Chapter 53 - Kai - Running into Trouble
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.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Kai says.
His eyes flick to the rear-view mirror, hoping Mabel will catch eyes with him and pretend she cares. She doesn’t. He doesn’t know what he was thinking. As if Josh would talk any sense about that night - the night on the videotape taking up space on the passenger’s seat. For a brief moment, he side-eyes the video, resisting the temptation to throw it out the window—but there’s a small part of him, the small part that can still hear Claudia’s voice in his mind, that says; Isn’t it time you looked at what’s hurting you?
And Kai can tell it’s Claudia’s voice, not his own, because he would never say that. He would say… well, he doesn’t rightly know. And he suspects it has something to do with not going on his daily run today—a way to pound out his thoughts with footfalls, to ease his meandering mind with the sound of his heavy, laboured breath. He feels the itch to run, to run away from the tape beside him, to run away from the ridiculous quarrel with Josh. Of all outcomes, that was the one he dreaded the most, and now it has happened, he feels as lost as he did way back when.
“Stupid symbol. Stupid study. Stupid me.” He almost blurts Stupid Sophie but stops short. No matter how angry he is at himself, he can’t project it onto the sad girl with the splintered soul. And he understands now, the depth of his desperation. He realises he wanted to help her, impress her, and now he has nothing to show for his trip; no data on EMF and no data on the symbol.
You have the recording, Claudia reminds him, and for the first time since her death, he swats, actually physically swats, her voice away with a hand as if she were a pesky fly.
Silence. And now he has it, he’s not sure he likes it.
He’s getting moody again, it’s not a natural state, and he can’t rightly tell if it’s all this nonsense with Josh, that he failed to get information for Sophie, or because he’s driving back in Llangellen with its depressing dark clouds and gloomy outlook: its EMF, Kai reminds himself. That’s why he’s here—he anchors himself back on his own path instead of being pulled along by Sophie’s compass.
He stops at a tiny petrol station, filling up, and while paying notices a hiking trail leaflet on the counter. He picks it up for purchase, and the old man behind the counter eyes him suspiciously as he pays. It is not long after when his yellow Mini pulls up on an empty, open road nestled within a mountain range. The engine idles, heat rising from the bonnet. Around the car, the mountainous horizon is cloaked with drizzle, a freezing fog smothering the muted monoliths. Fields sprawl out unevenly in all directions only to disappear beneath the thick brume in the near distance; nature’s concealing cloak.
If the middle of nowhere was a place, Kai thinks, it would be Llangellen.
The car door slams like a gunshot in the silence, and Kai stands for a moment, shoulders hunched with cold. He’s looking at that bloody VHS tape in the passenger seat. His body already feels drained, and his long sigh is one of pure dejection. He hates running in foggy conditions, but his urge to alter his state of mind with run-induced-endorphins is stronger than the desire to stay dry.
He’s at the boot of the car, grabbing his running shoes and lightweight, breathable jacket. With an obligatory groan, Kai bends to tighten his laces, taking a few moments to stretch out his calf muscles and hamstrings while he’s down there. His knees click as he stands.
God, I’m getting old, Kai thinks to himself. Which isn’t entirely true, but youth is a subjective concept only ever appreciated through hindsight—his grandfather’s words. Kai finds himself using them more and more these days.
He opens the back door.
“I’ll be twenty minutes, tops.” Kai promises Mabel, winding the window down a few inches, even though there’s not a single chance of Mabel overheating in the freezing mist. Fresh air might put her in a better mood, Kai thinks. She’s looking about herself in her cat carrier; self-righteous and indignant. “Don’t get yourself into any trouble, Prissy-Pants.”
Before he sets off, he fills Mabel’s water bowl from his water bottle, gives her a handful of kibble (he keeps in the car for emergencies like this), and rummages in the glove box to procure his recently purchased Hiker’s Guide to Llangellen. The slim pamphlet shows Llangellen Bay on the cover under a glorious sun; the photo of the sea isn’t the slate grey he’s seen but pristine clear, blue and gentle. On this forlorn autumn day, he can’t imagine Llangellen ever looking like this beautiful holiday depiction. He unfolds the pamphlet that opens to a map and traces his finger along the mountain road to locate himself.
