The Huddle

  Prompt: You arrive at a destination you promised an old friend you’d visit after they passed, only to find them there too.         

The GPS coverage was starting to get patchy. Arnold slowed down to a crawl and squinted through the windshield at the trees. If any of the blotchy shapes blurred by the weight of the rain resembled three ancient oaks standing in line, with two others facing them, that meant he had arrived. Martin had described the location for him so many times and in such detail that Arnold almost thought of it as a childhood memory. It was a curious feeling, pulling up to a remote location in a region of the country he had never visited and finding the landscape familiar.   

He parked on a short gravel track leading down the hill. The rain had hammered down ever since he had left home four hours ago and showed no sign of abating, so he jammed his hat down over his ears and stepped out into the downpour. He tried to summon any of his favorite memories of Martin to accompany him on this pilgrimage, but he could not scrub the uncomfortable, foreign images from his head: Martin’s elastic, bony frame decorated in the trappings of a suit. His absent face resting on the pillow of his coffin like a placeholder. The eulogy from people who knew only the surface veneer of the man. Above all, Arnold was troubled by the realization that Martin had never told him why The Huddle was so important. He had carried out his own research, of course, but that had failed to yield anything constructive. The site was venerated by certain pagan groups but nothing in the materials he had found had hinted at why.   


The ground under his feet was treacherous, melting more into slurry with every passing minute. He clung onto passing trees and stumpy outcrops as he made way down to the clearing. There was a palpable change in the energy as he trod uncertainly onto the stage framed by the trees. He suddenly felt weighed down under a concentration in the density of existence. There was some frequency of power here, although Arnold could not tap into it or even comprehend it. He turned to his left to look at the dry-stone wall that he had passed on his way down and that threaded its way through the meadows like a keloid snake. He blinked, and a smudge of color came into view. If he wiped the rain from his eyes and peered keenly, the shape looked conveniently familiar: it was Martin’s pipe cleaner frame, draped in the olive-green oilskin that he used to don when roving off on his week-long hikes along the coastline. Arnold had offered to come with him once but had been hopelessly outpaced by the man’s stilt-like strides; he had sat on a rain-worn bench and watched him pace out over the cliffs, flinging his arms wide and summoning some silent magic from the elements. This, then, must be Martin’s final prank: a will sacrificed in favor of a scarecrow with some withering note pinned to its chest. Arnold quickened his pace and made straight for the figure tilting slowly from side to side with the pressure of the storm. He got to within a dozen feet of it and could start to see the petrochemical rainbows of the oilskin’s wax when the figure stood up and walked off.   

Arnold’s knees momentarily softened and he felt himself keel forward with a wash of nausea. He caught himself on one of the wall’s jagged stones and breathed with such artificial violence that he almost felt light-headed again. The figure was moving at a determined pace toward what looked to be a hide or a lookout shelter in the middle distance. Arnold felt his temples and the tips of his fingers vibrating and his vision clouded over for a moment. When he felt that the swarming in his brain had subsided enough to allow his thoughts to return, he could not conclude anything other than that this was some sort of message Martin was trying to send him. It would be a disservice to his friend’s memory not to go after this eldritch harbinger. He hugged his already buttoned coat closer to his chest and set off down the path to the shelter.   

The air under the slanted timber roof was quiet and cold, laden with the spray of the rainfall and a whispered breath of mildew. Arnold had been so gnawed by the need to understand that he had broken into a virtual run on the final slope up to the threshold steps. He stood in the darkness for a few moments to catch his breath and saw the skeletal figure in its oilskin standing at the other end of the shelter, peering out across the wilds. It seemed to weigh his presence for a moment before turning and revealing Martin’s peculiar triangular jaw and the shine of his green eyes. It took him in for a moment, then swivelled back and stared out through the torrent. Arnold felt his entire consciousness pool into a small, swirling ball in the pit of his stomach, motionless and struck dumb until he finally heard his own distant voice say: ‘I don’t understand.’  

The figure turned to face him again, this time with a wry, mournful smile on its face. ‘I wish I could explain it to you; I really do. The truth is, I don’t really understand it myself. I just knew you would be here.’   

‘What is this place? Why is it so important?’   

‘I don’t know, Arnold. All I can tell you is that this is the place to which I have always returned. It’s the backdrop to everything.’ He sat on the low wall at the front of the shelter and looked at him, the gleam of his eyes catching the pockets of light in the shadows. ‘Do you know why you’re here now?’   

