Beth Fuller's Blog, page 3

Interview

Hello!

Some more exciting news for a very chilly Friday morning…Indiebookbutler published an author interview with me! It’s my first official interview, which is very exciting stuff. If you want to check it out, you can find it here:

Elizabeth Duffield-Fuller Interview

The Silence (2021)

Submitted for a Reedsy Contest #78 in response to the prompt: Write about someone who keeps an unusual animal as a pet...

It was one month to the day after George’s funeral when the silence came. The house, which had been quiet and empty since they hoisted his corpse out of the easy chair he lived in, was even quieter and emptier than usual, as if there was an invisible weight in the air.

At first I told myself that I was being paranoid, or that grief was playing tricks on my mind. That’s certainly what my daughter, Mandy, would say. The grandkids would probably trot out some pseudo-scientific term for these delusions that they had read about on the internet, but I have never been able to keep up with all that stuff. It’s only because you haven’t left the house in so long, maybe they’d say. It’s not good for you to be so isolated all the time. I’d given up leaving the house. There was no point, now, not when you can get your shopping delivered to you easy enough, and I had long ago given up all my clubs and activities. Being George’s carer had been a full-time career by the end.

I tried to push that unnerving silence out of my mind, filling the air with inane radio chatter just to hear someone other than myself, but it didn’t help. The sounds came out muffled and muted, as though they were underwater, no matter how high I turned the sound up. Probably have the neighbours round to complain soon. There is only so far sympathy for the batty old widow stretches, after all.

I wanted to think it was deafness settling in, rather than dementia. I felt panic, like rickets, trembling in my limbs at the very thought of it. I remember my own mother losing her marbles at the end. She didn’t recognise any of us, not even my father, and they had been married sixty years. Would Mandy come round to see me, and I’d mistake her for a carer or nurse? Would my teenage grandsons, Leo and Jack, become transmuted into sullen strangers hiding under their headphones in my living room? I remember wondering if this was how it began.

I almost booked a hearing test from Specsavers on the highstreet, but I thought better of it. It was better not to know, I decided. Still, the silence haunted me. It followed me about the house, winding itself underfoot like a hungry cat heeding the call of the tin-opener.

It was on a foggy Tuesday that I realised the silence came in pockets. It was a thick, sleepy kind of day and I had fallen asleep in the easy chair to some afternoon drama I wasn’t really watching. The whole house was imbued with that same weary restlessness, dozing away in the armchair, time laying heavy on my hands. The fog blinded the windows until it seemed there was no world waiting for me out there anymore. As if, after George’s death, everything had shrunk down to this square house and it made me feel more claustrophobic than I had felt in a long time.

On impulse, I got up and went to the backdoor, opening it out to stare bleakly into the thick white clouds shrouding the house, and, to my surprise, I could hear everything just as clearly as I once I could. The birds were complaining loudly in the hedgerows, the cars were chuntering down the busy A-road passing by the back of our street (and hadn’t George complained about that when they were proposing it, but dozens of town hall meetings hadn’t done any good for any of us. Mandy still refused to use it on principal). The world seemed loud and close once more and I froze in place, submerged by it.

There was a distant wash of panic through the air, as if something had realised I was missing, which loomed up overwhelmingly behind me. I turned to stare back inside the house, but it was empty, as always, and then the silence surrounded me once more. I frowned, staring out at the thick white fog staring back at me, and then went back inside. The silence dutifully followed.

“What are you?” I asked it, but, of course, it did not reply, but it was after that that I started thinking of it as The Silence instead.

The next day, I tried an experiment.

“I am going into the garden,” I said loudly, feeling rather foolish as I did so. The Silence did not answer, of course. “I want you to stay here.” The Silence shifted a little, the empty feeling in the house feeling a little panicked and a little petulant. “I will be back in three minutes, I just want to check the bird feeders,” I said firmly. “I want you to stay here,” I reiterated firmly, and I got to my feet.

I opened the back door and stepped out. The petulance grew, but so did the noise. Birds and cars, even the distant chattering of school-children as they squabbled and screamed through their lunchtime breaks. I felt a broad smile break across my face as I went to fill up the bird feeders. They needed it. I hadn’t bothered filling them since before George I died. I had to scramble around in the garden box to find a half-empty packet of bird seed mouldering around at the bottom. The Silence enveloped me thickly the moment I stepped back over the threshold into my house, bounding around me like a great, invisible dog.

