Aria Remains

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Aria opened her eyes to a house she did not recognise. Others slumbered in the same room, hunched against the night, appearing to her as nothing more than dark and mysterious shapes yet she knew, somehow, that they were just like her, refugees from life, stranded together in a place that did not exist, set within countryside that was no longer there, in a country that had long ago been overrun, renamed and then forgotten. She knew that seventeen generals had been killed during the futile battles for the neglected nation, countless troops and obscene numbers of civilians, inches gained day by day, the forces of each side advancing than retreating, claiming ground and then losing it again. The house, although empty of furniture and fixtures, was clean and well cared for, as though it had recently been prepared for someone new to move in, to take the place of those who had recently left, those who had found some kind of stability, had managed to place their feet upon solid ground once again. The holes in the walls, through which bullets and shells had trespassed, had been seamlessly patched and repaired, the air outside no longer tainted by the smell of burning bodies. Suddenly, as the others in the room disappeared, transported elsewhere, perhaps into the reverie of another, someone who might have been able to make sense of it and who was not lost, who was not trying to find their way back to somewhere else, she was disturbed by Sam, asking her if she had a match because, for some reason no one would ever know nor even think to ask about, he desperately needed a match.

‘No,’ Aria had said, ‘I don’t. You know I don’t smoke, so why…’

Looking down she saw the entire carpet - a deep plum colour, soft and thick - was almost totally covered in matches, scattered all around, the sulphur extinct, reminiscent of the Tunguska event that flattened eighty million Siberian trees, shocked into submission by the meteor sent from space that grazed the earth but left no crater, yet carried upon it microbes that bore the solutions to all of life’s puzzles, the answers to and meaning of everything. The microbes formed stromatolite reefs upon the land, precipitating minerals, becoming absorbed into other microbes and producing complex cells that, in turn, grew to form the bodies of the generals who were commandeered into such a useless war. The generals railed against the teachings of the microbes, pretended they did not feel their influence, and so were doomed to die by the hand of the sword rather than live by the grace of goodness and light. Aria, sickened by such pointless waste, at the unenlightenment and avarice of warfare, looked back to Sam, who was now attempting to strike one of the matches against his trouser leg, trying again and again without success since it, too, no longer sustained viable phosphorus sulphide.

Next, she was with Robert, walking across the bridge near the railway station where they had paused once before. He had found, or maybe inherited - it wasn’t clear - but, one way or another, he had come into possession of a large and disused mansion, hidden deep within peaceful, beautiful countryside. He was explaining that he had found thousands of pounds buried in the garden and behind the plaster of the walls, but had been told that he could not keep any of it for himself since they were corrupt and unclaimed funds, abandoned by the soldiers who had infiltrated and destroyed a land which had once been so blissfully idyllic, a land of waterfalls and white dragonflies and unending hopefulness that their government had chosen, instead, as a site for their slaughterhouses of shame and factories of death. They would move there, though, Robert assured her, and would make it their perfect home, would turn it into a tiny memento of what had been there before. Aria would choose its decor, Robert would design and construct the most stupefying gardens, would build a maze and swimming pool and plant the seeds of every tree known to mankind and circle the entire plot with shrubbery.

‘What kind of shrubbery?’ Aria had asked.

’Hundreds and hundreds of Rosa ‘Thomas á Becket’,’ he told her, gesturing to the fields beyond, ‘stretching as far as the eye can see.’

Walking through the fields neighbouring the mansion, Aria turned to speak to Robert but found he had gone, had completely disappeared. She turned and turned, called his name and ran from one field to the next, but could not find him anywhere. In the distance, emanating from somewhere she could not see, she could hear the faint sound of a dog barking. Returning to their home, the work on which had now been completed, making it the most astounding building she had ever seen, she came across an old woman standing in the garden, talking with a handsome man. Although unable to hear what they were saying, Aria ducked behind a gate at the end of the path and watched them closely. She didn’t recognise them, didn’t know who they were yet, at the same time, she felt close to them, felt they were somehow important and indispensable to one another. They appeared to be arguing at first, then coming to an agreement and, finally, the man nodded, put his hand upon the old woman’s shoulder and she immediately vanished. He looked towards the gate but Aria didn’t think he had seen her, and then began walking to the house. As he did there appeared some kind of shimmer, a flickering in the air that fused all the colours of the trees and grass and sky and then, in an instant, both the man and the beautiful house were gone.

