Bring Them All Into the Light
HEATHEN
They’re on holiday when he sees the cottage. Julie and Nico are bickering in the back seat, Maggie searching through the glovebox for something—anything—that might shut them up for five minutes. He rubbernecks as they pass it at speed, pulls into a lane half a mile up the road.
“What are you stopping for?” Maggie asks, feeding an audiobook into the stereo.
“Nothing. Just want to check something out,” Rob replies.
He almost misses the cottage again, but the For Sale sign peeks above the dry-stone wall just in time, alerting him to hit the brakes.
There’s a gravel layby for parking, so he pulls into it and kills the engine.
The building is small; walls of piled stone, a roof of mold-spotted thatch sticking up in tufts like a hairstyle gone wrong.
The front door is painted white, worn away to bare wood in patches.
There’s a large garden at the rear, sweeping away from the road and partway up the hill behind it.
He thinks he sees a path and a gate. A trail leads up the slope.
“Won’t be a moment,” he says, stepping out of the car. Maggie shouts something, but he can’t tell if it’s aimed at him or the children.
Peering through the window, Rob can see the cottage is deserted.
He has to bend to press his nose to the glass, his eyes adjusting to reveal an empty room.
Cracked tiles on the floor, a thick layer of dust forming a minimalist carpet.
It gives him permission to climb over the waist-high gate to one side, into the rear garden.
The grass is patchy and weeds have pushed through the lawn, but the path is still there, leading to another gate at the far end, becoming a dirt track that ascends the hill.
He can’t see the top, but he assumes it stretches all the way to the crest. There’s something fascinating about that hill.
The way it swells from the flat land around it, the pleasing curve of its rise and fall.
He stands and stares at it for a minute, thinking.
When he returns to the car, Nico has fallen asleep in his seat while Julie is munching her way through a giant packet of Cheetos, the orange dust smeared across her face like pollen. Maggie’s look dares him to comment on her parenting choices.
As he clicks his seat belt into place and restarts the engine, he says, “I like this place. Mind if we swing by the real estate agents in town? Just to see how much it’s going for.”
The asking price is a fraction of their home’s value.
Once the vacation has passed they spend several evenings arguing over it, but he gets his way in the end.
They can buy it with the equity, live there mortgage-free.
He can work remotely, while Maggie’s online business can be managed from anywhere with a Wi-Fi signal.
The children will have to change schools, but that might be for the better; the countryside is a healthier place to grow up than the bustle and fumes of the city.
It’s a pleasant surprise to discover that the deeds include the hill too, a plot of land that stretches to the brook running behind it.
The kids can play there, build a fort in the apple tree.
Most importantly, they can all breathe again.
In the countryside they will meet their true selves.
They move into the cottage two months later.
The children complain that it smells weird, and Maggie finds fault on a daily basis, from the rusted plumbing to the inch-high gap at the bottom of the door that lets in an occasional mouse, but Rob is happy.
While they bicker and unpack boxes, lining the new nest, he stands in the garden and stares up at the hill.
Maggie finds a handyman in the village. It’s what she does, managing the cottage as she would her business.
A young man with a wild thicket of brown hair and a warm smile—Derek—who fits a new door and tidies up the thatch.
She spends hours making him cups of tea and guiding him from job to job, fixing and replacing, turning this pile of stones into a home.
She doesn’t mind too much when he walks mud across the living room floor, or when he knocks his tea over, staining the stairs brown.
“You can’t make an omelet,” she says. “And so on.”
While Derek’s fixing up their home, Rob spends most of his time in the garden.
It’s quiet, away from the banging hammers and the boiling kettle.
The Wi-Fi coverage is patchy, and his laptop won’t connect when he sits on the bench by the apple tree.
Instead, he rests it on his lap and pretends to work.
His eyes follow the line of the path, straight as an arrow, up the hillside to the sky.
One day he leaves his laptop on the bench and walks to the gate at the back of the lawn.
The path up the hill is steep and the stones are loose, forcing him to scrabble on hands and knees.