“Well done. Good boy.”

I didn’t know if it was a boy, of course, but it felt about right. I let out a strange, strangled laugh. Mandy would have me committed if she knew I had an invisible pet.

“Do you eat anything?” I asked. There was no reply. “Should I get you anything?” I tried again. Again, there was no reply. I frowned to myself. Well, it was at least a very convenient sort of beast.

After that, The Silence and I got into a routine, of sorts. I suppose I ought to have wondered if it was malevolent, some unquiet spirit or poltergeist haunting my two bed terrace, but it never felt like it wanted to hurt me. It felt like it wanted to protect me. It would follow me forlornly around the house, tripping over my heels as I floated to the fridge or the wet room. It waited outside the door as I went to the bathroom (I had set very firm boundaries on that one), and whenever Mandy came round to see me (Sunday afternoons, three o’clock) The Silence went out into the garden, or upstairs onto the bed to wait. It was shy of strangers, it seemed. One day I went to the corner shop, to see if it would follow me out of the house. It didn’t, but it was waiting dutifully for me when I got home again.

I tried dusting flour across the kitchen floor once, to see if I could see any footprints when I called for it, but I could just feel a reproachfulness oozing at me from the living room and it refused to get any closer until I had swept it all up again. Sometimes I held out a flat hand and made little kissy noises like you do to stray cats, to see if it would let itself be stroked, but though The Silence grew warm and friendly to my advances, it never came close enough to be touched. Some things don’t want to be seen, it seems. Like love and grief, they can only ever be felt.

One month after The Silence arrived abruptly in my life, I decided that if it was going to stay, I’d better learn some more about it, so I took myself off to the library. I confess, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I stood in the middle of those metal bookshelves, staring around a little hopelessly, uncertain where to start. Surprisingly, they didn’t seem to have a section for mysterious invisible animals that turn up unannounced in your house. In the end, I settled for the supernatural section. A lot of it was dominated by strange werewolf erotica with strapping topless men leering from the cover, but I found a dog-earred copy of My First Haunting, what to do in your first supernatural encounter, and a glossily pristine copy of Ghosts, Spirits and Unnatural Phenomenon, which looked brand new. The lady behind the counter gave me a strained smile as she stamped them out for me and I thought that perhaps I ought to have braved those self-check out machines that I always avoided, after all. George was always the one who fiddled with all that fancy technology. Any time anything new came out, he had to have it. He even had all the latest mobiles, though who he had to call I didn’t know. He tried to set one up for me, once, but I kept losing it.

The Silence leapt up around me as I came back home. I had grown to recognise the patches where it was and the patches where it wasn’t, now. The quiet was more unwieldy where it was, the air, though still invisible, seemed thicker somehow in the place where his presence was. I could feel him bounding and leaping about me enthusiastically as I shut the door behind us both and it occurred to me that the poor thing was probably lonely. That had been the longest I had left it since it had arrived. I felt a wave of shock reeling over me as I realised that it had been the longest I had left the house at all since the day of the funeral.

I settled myself down in the armchair, The Silence purring soundlessly by my feet, feeling more cat-like than canine as it settled itself down for a quiet afternoon of reading. The glossy book was far too technical for me to be getting on with, but the older one was full of fun personal anecdotes and grainy bookplate pictures, and some scallywag before me had annotated all over it in pencil, which I quite liked, actually. It felt almost companionable, knowing that someone else’s hands had touched these pages, their eyes had scanned these words.

There was a post-it note tucked into the book jacket of the older book, and as I withdrew it, I found a hand-written phone number. I stared at it for a moment.

“Well,” I said to The Silence, “What do you think? Should I call it?” The Silence did not respond, as if it was considering the matter. “Well,” I said aloud, “And why not? What’s the worst that could happen?”

I picked up the landline and dialled the number. I almost hung up as the ringing started on the other end, but The Silence sent a warm wave of comfort in my direction and I held my nerve. The phone picked up on the fifth ring, and I could feel my heart hammering in my chest.