“Perfect,” he says, and he means it. It’s almost as if fate delivered him here.
I thought you didn’t believe in fate, Claudia says—Kai begins to run.
He starts stilted, as always, but soon he settles into his stride.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
Kai counts the rhythmic pounding of his feet as the world blurs by in his peripherals. The only thing that matters here—here on this single road snaking forever upwards through the countryside—is breath and pace. He stares straight ahead, putting one foot in front of the other.
It’s logical. Running, he finds, is a metaphor for clear thought. And clear thought is what he needs. There is something about the girl. There he goes again, referring to Sophie as a girl. It’s an insult, really, but he doesn’t mean it that way. He can’t stop replaying the image of her as she disappeared into the yawning black hole of the library, as if the gothic building had gobbled her up whole. And there was that tragic smile, hinting at the woman she might be if life wasn’t bearing down so heavily on her. It reminded him of Claudia’s small smiles, those last few weeks before—
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
The incline increases, causing his breath, already laboured with the heavy fog, to shorten still. It takes him a little while to find what he’s looking for, the road meanders differently in reality, nothing like the map suggested. There are no obvious landmarks in the desolate mass of concealed landscape, so he second guesses his steps until he finally finds the track he is looking for.
It’s less of a path and more of a sheep trail, the terrain rutted with deep gorges on a single track. It’s a rolled ankle waiting to happen. His mind jumps, making a tenuous link from his ankle to Sophie’s statement about that symbol being tattooed on her twin’s ankle. It’s funny. Not funny ha-ha, but funny-weird. He hopes Sophie has had better luck scoping out the library than he had at Josh’s house.
You could try watching the video, Claudia suggests.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
The trail turns into a steep decline, twisting in meandering tracks downwards. It’s hard to find his footing because the further down he goes, the thicker the ground fog becomes. He slows his pace, taking more purposeful steps, yet the ground still loosens beneath his feet, and he stumbles; twisting and almost rolling over his ankle, as predicted. With a sigh, he admits defeat and staggers to a walk. His shoulders are already sore from holding them tightly around his ears with the double whammy of cold and the anticipation of tumbling, so he swings his arms in wide, arching circles, trying to loosen them up.
Muted by fog, a ghostly outline of a chain-link fence appears in the near distance.
Bingo!
He is mere yards away before the barricade solidifies from the mist, though how far the fence goes on for is anyone’s guess. The chain-linked metal soars overhead; rising from near-dead grass, and wearing a crown of rusted barb. It reminds Kai of concentration camps he’s seen in old war movies. With a hand trailing along the fence line, Kai walks the parimeter in hope of finding some form of opening—he does not fancy climbing over the top, thank you very much.
It is not long before he finds a dishevelled sign reading, ‘Danger — Keep Out.’ It hangs lopsided and forgotten. The only evidence that anyone has been here in years is the ghost of graffiti tags lingering on sign; the graffiti has long been washed, or scrubbed, away, but it leaves behind its shadow; a faded dull sheen outlining where the spray paint had once been. There is no art to the graffiti, no creativity, and Kai turns his head this way and that to discern the near invisible marks. One faded outline shows a stick man’s simple circle head, but there are crosses where the eyes and lips should be. The other is harder to make out, and he has to get up close to see the mark on the bottom right corner.
It is the same symbol they found scratched under her bed, the same symbol that seems to be repeated in this town time and time again. And if Kai’s research has taught him anything, it’s that patterns are evidence not yet fully formed in the human mind. The answer, hidden in plain sight, the mind yet to connect the dots. Beneath the sign, a weakness in the fence already waits for him like an open invitation; a tear in the fabric of security, and by the matted, muddied area in front and behind the gap, Kai deduces this path, although not well trodden, is still in use. He starts peeling the chain-link fence apart, supposing an old mine shaft might be an exciting or, at the very least, a dry place for bored teens to visit with a bottle of white lightning or whatever cheap booze teens drink these days.
White Lightning.
