Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016

Smoke and Mirrors by Owain Lewis

A fiction debut from published U.K. poet and rock-climbing instructor Owain Lewis.

At the bend in the road he slowed the car down almost to a stop. He was smoking a cigarette, the last in the pack. As the car crawled along, he listened through the open window as the tires crackled at the edge of the road where the tarmac frayed and turned to gravel. Just as the road began to narrow again, coming out of the bend, he brought the car to a stop and reversed back into the bend where the road was wide enough so that cars coming from both directions at the same time could easily pass.

He’d often stop here on his way into town on his weekly supply run. The road skirted round a sharp spur poking from the valley’s side. If you parked in the bend and walked just twenty or so yards downhill you could easily believe you were in the middle of nowhere. There were days, mostly in summer, when he would spend the best part of the afternoon beneath a small outcrop of rocks just glimpsed from the road, at the foot of which stretched a smooth, grassy platform where he would sit getting high, listening to the wind and watching the clouds and buzzards drift across the sky.

It was not one of those days. Autumn was almost done with. A deeper change settling in; the sky stratified, with the odd blue aperture floating by, bracken turned to rust, the crimson flecks of rowan berries sprayed across the hillsides, the days contracting, and somewhere over the horizon, just out of sight, winter waited to pounce.

He took another drag on his cigarette, not much left to go now, and reached across the dashboard to pick up the envelope flickering in the warm air blowing from the car’s windscreen heater.

He’d recognised the handwriting straightaway. How long had it been since he and Alicia had parted, believing it safer to go their separate ways than stay together, two trails being harder to follow than one? If it had not been a decade then it wasn’t far off. And in all that time, how often had he thought about her? Mostly not at all.

It was different at first, obviously. In the beginning he couldn’t get her out of his head. He’d been on the move trying to outpace the memories, trying to put some distance between her and him and the things they’d done together. It never really worked, though. How could it? The patterns were repeated; continual movement with the odd touching-down from time to time, staying nowhere longer than a few days, leaving nothing but tire marks and the sweat of the road behind. It was what they’d have done if they were together, only he was still doing it and she was out of the picture.

It was when he settled and stopped moving that things began to fade.

There was, of course, still the odd occasion, sparked by a certain sight, sound, or scent, when the image of her would swim up from the depth of his memories and dance about his mind for a moment or two — the tang of smoke from burning rubber, lipstick on a windowpane, the subtle pop of his hippie neighbour a half mile down the valley beating out her afghans on the washing line, a sound like a handgun going off — but the sensation was always brief, like quick fish glimpsed through bright water, and other than a faint wisp of something distantly related to nostalgia it left no lasting imprint on his emotions. Through silence and the observation of his surroundings over the years he’d learned how to let these things go. Some mornings the valley filled with mist as thick as cream but it only took a bit of warmth and a gentle breeze and the air was clear again.

For quite some time that morning he’d sat at the kitchen table holding the envelope, turning it over in his fingers, thinking back on those times now caught up with him. When he eventually opened it, inside he found a single piece of paper folded in half on which was drawn a picture of a bird very similar to Picasso’s Dove of Peace. He smiled when he saw this, amused by her humour, but nonetheless he recognised the warning. He left the envelope on the table and made himself a breakfast of boiled eggs and toast and a mug of fresh coffee. As he sat and ate, light through the window blinds sliced the room into slanting bars of shadow and brightness; motes of dust, lit up like so many tiny suns, sparkled and swirled as they shifted in the air. A trapped fly battered against the window glass. He got up to let it out, glancing up the track as he did so.

When he’d finished his breakfast, he chopped wood in the barn for an hour, stacking the split logs neatly against the wall, pausing now and then to glance out of the doors and up the track again. Afterwards he gathered up a few things from the house, picking up the envelope from the kitchen table on his way out, and set out in the car towards town.

A few cars passed as he sat waiting at the bend in the road. He looked into each in turn. The fifth car that passed slowed and as it came alongside the driver locked eyes with him. He didn’t recognise the men, but he recognised the type. After they passed he watched them in the rearview mirror until they disappeared round the bend. It was unlikely that they could have recognised him. He had cultivated the wild man look for many years; even he had forgotten what he looked like underneath. He waited awhile at the bend anyway. If they had recognised him they would be back along soon enough. If not, they would park the car off the road somewhere, he knew a few likely places, and approach the house on foot, staking it out, watching his movements. And he would play his part. He would return from town clean shaven, his hair cut short, and he would go about his day as he always did.

In the bottom of the valley a copse of silver birch swayed and shivered in the wind, their leaves glowing like underwater coins. Down valley, where the hillsides opened out and the teeth of the first northerlies stripped the trees to bone, the brook, hidden for much of the year, stretched out in a long unbroken line all the way down to The Riffle and Doxey’s pool, where it scratched at the earth like a dark and crooked finger. Above all this, a background for the scattering of crows he watched fighting to stay afloat in the sea of shifting air, the remains of graphite clouds shredded across an immense and quickly clearing sky. When the last of these had stretched and dissipated into nothingness he took the final few drags of his cigarette and, when he was sure there was nothing left worth smoking, flicked it expertly out of the window, the dim glow of it arcing through the air and over the barrier to end its life in a hiss on the damp grass below.