“George!” A jovial voice exclaimed on the other side, and I almost dropped the phone. For a moment I thought he must be strangely telepathic, this stranger on the phone, and then I remembered that number recognition was available on most phones these days.

“What a lovely surprise!” he said, still blithely unaware of my shock. “Haven’t heard from you in years! We’ve missed you at the meetings. George? Are you there?”

I found my voice with difficulty.

“This is Moira, his wife. I’m afraid to tell you that George has recently passed away.” My voice grew thick as I stumbled over the words, still unused to saying them aloud. There was a deep breath in on the other side of the phone.

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that. He was a good type.”

“How did you know him?” I heard myself asking. “I found this number in a library book, I didn’t know…I don’t…” I heard the tears welling up and tried with difficulty to swallow them down again. I didn’t know George kept secrets, I was going to say, but I could not say them aloud. The Silence sent a compassionate wave of sympathy in my direction and I smiled at the invisible patch wetly. There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“I think we’d best meet in person,” he said. “Some things are better said face to face.”

Mandy would have said I was an idiot, meeting up with someone I didn’t know, so I didn’t tell her. I suddenly wondered if this was how George felt, when he was sneaking around to meet this Mike fellow. We met on a park bench on a Saturday afternoon. I’ll be the one with the red carnation, he had joked. The sun was bright and shining and the pigeons clustered round our feet. Mike was around about my age, but he had weathered better than I had. He was plump and ruddy cheeked, and just about as you’d imagine from his voice.

“George first came to our meetings, ooh, fifteen years ago now?” he said after we had made the obligatory introductions. “His brother had just died.”

I remembered that time well. Martin had been George’s older brother, but they had been like enough to be twins, everybody had said. George had taken his death hard. Barely said a word to anyone for weeks on end and started to drink more heavily than he ought to. Though I never said so to anyone, I did wonder if that was when all this degenerative disease thing started to kick in. He wouldn’t be diagnosed for another four years after that, but all the same, I wondered whether something in his body gave up then.

“Meetings?” I said aloud.

“Paranormal Encounters in Kent.” He said it matter-of-factly enough, as if he was talking about a chess club or a coffee morning. “George said that he was being haunted. He didn’t know how to talk about it to anyone because-”

“They might think he was mad,” I finished slowly, my own words echoing back at me. In that moment I felt both closer than I had ever felt to George before, and indefinably distant. I would have thought you could have told me, George, I reprimanded him silently. “Was it Martin haunting him?”

“No, no. It wasn’t a spectral encounter.” Clearly this was a fancy way of saying ghost, I thought. “George thought it was a protective spirit.”

I froze. “A protective spirit?”

“Yes, an invisible entity sent to guard and guide you when you have fallen off of the right path. It looks after you until you have got yourself back where you’re supposed to be.”

“Like a guardian angel?” I asked carefully, and Mike laughed.

“No, they’re not sentient. They’re like animals. Guard dogs, I suppose you could say.” He cast an eye over at my frozen expression and then reached an over familiar hand out and patted mine kindly.

“It is said they can be sent by those who love you,” he said softly, his eyes all too knowing as they met mine, and I blushed deeply. “George always thought Martin had sent him one to guide him home. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover George had sent one, too,” he said.

I got to my feet, clutching at my handbag and a flurry of pigeons took flight.

“How long do they stay?” I asked, avoiding his eyes, embarrassed at taking all this nonsense seriously.

“Just as long as they are needed,” he replied.

I don’t know how long The Silence stayed with me. I hurried home from my meeting with Mike, terrified lest it should already have gone by the time I returned, but it was there, waiting for me on the doorstep like usual, and I felt myself breathing again, relief flooding through me. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to it yet, not so soon after losing George.

It didn’t like the shrill cry of the telephone, I remember that. It used to slip away to another room whenever the phone rang, breaking through the silence, and when Mandy and the boys came by, it took itself off into the garden alone. One day, it wasn’t waiting on the doorstep when I got back from coffee with Mike (a new weekly tradition), and it didn’t turn up until dinner time. When I took up Seniors Yoga at the Rec. centre, it started disappearing more regularly. Two or three days might go by before I sensed its heavy weight and quiet seeping into the room beside me comfortingly. It was coming up to the anniversary of George’s death when I realised that I hadn’t felt The Silence in a long time, that I didn’t know, actually, when the last time I had felt it was. That was when I knew it wasn’t coming back again, and a wave of sadness washed over me as I said goodbye to strange pet for the last time, but then the doorbell rang, piercing through the silence, and time moved on once more. 

