Into the Night

"There is no greater misery than to recall, with bitter regret, a day when you were happy"
– paraphrased from Dante’s Inferno

It was a little, tumbledown shack jutting from a jagged outcropping close to land’s end. The surf battered a bitter wash of grimy seawater against the slime-ridden rocks, and cast salt-smoothed pebbles all about the pitted, desolate beach. Each inflowing tide launched its spray against the hut’s worn boards, causing them to creak and swell. Salt droplets dribbled between the slats, seeking sanctuary from the chill outside.
    Theodore, too, had been washed up inside the shack, and had called it home now for, oh, so long. A few months, at least, perhaps closer to a round year. He couldn’t accurately know, but regardless never bothered himself to find out. After all, what need was there for timekeeping, out here, at the ocean’s border? He could, he supposed, have divined his position in time from the sun and the moon, or however the whole thing worked. Theodore had never much involved himself with such arcanery, and what was the use, what with clocks and watches so readily available. Of course, that was all before… well, he hadn’t managed to grab his watch back then, had he, damn fool that he was.
    Theodore sat back in his creaking, wooden chair, straining the lengths of thin, knotted rope he had salvaged from the sand to bind the chair together. Resting his head on the hollow pole strapped across the chair’s back at head height, Theodore caught a sliver of starlight, glimmering through a knothole in the patched roof. He watched it until it passed out of sight, or until his eyes grew heavy and lent the night its darkness. His head lolled, his lank hair falling about his tired face, and he dropped into a slumber.

* * * *

‘Are they closed?’ he asked, smiling.
    ‘Yes!’
    ‘Promise?’
    Annie slapped at him playfully, but Theo deftly dodged her blindly flailing palm and grasped her wrist lightly in his hand. ‘I promise!’ she laughed. ‘Get on with it!’
    Theo smiled again, and steered her steadily across the capacious room. ‘On three,’ he said.
    ‘This had better be worth it,’ Annie grumbled with a grin, as Theo began counting with careful languor. She tapped a slipper-clad foot impatiently into the thick carpet.
    Chuckling, Theo clasped Annie’s shoulders from behind, angling her to face the bed. ‘Open your eyes,’ he said – after an age – and Annie’s lids sprang open. There was silence for a moment, and Annie remained very still. Suddenly, she shrieked out a gasp and jerked forwards, before spinning on the spot and jumping into Theo’s arms, nearly toppling the both of them to the floor.
    ‘It’s beautiful! Oh, it’s beautiful, Theo, thank you!’ she wailed, squeezing him so tightly around the middle all Theo could do was weather the embrace. He placed a kiss on her forehead, wrinkled up in delight, and she released him. Amid further squeals of joy, Annie plucked the dress from the bed and twirled about with it clasped to her bosom, testing its size, her face glowing. Letting the fine silk glide through her quivering fingers, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, I love it!’
    ‘Will you wear it, next month?’ Theo asked, his smile slipping into earnest sincerity as she spun on her heel, the dress gliding through the air. She spun to face him.
    ‘Yes! Oh, yes, of course I will,’ she cried, and flung herself at Theo again, still holding tight to the gown. ‘Our wedding dress,’ she breathed, and fixed her big, hazel eyes on his.
    ‘I love you,’ she said, simply.
    Theo, who could never keep friends and who had ducked fearfully out of college, gazed back into those deep pools, and was elated. ‘I love you, too.’

* * * *

It was dark as pitch when Theodore awoke, starting with a cough and almost tumbling out of his groaning chair. He ran a hand over his sleep-lined face, then through his greasy hair, tugging it from his eyes. He no longer took the time to walk that short distance down to the rock pool and wash the grime from his face: that futile act had been abandoned within a week or so.
    Instead, he would simply sit in his little wooden chair, often having dragged it outside to his makeshift porch, and regard the ebb and flow of the ocean.
    It humbled him, every time he gazed upon its turbulent surface, spread vast across the face of the world. It was so… big, so much more than him, that it made him feel even more isolate than usual. It was a feeling he had become used to during his solitude. Humility came easily, washing over his shore, inexorably eroding the rock that stood firm but to ultimately relent to nature.
    It was the way of the sea, to erode that which it covered.