He wipes the mud on his V-neck sweater. The trail fades in and out of existence as he nears the top, like someone’s dream of a path that used to be there, or a premonition of what is to come, but he does not slow down and he always finds his way again.
When he reaches the top—finally, his thighs burning, his pants dirty and torn—he discovers it is flat, a level platform of scrubby grass and stones. Turning, he can see for miles in every direction. He sits and hums to himself, waiting for whatever comes next.
THE AWAKENING
It’s hard to say whether he dreams the stairs, or if they simply come to him one afternoon as his fingers claw at the tufts of grass.
He has taken to climbing the hill several times a day, sitting at the top for an hour or more.
It clears his mind. The experience is the closest he has come to something spiritual.
He does not say the word “God,” not even to himself, but the concept nestles in his thoughts.
The sketch he draws for Derek is simplistic and out of scale, like something his children might draw. It does not reflect the impressive structure he envisions but it is the best he can manage.
“So it’s a stair?” Derek says, having turned it this way and that, holding it up against the sunlight pouring through the window.
“Yes,” Rob replies, his finger pointing to the pencil lines. “A staircase. All the way up the hill, from our gate to the top. Straight, like the path.”
Derek looks at him, then back to the drawing.
“I could do it, I guess. That’s a lot of wood, though. And a lot of work. I might need to hire another couple of pairs of hands, plus a bigger truck… Are you sure? It won’t be cheap.”
Rob is sure. He’s never been more certain of anything in his life.
Maggie takes some convincing. The work won’t even make a dent in their savings—Rob was a hotshot trader, back when he wanted to be—but it’s the principle of the thing that matters.
They shouldn’t be throwing away money on a vanity project, a frivolous set of steps that lead nowhere in particular. Can’t he just buy some better boots?
It’s not about the climb, though, or the view from the crest of the hill. Rob can’t quite explain it, not even to himself, but there’s a greater plan at work here. He has faith that someday it will all make sense.
Once they’ve approved the job, Derek sets to work.
He thinks it’s an enormous waste of his time.
He tries to find the most durable materials, but even using those he doubts the staircase will last more than ten years, maybe fifteen.
The posts will rot in the ground, the winter winds will tear it away in strips.
But he’s learned over the years that it isn’t his role to offer advice, or marriage counseling.
His place is to work the wood and make something new, so that is what he does.
That he does it rather well does not go unnoticed by Rob, or by Maggie.
It takes Derek and his team—a boy in his teens called Nigel, and an overweight older man who goes by the name ‘Hutch’—almost two months to complete the stairs.
There’s some debate over whether planning permission is required, but since the structure is on private land nothing is ever done about it.
Rob knows his money will smooth things over if it has to.
The important thing is that the stairs are built, and as close to his sketch as possible.
It’s like magic, watching that childish drawing manifest on the hillside in actual wood and nails.
Despite the cheap oak finish and a few steps that don’t quite sit straight, it’s a sight to behold, that stairway ascending the side of the hill. Like a pathway to something better.
They walk up it that evening. All four of them, as a family. Julie and Nico call a ceasefire for a few minutes, and they stand atop the hill, holding hands, staring out at the view. Rob feels closer to them than he has since Nico was born.
“I guess that doesn’t suck,” Julie says. It’s possibly the most enthusiasm she’s ever shown for anything.
After a couple of minutes the kids get bored, and Maggie uses them as an excuse to walk back down to the house and make herself a pot of tea. Rob stays behind. Looking around him, he feels something swell in his chest, like a balloon expanding inside his ribcage.
It’s at this moment that he hears the voice.
He isn’t sure that it’s a voice at all, not at first. There’s a rustle of leaves that lasts a little too long, a babble from the brook that almost suggests something more. The wind blows harder than before, hush ing past his ear.
Then a word, as clear as if someone were standing behind him.
Build.
Rob turns to see who’s there, and when there’s nobody within sight, he assumes he was simply mistaken. Sound can play funny tricks if you’re not careful. But there it is again, coming from in front of him this time, where there’s definitely nobody to be seen.
Build.