The Sleepers (2021)

N.B. This short story was first submitted for Contest #77  on Reedsy, in response to the prompt: Write about someone who gets stuck in their workplace during a blizzard and decides to explore rooms they aren’t normally allowed in

I’m not supposed to be working the nightshift, but Llwyd missed his wife’s birthday last month, after the coraniaid incident, which meant we were all pulling doubles, and he had been in the dog house ever since. I agreed to cover his evening shift, so that he could creep home for Valentine’s Day with a cheap bunch of flowers and an even cheaper box of chocolates and try to win back some brownie points, even though Management (the type with the capital M) were very clear that shift swapping of any kind was not permitted. But the AFCU is always dead, no pun intended, on a midweek evening in February, so I didn’t anticipate any problems. The snow started just before dusk and caught us by surprise. No one can get in to relieve me, and I cannot get out, so it looks like I am pulling a double shift, perhaps even longer than that, if they cannot dig me out in the morning either.

I sigh long and deep as I stare out of the window at the snowdrifts piling up outside. It has already buried my old Ford Focus, waiting forlornly out in the car park alone, until it is nothing more than an amorphous white lump.

The Anthropomorphic Folklore Containment Unit is large and cold. Like all municipal buildings, it is underfunded and left largely to the neglect of time. The beige walls are peeling, the old radiators clunk and gurgle and the strip lighting fizzes and crackles like a bonfire on the ceiling every time I walk underneath it. The permanently sticky lino floor echoes my footsteps back at me as I make my rounds.

Normally I’m strictly a behind-the-desk kind of girl, but we were all trained for perimeter checks at induction. One of the Managers came in with a bright grin, checking my name off of his clipboard, Ah, you must be Ceridwen, wheeling in an old boxy telly, twenty years past its prime. The video had a distinct eighties vibe, with glaring colours and jangling pop music, incongruously cheerful as they explained exactly what you should do if one of the sleepers stored here awoke. Awakenings are rare, thankfully, but now, as I parade past the drawers which lock the sleepers in, I can’t help but think that they are not rare enough.

The light in the silent building bounces back from the dark windows outside, and I cannot help but feel stifled and watched as I proceed down the empty corridors, making sure everyone still slumbers.

You owe me one for this, Llywd. It was just like him to choose the one night of the year there is a freak weather storm to lumber me with his evening shift. I hope he is at home, cuddled up in the grateful arms of his wife and blessing all his lucky stars that he managed to escape this one.

The occupants in this corridor still dream, so I turn down the next one. It homes the tier two sleepers. They are anthropomorphised, but no one would ever mistake them for humans. The coraniaid, for instance, are squat little dwarfish people, buzzing with magic and mayhem. The old kings called them a plague. I suspect the current prime minister would label them a terrorist threat if the AFCU ever failed its mission badly enough to make him aware of them.

We keep the lights turned dim down this corridor, all noise hushed to a minimum, trying to reduce the risk of waking light sleepers. The strip lighting does not crackle into life at my approach, so I turn my torch on instead. Its halo of light bobs and weaves with every footstep, alighting on the scars of our all too recent altercations here. The dents in the paintwork, the scratches on the floor, that fractured window, against which the snow still falls, even now.

I linger by one of the large metal doors lining the walls, and my fingers brush the brass nameplate, dimpling over the word coraniaid etched into place. The door is looking distinctively more battered than it had done before the incident, with scuff and scrape marks denting the sturdy metal door. There are now deep scratches around the frame, a testament to the struggle we had faced to get those little folks back into their unit. I shiver, trying to quash the memories and the guilt. I am successful at neither.

The anthropomorphised ones are always the worst. Our friends over at the CFCU have to deal with the grim and Cŵn Annwn and Cerberus, of course, but they are, at the end of the day, just big dogs. They are only classified as tier five, scarcely even worth containing at all, we often joke. Management does not agree. All sleepers must be carefully monitored. All sleepers must be contained.