* * * *

They had married in a small church on a hill at the top of their road. It had been a very small, almost private, ceremony, and they had become previously acquainted with the vicar. They had both attended several of his sermons, though neither of them was devoutly religious. Oh, they had faith, they agreed, sure enough, but not religion. It was an odd thing, to realize that you had become a person who had, somewhere along the line, let go of God’s hand, and had never quite recovered the touch. The vicar accepted them regardless, and they were sure to give generously to collections, and donated tins of peas and potatoes and so forth in the harvest festivities that rolled around in the month following their wedding.
    For Theo and Annie, the church was a sort of surrogate family, or, more approximately, a community of friends they were otherwise left lacking. The concept of heading out into the world with the express purpose of making friends was one that had eluded them both, just as religion had somehow passed them by without so much as a wave. But making friends, the act of it, was a concept neither, for reasons they similarly could not sufficiently explain, could entirely grasp.
    It didn’t matter, though, not then. They had each other, and, as anyone will tell you, this is all they needed.

* * * *

The sun went down. Its dying light fled Theodore’s weary form, sagged against his abbreviated porch, as he slept fitfully by the edge of the falling tide.

* * * *

It had been a strange meeting. It had not taken place at a bar, or at the wedding of a distant relative-removed-to-the-nth degree, or in happenstance while emerging from the grocer’s, or however two people went about meeting. Rather, they had merely seemed to gravitate towards one another, orbiting in ever decreasing circles like planets turning inward to their expanding sun.
    Their home town was small, a tiny community of law-abiding folk and the odd eccentric often found chatting happily away to itself while trotting back and forth along the promenade. Neither Theo nor Annie had fit particularly well, and theirs had been a formative relationship built on the strange feeling of déjà vu; as if the woolly-hatted girl one had been sat a couple of rows back from on the 22C to Acksby was the very same who had been agonizing over which tin of soup (Vegetable, Serves One) to buy while you selected your own (an ill-advised Scotch Broth, For One).
    Neither could even pin-point the moment they had fallen into partnership. Somehow, their planets had aligned at a bay side café with a shortage of tables, where they had ended up trading pleasantries over two full English’s.
    Even that hadn’t strictly been the start of it, not if the chance meeting in the library the following week was taken into account. They had bumped into one another, each embarrassedly half-remembering the other, in the English Literature section, where Annie had tried to explain Emily Bronté over Theo’s assertions towards the anti-heroics of Odysseus.
    Their meetings had become more frequent after that, as petals shyly bloom on a sun-starved bud, and their encounters had slowly, carefully, blossomed into… well, marriage.
    They had found happiness under the sun.

* * * *

Theodore had tried to build a fire, and had almost burned down his hut, despite the wetness of the wood – which gave some indication as to how out of control the fire had become.
    Naturally, he had forgone any further attempts, contenting himself with lying on the beach to bask in the sun-warmed sand, though he had the unfortunate tendency to keep waking spitting mouthfuls of the stuff. Sometimes he didn’t even bother making the infinitesimal trek to the beach, instead sleeping on the hard, chilly boards inside the hut. It so often suited his mood.

