Porlock Hill, Somerset, England. November 1989.
After a day and a night of clattering rain, the pelt of hard, cold water on weathered, displaced slate distilled into a solemn new morning. A single pendulous drop hung tenuously in the centre of a discoloured damp circle on the ceiling of an upstairs room in an ancient cottage. Clear, round, perfect, it hung long enough for Yani to time its life in silent seconds before it fell straight, tear shaped, onto the cracked, time splintered floorboards. Perfection became destruction in the blink of an old man’s eye.
His eyes welled, deep pooled, red and watery into the new-day light. The floor was a broken, uneven, worm-thread patchwork, the ceiling above was indelibly scarred with overlapping rust rimmed circumferences and in between, for a very short moment, a tiny, perfect, silvered orb had fallen through time and space.
Unlike the rain of Semipalatinsk forty years before, these droplets fell clear and clean, unpolluted, unspoilt. They carried no radiation, no raging decaying atoms, just the uncertainty of a changing world.
The production of doomed perfection reassuringly repeated itself several times before all his senses returned from another fitful night’s sleep. A dull light sloped through the window, seeping into his room by way of the gap in the fading curtains. The pounding night rain had slowed and was now only faintly echoed in the solitary monotonous drip-drip of the leak in his roof. Through the curtain gap he could see the grey day undressing itself, shedding away the wettest of nights. Shadows shifted and slowly enlightened details on the village scene beyond his window. Texture, contour and landscape all gradually revealed as the night rolled back over the western horizon. The village for now was silent with only the dripping ceiling to disturb the heavy quiet. But elsewhere in this confused, colliding landscape the churning blanket of storm clouds continued to roll and swirl, dropping spears of steel straight showers in a harsh warning of winter. Crystal rods of rain illuminated by an occasional searchlight beam of sunrise-yellow pierced the distant hilltops like arrows raining down on a medieval battlefield. To the West, the cloud base feathered across the hills, brushing the tops of the tors and the ancient circles at Withypool and Hawkridge where sacrifice and ritual, awe and magic had been stone-cast into the landscape millennia before. To the East, across the levels, Glastonbury rose from the shining floodplain, a defiant tower of stone, an Avalon awaiting the re-awakening of a mythic king.
Relique of the Sunken Day by Teddy James