I have been thinking about transferring over to the Canine Folklore Containment Unit for a while now, even before the coraniaid had awoken and escaped. It doesn’t feel right, somehow, keeping these sentient creatures encapsulated in their perma-sleep. Management had explained with painstaking detail at our induction why the world was no longer a safe place for them to roam freely, how it was as much to protect the folklore creatures as it was to protect the mortals, that we captured and contained these myths. It had sounded plausible at the time, buffed up to a glossy shine by buzzwords and sound bites, carefully honed by years of repetition. But doubts, like damp, have a way of seeping insidiously across one’s thoughts, slowly at first, and then with a growing intensity. At least with the canines, the sleepers didn’t know where they were going. They didn’t know what was happening to them. The anthropomorphic ones knew. They fought, and struggled and wanted to be free.

They are too dangerous to be allowed out, and it’s not like we’re killing them…They’re not being hurt…but I am finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the niggling suggestion that, despite the government-stamped official-sheen of the operation, the uniforms, the acronyms, the pension pot and union meetings, we’re not exactly the goodguys here.

My fingers brush against the brass plate again, and I pull away sharply, superstitiously afraid that the echoing resonance of my own doubts might rouse the creatures within from their slumbers again.

No one knows for sure what wakes the creatures. We only know that it is our job to put them back to sleep.

I hurry down the next corridor and back to the communal area for a well-earned tea break, even though there is no one left here to gossip with over the biscuit barrel. The blizzard is building up steam now. I stare out of the staff room window at the chunks of snow still pouring from the sky, piling up against the windows and doors with a malevolent enthusiasm. The health and safety poster chides me from the pinboard, and someone has written a reminder for Arawn’s birthday drinks on the whiteboard next to it. It seems strangely distant, like a message from another world, out of place here in the silent, waiting dark.

The thought scratched at the back of my mind, that this must be what the sleepers feel like, trapped and helpless in this wretched old ruin. The old chairs of the staff room are threadbare and morose, spitting out chunks of dented foam through their scratchy woollen covers and the urn on the counter has long since ceased its humming. I heat up my coffee again in the microwave, and the ping echoes around the empty walls. I cannot stay here. I should not be here. I ignore the whispered warnings at the back of my mind and cradle the mug in frozen fingers, trying futilely to stay warm. The night is not half over and I am already bored, so I leave the dismal comfort of the staff room and start to make another circuit of the corridors.

Outside of the communal area, I hesitate. Opposite the double doors which lead to the sleepers’ corridors is a narrow staircase I have never climbed, for it is strictly off-limits. I stare at it. Rebellion itches at me in the half gloom of the energy-saving light-bulbs. Only Management are allowed on the upper floors, and I am definitely not Management material, see my rule-breaking shift swaps for exhibit one, and my nebulous questioning of the AFCU’s morality as exhibit two. Neither polished up my resume for promotion. But I am the only one here at the moment, and the AFCU budget does not stretch to internal CCTV. It barely affords the worn-out grainy system at the gates, which scans in every car which arrives and leaves. The snow is the only reason I am alone here. Normally, we run shifts in packs of three of four, more at solstices, equinoxes and other holy days, when we are expecting trouble. I’m never going to get another chance.

I hesitate for one moment more and then feeling decidedly maverick, I edge my way up the winding flight of stairs. The motion-sensor lights fizz and hum with my movements as I arrive in the upper corridor, sending the narrow halls into dazzling brightness. For one paranoid moment, I am afraid that someone will see the tell-tale shimmer of the lights through the windows, but no one can possibly be out there now. They won’t be able to see through the blizzard, even if they are.

There is carpet on this corridor, in deference to the status of its occupants. It’s only those squares of rough carpet that come in cheap for self-assembly, but still…It mutes the sound of my footsteps as I creep disobediently along the row of shut doors.

The first corridor I find is empty offices, neat filing cabinets, ergonomically designed swivel chairs, water-marked cup-ringed desks, occasional sticky-notes or loose papers set around the desktops. The next row is conference rooms and a Management staff room (markedly better than the plebeian one downstairs). It is a little dull, truth be told, and, feeling decidedly disappointed, I am about to turn back to the safe and well-trod route I am supposed to stick to when another door at the end of the corridor catches my eye. Its brass plate is faded and dented, the tarnish dulling slightly, but the words are still legible. Tier One: Anthropoid sleepers.