* * * *

Theo had made a friend, shortly before the first meeting (that he could recall) with Annie.
    James. Good old James.
    He had been Theo’s foil, in a way: gregarious and popular, he had eventually given up on trying to introduce Theo to his manifold friends, for Theo often made some excuse to miss a second meeting, and did little to prolong any acquaintance into full friendship.
    ‘You’re a social black hole,’ James had noted, on more than one occasion.
    ‘That’d be you, surely,’ Theo had replied, with a smirk. ‘You’re the one who draws these people in. Nothing can escape you and your ability to buy it a drink and get it talking about its life.’
    James had grinned. ‘Yeah, sounds like me. Okay, not a black hole, then. You’re a star – and no, I don’t mean you twinkle away all shiny up in the sky, yeah,’ he paused. ‘No, you’ll get all old and grey, and implode.’
    ‘You mean a white dwarf. If you’re going to insult my social skills, at least get your astrophysics right,’ Theo had laughed, and James had cuffed him on the arm before hopping up to get another drink and flirt quite shamelessly with the barmaid. Theo liked James because, despite these comments, he never pressed Theo to reveal anything about himself that Theo wasn’t prepared to share. Nor did he try to change his ways, though he often voiced the hope that Theo would change, one day.
    ‘Not in your lifetime, buddy!’ Theo had responded, and James had laughed and tut-tutted and shook his head.
    He had, in fact, been remarkably prescient.

* * * *

Theodore remembered him, sometimes, when he dropped his guard in quiet moments – and of those, there were many. It was hard to forget him, honestly; you couldn’t forget his smile, that big, brash thing spreading hugely across his face, taking in all of life with a wink.
    He cried, often. He no longer felt ashamed about doing so.

* * * *

He recalled the smell, most of all. His hands stunk of a tinny, iron scent, no matter how much he scrubbed at them with the stained, shrinking bar of soap. It made him gag and retch, but even the smell of his bile, the sight of its dribbled splatter over the tiles, mingled with tears and ice-cold water and fear, could not overcome that original, unearthly stench.

* * * *

Theodore saw boats from time to time, passing across the shimmering horizon like clouds across the sun. His first impulse was often to shout out, to wave his arms high above his head, to catch their attention and be taken from this place like a castaway saved from his shipwreck island.
    But that was patently ridiculous. He wasn’t a castaway. He didn’t need saving.
    He mused on what the ships were doing, out there on the ocean. Perhaps they were ferries, or cruise liners, taking passengers sailing through the beauty of the world at their leisure, holed up in their stuffy cabins, peering out of smeared portholes. Or maybe they were cargo ships, transporting crates of who-knew-what to distant shores. Theodore had no idea what kind of goods were traded by sea nowadays: the only image he had was of fine silks, and wool from Kashmir, handled by rich trade barons and sped through the Indies by herds of sweating slaves.
    A little out-dated, he imagined.
    So he sat and watched the boats passing by, and let his mind wander across the exotic continents, to far-off places he would never reach, that he was not a part of. It comforted him, in a way.

* * * *

He had never shouted at Annie, no matter what had occurred; had never raised his voice. That was important, Theo knew. He recalled his grandmother, sitting alone in a house full of ornaments from all over the world, telling him about the Rule.
    ‘It’s the Rule, you know. Important, very important, is the Rule. Because no one likes to be shouted at, no, not at all. Makes you feel small and frightened, doesn’t it? It does, and no one likes that. And it hurts you, too, down in your throat, makes you sick. And you don’t want to get sick now, do you?’
    ‘No, granna,’ Theo had mumbled, his little blue dinosaur clutched in pudgy fingers.
    ‘No, no you don’t want to get sick. So there’s no shouting, never shouting. That’s only for them who don’t care about getting sick, and who don’t care what happens to them when they do. Lonely sort of a person, one who gets sick from shouting.’
    It had been a few months after her husband had disappeared, as Theo was told in later years. He had disappeared, and had never been seen again. He had probably been very sick.
    Theo had listened carefully, sat up on his grandmother’s knee, studying the lines around the hollows of her eyes, and he had never shouted, after that. It was the Rule.
    You must never shout, no matter what. Better to vanish, than that.

* * * *

Theodore slept under the star-lit sky, dreaming of blue dinosaurs lost in dusty attics, and men who vanished from the face of the world. Above him, the stars hid themselves behind roils of cloud, vanishing gradually from sight.