Listing to Port

1. There were two detectives who went to a small village on the edge of a marsh. The earth was black in that place and the cold waters black too. There were no paths through the marsh, which was a maze of blasted thickets and dry, crackling reed-beds where strange birds lived. No water could be said to flow into or out of it. There were rumours that time went in different directions in different parts of the marsh and that its waters flowed from now to then rather than from here to there. Nevertheless, a reed-cutter had ventured into its nearer parts to gather eggs, and she had found a body on a mudbank, so the police were called.

2. They had a bit of a thing for each other, these detectives, but nothing would ever come of it because one was married and the other had too much of his identity tied up in being straight. Neither of them was particularly near retirement, but one was older than the other. Their companionship was based around their taciturn refusal to talk about their pasts, which one must assume were both murky and mysterious. In the village they found no-one missing and no-one suspicious. Though there were those who said that human finger-bones and the like had a habit of washing up in the marsh and it would be well to look out for a serial killer. There was a fortune-teller who gathered up the bones, because she was on the look out for her long-lost son who had slipped off playing into the marsh some years ago. But they were not the bones of a child, and she had taken to casting futures with them instead. This near the marsh, the bones would only fall in spirals, revealing nothing of themselves to anyone.

3. The detectives placed the remains, which were mainly skeletal, in a body bag in a refrigerated trailer. The next day most of the locals gathered in the village hall. There was an old man who said he was sure the murderer would be there but everyone, it seemed, had stayed out of the marsh for months. Someone said to see the fortune teller in her mouldy house by the willows, and since there was no other option, they went.

4. The fortune-teller was pleased to see them, for she was often lonely. She did not think she knew the body, she said, but she did know the marsh. She showed them a great black crystal with a spiderweb of incarnadine flaws at its heart, opaline and shimmering. It is a paradox, she said. Paradoxes grow around here like mushrooms. What with time in the marsh the way it is. I can show you the trunk of a hollow tree that is entirely crusted with them, down by the pool where I found the finger bones. Growing off all those petty little frog intrigues dragged back and forth through the years. But I have never found one so large and so strange. I truly think it could be worth something. I was hoping to pass it on to my son. The younger detective looked into the crystal and thought he saw his future written there, and he needed to know more like he had never needed anything. But the fortune teller shut the box. It is for my son, she said. I can show you the pool where the finger bones wash up, and maybe you can find the key to both losses for me, and I will bury it with him. I have never dared to dig there.

5. She gave them a map and a spade and sundry documents of her son’s that could be used to identify him. The detectives thanked her and, having little else to go on, packed sandwiches for a trip into the marsh. As they walked the sun ticked back and forwards across the noonday mark in the sky like the second-hand of an ailing watch. When they reached the pool, the younger detective started digging. The older leaned on the willow tree (they had not thus far checked its bleak crack for more glittering paradoxes). He opened the packet of documents and began to read. The first one was facts and strands of hair and identifying marks. The missing boy, it seemed, had had a wine-stain mark on his left shoulder.

6. The older detective had just such a mark on his shoulder, and he knew that as a child he had been found wandering (though he did not like to discuss it). He realised that he could be the fortune-teller’s long-lost son. He told the younger detective of his suspicions. But the younger detective, in sudden fright of losing the crystal’s speaking flaws to him (or of losing him to the crystal’s speaking flaws) jerked back the spade and swung at him with it. It hit the older detective in the neck and he bled out on the wet mud.

7. The younger detective threw the older detective’s body into the crack of the rotted-out willow tree by the black pool, where it hung for several days before slipping down into the water. It drifted into the currents of the marsh and washed back and forth through time, shedding small bones and shreds of skin along the way.  Eventually the body fetched up on the reedcutter’s mudbank, three weeks before it had been laid to unquiet rest. The reedcutter found it, and called the police.

8. Some two days into the future, the sun ticked back and forth across the noonday mark like the second-hand of an ailing watch. The younger detective walked out of the marsh and into another story, which we are not concerned with here. He no longer needed the crystal. Before he left, fearful of evidence, he tipped the bag containing the skeletal body into a cracking reed bed. The body slipped into a deeper current where time turned itself inside out. It took the bones and reclothed them in their raiments of past years.  

9. Twelve years before, a thrashing bag bobbed up from the current onto a sandy bank, and tore itself open under the moon. The older detective crawled out, young and gasping, with his memories scrambled. He stumbled South, out of the marsh, back to the city. It seemed he had been somewhat changed. He no longer bore the fortune-teller’s mark, he could not remember who he was, he bore no documents. In time he married a nurse, and the itch of the memory of the younger detective faded from his brain. But he knew that he himself had had a flair for detective work. So, after some years of rehabilitation and retraining, that is the field he went back to. Eventually, he was paired up with an older partner who was as taciturn as he about his past.

10. Some time later, they got a call about a body in a marsh…