Look What I Found

"Dig anywhere long enough and you'll find the ground has been something else before. It keeps the record whether anybody comes looking or not."

I got the first barrow of twenty-mil down to the far edge and started spreading it along the bottom, and about the third shovelful in I stopped, and put the blade down, and went onto my knees in the wet.

There was a band running through the wall of the cut.

Dark. Near enough black. Dead level the whole length of it and about a hand's width thick, and I hadn't seen it in the section I'd opened the day before because the day before I'd stopped six or eight inches shallower and never got down as far as it. I put a thumb into the face of it. It broke soft and greasy under the nail and left a mark on the skin, and I got it up under my nose and it smelled of exactly what it was.

Charcoal.

I sat back on my heels with my hands on my thighs and my heart going like I'd run up from the road. A burn horizon. Level as a string line, forty centimetres under my own grass, and it had been lying there through every one of the eighteen years I'd spent walking about on top of it, putting fruit trees in over it, complaining about the drainage above it.

I laughed out loud. On my knees. On my own. In a trench.

I'd argued for a layer like that in 1994, on somebody else's ruined pasture up in the Midlands, and been told the evidence was thin and that I'd want a great deal more of it before I put my name to anything. They'd been right and I'd taken it on the chin, and then I had gone on thinking about it, on and off, for twenty-four years. And here it was. In my paddock. I could have laid my hand flat on it.

I cut a clod off the face with the trowel — fist-sized, the band running clean through the middle so the whole sequence was there in the one piece, the pale stuff underneath, the black, and the good dark soil that had built itself up on top since. Then I got off my knees, which took longer than I wanted and I did not care in the slightest, and went up to the house at a rate that would have embarrassed me if there'd been anyone in the paddock to see it.

She'd come out for this. She'd come out in her socks and stand in the wet with her arms folded, and want to know the depth, and want to know whether I'd photographed it in situ before I went at it with a trowel like an idiot, and then she'd tell me what dating it would cost and how long the wait was, and then she'd want to know when we could open a second face further along to see if it ran.

In through the back door with the boot against it to shut it, and then I pulled up on the mat, because I had the far edge of that trench up both forearms and to the knees, and there was a visitor in the house.

"Karen!"

"In here, Chris." From the far end. The lounge.

Through the kitchen and the dining was the short way and I didn't take it. The dining end is cluttered, and the man was in there somewhere with his tea, and I had half the paddock on me and a lump of it held in both hands like a bird's nest. So I went along the passage on the boards and left it for somebody to sweep up later, which for once in my life I had decided was not going to be me.

The lounge door at the passage end was shut.

I got a hand to the handle and lifted, the way it always wanted lifting, and I was already grinning.

"Karen, look what I—"

The door came off the jamb and the back of it was colour.

All of it. Edge to edge, top rail to bottom. Greens and purples and a hard yellow, the whole of it turning over on itself, throwing sparks along the sides where it met the timber. And it came round toward me as the door came round, because it was on the door, and the door was in my hand.

Karen was standing right in front of it.

I didn't understand any of it. There was no moment in which I worked out what I was looking at. Something went over my scalp and down through me all at once, cold, like a bucket of water, and my legs had me moving before I'd had any say in the matter.

She was going in. Not falling — I have seen people fall and it does not look like that. Going in shoulder first with the rest of her coming after the shoulder, tipping, and then her head went and I couldn't see her face any more, and one hand came back out of it toward me with the fingers open.

"Karen!"

I had her hand and she took hold of me, and she had a grip on her, she'd had a grip on her since 1997, and for about a second and a half I had my wife and I was going to keep her.

Then it wasn't there.

Nothing tore. Nothing pulled. Her fingers came through mine the way water comes off a shovel and my hand shut on itself and there was nothing inside it, and I stood there with my fist closed on nothing at all and made a noise I didn't recognise as mine.

I grabbed again. At the air where she'd been. Twice, three times, at nothing, and I went on doing it well after it was clear there was nothing to do it at.

Then I went in after her, and I did not decide to.

The colour went through me. Green, then purple, then the yellow, and I was shouting her name the whole way with nothing coming out that I could hear.

Then there was ground under my feet and I was still shouting it.

"Karen!"

Welcome to Clivilius, Chris Owen.

