Blast From The Past

The first time I heard it, I knew. But that knowing was the deep down sort that we have a habit of pushing away and dismissing when it suits us to do so. We do whatever we can to pretend it’s not there, or that what we’re experiencing is of no consequence. We kid ourselves and repeat over and over that it’s going to be OK, when we know nothing could be further from the truth. We have been warned, and there will be consequences.

The oldest part of us. The part that saved our bacon when times were violent and dogs ate dogs just to see another day. That part never forgets. It remains on guard come what may, and thanks to that, I knew and I reacted just the way I should have done, but I supressed my response all the same.

I was sat on my bed pulling my socks on when I heard the tapping for the very first time. My house is in a small village, in a location familiar to many; the middle of nowhere. This is a spot where people come for peace and quiet. Only there is no quiet. The countryside is a place made noisy by a throng of birds and animals. The dawn chorus, a bunch of hormone infused teenagers intent on seeing who can be the loudest and most discordant. 

The house I live in isn’t old, but it has its aches and pains and it reminds you of them throughout the day, but mostly at night. Tractors and the shepherd’s Gator rumble along the road that lies out at the front of my place, and I hear it all and a darn sight more. 

The peace of the countryside is a timeless peace, and in a very special way, it is quiet. True silence is ominous. We will have plenty of that when we are in our graves. The quiet the living crave harks back to the time we lay curled up within our mothers. The comfort of familiarity is the quiet that calms a racing heart and stills a confused and pained mind. 

My home whispers reassurances to me even as it moans. The passing farm vehicles check in with me and remind me that all is well in the world beyond my front door. The birds serenade me in the mornings, and at night the squealing and wailing foxes may sound like they are in pain, but there is a neighbouring sensation they are indulging in. And so life goes on. The symphony of my little piece of the countryside is the pulse of that life, and without it I would fall silently into the abyss. 

Tap Tap Tap Tap…

The strange sound that I attempted to weave into the normalcy of my world went on beyond that, but I had invisible fingers in my ears by then, and I was creating noise so that I thought I could not hear it, but I heard it all the same. My heart fluttered and for a crazy second my legs forgot how to be legs, and I damn near buckled there and then. But then normal service was resumed. Or so I thought.

As I made coffee and toast, I opened the blinds in the kitchen. The wooden pull clacked against the blind itself. A sound not unlike the ropes patting a tune against the mast on a sail boat as it dances restlessly in the wind. A sound that doesn’t belong in a home. This sound did not belong anywhere, and yet here it was and it was here for me.

Tap Tap Tap Tap…

This time there were only the first four taps. That was all that was needed. A reminder. A prompt. A sound made by the blind that did not belong to the blind, just the same as the sound upstairs could not have come from anything in my home, or beyond it.

I stood there. Frozen. I swear I could see my breath rise up from my gawping mouth. This was a haunting. I may have dismissed the sound the first time around, but now I was possessed of a certainty that I could not shake off. 

A simple sound haunting me. I knew something else too. There was a reason for this. The haunter wanted something from me, but what that was I did not know, and my ignorance frightened me. I feared reprisals should I not comprehend what was needed. A dire retribution, should I fail to act in order to appease this restless spirit. There was a darkness here that I could not comprehend. A darkness that I could not run from. A darkness that I must run towards despite my fear and cowardice.

I drank my coffee. The toast sitting forgotten in the toaster. I was not hungry. The coffee a habit and a prop. 

Tap Tap Tap Tap

The sound of it in my head now.

I walked over to my armchair and sat carefully upon it, not relaxing initially. Drinking more of my coffee, then placing the now useless mug on the low table before me. Closing my eyes, I let my muscles rest. Smiling at the absurdity of what I was doing. Imagining a therapist on a fictional chair opposite me; tell me about your mother.

My eyes sprang open. Ice thrown at my back. Those were my words, and yet they were not. A shared meaning?

Tap Tap Tap Tap

Even as I closed my eyes and created a replay of the sound in my imagination, there was a reply.

Tap Tap Tap Tap

Tap

Tap Taaap Tap Tap

Tap Taaap Taaap Tap

Taap Taaap 

Tap

The reply may have been imagined, but it was as real as anything in my life. I had a notion of what the sound was now, perhaps not what it meant, but I thought I could decode it. But then I already knew what it was saying. This was a cry for help.

