The Missing Years

by Katie McIvor

I took my wife’s hand as we walked through the gardens. The sun hung low in the sky, pink and pale like a boiled sweet, and a handful of early evening stars glinted in the deeper reaches of the dusk. My wife, looking around in wonderment, said to me, “What is this place?”

The gardens were sweet-scented and strung with small yellow lights. In breathing the perfume of the trees, for an instant I felt clouds form behind my eyes, an intoxicating dizziness, as though I had been drugged. I blinked sharply. I could not remember how we had come to be in the gardens. At my side, my wife wore a dreamy expression, her head lilting a little. I tightened my grip on her hand.

Other people lay sleeping, here and there. Some were stretched sidelong on benches, some had curled in the short grass beneath trees; a few had climbed the steps of the wooden pagoda and lay hexagonally, feet to feet and head to head, around the insides of its walls. I approached a man who sat fast asleep with his back to the trunk of a jacaranda. He did not stir when I spoke to him, nor wake when I shook him by the arm. The peaceful smile on his face frightened me, for it seemed to me that he preferred his dreams to reality, if indeed this was reality.

My wife and I followed a small gravel path. We could hear music, faint and somewhat discordant, as though several different bands were playing in separate areas of the garden. Paper triangles were strung on garlands between the trees. A low wall to our left was adorned with lanterns, red and green and yellow. I peered over the wall but drew back swiftly at the sight of yet more sleeping bodies.

We were not the only people awake. At one point a drunken reveller stumbled into our path, his glass sloshing. He issued a slurred apology to my wife, who recoiled. A small knot of people stood laughing loudly beneath a banner adorned with symbols in some foreign language. Nearby, a man with an empty wine glass was bobbing his head to the music. He smiled as I approached him.

“We’re looking for the exit,” I said. “Do you know the way out?”

He stared into my eyes with such an oddly intense look that I wondered if he might be blind. Then he leaned towards me and whispered, “Don’t you let go of her, sir. If you take your eyes off her, she’ll be lost forever.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I inspected him, deciding with disgust that he must also be drunk. I led my wife away.

We wandered through a grove of white birch trees. I was very tired, but the thought of lying down and sleeping in that strange garden filled me with fear. I was convinced that we would not wake up.

At length we discovered a gate set into the high wall. The iron of the hinges was scabbed with rust. It was a struggle to open it with one hand, but I refused to let go of my wife. In the end, between us, we yanked the gate wide.

Outside, we found ourselves on a narrow cobbled street. The air was warm and dark, the shops low-slung and lit frantically with neon. My wife was afraid of the tall shadowy figures she could see drifting between the streetlamps. Keeping her hand tucked firmly underneath my arm, I entered one of the shops. The warmth inside, together with the blaze of the neon, caused my head to swim and my eyes to fog with tiredness.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman at the counter, “my wife and I are lost. Do you know where we are?”

She gave us a worried look. “Don’t you know?”

My wife whispered, “Who are those people outside?”

“Don’t speak to them,” the shopkeeper said forcefully. “They’ll try to take you.” Then she opened her computer and asked, “Who are your family? Maybe I can contact them.”

I gave our names and our parents’ names. My wife had wandered out to the end of our arms’ tether and was staring through the glass of the shop window, which was decorated with stickers and colourful garlands. I could see the shadowy people moving along the street outside. Sleep clouded my eyes for an instant and I woke to find my head tipping forwards, my feet shuffling to catch my balance.

Something shifted in my pocket as I stumbled. It was my phone. In a burst of sudden hope, I pulled it out and pressed my code into the screen: no signal. “Excuse us for a moment,” I said to the shopkeeper, and hurried my wife outside, where I scanned my phone through the air above our heads in search of reception. The bars remained stubbornly flat.

When I lowered my phone, one of the shadowy people had approached my wife and was beckoning to her with a darkly-robed hand. My wife, as though caught in a trance, leaned towards him. Her eyes were closed, her mouth widening into a smile.

“Excuse us,” I said again, sharply, and steered my wife back into the shop.

The woman behind the counter smiled and asked if she could help us.

“You were looking for our families,” I reminded her, gesturing at the computer behind

her. “You said maybe you could find them online?”

The woman tilted her head to the side. She gazed at me for a long moment, her thoughts swimming like slow fish behind her eyes. Then she said, “I remember you, sir. But that was over twenty years ago. Your families sent money for the funerals.”

I stared at her in horror. In truth, her face had aged: lines spread from the estuaries of her eyes, and her hands curled in on themselves like claws. The longer I looked, the more she seemed to age, withering into an ancient creature, something scarcely human. Her eyes and mouth widened into black pits as she smiled. Her teeth dropped one by one and fell with small clicks to the countertop. The lights seemed to brighten and darken around me, pulsing like blood behind my eyes. I backed away. My wife was crying. Still clutching each other’s hands, we left the shop.

The streetlamps had gone dark and the buildings were glazed with moonlight, a whitewash of luminescence. I felt tired beyond belief. My wife wiped her eyes. She walked more and more slowly, tugging me backwards, causing me to stumble. I turned and saw that she was looking over her shoulder into the dark doorways and corners where the shadowy people gathered.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s not safe here.”

“I know,” she said, but she said it so sadly, as though stifling a lifetime of regret.

I thought of the gardens. The gentle music and the soft scents seemed to me now a refuge, a haven from the strange shadowy figures who wished to take my wife away. I wondered if we should return to the gardens and try to sleep there, although I could no longer remember the way nor be sure of their direction. I wondered how we had come to be in this terrible place, if we were conscious, or dead, or doomed to some purgatory of sleeplessness. Perhaps to sleep was to escape.

Lost in thought, I almost walked into one of the shadowy figures who had stepped out of a doorway ahead of us. I swerved to avoid him, and in doing so realised that I had let go of my wife’s hand.

I felt her move round behind me. Everything had become slow and sorrowful, the moonlight filling my eyes, my heart. My wife’s fingers trailed gently across the back of my neck and I felt her faint breath as she whispered: “I hope you get some sleep.”

I whirled round. The street was silent, the shadowy people drifting away from me. A light rain began to fall on the cobblestones. My wife was gone.

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Author Bio: Katie McIvor is a Scottish writer and library assistant. She studied at the University of Cambridge and now lives in England with her husband and two dogs. Her short fiction has recently appeared in Mythaxis Magazine, Etherea Magazine and the Nashville Review, and is forthcoming from Silver Blade.

TWITTER: @_McKatie_

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