Aria kicked at the sheet that clung wilfully to her legs, then raised a hand to her face in a groggy attempt to shield her eyes from the sunlight streaming through her windows. For a few brief moments, feeling as if she had barely slept at all, she let herself relax, breathing deeply, allowing the muscles in her arms and legs to loosen.

And then she remembered and became suddenly embittered, so that all she wanted to do was to scream, to call out to the universe and entreat it to quell its spiteful machinations. To take everything she owned and tear it to shreds, to rip and mutilate, lacerating the clothes and papers and journals, to smash the windows and the mirrors so that she would no longer be able to see herself, to witness the aura of guilt that clung to her, nor see the rest of such an unprincipled world, to knock everything to the floor and stamp upon it until only splinters remained. She had no need for any of it, she thought, since without happiness, without even the chance of contentment what was the point of it all? She wanted to understand something - anything - so that she might be present in her own life. She wanted to take control of herself, of her future.

She sat up and rubbed her face, trying to concentrate her breathing, trying to free some sense within her mind so that she could place what had happened in some kind of intelligible context. How, she wondered, had her life become so filled with sorrow, so treacherous? Two people she had met had died within hours of perforating her world, standing at the entrance, waiting for an invitation to enter, bringing gifts of possibility and diversion. Worse, even; they hadn’t simply died but were killed, viciously slaughtered as though being punished. But for what? For something she had done? For just wanting to get to know her, to spend time with her?

She scalded herself again for not caring enough about Sam and for caring too much about Robert, then remembered the conversation with Ruby, wondering if she had somehow attracted the attention of a stalker, someone so desperate to have her for themselves they would do anything to preclude her from happiness with another. She shivered, got out of bed and went to the window, just to check whether there was anyone standing below, down on the pavement, staring back at her. Finding nothing unusual, just the same quiet street, nobody stirring, the curtains in the houses yet to be opened, she closed her own and pushed the hair back from her face. What was she thinking? How could she consider herself so important? There was surely no stalker, no one prepared to commit these atrocities just to stop her being with someone else.

She failed to notice that the small brown bottle was no longer on the windowsill. She had forgotten about it, had discarded all thoughts and memories of it while she slept, and so it had disappeared, had found another place to be as though it had never been there at all.

Her mouth felt dry, her skin sticky and dirty from the heat of the night, so she brushed her teeth, showered and then, still unable to summon any desire to work or to do anything other than sleep so that soon, perhaps, she would wake from this nightmare, that the dreams would leave her and composure could be reborn, she made some coffee, checked her phone with indolence while she drained the cafetière and then forced herself to at least try to escape her sad lethargy, to check her computer, hoping that she might find something there that would shake her from her dejection. Humorous videos of cats, maybe, or a piece, just the merest sliver of good news that might pierce her moroseness.

Even the charm of the automagically-awakening screen brought her no comfort as she entered the office. Logging into the online platform on which she hosted her digital shop, she checked the several notifications of sales, replied to a handful of messages that contained some of the usual questions - which paper do you use, where do you buy your ink, do you ship your journals to X,Y and Z - and did feel a small degree of pleasure as she read through some positive reviews of her products.

Then she saw something else.

An email. In her regular inbox, yet it hadn’t appeared on her phone. Just like the ‘searching’ message, the one that had disappeared within seconds of her opening it.

As she moved her cursor down the list of other messages to open it, she noticed that, again, there was no sender, no title, no three-line preview of what it included as all her other emails showed. There was nothing other than the name of her inbox and, different from before, the time it had been delivered.

Midnight.

She clicked it and then frowned, leaning forward slightly to read the tiny typeface, stark against the harsh white background.

What she read made no sense to her and she leant back again, looking briefly towards the window, wondering what it could mean, before looking again at the screen.

’Lbh zhfg pbzr onpx gb rnfguber,

6-9-14-4 20-8-5 16-1-19-20, 18-5-20-21-18-14 20-15 20-8-5 6-21-20-21-18-5’

The computer screen flickered a few times so, thinking quickly, fearing it might disappear as the other message had done, she took her phone and snapped a photograph of the bizarre message. The screen flickered again, then began rolling over and over, the message repeatedly turning from bottom to top as though it were glued to a ball until, with an odd, dull beeping sound, the screen went black. She wiggled the mouse, tapped the keyboard, reached around the back of the monitor to press its power button, but nothing would bring the computer back to life.