It didn't come in through my ears. I know what a sound is and I know where a sound arrives, and that did none of it. It sat in with my own thinking, in the place my own voice sits, flat and even and almost polite. I turned right round looking for whoever had said it and there was nobody within a mile of me, and I understood then that whatever had happened to me was not a thing I was going to be able to think my way back out of.

And I couldn't see her.

Three seconds, maybe four. That was all it was. I have had worse things happen to me, and none of them have been anything like those four seconds — standing in a place I had never been in my life, turning on the spot, unable to find my wife, and everything in me going out from under at once.

Then she was there. A few metres off, side on, upright, moving. I got to her and got hold of her arm and she was solid and she was warm, and she came round on her heel and I pulled her into me and held on far too hard.

I was shaking. Right through — arms, legs, jaw. It had all come at once and it had nowhere to go.

"I thought I'd lost you somehow." It came out into her shoulder, muffled and too fast and nothing like steady. "When I saw you disappear like that."

She was rigid against me and her heart was going hard enough that I could feel it through both our jackets, and I stood in that dust and felt my wife's heart going and it was the best thing I have ever felt in my life. I didn't want to let go of her. She was already pulling back to look.

I turned with her.

The sky first, because it was over everything. Blue. Ordinary blue, and that was the thing about it — high and clean, no cloud in it anywhere, and the light coming in from a sun over on my right at about the angle a sun ought to be at in the middle of a morning. There was nothing whatever wrong with it. That was what was wrong with it.

Then the ground. Dust, orange and brown with a deep red running underneath it, going out in every direction I could follow, and not one green thing standing anywhere in the whole of it.

I have spent my entire working life looking at ground. There has never been a paddock I couldn't get something off. I looked at that and it gave me nothing back at all, and I felt it go through my stomach.

"What the hell just happened?" My voice had climbed and I couldn't get it down. "And what the hell is Clivilius?"

"I think this place is," she said.

Behind us there was a wall.

It stood up out of the dust with nothing holding it and nothing either side of it, at least three metres tall and wide. Translucent. I could see the barren nothingness on the other side of it.

I stood and looked at it with my arms down at my sides and did nothing at all.

That is not a turn of phrase. My wife walked past me and put her hand flat on the thing, and I stood behind her and watched her do it, and I knew what I was doing while I was doing it, and I did it anyway.

"Luke!" Her face was right up at the surface of it. "Luke, where are you?"

Nothing came back. Not so much as an echo. The dust took the sound off her and kept it, and the quiet that came in after was the loudest thing out there.

"Help me," she said, and put an elbow into my ribs.

"Luke!"

I had met the man once. I stood in the dust and shouted the name of a man I had met once at a wall standing on its own in the middle of nowhere, because my wife had asked me to, and I would have shouted anything at all she wanted.

"Luke!" Karen screamed, and started hitting it with the sides of her fists.

Something let go in me then. I got both hands into it alongside hers — "Help us, please!" — flat-palmed at first and then with everything I had, and it didn't give and it didn't shift and it made no sound whatsoever. Not the sound glass makes. Not the sound anything makes. I split the heel of my right hand open on it and kept going.

And it was cold. That was the thing that finally got in. Cold right the way through, colder than the morning had been, the cold that comes up off stone when you turn it out of the ground in July, and it went into my forearms and up into my chest, and I stopped, because there is no arguing with anything that cold.

"It's no use," Karen said.

She put her back against it and went down it and sat in the dust, and the dust came up around her hands and took her fingers in past the knuckle. It was as fine as flour. I noticed that, and I wished I hadn't.

I couldn't look at her sitting down there. I looked at the top of the wall instead. My eyes had stung up without asking me and I stood over her holding my face still, which fooled nobody and was not meant to.

"He'll come back for us, won't he?" It came out small. There was nothing behind it and she'd have heard that.

"I don't think it matters anymore." She let a breath go and it was very loud out there.

My legs went. I didn't sit down so much as stop holding myself up, and I came down into the dust beside her with my shoulder against her shoulder.

"What do you mean, it doesn't matter anymore?"

"We're not going back home," she said, and shook her head.

"We're not?"

I heard my own voice going up and couldn't do a thing about it. I'd let the ducks out at first light and taken the eggs out of the straw with my own hands, and there was nobody to shut them in tonight. Nobody at all. That was what came up in me, out of everything there was.

"But what about work? And the house? And the animals?"