The Constant Land

Two young kids ran around the brightly lit shopping mall. Their shoes squeaking on the floor and sometimes leaving little tyre marks.

As it was Saturday, Ray gave himself the day off from the farm and went out for a few hours.

He did this every weekend.

Sitting in the foodcourt, he would usually meet some of his buddies of a similar age and they would either sit and talk about their tractors or sit and not talk at all.

They were a generation of men who had seen other men die horribly and it left them with nothing to say.

All with coffee. But this Saturday it was Ray on his own. The last of his buddies had moved away to be with his daughter in the next town over. The rest had dropped liked flies over the years.

Gradually over time, and it was almost a joke among the group.

But as Ray sat on his own, cradling his coffee, he didn’t particularly see the funny side of it.

Some inoffensive muzak played overhead, some band he’d never heard of.

It mixed with the low hum of the air conditioning that kept the place refreshingly cool in the harsh

Ontarian afternoon.

A blinding light from the outside world searing through the glass doors leading to the parking lot.

He took a sip of coffee. He sat hunched forward at his immovable table and chairs like sitting in the cafeteria of a school or a prison, he looked around at the mall and how it had once been a place almost ready to burst into life and how it was now just a place of empty shops, fading away like his friends. The foodcourt still had life, serving up pizza and sub sandwiches and drawing a seemingly healthy crowd, but the rest of the place was mournful.

The crystal place used to be a bookshop. The luggage shop used to sell clothes.

The RadioShack hollowed out and standing dead and empty.

The cheerful music tried to hide it, but it was plain to see.

But the kids didn’t see it, and they enjoyed running around as their parents sat a few tables away looking over a map.

Ray was sure he picked up a British accent from one of the kids as they laughed.

He sat for a little while longer and finished his drink.

The drive home took him past places he had known all his life.

Places he’d spent a lot of his youth.

The park his mother had taken him before he started school.

The garage that repaired his second bike.

And the ice cream parlour where he met Carolyn for the first time.

Only this remained, now a kitsch pastiche of what it used to be, camping up the 50s aesthetic to pull in the customers.

The park was a parking lot, and the garage was a minimart.

His small bag of groceries jingled in the passenger seat.

The voice on the stereo yammered on. His usual talk radio station.

His eyes focused lazily on the road ahead as the sky turned purple and the first few stars began to peek.

And it was peace.

The liminal nature of driving from one place to another in such wide and practically empty surroundings gave Ray comfort, the thinning surroundings giving way to endless expanses of farmland and the skyline of his parent’s youth.

Out there, he felt timeless.

A blurred black figure was standing by the road and Ray tried to ignore it as he passed it.

It was hard to ignore, even if you had seen it every day as Ray had done.

And again it flashed by. A shape like a person, blurring at the edges.

By now Ray felt little when he saw it.

Originally it had terrified him, when it leered down at him as he lay in bed when he was small, but now, by sheer regularity of it’s appearance, it only tickled his nerves. Giving him only an uncanny feeling of awareness.

Like sensing someone staring at you.

There it was again, and then it wasn’t. Barely even a flicker in the rearview mirror.

Ray kept on, and kept thinking of the bottle of something clinking beside him.

Night had fallen thick, on the now bleached and beaten porch, Ray sat drunk and barely awake.

He hadn’t drunk like that for some time but for some reason, that night, he felt the desire to.

And so put away the whole bottle and was ready to break open the next.

But sleep was pulling at him and his head sunk to his chest and his arm began to fall limp, but his impulses rushed his head to bob up and down.

Finally he gave up and he slumped into sleep.

He saw his childhood again. The park with his mother and her laughter as he flew on the swings.

Fleeting glimpses of his father out on the land, silhouetted by the high sun on his tractor.

Distant and deaf to him.

And then there was the figure again, standing in the barn, peering through the slats as solid blackness. Seeing without eyes.

It had been at the park too. A little way off, just before the forest, standing almost in sight.

A haze of a person.

And then Ray was standing at the altar, a modest congregation, a modest church, a beautiful bride standing opposite, Carolyn’s nervous excited smile reassuring him as she massaged his hand.

And he smiled too.

And the figure stood in his periphery. Half hidden by a column. There again.

And then they were fighting. Screaming. Years together and it was falling apart.

Carolyn’s face furious with disbelief, him trying to explain, trying to show her- but she never saw it.

Never.

And thought him mad.

And soon she was gone, struggling with her bags into the taxi and leaving a cloud of dust on the

driveway that seemed to take forever to clear.

And in the mist of the dirt, just for an instant, the outline of the figure cast by the sun.

And then Bruno, the dog they had owned and loved. All he had left.

Bruno saw it. And it drove him insane.

Dying, screaming, in Ray’s arms on a winter night.

Out in the cold as the snow fell.

Bruno’s dying howls caused Ray to flinch out of his sleep, his grasp on the empty bottle spasming free and the bottle falling heavily on the floorboards.

He sat there, motionless in the balmy evening air, the gentlest breeze playing with the hair poking out from under his faded baseball cap.

Which he removed and dropped almost with defeat to the floor.

He sat like a deadman for some time, looking at the field across the highway and the sway of the crop.

It looked peaceful over there.

Ray’s lapsing tired old eyes rolled up and saw the figure standing on the other side of the porch, half defined by moonlight and yet still illusive. Not here nor there.

And then he remembered one of the few things his father had told him.

“We only look after the land. It isn’t ours. It belongs to something deeper”

Ray looked on at the form, it’s strange height, somehow too tall to be where it was and yet standing unaffected by the porch overhang.

Transposed over space, like two overlaid negatives.

The figure seemed to step forward, it was hard to tell between drunkenness and the ethereal otherness of the thing.

No creaking of the boards, no slow heavy footsteps, just silence as it grew closer and Ray watched through his stupor.

The sound of the breeze and the nearby crickets continued unaffected, made eerie by this unearthly presence.

And then when it was only a few feet away, just beyond touching distance, it vanished as if slipping out of focus and out of view.

Ray barely reacted.

This had happened before.

It had happened a few days earlier.

And he was certain it would happen again.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Written by James O’Neill.

James O’Neill is a London based sculptor and writer. With his sound design partner Paul Freeman he has produced several short form audio plays that explore character and atmosphere. He is inspired by the works of John Le Carré, P.G. Wodehouse and Edward St Aubyn.