I pulled out my phone and opened my browser. My first search told me everything I needed. This was a series of dots and dashes…

Help Me.

I placed my phone by the coffee mug and closed my eyes again.

Tell me about your mother.

A whisper that could not be ignored. Not my mother. I didn’t think that was it. 

A mother. 

A woman. 

Someone’s daughter.

A connection. 

A loss.

I gulped down an inexplicable sob. A feeling of loss swept over me. A loss that was my own and a loss of a family deprived of someone they loved deeply and dearly. I knew how this played out, it was a loss that could only grow.

Lost.

Help me.

I opened my mind as best as I could and I focused on my part in this; I will help you. I focused more and more on my willingness and desire to help. Somehow I needed this. I’d needed this for a long time. A time longer than the span of my own years. Some things we are born into. We are as much a product of our parents’ pain and brokenness as we are their love and nurture. We are supposed to heal in this life. Heal wounds inflicted upon us before we ever set a foot on this earth. If we don’t, then this is the legacy we bequeath to our children, and each and every child in the generations that follow. No one tells you this. They’re too ashamed to. Your pain tells you though, if you’re brave enough to face your fear and listen to it. And right now, I was listening. Listening in a way I’d never listened before. I don’t think I could have listened like this before today. I don’t think I could ever have done this on my own.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

A whisper seemingly to myself, but we’re never alone. Not really. We carry others with us. So many others.

That’s when I saw it in my mind’s eye. A flash of an image for all of a second, but that was all that was needed. I was in my car before I knew what I was doing, pausing before turning the ignition. Allowing myself a brief moment of laughter that I had to strangle away when I heard the tone of detached madness within it. I shuddered and drowned myself out with the sound of the car’s engine. Distracted myself with the task of driving to a destination I had once a vague notion of, but now knew only too well. A memory that was not my own, but that I would own soon enough. 

I did not know the way, but I got there all the same. The winding country roads seeking to sooth me even as my anticipation built. Underneath that growing feeling was a maelstrom of thoughts and emotions rising up and threatening to undo me. I gripped the steering wheel more and more tightly, gritting my teeth and becoming increasingly tense, even in the midst of such beauty. The nearby sea danced and the wind frolicked through the meadows. Trees bowed in respect at my approach. They all knew. This whole place knew. It had had to keep a secret for far too long, and now it was time for the truth to be brought out into the light.

As I made a final turn to our destination, a stone caught in the tread of the front offside tyre and tapped the message yet again. A siren call that I was never going to be able to ignore. The message was the same, but as I neared the place that it came from, I realised that I didn’t need that sound. Maybe never did. One way or another, I was destined to be here. There was something here for me. Something lost to me that only I could find. 

Leaving the car, all the feelings of trepidation ebbed away, replaced by a heady elation. It were as though I were reuniting with a lost love. I knew there was something off about that image, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was this meeting. All I wanted was to be whole again. I yearned for this and I always had.

At last! I could be whole for the first time in my life.

I wanted to run, and I think I would have run, if it were not for the place that now greeted me. This was a place unlike anything I had ever before encountered. This was a place that mirrored my lack. This was a place that hadn’t belonged for an age. 

There was a sign saying Thymeham and a notice board nearby. It wasn’t the board that slowed me. It was the approximation of a village that loomed up, shocking and confusing me. If a place could be a ghost, then this was the place. In a way, I had gone back in time, but there was something missing and it was all wrong. I glanced at the board and it told me some of what I needed to know; a place frozen in time. 

I felt cheated as I scanned down the sign. The buildings themselves had been frozen in time, but not before the army had evacuated the entire population of the village. The soul had departed and all there was left was a dead shell. I found myself wandering around the deserted village. A village emptied out by the army in the Second World War, to be used as a training ground. It didn’t look like it had ever seen that sort of use, and I couldn’t help wondering whether there was an official secret behind what had happened here. Something more to it. A reason that made the ghost village make more sense.