It makes Kai think of Josh. It makes Kai think of that night. It makes Kai—
A snap of branch underfoot steals Kai’s attention back to the now. He immediately drops his hands from prising open the fence, and the guilt of doing something he shouldn’t stirs in the pit of his stomach. He spins but can’t see anyone or anything in the claustrophobic fog. He should call out, he thinks, but there is something about the muted silence that makes him hold his breath. Just when he talks himself back into breaking into the unused mine, convincing himself that the sound came from rambling sheep, a dull torchlight cuts through the mid-afternoon fog. Kai cringes as Peters comes into view, cutting an imposing figure in the gloom.
Great.
The sergeant nods at the broken fence line and rubs his chin in that American TV cop way.
“Can’t you read, Boyo?” Peters asks. He puts his enormous dinner plate-hands on his hips, then doesn’t move—not an inch; not even a millimetre.
He doesn’t know why, but Kai laughs, though his innards twist. There’s something about this guy. Something he doesn’t like at all. Maybe it was the way the copper loomed over Sophie in the pub last night, domineering, making her look even smaller; even more fragile, if that’s possible. Kai wonders if she might have been bullied out of town if she hadn’t had him for backup—if he hadn’t squirrelled her off to the Coach House.
Stop thinking of Sophie, a voice he can’t decipher as his own or Claudia’s. His right hand fumbles to an empty indented space on his wedding finger.
“It must be quite demoralising?” Peters says.
Kai makes a serious of bemused and confused sounds that articulates nothing.
“To be her sidekick?” Peters continues.
“Sidekick?” Kai asks dumbly.
“You know. Following signs and symbols, trying to make sense of what’s going on here.”
“Following signs?” Kai scoffs. “That’s not exactly what’s happening, Officer—”
“—Sergeant,” Peters corrects him.
“Sergeant. I told you in the pub, I’m here conducting research.”
“And I told you in the pub to go home,” Peters says.
Kai’s lips curl up in a bemused smile. “Is this like a - I don’t know, some kind of Anglo-Saxon Welsh squabble?” Kai asks. “Some sort of prehistoric racism?”
Peters smirks, almost laughs, which would be a first. The man’s a grunt, Kai thinks.
“This mine, this land,” Peters nods at the land behind the fence line, “it’s private property.”
“I know. I’ve formally sent a request for permission to enter as part of my study.”
“And you’ve been granted permission, have you? You got that evidence on your person?” Peters asks, smug.
“I don’t see why I’d be denied. This unused mine might be responsible for emitting frequencies that are causing, or at the very least contributing, to the local malaise. My research could help—”
“—Malaise?” Peters snorts. He says it with such condescension in his tone, Kai wants to slap his stupid macho face. “You step one foot in there,” Peters says, that silly smug face again. “And I’ll arrest you on a charge of trespass. You understand?”
“But…” Kai lifts his hands in a gesture of utter disbelief. “Don’t you want to find out?”
Peters stares for several long seconds. Something strange, thinks Kai, is going on behind those eyes. Then the man hitches his head back in the direction of the road. “I’ll walk you back to your car,” he says.
And Kai can do nothing but follow.
The track Peters leads him on is more direct, the pathway better suited for species of the two-legged variety. Local knowledge, Kai thinks. But in the muted silence of the thick fog, the concealing tendrils, it’s not long before Kai loses sight of Peters. He doesn’t want to call out and sound like a city-sissy, and so he picks up his pace and continues following the sound of Peters’ footfalls—until they, too, disappear.
Reluctant; “Hey, Peters?” Kai calls. Nothing. “Peters?”
Kai purposely doesn’t look around himself. He doesn’t want to get himself turned around. So, he carries on, one foot in front of the other, without the copper.
Good riddance.
Soon, he is back on the road, much closer to his car than the track he had previously taken. There’s still no sign of Peters or his cop car.
But something is wrong, and Kai’s stomach drops.
Kai jogs closer to his car. The entire passenger side is covered in black graffiti. A crude message that will cost a fortune to remove;
GO HOME.
It’s punctuated, of course, by that bloody symbol.
Kai is about to swear, only something else catches his eye. The back door on the driver’s side is wide open. He sprints around the car.
“Mabel?!”
But Mabel doesn’t reply with her pissed off mewl.
It’s not only the car door cast wide open; the cat carrier door is open too. And Mabel is nowhere to be seen. His stomach twists. He can’t lose Claudia’s cat. She’s the last living piece left of her memory.
“Mabel!” he cries out again.
But the only sound he hears is silence.
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