David

It had been almost two months since I had returned, and things between Maggie and I had gotten worse as time wore on. Our relationship, such as it was, had slipped away from us.

After I had spoken to Tony that day, the arguments had stopped; Maggie no longer believed I kept something from her, instead she thought me ill, and treated me so, fussing over me constantly, asking how I was and pleading with me to seek help.

For me it was far worse than the constant rows it replaced. I could ignore the rows, but I could not take Maggie’s pity. It ate at my soul to see her look at me, her face filled with such pain and sorrow. I took to avoiding her as much as possible – I went for walks, locked myself in my study, went to the pub, did anything to avoid her company.

After a while, I think she realised why I avoided her, and she strove to make things between us as they had been. She avoided all talk of my disappearance, and hid her concern for my perceived illness behind a mask of forced smiles. We were cool with each other, almost like new acquaintances, dancing around each other trying to please, hoping not to offend. That too lasted a little while.

But now our relationship, if it could be called that, has degraded to polite small talk when in company, but other than that we barely speak. We lived in the same house but were strangers.

Tony came to visit most days but spent nearly all of his time with Maggie. For that I was grateful; she had a friend to confide in, and I did not have to face my son and see in his eyes and hear in his words the pity he too felt for me. It was out in the open now, his belief that my story was a fabrication of my unconscious mind to protect me from some horror that I had lived through during my disappearance. They had sat me down, told me what they believed and begged me to seek help – could they not understand that my story was so horrific, so traumatic, that nothing else could ever be worse.

It all came to a head one day when Maggie asked, politely mind you, if I intended going back to work.

To say I had not thought about leaving Maggie would be untrue. I had on occasions considered it to be the only way forward for both of us, but I had never voiced those thoughts.

Yet I heard myself saying, “I’ll start looking next month. Between then and now I am going to look for somewhere else to live. It’s best for both of us that I do – we are not the same anymore, and I very much doubt that we ever will be. I still love you, Maggie, and always will, and I am truly sorry that it has come to this."

I had not rehearsed any of it, it was all spontaneous and from the heart, and must have come across that way, because Maggie had stepped forward and put her arms around me with her head resting on my shoulder. We stood that way, neither speaking, for what seemed like a lifetime.

Maggie eventually broke the spell, she kissed me on the cheek and said, “I will miss you Dave. But you’re right, it is for the best, best for all of us. I cannot live this way. I cannot pretend any longer." And with that she turned and walked away.

It took a week to find somewhere suitable to live, two days to move all my things, and just like that we were over.

Tony helped me to move in, but conversation between us was really strained, and without discussing it we both seemed to limit talk to the minimum - Tony commented on the house, its size and convenient location next to my favourite walk sites, and I nodded, smiled and replied with equally banal comments.

As he left, Tony promised to visit as often as he could, but we both knew that something would always conveniently get in the way.

Eventually I was alone. Alone with my thoughts and my conscience. Alone to consider my next steps.

###

Maggie

Maggie sat alone in the living room and cried.

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She and Tony had gotten drunk the night before, very drunk – David had finally left, and Tony had insisted on coming back to keep her company.

The evening had started sombre, and given that both their lives were really in tatters, it was quite understandable. But as the night had worn on and the wine bottles had emptied, so things had gotten more light hearted, and they had talked of the good times from their separate lives with David.

It had been a little like a wake, after all she had lost David and Tony had lost a father and friend. She knew that they would see him again from time to time, but she also knew that the David they had known was dead for both of them now.

Tony had gotten so drunk that he had fallen asleep on the sofa. She’d thrown a blanket over him, and staggered up the stair to bed, where she’d promptly passed out within seconds of hitting the pillow.

Maggie cried now because it was finally beginning to sink in – David was gone, gone from her life forever.

She knew that hundreds of couples broke up every single day, and they all got over it given time. But she also knew that this was different. She had betrayed David, had pushed him away after all he had suffered. But there was nothing else she could have done, not after she had found out the truth, the terrifying truth of his story.

Tony was wrong, David was not disturbed or mentally ill, he really had been taken to another place, another world. Maggie knew that now, had known for weeks.

But she could not bring herself to face it, to accept such a frightening and terrible reality – that other worlds and terrifying beings really existed, and that they could come here and take people away at a mere whim. The thought absolutely terrified her, and she had wanted David gone, out of her life, so that she could bury all those terrifying thoughts away and forget what she had seen and all David had said, and just go back to the safe and normal life she had known before she had ever met him. That was what she wanted, what she needed to allow herself to retain her sanity.

So she had driven David away, and with him, she prayed, went the terrors of all she had learned. But his going did not ease the guilt of what she had done to him. And so she cried.

The thought of what she had done, how she found the truth, and how it had brought her almost to the brink of madness, made her skin chill with terror, and yet her eyes still filled with tears of guilt.

“If only I hadn’t been so suspicious, if only I had left well alone after Tony had all but convinced me that David was ill. But no, I couldn’t leave it alone, I just had to be sure, know for certain that there was no-one else,” she whispered to herself.

She had searched his study, and at the back of his bottom drawer, wrapped in an old towel, she had found knives, terrible knives. Just the look of them had made her feel sick.

She had known immediately what they must be, that they were the knives Jane had told them of, the knives the police had taken from David – the knives that had somehow mysteriously disappeared from the police station.

The police had come to see her weeks ago, asked about the knives, asked if David had acted suspiciously or done anything out of the ordinary.

But David hadn’t, he’d never mentioned the knives, let alone talked of getting them back.

She didn’t pick them up, hadn’t even been able to bring herself to touch them. She had been so confused, and could not understand how they could be there, in a drawer in her house.

And as she had tried to rationalise away those so wicked looking knives, David had returned from one of his walks. She had wanted so very much to confront him there and then, to force him to tell her what the hell was going on. But she was also so ashamed of her behaviour, her suspicions – that she had stooped so low as go through his personal things.

She remembered her thoughts of that moment clearly. “I will confront him, but not now, not like this, not after snooping around. I’ll ask him about the knives later. I’ll tell him the police have been round, and see what he says then.”

And so she had shouted down to David that she was cleaning in his study, and would be down in a few moments.

That was when it had happened, when her life had changed forever.

She had reached to replace the towel over the knives, and in front of her eyes they had gone, just vanished as if they had never existed, as if she had imagined seeing them.

She had slumped to the floor, sat hand over her mouth to stifle the scream that she knew would surely come if she took her hand away.

The truth of it had come to her then, as she sat there. The reality of what she had witnessed washed over her, filling her mind with the certainty that David had been telling the truth all along, filling it with the certainty that the horrors he had spoken of were not just fantasies.

So Maggie sat and cried. David was gone, and she would have to live with the guilt of driving him away.

But that, now and for years to come, was a price she would gladly pay to keep her safe and secure, normal life.