Drawn to the centre of the village, I walked inside the school house. There were pegs with names on them. Old names for young children. A chalkboard still held a lesson upon it and everywhere there were bright and colourful drawings and paintings. Nothing had aged here, but the children who had been forced from their home had. All of them long gone. 

Standing within that building, I sniffed the air. There was nothing old about that air, there was the faint tang of salt from the sea and a sweetness from the meadow grasses. This world had continued to breath, even as this village lay still, empty and lifeless.

Taking one last look at the memory of a childhood disrupted, I exited the other side of the school. I wasn’t here for them, but I had been afforded respite from the reason for my presence. Given time to take in the surroundings. Pay a form of homage.

I walked on and turned a corner. There in front of me was a modest outbuilding. Somehow I knew that were I to push the catch on the green painted wooden door, I would find a rack with tools. This was the place used by the caretaker and gardener who had once pottered around the village keeping it tidy and neat. My breath caught in my throat as my mind perused those tools. In this building was a spade. I shuddered at the thought of it and moved from the door. I no longer wanted to be in its presence. The door and something beyond it would have something to say about that though.

On the other side of the outbuilding, everything fell into place. The image that had flashed awake in my mind flashed once more as I saw it with my own eyes. As those two images crashed into one another, I fell to my knees and scrabbled at the ground. 

I was sobbing, snot hanging from my nose. Blinded by tears I paid no heed to. Possessed as I pulled and tore at the earth. The sod came away and under it the soil was rich and firm. I clawed and pushed, digging down and down. Fingernails encountering stones and threatening to peel painfully away. 

Out of breath, I stumbled up and around the outbuilding. Thankful that my vision remained blurred. Pushing the green door open and holding my breath as I stepped in and grabbed at the spade that I wished I had no need of. Not wanting to breath the air in here. Air that might still contain toxins. The poison that had leaked from the man who had been here before me and used that spade so long ago.

Back at the shallow hole, I dug. Ferociously, I went at the ground and threw it asunder. When I was close, I slowed. Discarding the unholy spade and again falling to my knees.

“You can’t be here,” said a voice from above me.

I ignored that sound more readily than I’d ignored the first cries of help that had come from this place.

“Do you hear me?” the voice was louder now, “we have strict opening time. I don’t know how you got into the car park, let alone here…”

The voice didn’t trail off. It stopped. The breath of the world that had been constant even in this place frozen in time, now abated, and in that moment there was a reverential silence. I stared down into the empty sockets of my grandmother’s face. I think I always knew it was her, even before I set out to reunite with her. I brushed a clod of soil gently from her forehead, the way I had always wanted to stoke an errant hair away from my lover’s. Then I lowered my own forehead to hers. It wasn’t so cool as I would have imagined, “hello Geraldine, I’ve waited such a long time to meet you.”

Something passed between us then. You could say that Geraldine passed on, but that wasn’t quite right. I felt a part of her become a part of me. Perhaps she was always there, but it was for me to find her and for her to find me.

Looking back, I suppose I should have been sad, devasted even. Instead I was happy and relieved. This was something I was always meant to do, and here I was fulfilling a piece of my destiny. Only one piece of it mind. There was much, much more to come. Besides, destiny is a funny one. Each time you do as it bids, you unlock the next level. 

“I think you better call the police,” I said this without looking up. I wanted a little longer with Geraldine. I wanted her to hear that I was not going to rest until I knew all of her story. I may have uncovered my grandmother’s remains, but I wanted the whole truth of it. There was a man who had killed my grandmother and deprived so many people of her light. Now I wanted justice. I wanted to know why.

As I stepped away from the hole I had dug, awaiting the arrival of the police, I looked around the village that was itself a mausoleum. To the far end, I could see the spire of the village church and there I knew there would be a graveyard. There was the place that Geraldine would be buried, the first internment for nigh on a hundred years. She belonged here now, and perhaps always did. There was a story here that I’d only now begun to unravel. My journey had only just begun. The baton passed from generation to generation, and along with it, the search for truth and meaning.

Smiling to myself, I looked back down at my grandmother’s remains. That was when I first heard it and I knew. Only this time, I was wide awake and all ears. Never again would I ignore that call. I picked up the spade and walked towards the source of the now familiar tapping…