Family Artifact

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This thing around my neck has haunted me for three nights now. I haven't slept more than a few hours in that time, and after the last night, I decided I need to get rid of it.

I'm walking now, with the locket around my neck in the direction of the most deserted place I know - the old mill on the edge of the village. It's cold and clear this morning, the sky a strange blue-grey, the trees black gouges against it.

I'm hoping I won't meet anyone on my walk. The house is just too well known, and I'm careful around the rim of the village.

But it's the mill that the locket leads me to, the house of old Wes, the man who found that locket. I've never been inside before, but I know if I go up the path that leads to it, I'll find that door. I know it.

I stand at the edge of the mill, staring at it, at the door. Like a thousand times before, I wonder if this is nothing but a bad dream, if I'll walk down the path and get home safely. I'm a city kid by blood, and this whole thing is beyond my comprehension.

But I take one step, then another, and it seems the third makes no difference. I'm walking up the path to the door. There's no turning back now.

The door is in place, of course, and normally it would have taken me a couple of minutes to undo the latch and pull it open. But I don't have minutes, because I'm still wearing the locket around my neck and this is the last place I'm ever going to wear it.

The locket. Even still, I reach up and touch it. I unclasp the chain and lift it from around my neck. It is heavy, though not weighty, like the weight of a promise. A long, slow purpose.

I can't see the face of the man in the locket. My fiancé, perhaps? It's been so long now, and I've forgotten. Or maybe it's my father, his distant face too far back in my memory. But maybe he died in the war, or the locket wasn't actually at all to do with the war.

I haven't read the inscription on the other side of the locket. I'm not interested. But there are words, though. There are little symbols, symbols for numbers, and there are words to describe it. Latin, I think, but I'm not sure. I just registered this as a language, not a language: [language=Latin is applied] I don't know. I'm not sure how it works.

The door clicks and swings open, and I'm inside, walking in through the dust. A little dust swirls around me and makes shapes, it's so still.

I've been in Wes's house before. You wouldn't know it from the outside, a little place, all the better for being so. The door is so clean and solid, made of oak. Supposedly he passed the mill on long leases back and forth for most of his life for it. But everyone knows it's just a front, and that he stays in his house now, talking to himself and the dusty little furniture, riding his rocking chair and selling nothing.

That's the Wes I know. And I don't like him much. He's never been anything but gruff with me, or anyone else.

But I've wondered, you know. I've wondered about all of this. How he got the locket . . ..

I'm inside now, in the house. I don't think I've ever been this far inside the place. It's darker and emptier than I'd imagined. Just a couple of cupboards and a kitchen, near as I can tell.

I'm looking around. I know where I'm going. The dusty little room up at the back, that's where I need to go.

Wes's little room. 'They' say he talks to himself, but he doesn't. He just thinks he does. Or maybe he doesn't talk, but he makes whispers, whispers that sound like words. Some people don't hear them but I hear them. And I heard a couple this morning, when I was wandering in the woods.

I just want the locket now. It's the only thing I care about, and I want it in that room. So I look around.

There's just the dusty little bedroom. Fine. This looks like a job for a real cleaner, but I haven't got time for that.

I look through the window at the back of the house. It's a long way down, but the locket here is heavy, so I drag the chain over my neck and hold it. I can get the window open.

It's old and crunched and in need of replacement, but I manage to pry away some of the dust with my fingers and the locket spins in my hand and I hold it tight and think that soon, I will have it.

The locket always looks sad to me. Dark. Cold. Stiff from all the years of being wrapped around Wes's neck. But I hold it tight, and I look at the window, and I wait for it to open.

The window creaks and opens up, way I managed it with the locket in hand. I look down, and then I think, 'No.'

There are no trees for me to jump from, no river to fall in and drown in. Just a drop of five feet maybe, and that is nowhere on this earth I could be comfortable in, anywhere.

I stare, and I wonder if this really is time travel, if all the time I've been walking here, I've been traveling in time all the while. A little bit of me wishes that was true, but it's probably not. I'm still here, still walking into the room with the locket in my hand. And I'm definitely walking back out again.

There are no tables either. No furniture. The stuff in here is piled in the corner, shoved into place by the fire place, and it's all broken bits, paper and light things, but it's all that's here.

No table for me to rest this locket on. I can do nothing with it. I have to throw it away.

I look at the locket in my hand and I wonder where it will go. I hope that it's dark and cold now, like this locket, because it deserves to be nothing else.

I open my hand and throw it out the window, and I watch it fly in the air, turning and turning, towards the ground. It's the only thing in my collection I think, the only thing in my life, that I would throw away.