Hollowmere, and what the water kept
The survey rods are heavy in your hand, and you have stopped walking. The water has dropped again — you can see the top of the church window now, the stone lip of it crusted with pale silt, and below that the dark glass of the reservoir ref
Turn 1 of 7
I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.
The survey rods are heavy in your hand, and you have stopped walking. The water has dropped again — you can see the top of the church window now, the stone lip of it crusted with pale silt, and below that the dark glass of the reservoir reflecting a sky the colour of a bruise. The exposed road smells of mud and something older, something mineral, like a coin held too long in a closed fist. You came down here to take measurements, to put numbers on what the drought was uncovering, and instead you are standing forty yards from a woman who should not be there.
She is wringing out her sleeve with the absent, habitual motion of someone who has just gotten wet and does not think much of it. Her clothes are wrong — not costume-wrong, not the deliberate wrongness of a re-enactor, but genuinely, utterly wrong. The fabric is heavy and hand-loomed, the cut of her bodice something you have only seen in a museum case. Her boots are leather and laced halfway to her knee, and they are caked with the same grey silt that coats the bridge stones she is standing on. The bridge that has been underwater since 1823.
She looks up at you and there is no surprise in her face at all, only a kind of tired patience, the expression of someone who has been waiting and is mildly inconvenienced to still be waiting. Her eyes are dark and steady and very human. She is not transparent. She is not glowing. She is not doing anything that a ghost is supposed to do. She is just standing there, wet and cross, on a bridge that drowned two centuries ago.
"Has the mill opened yet?" she asks. Her voice carries clearly across the still water between you, and it has an accent you cannot place — northern, but older, shaped around vowels that have shifted since.
"Th'upper mill. My brother said he'd be there when the shift changed, and I've been waiting."
You know the mill she means. Everyone in Hollowmere knows it. The upper mill burned in 1809, three years before the valley was flooded to make the reservoir, and its foundation stones are under thirty feet of water even now, in a drought year. You open your mouth and close it again. The survey rods are still in your hand, and the woman on the bridge tilts her head at you, waiting for an answer that will make the world make sense again, and you do not have one to give her.