Year's End

Every year, we invited Ben to our New Year’s get together. We’d invited him over for so many years that it was now part of the latticework of traditions that held the festive period together and held together all those who sailed in her for that matter.

Every year, we asked Ben to join us. And every year he would provide a vague affirmation of his attendance. He might attend was what was said, but the vagueness was an uncrossable river that kept us separate for decades.

I’d like to say that I knew what was coming, or that I at least sensed a storm looming. Maybe I did. But I also know that we all have a habit of overriding our instincts. Later, we rewrite history to make us look far better than we ever were. Most things only make sense after the fact. There’s only coherence, once we’ve written the story and edited it so it doesn’t have too many flaws or holes.

The New Year’s Eve when Ben came a-calling was a severely cold one. Ever so still, as though it were waiting in heightened anticipation, and made eerie by the mists that had no right dancing over the frozen ground like lamenting waifs warring with silent banshees.

I imagined Ben emerging from that mist and hesitating in front  of our door for an age. Arm outstretched. Fist made ready to thump at the weather beaten oak. Ben was never a doorbell sort and his knock was distinctive. There was no timidity to that knock, or the man himself. And yet he was gentle. Dangerously gentle. To bid him relinquish his peace would be to unleash a force of nature. Only a fool or a madman would do such a thing.

Then he broke the spell of silence and changed everything.

The knock chimed out throughout the house and we all ceased our activity. Our numbers were whole and we expected no one else. This was a visitation and we all knew it. After the initial inertia we looked askance of one another; you go. No, you go. No one wanted to open the door to what felt like another dimension. Another twisting outcome to a year almost done. We should have listened to that cautious silence. Better still, someone should have spoken up. No one did.

I opened the door to the damp figure that filled the doorway. There was something pathetic about his bedraggled state, but it did not hide his elemental stature. I feared the sight of him and yet I lit up at his being here. We had all wanted him to join us for an age and now, here he was. A wish fulfilled.

“Come in,” I bade him. I tried for enthusiasm, but the cold mist choked that from me.

He nodded and silently stepped in from the inhospitable cold. I closed the door against the foul weather and took his damp wax jacket from him. It dripped as I carried it to the nearby cupboard. Thinking better of it, I hung it on the end of the banister. Not wanting it to infect the other coats.

I gestured towards the living room and he brought his ominous quiet with him, wearing it like a cloak of thrashing serpents. My ears popped as we descended. The night was altered before he entered the room. A flood tide that quelled the warm spirit of the evening.

He was welcomed all the same. Automatic words shot from armed and loaded mouths. Conventions followed. Hands shaken. He accepted a drink and emptied the glass. The choreography of the evening bent and stretched, but refused to break.

Another drink found his hand. He saw to it and then at last he spoke, “there’s been a happening.”

The words were discordant. His meaning more so. Murder would have been more acceptable in that moment. The spirit of the evening already having been butchered. I wanted to step in. To intervene. But the size of the coming juggernaut precluded it. I was small. Whatever was happening here was bigger than any of us. Nothing would ever be the same again. The very fabric of our lives was singeing before our eyes, and soon it would unravel before turning to dust. It already had. We weren’t to know it then. Ben was merely the messenger. Messengers are ambiguous. They carry with them the stench of bad tidings and that makes them a hateful breed. Even the hulking figure of a loving and gentle man.

Ben was always an impossibility. Otherworldly. That he’d had another life and been forged in the fires of pain was obvious. He did not belong, but he was loved all the same. Loved in return for the force of love that he was. No one could match his love, and no one tried. Our love was closer to like and it fell from us as easily as a smile in the wake of offence.

We broke into our battle formations. Some of us contained Ben. Others gathered intelligence. Then a force ventured forth to establish just exactly what the happening was. I joined this number, glad to leave the house and the brooding giant. Suspecting that all around me were motivated similarly. We were the cowards and the rogues. Brash in our actions, but all the while running from what we thought was the worst of it. Perhaps this is the true nature of bravery. 

As soon as we left the warmth of the house, the coherence of our group dissolved and the freezing mist exploited our division. We, all of us, walked alone as we headed to the Big House. Something bad had happened. We knew that much. But our enclosed natures made us incapable of understanding the scale of what had occurred. And we belittled it further into a manageable history. None of us wanting to think of a present or future that could be at all blighted or destroyed.

I’d never seen the Big House in such circumstances. The way the mist shrouded its imposing features transformed it into its true reality. This place was old. Old in a way that stood outside anything we knew. The history of a place like this was never taught in school. There were entries in the Bible that referenced such monoliths, and those entries were a warning.

However cold the night was, we were colder still. None of us wanted to go any further, but our collective presence drew us on. And our lily-livered silence damned us. The main entrance door was ajar and as we crossed the threshold I knew we could never go back. That was the turning point for us all. Hunching my shoulders and walking on the balls of my feet I wondered what it was that Ben had seen. My judgement of him transforming now I was here. Prior to this I saw him as the potential perpetrator of an unpalatable evil. Now I knew he’d witnessed it and been touched with a dark, transformative hand that seldom made its presence known. Was he lucky to survive such a thing? I already doubted that.

 “In here!” 

I recognised the voice. Geoff the Accountant. A studious man who loved to walk and reward himself with a real ale at the end of his exertions. I moved towards the sound of his voice, aware of others doing the same. Three of us arrived in the kitchens and in the dim lighting emanating above us we saw two smeared trails of blood. 

“Where’s Geoff?” asked Alan the plumber redundantly. 

No one answered. The story of what had occurred and Geoff’s fate lay before us.

“Here!” 

Again, the voice was distinctive. Harry, the Meat. A butcher retired these past sixteen years. Alan moved forward, but Barry grabbed his arm and arrested his progress. The denial in Alan’s expression barely dissipated, but he allowed this restraint. All the same, we moved towards the sound of our fellow villager, but in the manner of professional mourners. There was no rush. There was nothing to be seen at journey’s end, other than the scene of another crime. 

We relied upon the safety of numbers. As we always do. On the polished wooden floor of the dining room were three trails of blood. One of which was more liquid and fresh. Harry had, in the end, suffered the same fate as his stock. But where his meat now resided was anyone’s guess.

We looked amongst us. A frightened and receding trio. I nodded towards the door. I could not read the response in either of my two companions, neither did I care to. I was leaving here come what may, and my hope was that my resolve would bring us all from this place before we suffered whatever bloodied fate two of our fellow villagers already had. Not to mention the former occupants of the Big House.

I left. That was all there was to it. And if I had to swear to it, I’d attest to Alan and Barry being with me as we left the Big House. Naïve Alan, and the lovely and quiet Barry. An aged man who had been born old and sweet and calming. A man made for dotage. But by the time I got back to my family home, I was accompanied only by that infernal mist. It clung to me like death’s fingers and filled me with despair even before I saw the door of our house sitting awkwardly ajar.

As I stepped into the hallway, there he was. Ben was wearing his damp wax coat again. His head was bowed, but still he towered over me.

“Ben?” I asked him, wanting him to say anything to dispel my feeling of utter anguish.

“There’s been a happening,” he whispered in a voice that was no longer his own.