I swallow. I have never known what was in tier one before. Rumours circle around about dragons and giant arachnids, but Llwyd has always been dismissive. He says creatures that dangerous wouldn’t consent to sleep. The Management would just put them down completely.

Anthropoid…Sleepers that could pass for humans. That cannot be so bad, can it? Not so very dangerous that it needs to be tier one? But then the truth hits me hard. They will hide out there amongst the mortals too easily. If they escape, we might never get them back.

I know I ought to walk away, but it is impossible to leave my curiosity unfed now. I turn the handle.

Behind the door is another staircase, as steep as an attic ladder and so narrow that I can barely squeeze my way through. Although I am not given to claustrophobia, as a rule, the air becomes tight and heavy in my chest and I find I am struggling to breathe. I crest the staircase into an equally thin corridor, lined with doors on both sides, all with brass plates. More sleepers? Up here? I feel a shudder running across my skin. Why would the Management hide them here?

There are no electric lights up here, no motion sensors to herald my coming as if even the slightest light will wake these anthropoid sleepers…whoever they are. I fumble for my torch and click it on. The beam swings wide and lands on the nearest brass plate, and I freeze. Llwyd Ap Cil Coid.

I remember teasing Llwyd about his preposterously pretentious name when we first became friends. He said he had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his grandfather and so on ad infinitum, until you reached his first recorded ancestor, who was named after some legendary welsh magician. We had laughed and dismissed the legend, but I cannot help but wonder now if it is true. Is Llwyd’s ancestor a sleeper, and, more to the point, does Llwyd know?

My thoughts dart wildly from unlikely theory to unlikely theory. Is Llwyd here under false pretences, trying to get his ancestor free? Perhaps it was no coincidence that the coraniaid awoke during Llwyd’s shift? A diversion? A practice?

I stumble backwards, my stolen knowledge heavy in my hands, and I drop the torch. As I bend to pick it up, the ray falls upon the next brass plate. Gwyn Ap Nudd. My stomach clenches. I know Gwyn. He’s the one who campaigned so hard for the staff room’s coffee machine, the one who always makes the lame puns, and laughs too loudly at his own jokes.

Are all AFCU officers descended from sleepers? Yet, even as the thought crescendos in my head, I know it is not true. I already know the truth, even before my flashlight falls upon the next brass plate. Ceridwen.

My fingers fumble for the handle before I even know what I am doing, and as they close around the brass doorknob, the memories start pouring back in, unlocked from the suppression they have been coated under. The Management awakening us, heroes and villains of old, human, or, at least, human-shaped. Picking through our memories like a strawberry patch, erasing and suppressing all the strands of who we once were, unravelling the tapestry of our lives until we were just so much tangled string. Coating us with new stories instead, false lives, implanted memories. We, they explain before they change us forever, will be uniquely suited to catching sleepers, as unknowing sleepers ourselves. Dressing us up in little uniforms and sending us out into the mortal world, closely monitored, capturing our own kind, working against our own people.

I try to pull my hand away, but it seems stuck to the handle, seared in place, the skin burning to the brass. The door falls inwards, dragging me with it, and the perma-sleep which always waits for us in these vaults, thick and heavy as the snowdrift outside, begins to coat me inexorably. The last thing I know is my torch falling to the corridor outside and blackness clawing at me, dragging me under once more as my eyes drift shut.

*

I sit, trying not to fidget in the uncomfortable plastic chairs they have perched around the interview table, preening smartly in my new uniform. It is second-hand, of course. Everything in the AFCU – I think the abbreviation delicately in my mind, the syllables still foreign with that waxy newness to them –  is second-hand, yet the uniform fits so well, it’s almost as if it were made for me. I sit up straight, though I have been waiting for my new supervisor to arrive for twenty minutes. I want to make a good impression.

The door opens and a Manager (with a capital M) comes in with a bright smile and an old telly. He checks the clipboard before him.

“Ah, you must be Ceridwen, the new girl.” He smiles brightly. “We’ve just got a short induction video for you to watch. It’s a little dated, I’m afraid, but it shouldn’t take long, and then we can give you the welcome tour.”