Arnold felt stripped of any ability to comfort. ‘We buried you last week.’ Martin clasped his hands together then flung them wide with a shrug of his shoulders, kneading his face and eventually coming to rest with a rueful grin.   

‘Was it a nice service? I feel like I’ve lost track of time. Or of what time means.’   

‘Martin, why did you bring me here?’   

‘I wanted you to see this place, at last. But it had to be when you were ready to see it. Ready to understand.’   

‘Understand what? I don’t understand any of this’, Arnold felt his inner self flail and lash out at the emotions that were vying for space, the fresh grief and the anger and now the fear at this ghoulish dummy of his friend borrowing his friend’s voice.   

‘Sorry…it makes more sense, somehow, when you don’t have to worry about the before and after. Even if it does feel a little bittersweet. Every time I’ve been here before, I could feel your presence somehow, even if you were never really here. Now that you are here, I’m wondering if I am.’ He kicked his heel against the wall. ‘I don’t think that’s the important thing, though. It’s good to have a moment to ourselves.’   

Arnold could hear the rain booming down on the roof of the shelter, slamming against the tiles and echoing dully through the curtain of water. He could not think of a single question that made any sense; eventually, he settled with ‘Are you a ghost?’   

Martin gave a single breath of chuckle at this. ‘I’m not anything I ever imagined a ghost being. It feels…light. As if I’d put down a heavy bag I was carrying. Come here a moment.’ When the other man crossed the two dozen paces between them, Martin reached out to offer a handshake. The men’s hands closed around each other tightly. Arnold recognised his friend’s python grip and the unusual length of his fingers. The hand was pale and clammy, but so was Arnold’s own, chilled by the walk through the rainstorm.   

‘You don’t feel like a ghost to me either. So…why are you here?’   

‘To pass on the torch, I think. Wait: that’s not the right expression. To pass down the story…that feels more like it. I always returned here whenever I came to an impasse in my life. When I wasn’t sure whether marrying Alison was the right choice; when I got offered that consultant job on the other side of the country; when they tried to recruit me for the office marathon team. The next weekend, every time, I headed out here to think about things, and they always became clearer.’ He stood up and began to pace around as he spoke, wheeling his arms in lazy circles and letting his voice bounce across the echo in the shelter. ‘What do we really know about death? Really? We’re all brought up to believe that life is a linear experience, the same thing we’re taught about time: the portion of life and time that you get to enjoy is bookended by your physical body. When your body surrenders, the spark of your mind leaves it; the stronger sparks become phantoms, and the weaker ones become dust and air. Imagine this, though: what if you could reject the linear path and go sideways?

‘This place has an energy that seeps into you. I think it picked me out, somehow, or maybe someone vouched for me. Now I’ve vouched for you, and you can begin the process of gradually soaking up the power of it all. The power to take a different route.’   

‘Hang on.’ Arnold squeezed his forehead between his fingertips and tried to decide how much of this narrative he believed. ‘You’ve told me about this place dozens of times. Why didn’t you ever invite me here when you were…before? Why didn’t I just decide to come down here one day by myself?’   

‘That’s a good question.’ Martin smiled. ‘Why didn’t you? You never even asked me exactly where it was.’   

‘I don’t know. I guess I always thought of it as your private place, like a shrine or something, and I didn’t want to intrude.’   

‘That makes sense, sure. I see things a little differently, though: I think you didn’t come here earlier because the place hadn’t called you yet. It never called me to bring you here in the previous chapter of my being, but I remember feeling very strongly that I should urge you to visit after I had passed.’   

The men listened to the cymbal-chatter of the storm for a moment. Arnold leaned back against one of the square wooden pillars holding up the shelter’s roof, not caring that his shoulder was exposed to the rain. ‘So…you’re saying that if I come here often enough, I’ll be able to…sidestep death and just keep existing, the way you seem to be doing? How many times is enough? How long do I have to stay?’   

‘The place knows these things; we do not. As for when you will have to come back, you will find out when the time comes: you will feel the need to return. If you notice that you are becoming fast friends with a new acquaintance or colleague in the future, perhaps that too is the place feeding the energy within you, bidding it seek out a new audience for the story, as I did with you.’   

The sky finally appeared to be clearing: a dazzling slice of sunlight was burning off the distant clouds and spreading its way towards them.   ‘Will I see you again?’ Arnold blurted out before he could catch himself. Martin shook the great folds of his overcoat until the raindrops shimmered and stood at the doorway to the shelter, looking out over the moors.

‘You already have,’ he said tenderly.
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