“The Ones Who Came Before” by Alice Gwynn

 

Mira and Sam had the playground at Waverley Castle all to themselves. Unleashed, Sam bucketed towards the towering structure, built like a castle itself out of wood with four levels of ladders, wobble-bridges and soaring turrets. 

“Watch out!” Mira called after him as he launched at the climbing wall, clawing his way up to the first level and wiggling through an open hatch. “It might be slippery!” She swiped rainwater from a nearby bench with her sleeve and sat down, turning to her phone. No messages.

Two months earlier, Josh had finally left, after years of head-spinning aggression and coldness. They’d had a good relationship before getting married, but once Sam was born and the problems began – the drudgery of childcare compounded by diagnoses of ADHD and epilepsy – Josh had grown distant, then critical, then downright hateful. “Where’s the woman I married?” he’d sneered. Here, Mira had thought afterwards, too frozen in the moment to speak. Right here, buried under all the stress and grind and sleep deprivation. 

“No-one stays the same throughout life,” her friend Audrey had coached her, indignant, “but that doesn’t mean you’re a different person. You’re still you. You’ve just got a lot on your plate. He should be able to recognise that.” But he didn’t. And now the only way they were communicating was through their solicitors.

People were layered; your experiences grafted to you like a plaster cast, one sticky coating upon another, reshaping you. Mira supposed the layers hardened and sculpted a new self, but she’d hoped, once the most challenging years with Sam were past, she could crack herself open and excavate something of who she used to be: her fun self, the self who painted and had the energy to host dinner parties. Who had things to talk about, who laughed with her friends. “Challenging” – that was the term Sam’s primary-school teachers used for him. She loved him – he was her child, of course she did – but she also felt exhausted by him and, often, at a loss for how to deal with him. She felt a tremor of guilt, as usual, for having such thoughts.

Mira glanced up at the playground, where autumn leaves were blowing around the base of the castle. She dropped her phone back into her pocket and got up, walking over to check on Sam. She ducked into the centre of the structure, which opened up in the middle and offered a clear view to the top.

“Sam,” she called. “Where are you? Are you alright?”

She caught no glimpse of his red coat. The wooden walls glimmered, still slick from the rain. Distantly, she heard footfall – the sound of a child running, perhaps around the top level.

“Sam,” she called again. “Is that you up there? Come down the slide, now.”

The footsteps ceased. Distantly, Mira thought she heard the thin trail of a child’s voice, followed by whispers, reverberating somewhere along the upper level. She felt a cold prickle of fear patter along her skin. Trying to keep the anger out of her voice, she said, “I’m going to the bottom of the slide. Come down now, please.”

She edged past the climbing wall to the bottom of the giant silver slide, partially enclosed to make a tunnel of the top half. Bending down at the bottom, she peered up it, but couldn’t see the top. Again, she called her son’s name. The castle stood quiet. The last remnants of rain dripped slowly from the edge of the slide.

Perhaps Sam had fallen and hit his head. Perhaps he had passed out. Mira hurried to the nearest ladder and began climbing, squeezing herself through the small opening to the next level. 

“Sam, if you’re ignoring me, I’m going to be really cross when I get up there,” she shouted, adrenaline coursing now. “If you can’t do as I ask then I’ll have to take you home.” The top level was too high; she should never have let him go racing up there. She felt claustrophobic, squeezing through each tiny hatch and barely managing to heft her body onto the next floor up. At the top, she hunched beneath the low roof and hurried around the walkways, expecting at any moment to jump out of her skin at the sight of Sam crouched and grinning at her. But when she had walked along each side and reached the top of the slide, there was still no sign of him. She peered down the dark funnel to the distant patch of mud at the bottom, then out through the open window, a square hole cut out of the timber, scanning the grassy expanse with its oak trees, swings and obstacle course.

“Sam!” she screamed, tears rising in a boil of fear and panic. “Where are you?”

*

Sam loved this playground. It was his favourite. He liked to pretend the castle was his real home, with different nooks for his bedroom and kitchen, bathroom and living room. He left his mother behind and clambered the slippery walls, checking his little tokens from last time were still there in the right places before climbing to the highest level. 

At the top, he ran along the wobble bridges and pretended he was shooting dragons from between the turrets. The netting of the open sides cast dark dapples inside the castle; he passed from the dim light into the enclosed darkness and back again as he ran around the walkways from corner to corner, grey shadows melding with black. The shifting light began to make him dizzy – that feeling that sometimes came on and made him lose time for a while. He often woke up in bed or on the sofa with his mother beside him when it happened at home.

Panting, he sat down in the alcove by the top of the slide, hearing his own footsteps echoing in his ears. When he shut his eyes, the footsteps rang louder – not his own, it seemed then, but those of another child. Sam felt the blackness flood him, but a moment later a hand on his shoulder caused him to open his eyes. A boy was leaning over him – brown hair like his own, and the same height and age, but wearing an odd costume, like the ones they gave to the three kings in the school nativity play.

“Come with me,” said the boy. “I know where to go. Hurry, though – there isn’t much time.”

