Berengaria's Best: The Ultimate Short Story Collection

In the Ruins*

They take a weekend off for the sake of their marriage.

On the train, neither of them speak. Sandrine immerses herself in a paperback, tilting the pages toward the train window to catch more of the diffuse light from the outside. Charles closes his eyes and listens to his seminar lectures over headphones, the thin wires disappearing into his shirt just below the third button. Their mismatched luggage huddles in the rack over their heads like two different breeds of dogs held captive in the same cage.

The other passengers take them to be strangers to each other.

The rain coming down in Bourillès is just heavy enough to discourage both of them from suggesting they walk to their hotel. They take a taxi instead, each silently looking out their own window at the passing buildings and shops. When they arrive, Sandrine automatically carries both of their bags inside as Charles automatically reaches for his wallet to pay the fare.

In their room, Charles takes off his shoes, stretches out on the bed and reads entries aloud from the coastal guide book in the dim light cast by the bedside lamp.

Sandrine perches on the end of the bed, one leg slung over the other. She turns on the TV, flips through channels with the sound off.

They sleep with their backs to each other.

The next morning, fog hangs like bed sheets pegged out to be washed by a fugitive drizzle that slips unnoticed under watch faces and down collars. Sandrine pulls on her thick, yellow rain slicker and sturdy hiking boots, determined to stay dry. Charles packs the rucksack for the day. He adds in an extra pair of socks for both of them.

A long, gently sloping asphalted trail takes them up the side of the hill to the ruins of the castle that comes so highly recommended by the guide book, which is riding safely tucked away from the weather inside the inner pocket of an inner pocket of the rucksack.

Inside the provisional shed that squats like a metal toad at the castle entrance, Charles buys two admission tickets from a vacant-eyed teenager. Sandrine stands behind him with her arms crossed behind her back, wordlessly surveying the moisture-bent collection of pastel-toned, photocopied pamphlets by local amateur historians; the smattering of pictorial regional guides in a few foreign languages; and the sympathy-stirring assemblage of dusty, faux-medieval bric-a-brac. The rain is working a transparent masterpiece of pointillism into the fine layer of dust on the glass of the window. They are the only visitors.

On the modern, aluminum bridge spanning the moat, Sandrine stops abruptly. She looks up, attempting to reconcile the computer-generated image of the castle as it looked centuries ago on a large board adjacent to the mouth of the drawbridge, with what she can see through the fog that hangs like a shawl over the shoulders of the towers and crinoline walls.

Charles walks straight into her.

Sandrine jerks around and when their eyes meet, they are suddenly the strangers the other passengers on the train took them to be. For one split second, neither one of them recognizes the other.

And then the moment falls, shattering at their feet.

Charles apologizes. Sandrine looks away.

They both walk towards the open mouth of the castle and the milky, spectral interior. Charles following Sandrine.

Just inside the walls, the ground widens out into an unevenly cobbled courtyard and Charles stops to read some historic notes printed on a large, transparent tablet bolted into the stonework. When he turns around, his finger pointing towards a fact he hopes will bridge the awkwardness of the moment, Sandrine is nowhere to be seen.

A quick start of fear makes his pulse beat loudly in his ears, drowning out the sound of the single raindrops as they fall on his jacket. And then he laughs at himself, his sense of rationality taking over.

Sandrine hasn't been snatched by ghosts. She's simply crossed the courtyard and been breathed in by the fog laying thick as wattle around the uneven, cracked stones. Still, he shivers involuntarily as he quickly crosses the courtyard after her and allows the fog to breathe him in, too.

A flash of yellow steers him left. But when he arrives where he is sure he'll find his wife standing with her arms folded behind her back, head tilted to the side, she isn't there.

Disoriented, a knot of frustration beginning to form between his shoulder blades, he wanders from room to room, obstinately reading every word on every tablet he can find. He drifts through former sleeping chambers, halls, stables, and kitchens, past the well with its top sealed closed. He refuses to be rushed.

Now and again, a flash of solid yellow flares unexpectedly in the pearl-grey mass and then recedes, beckoning him on, until the wraith of Sandrine's rain slicker appears only as a dull, mis-toned patch of fog in the distance. And then it finally dissolves altogether. The yellow rain slicker that's hung peacefully in the closet of their home, nestled against his own coats, for all the years of their marriage. He follows its receding shadow, and it misleads him into yet more empty remains of rooms where he will find himself completely alone again.

Another rush of anxiety grabs at Charles, making him forget all about the tablets and increase his steps. He suddenly can't remember when he last saw a flash of yellow in the fog. He turns right following paths made of crushed pebbles, darts left, jogs across small courtyards carpeted with damp grass, roofless corridors and blind staircases, rapidly pursuing the lost rain slicker. His heart beats wildly and he can't order his thoughts into more than terse, distressing messages of his own fear.

Suddenly, a solid metal fence that marks the end of the castle grounds rises abruptly in front of him, and he crashes into it, lurching dangerously over the top. He can go no further. This is the end.

And Sandrine isn't there. Charles turns, one hand white-knuckling on the fence, and shouts her name into the stonework that reverberates his voice back to him, even as it echoes in the emptiness of all that lies behind.

He calls her name again. And then again.

His only answer is the hoarse consolation of a distant crow.

From somewhere behind the fog.