Chapter 18 - Sophie - Contained

A dark, small-town mystery steeped in folklore. THE STUDY OF QUIET THINGS is a serialised fiction drama shared one chapter at a time.

This is a serialised fiction. If you haven’t read the previous chapters, you’ll find them here in order, so you can dive right in.

Sophie was too young to grieve the death of her mother—too young to understand her emotions and the world around her. But despite decades passed, Sophie still has no more understanding of grief’s complex emotions now than she did back then.

Denial. She knows this is one of the first stages of grief, but she’s not in denial. How can she deny something that isn’t true? What she needs to do, she tells herself, is to carry on… which is why she went to work, hoping the daily grind would help calm the impossible ideas the police gave her.

She laughs to herself, imagining Jessica’s face when she tells her what happened, this misunderstanding. This mishap, and how, on top of the police’s misinformation, she lost her job. They will laugh about it, write a story about it, Sophie thinks, unable to part from her storyteller instincts.

Sophie has an address in Google Maps, and the only reason, Sophie tells herself, she is going to the destination the police gave her—Chester Morgue—is to prove them wrong. Jessica hasn’t got reception, that’s all. Or maybe she’s just run out of credit again. And the body in the morgue will prove this.

Sophie clambers onto the train going north. The carriage is full and stuffy. She takes off her beanie and shuffles next to a window. The heating inside is stifling, so she wrestles out of her jacket and stuffs the jacket behind her lower back as a pillow. With her miss-shaped jumper’s sleeve, she wipes the window wet with breath and condensation—though there is no view to peer at other than the bustling grey city she’s leaving.

For a long time, Sophie does nothing but stare through her own reflection at the bleak city landscape, watching as it morphs to towns, villages, and eventually, wild countryside under a blanket of angry storm clouds. But her mind keeps circling around to the police visit, to the possibility that Jessica is—no. She won’t allow it. She opens her message app, scrolling to the angry message she sent last night, still unanswered. Sophie needs to scare the girl called Rhian into answering. She fires two texts in quick succession:

Sophie:

The police think they’ve found my sister’s body.

I need you to tell me when and where you last saw her.

Now.

Immediately, three little dots appear, the person is writing back. Simultaneously, Sophie raises the phone and lowers her face towards the screen, waiting.

Rhian:

I promise I will tell you everything I know.

But I can’t do it on the phone.

“Want to make a bet?” Sophie says, calling the number right back, but immediately, the person on the other end cuts the call.

Rhian:

I can’t talk. It’s not safe.

A ping comes through with a link. It’s a Google Pin. The accompanying caption:

Rhian:

Meet me here, 4.30

Sophie bristles.

Sophie:

You better tell me what you know now

or I’m giving your name and number to the police.

Rhian: Then you’ll never know what really happened to Jessica.

Happened. Past tense.

“Shit,” Sophie hisses, and an elderly man sitting next to her huffs in disapproval.

Rhian:

I want to help you, just like Jessica wanted to help me.

But you can’t tell anyone, not even the police.

The writing dots continue…

Rhian:

ESPECIALLY not the police.

My phone is about to die.

See you 4.30

Rhian x

Fuck, Sophie says, but to herself this time. Still, the man opposite shuffles in his seat as if he can sense her unspoken curse. She follows the link to the pin; Llangellen Park, and the memory of the news report this morning comes flooding back to her; the angry police sergeant, the girls in the party shot: Kate, the story that lured Jessica to this strange place. Carys, the new victim, luring Sophie in her twin’s footsteps. With a sharp intake of breath, Sophie makes a bitter discovery; the small town of Llangellen is only an hour away from Chester Morgue—where someone who is not Jessica lies waiting to be identified.

It can’t be Jessica; Sophie tells herself again.

She image searches the location Rhian has asked her to meet. The images show various angles of her meeting place: a children’s playground on the top of a cliff on the outskirts of a coastal countryside village, a twenty-minute walk from the nearest bus stop if Google Maps is correct. It doesn’t fill her with enthusiasm. In fact, the only thing it does is fill her head with doubt and dread.

Her mind searches for a distraction and she catches the melodic timbre of a poem forming: a line, a thought, a gesture—an invitation. So, Sophie does what she always does when her mind is uneasy and there is no way to untangle her thoughts from imagination.

She writes; the scratch of pen on paper soothing the itch her mind cannot reach.

Contained: def - prevent a problem from spreading // showing restraint?

To hold within…

She doesn’t fit inside her own body

Contained

in a place vessel too small

to call her own

for all

the storm soaked swells

that serge rage within

And she wonders,

‘how do you live

without the need

to gnaw at your bones

or

with talons and stone

rip apart your skin?’

This is where truth hides lives

Hidden by layers

of blood and lung

heart and vein

Suppressed into a place too small

to call your own.

It surges,

the storm,

waves and waves unspoken

crashing against a body it

can’t escape...

There are no floodgates

so you feel it all

eroding your soul;

a tsunami of screams

with nowhere to go

but deeper

By the time she wrestles the words into a roughed out first draft, the train slows and Sophie alights for the next stage of the journey, feeling a little more centred having written out frustrations she would never admit aloud.

The interchange goes as smoothly as it can in the relentless rain. Fewer people board a less luxurious train going to a less luxurious place. She finds her carriage is completely empty and without coughing splutters, muted conversations, and staring eyes of other passengers, Sophie pulls out her beaten up MacBook from her rucksack, and rummages for other bits; notebook, pen, EarPods.

She curses. Her EarPods case is empty. Of course, she remembers handing them over to The EMF guy before the vase incident and forgot to take them back before her ungraceful departure. She untangles a spare pair of earphones, plugs them into her Mac and hotspots her phone.

Her research into Rhian and Llangellen is slow going, 3G occasionally flickering to one bar of 4G, but it is enough to collect a few newspaper headlines following the story of Carys Forester she heard on the news this morning…

---

Continue Reading:

---

I promise that The Study of Quiet Things would be forever free for readers here on Substack - but if you feel called to support my writing and keep the hearth lit in The Teller’s House, you can buy me a coffee to keep me fuelled.

---