14. Timothy
WHEN TIMOTHY COMES to, the first thing he is aware of is the stillness of the boat, and it takes him a while in the darkness to work out they are back on the beach and Ethan has gone. The boat and the beach around him are quiet. Timothy’s clothes are soaked through and sit heavy and cold against his skin, and he stays where he is until he feels strong enough to pull himself up. He pushes aside the heavy oilskin and steadies himself against the wall of the wheelhouse, shivering, before limping up the hill towards Perran’s.
Inside, he sheds his wet clothes and wraps himself in a blanket. He tries for a while to light the fire, but when the balls of paper and thin bones of wood he has put into the grate eventually take, the wind driving down the chimney pushes the smoke back into the room. As a grey cloud starts to fill the room he stamps through to the kitchen, fills a glass from the tap, and throws water over the small fire before retreating upstairs and dressing himself in several layers of clothes.
Throughout the night he remains cold, but eventually he returns to sleep and to a dream that he is standing by the water’s edge. The sea is still and reflects the sky above — a perfect mirror image — and Timothy has the feeling he could walk forward onto the water, as though he might be stepping not into something liquid, but onto a solid veneer that only has the semblance of water. He feels something compelling him forward and he steps out and is only partly surprised to find the water does not rise up over his shoes, but remains beneath his feet. Even so, he edges forward carefully, moving slowly away from the shore. He has to force himself to stare ahead and to continue moving and it takes him some time moving in this way to come level with the mouth of the cove. At this point he looks back towards the village across the water and wonders why he had not noticed this phenomenon before, and why the villagers milling around on the beach or those who are walking up on the coast road do not seem to have noticed either, and show no interest in him as he walks out to sea. He continues to walk away from the village in the direction of the ships on the horizon. Behind him, he is aware he is leaving footprints that fade only moments after he has passed, as though he is creating in his path a short wake. He looks down to his feet to see the footprints as they are being created and immediately wishes he had not. Wanting only to look down to his feet, he cannot help but look beyond and below them to the vast depths beneath him, the space between his body and the seabed, hundreds of yards below. Timothy is suddenly aware of the surface he is walking on. Now he has seen the void beneath his feet he cannot unsee it, and he turns and starts to run back towards the shore, though even before he looks, he knows it will no longer be there. The land has dropped away and the only things that mark the difference between the surface upon which he is running and the sky are the container ships, that now form a complete, though expansive, circle around him. He picks one of the ships as a focus and runs towards it. He is not sure how long he runs, but at some point he is aware of another presence in the empty landscape. It is a house, sitting alone in the vast expanse, and he runs towards it. The house resembles Perran’s house, though it is Perran’s house as a child would render it. White walls and a tiled roof. A door, flanked by a window on each side. He realises he is still running and has to slow as the house becomes suddenly much closer. When he enters, he sees the interior of the house consists of only one small room. Inside, there is a kitchen table covered with a cloth, and a chair at which he sits as he surveys the rest of the room. Against one of the walls is a cabinet along the shelves of which thin china plates lean. Beneath one of the windows is a porcelain sink and he stands to look at it more closely. The delicacy of the sink terrifies him, and as he looks around he notices the walls too are thin — terribly thin. He knows, beyond doubt, he could push a finger or a hand through any of the surfaces in the house without any difficulty, that he could tear the walls as he could tissue paper, to see what lies beneath. To avoid the temptation he pushes his hands deep into his pockets. He looks to the windows, and though he knows it was light when he entered the small house, he sees it is now dark outside, and the darkness is all but total. The room in which he sits radiates light, though he can see no source for this light, and it spills out of the windows to form a pool of brightness around the house. The ground around the house, he sees, is dark and contaminated and he can just make out through the windows steep walls rising up around him, walls that could be those of a quarry or of an immense scrapyard. He knows, without looking any further, that these walls rise to great heights around the house and he knows too they are what block out all the light from the sky above. The bright light emanating from the house flickers and falters and Timothy hears a roaring noise, as of a huge band of pressure approaching. He looks up and out of the window again and he sees that what he had identified as steep walls around the house are actually made of water, an impossibly tall, dark wave. The water seethes and he can see within it the detritus it has ripped up from the ground on its long journey to the small house, and buried far within the wave he can make out some of the forms of the village and the coastline around, contained now within the crushing weight of thousands of tons of water. He sees, within the wave, the long bows of the container ships, weightless in the wave’s body, and, though he cannot make them out clearly, he is sure he sees, suspended within its structure, the shapes of arms, legs and torsos too. As the wave approaches at what feels like impossible speed he feels the water draw all the heat from within the house, and the cold that penetrates far within him feels final and complete. Yet despite its speed, the water seems at the same time frozen, or slowed down, and the time it takes to reach the house is an age in and of itself, and he knows he must wait, looking out at the wall of water until it reaches and engulfs the small house. He wakes breathless and sweating in the cold of the bedroom and when he tries to move, he finds he is too weak to rise from the bed.
He lies like this for the next two days and nights, sweating and shivering. Unable to find any comfort in the bed, his sleep and dreams converge with his waking. Sometimes, in moments of drifting between the two states, he hears voices around his bed. Some of the voices are patient and concerned and others are angry and rave wildly at him, and others still are indistinct and he cannot work out from them what emotion the speakers are expressing. For the most part though, the voices sound to him like those of bureaucrats and he feels they are trying to impart to him information he is unable to absorb. He cannot make out from any of the speakers any words, just the sentiment of the words, just the impression they are important and that he should be paying attention. At one point he wakes, or dreams, he is not sure, to hear an argument taking place around him, an argument in which he feels he is the centre. And as his fever rages, he tries to follow the shadows of the speakers around the room, and the harder he listens to make sense of the voices, the further ahead of him they slip. Later, after it has been quiet again for some time, he hears the voice of one person talking to him and it is a voice that is familiar to him, though he cannot grasp to whom it belongs, and, over the deafening sound of his own breathing, he hears the words of the question that has been in his head for some time now. On waking one time in the pitch dark, he feels a more solid presence in the room, a figure sitting at the foot of the bed watching him. He knows it is Ethan and he tries to get some words out, but his throat is too parched by now, and no words escape. The effort of trying to talk pushes him back into sleep, and when he wakes again there is no one in the darkened room and he is unsure whether the glass of water sitting on the bedside table has been placed there while he slept, or whether it has been there the whole time.