She turned to her phone, opening the photo application, breathing heavily. She had managed to capture a faintly blurred image of the letters and numbers and so, in case this device were also to lose its power, she grabbed a pen and quickly copied the odd communication onto a nearby sheet of paper.

She studied it for almost an hour, trying to make sense of it, but could find nothing within it that offered any clue what it might be, what it could relate to. In the end it seemed to her to just be a random jumble of letters, while the long series of numbers meant nothing to her. They did not include any phone number she recognised, any postcodes or addresses, memorable or relevant dates. She could make out no series, no pattern or cohesion between them.

’Six-nine-fourteen-four…’ she said aloud as she read. ’Twenty-eight-five…’

Unable to find an answer, she went to the kitchen and started to make some more coffee. Still thinking about the message, she decided to call Ruby as the kettle boiled.

‘Can I come and see you?’ she asked. ‘There’s been some strange stuff going on. Other strange stuff, I mean.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Ruby said, ‘come round whenever you like. We’re not doing anything. Is everything okay?’

‘Just something I need your opinion on. I’ll come soon. Thank you.’

She walked to Ruby’s house almost immediately, leaving the coffee to go cold, greeting the ginger cat basking in the sunshine as she walked through the alleyway and checking her pocket to make sure the the piece of paper on which she had copied the jumbled message was still there, that it still existed in this world and that it wasn’t something else that had a place only within her imagination.

‘Hi, sweetie,’ Ruby said as she opened the door, sweeping Aria into an embrace. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m okay,’ Aria lied.

‘No, you’re not. Come in, come in.’

As she stood aside so Aria could pass, she called for Josh to put the kettle on.

‘I’ve already had a few,’ Aria told her.

‘Yeah, but when did you ever refuse? Come on, let’s get you into the kitchen, get some coffee inside you and then, if you play your cards right, in a little while I’ll crack open the wine.’

‘I don’t even know what the time is,’ Aria admitted.

‘It’s about half an hour to wine o’clock, by the sound of it’, Josh said, emerging from the kitchen and trying to look and sound as upbeat as possible.

They sat at the table, drinking coffee and talking about Sam and Robert, about what had happened to them, for a long time until Aria, feeling she could not bear to think about them any longer, that she needed to occupy her mind with something different so they could be left to rest in whatever peace they could find, even if just for a while, dug into her pocket and presented the piece of paper to Ruby.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, angling her head as she looked at it.

‘I had another email,’ Aria said, ‘and I managed to make a note of it.’

Ruby took the paper, laid it on the table and both she and Josh studied it for a few moments.

‘There was no sender, no other information at all, really, just like the last one. Then the computer went all weird and turned itself off.’

‘Maybe it’s just the computer on the blink, messing up the messages,’ Josh said. ‘I think I read about it once, it’s called hardware acceleration or something.’

Aria shrugged.

‘All the other messages were okay.’

‘Yeah, but if this was the last one you saw before it turned off, it might have only happened just then. Hopefully it’s not a virus or something. I’ll come and have a look at it later.’

Ruby, now watching Aria closely, seeing the dark circles beneath her eyes and the uneasy expression on her face, tried to make her smile.

‘Maybe it was from someone who has a cat, and the cat walked across the keyboard and typed all that out, and then its tail pressed send and then…’

Her words gave up on themselves, as though they could see how implausible such a scenario really was.

‘It’s true,’ Josh added in a bright voice, trying to help them both. ‘I had a friend whose cat would sit on the keyboard when the computer was sleeping, and the next time he went to it, in the password box thing there would be a million letters that he would have to delete before he could log on. Used to take him ages, pressing the back key.’ He prodded a finger at the table, quickly and repeatedly, just in case they were unable to picture what he meant.

‘But then,’ Ruby went on, disregarding Josh as she often did when he was being fatuous, ‘I suppose it takes more skill than a cat could manage, to remove the sender details and everything.’

She looked over to Aria sadly. ‘I don’t suppose we’re really helping very much, are we?’

As Aria was about to reply, Josh spoke again.

‘Hey, I think I know what it is.’

He grabbed the paper for a better view and then started searching through the drawers and cupboards, rattling utensils and plates.

‘What are you looking for?’ Ruby asked, wincing. ‘Don’t you break any of my…’

‘We must have…’ Josh interrupted, not listening, and then, turning back to them, proclaimed, ‘Ah-ha.’

