Part one of a two-part story
Finders Keepers
A young couple living the dream of self-sufficiency deep in the English countryside, stumble upon a pagan figurine and unleash mysterious forces
This is a spooky story in response to Idea #4 of JF Danskin’s “6 Spooky Writing Prompts.”
The brook enters Sara and Rupert’s smallholding from the northeast, running the entire forty feet of its width, exiting into neighbouring Cailleach Meadow.
The couple have worked for months to divert the stream that flows from the nearby downs. Too often, the waters would escape the confines of its channel and flood the bottom of their land.
They have dug a deeper and broader channel to accommodate the spates, which have grown more intense and regular as years have passed.
As well as altering the course, they have damned the flow at a point just before the land drops away to form a dell that is the lower half of their garden. They have installed a hydroelectric water turbine generator, powerful enough to produce sufficient electricity to supply their modest needs.
By damning the brook they are killing two birds with one stone. They will achieve their dream of almost total off-grid living, simultaneously reclaiming a good proportion of often flooded land for cultivation.
On her way back to the house from working on the new course of the stream, the glitter of metal reflecting the afternoon sunlight catches Sara’s eye in the dried-out course of the stream. She puts down her shovel and stoops to retrieve whatever is emerging from once wet and pliable clay, a clay now transformed into a hardened, cracked canvas. Something metal, a half-buried figure trying to extricate itself from the stream bed.
Using the tip of her fingers, she eases the object from the set of its encasing material, stands up and turns it in her palm.
Sara resists an urge to sling the thing into the flowing water. But her accountant’s logical mind stays her irrationality. Already, she is figuring the item might be old and valuable. And yet the cut of its features is sharp enough to suggest something recently fashioned.
She inspects it from every vantage. When done, she cradles it in her palm like something precious lost and now found. It is a representation of a bearded man wrapped in a short coat with a hood, bare-legged, wearing sandals and striding.
An inner voice tells her to take it back to the water, where it belongs. And so, as if in a dream, she walks ten yards to where the newly diverted stream flows, the torrent swelled by last night’s rain.
She lifts her hand to toss the thing, driven now by an unease that she has no rational reason to feel. Her husband’s voice behind her, just as it is about to fly from her hand.
She turns, startled. “You scared me,” she tells him, not yet sure she is happy to see him.
“What do you have there?”
“Have where?”
“In your hand — You have something.”
“I thought you were inside working on your novel,” she says.
“I heard you call. You sounded anxious.”
“I never called you.”
“I would swear you did.”
“See what I discovered in the old river bed.” She hands over her find, feeling a possessive pang as he takes it from her.
“Priapus,” he tells her.
“How do you know?”
“Look,” he says, pulling the figure apart, the upper half now a hollow that sheathed a phallus rising from the waist. He holds the separate parts up for her to see, one in each hand.
“Oh, God!” Sara says, the indecency of the revelation then leaving her momentarily speechless. It has become something obscene, its newly revealed phallus an accusation of a dirty secret.
Collecting herself, she asks. “It looks almost new. Do you think someone dropped it?”
“Dropped it? How could anyone have dropped it? We don’t exactly have passers-by wandering through our garden. Besides, why would they have something like this on them? It must have cost a few bob, even purchased from one of those tacky gift shops. Brass, by the look and feel of it.”
“It must have belonged to the Arkwrights, been in our river since way back when the house was theirs,” Sara says, holding out her hand, anxious to have it back.
“Maybe,” Rupert answers absently, again turning the figurine in his hand. “I don’t think this is brass at all,” he says. “I think it’s gold.”
In bed that night, she lies awake, resenting the plans he is making. Tomorrow, they will drive to the Iron Age hill fort on the far side of the downs. The small visitors centre there is something of a museum.
She knows her husband’s game: he is not interested in the relic’s history; he wants to get a valuation. If not that, the name of the best person to consult.
She falls asleep, remembering how she has stashed the figurine away in her bottom drawer, wrapped tightly in her satin chemise.
Outside, a storm from the west has breached the downs, its gust and squall harrowing the valley. The trees on their land take up its shout, swaying, boughs strained and shaken by each new blast.
The thrash of hail on the window panes half wakes her from dreams of women garbed in white robes, the Bacchantes in their night roaming.
Her consciousness returns to the world. She is aware of movement in the room, surmising Rupert is out of bed, padding the floorboards on his small hours’ bathroom visit.
She moves towards the centre of the bed, wanting to be close to him and have a cuddle when he returns. The shock of his presence jars her fully awake. She sits up, rousing Rupert along with her.
“What is it?” he asks.
“There’s someone in the house.”
They are both silent, listening to the creak and groan of the old cottage’s bones adjusting to the storm that shakes it.
“Just the wind,” he says.
“I’m not stupid!” she says. “It was different than that. The padding of footsteps. The bump of the toilet seat. I thought it was you.”
He slides back under the covers and turns from her. His departing words muttered from beneath the duvet before finding sleep, “You must have been dreaming.”
“I was,” she says. “But not about that.”
PART TWO CAN BE FOUND VIA THE LINK BELOW
Below is the image of a figurine of the Greek god Priapus. In Greek religion he is a god of animal and vegetable fertility, agriculture and gardens.
:Image courtesy of wickpedia Common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priapus#/media/File:Mus%C3%A9e_Picardie_Arch%C3%A9o_03.jpg
