ‘vastidity’ between life and death she’d mentioned, I had plenty of time to think about things.
I accepted she’d been right to despise me. Suicide was part of her plan, her grand scheme to escape whoever—or whatever—had impregnated her. But still, I should have tried to save her and her child at the tree. I hadn’t. Repelled by her, I’d merely stood and watched. I’d acted—not acted—wrongly. Was this void my punishment?
Yet sometimes I felt close to the living world. From it I heard sounds. These became words and sentences, finally conversations.
‘…a tumour…?’
‘…lodged in his brain’s frontal lobe, the part regulating personality and behaviour…’
‘…I remember him complaining about headaches… Stress-induced, he said… But we never suspected… Wait… Does this mean…?’
‘…I know what you’re going to ask… It’s possible, yes… Tumours in that location can cause mood swings, even aggression and violence…’
‘…Oh, thank God… I’m sorry, forgive my reaction… I’m not being callous… But it’s important our daughter knows he wasn’t responsible for attacking her… It was caused by his condition…’
Later, I began to feel things, then see them. I was returning to the living world physically, though I couldn’t interact with any of it. I lay on a bed, statue-still. As well as blankets pressing against my body, there were bandages pressing against my forehead. A tube wormed its way across my cheek and entered one of my nostrils. I didn’t attempt to move. It seemed I had no idea which part of my brain to use to make myself move.
Did I have locked-in syndrome? Was I trapped inside my own capsule, one made of flesh?
I finally noticed my wife and daughter at the edge of my vision, sitting on bedside chairs. Depressingly, they wore masks. That cursed pandemic hadn’t ended yet.
I heard my wife tell me: ‘…you’ve no need to worry any more. That box of objects you found is valuable. The person who’s believed to have buried it is well-known to local historians. Pete contacted one of them and he put us in touch with a collector. And the collector’s offered… Well, you won’t believe how much he’s offered. Yes, we’re bending the 1996 Treasure Act… Breaking it, to be honest… But it doesn’t matter. Nobody need ever know. The money’s enough to tide us over till you’re better and we can get the business going again…’
I should have felt happy, but my gaze was drawn towards Mary. She was uncharacteristically silent. Who wouldn’t be, though, in the presence of someone who’d previously attacked them with a dagger? Above her mask, all I saw of her face were her eyes, her piercing blue eyes.
Momentarily, like an eclipse where the moon passed before the sun, the blueness disappeared from one of Mary’s eyes and was replaced by a disc of cataract grey.
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