He triumphantly held a yellow and black pencil aloft, then sat back at the table and began writing out the alphabet beneath Aria’s mysterious message. The others watched him, glancing at each other as he worked, both clueless as to what he was doing. Finally, after checking and re-checking the message, scribbling on the paper and occasionally chewing the end of the pencil, he looked up at them with a grin.

‘It’s a reflective code,’ he said proudly, looking from Ruby to Aria and back again. They looked at him, then at each other, neither with any idea what he was talking about.

‘A reflective code,’ he said again, with slightly more volume, waving his hands in time with each word.

‘He was like this that time we went to Italy,’ Ruby said to Aria. ‘There we were, standing in the shadow of the Coliseum, in the cradle of ancient modernity, and he thinks that the bloke will obviously be able to understand that he wants mayonnaise in his roll if he just speaks loudly and slowly enough, with the appropriate hand gestures.’

For the first time in what felt like three hundred years, Aria laughed. A small laugh, a laugh heavy with sadness and fatigue, the lightness she had experienced in the bar now long-faded, but it was a laugh, nonetheless.

‘Oh, Josh,’ she said. ’The Italian for mayonnaise is maionese. It’s basically the same. He was probably just winding you up for being a dumb Englishman.’

Josh looked hurt for a moment, frowning at them both.

‘Look,’ he said, the irate tone in his voice only partially in humour, ‘I may not know how to order condiments in foreign, but I do know a reflective code when I see one. So, do you want to know, or what?’

‘Sorry, sweetie,’ Ruby said, rubbing his forearm commiseratingly. ‘Yes, a reflective code…’

He smiled, then said, pointing at the paper with the almost-flat point of the pencil, ‘See, everything’s mirrored, so the alphabet and numbers are back-to-front. A would be Z, B would be Y, you know, and similarly, the number one would be twenty-six, number two would be twenty-five and so on.’

He leaned back in his chair, enjoying the impressed expressions on the faces of Ruby and Aria.

‘Wow, that’s amazing. How did you even know that’s what it was?’ Aria asked.

‘Yeah, that is cool,’ Ruby agreed.

‘Well, you know,’ Josh told them, smirking. ‘A misspent youth of spy movies and war comics. It’s not the Rosetta Stone or the Voynich manuscript, but it’s still quite clever.’

‘So, what does it say?’ Ruby asked, moving from her seat to look over his shoulder.

‘You must come back to Easthope,’ Josh read. ‘Find the past, return to the future.’

They fell into silence, thinking about what the message could mean.

‘What, or where, is Easthope?’ Josh asked at last.

No one spoke for a time, trying to find an answer to his question. Then Ruby had an idea, picked up her phone and opened the map application.

‘No,’ she said shortly, squinting at the screen, ‘there isn’t anywhere I can see called Easthope, other than a tiny village in Shropshire, right on the Welsh border, but it doesn’t really look as though there’s anything there, other than walks and mountains and rafting.’

‘Do you think that’s it?’ Josh asked.

Aria shook her head.

‘I’ve never been there,’ she told him. ’Never even heard of it, so how could I return there?’

‘And you’ve never been to anywhere else called Easthope?’ Ruby asked.

‘Well, no, never.’

’It can’t be this, then,’ Ruby said, closing the app.

’Maybe it’s somewhere that used to be called Easthope,’ Josh suggested.

‘No, nothing,’ Ruby said, having searched her phone again. ‘There was a noble family from the seventeenth century who had that name, and then a couple of politicians and a Samoan football player, but that’s about it. No places that used to be called Easthope.’

Aria thought as hard as she could, trying to recall if there had been anything in her past that might have happened to her, someone she had known, something she had heard, anything at all that might have any relation to the name, but found nothing.

Still, as Ruby and Josh continued to discuss it, wondering what the message could mean and how they could find out who had sent it, she began to feel that she should know something about this mysterious place. Somewhere in the back of her mind she started to uncover hazy images, waves crashing against cliffs, a small dog - a terrier, perhaps - barking and running around. For a brief moment she saw a flash of a shape, a strange, twisted shape that looked like the branches of an ancient tree, grown into peculiar angles. It was almost as though she were watching some grainy Super-8 footage of a vacation she had forgotten, something that had happened to her an impossible length of time ago. Even the name sounded suddenly familiar, as though she had heard it, even spoken it, a thousand times before.

Easthope…

Easthope…