Sam rubbed his head and got up, starting to follow, then jolted with fright at the teeming concourse of the castle ramparts, suddenly vast and choked with people. The boy pulled him along by his sleeve; they wove in and out of women carrying laden baskets and men in heavy boots, some wearing clanking metal. The boy glanced back at him before surging on, and Sam was startled by their similarity. It was as if he was looking into his own hazel eyes, himself yet not himself. 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the boy said, eyes gleaming. “We’re fortunate to be given this chance.”

“What’s happened?” Sam said, struggling to keep up and getting swatted by flapping skirts. He dodged a heavy sword that swung from a towering knight’s hip, and gaped at the armoured figure striding past. “Where are we? Where are we going?”

“This way,” hissed the boy, who tugged him into a dark opening that lead to a stone staircase spiralling down. “I must take you to the hollow, to the place of exchange.”

Despite the occasional flickering candle, it was difficult to see. Sam had to concentrate so hard on keeping up and not slipping that he barely had time to think; it was as if he were descending from reality directly into the heart of a dream. 

At the bottom, they emerged into grey twilight. The boy hurried him away from the castle, across muddy ground and into the woods. Sam shivered as they moved farther away from the noise and bustle into the quiet stillness of the trees. Eventually, the woods gave way to open fields, where the boy stopped at the edge of a dip in the ground.

“This is the place,” the boy said.

“What? Where are we? Who are you?” asked Sam, still disconcerted by the familiarity of the boy’s face. “I need to go back to my mum – she’s waiting for me.”

“She will find you soon enough,” said the boy. “You may rest here for now. This is where you must be.”

“What for? Let’s go back. It’s cold.” Sam still felt dizzy, and the air had grown freezing, gnawing through his clothes like a starving wolf. Perhaps he was still in his faint, dreaming, though it felt real enough.

“We have managed to align. I had only a short time to do so,” the boy said. “My body is yet to be discovered.”

Sam looked around at the rutted, misty field, with its torn-up ground and hoof-prints sunk deep into the mud, but saw no-one else. 

“Selves must cross the same place at the same time,” the boy continued. “And there you were, in the right place, at the right moment. Now that you are here I may have my life back, such as yours is. I have delivered you to the place of my last breath, so we may both begin anew.”

“But I don’t understand,” Sam said, jiggling and rubbing his arms. “I don’t want to stay here.”

“It won’t be for long,” the boy said. “They will find you here. You will awake into your new life, and mine will be restored to me. We will remain ourselves – one and the same, yet at different times. And all this will become yours,” he added, gesturing back towards the castle. “For we are a prince, you know.”

“A prince?” asked Sam. It sounded better than his current life, with the visits to the doctor and his parents yelling, his mother crying and his father gone. He felt overwhelmed by the need to lie down, yet something in him fought the urge. “Would I have a horse?”

“Indeed, you may have your pick,” the boy said. “What are you, in your life?”

“I’m Sam,” he said. “I live on Appleton Road, with my mum. Dad left.”

The boy nodded. “Did he go off to fight?”

“No,” Sam said. “He just fought at home.” He felt heavy, as if the ground were falling away beneath him; he sank to go with it, lying down on the grass beneath the lip of the hollow.

“Never fear,” said the boy, kneeling over him. “I will be a good son. Your mother need suffer no more.”

“But she’ll miss me,” Sam mumbled. He closed his eyes, yearning for the tight wrap of his mother’s  arms. “I want to go back.”

“It won’t matter,” the boy said. “She’ll have her son either way, so far as she can tell. And we will forget.”

*

Several parents had arrived at the playground while Mira ran shrieking throughout the castle. They clustered near the base, hanging on to their children and staring up at the structure, unsure what to do. One woman in a camel coat stepped forward as Mira stumbled out, hair dishevelled and face streaked.

“Has something happened?” she asked. Mira staggered towards the group.

“My son,” she said, catching her breath. “I can’t find him.”

“Shall we call the police?” another woman asked. The group held onto their children tighter, glancing around the empty grounds. 

“He was in the castle,” Mira wailed. “I don’t know where he could have gone.”

“He might just be hiding,” the camel-coated woman said. “Children can be such monkeys.”

“It’s fully enclosed,” said a man, scanning the perimeter fencing. “He can’t have got far. You didn’t see anyone? In the playground?” 

“No-one,” Mira gasped. “We were alone.”

The group murmured, paralysed between wanting to help and wanting to steer clear, as if their children might be next to vanish if they got too involved.

“There!” piped up one of the women. “There! What’s that? At the bottom of the slide?”

Mira turned and rushed aside to look where the woman pointed. On the ground, on the opposite side of the long silver slide, she could see the crumpled edge of a muddy red coat. She cried out and ran towards the small body, curled upon the grass like a fallen leaf.

She gathered up the boy in her arms and rocked him, calling his name. The group followed and hovered nearby. 

“Bloody dangerous slide,” said the man, shaking his head. “Is he all right? Should we call an ambulance?”

“It’s too high, isn’t it,” said the woman who’d spotted the child. “You’ve got to have eyes on at all times.”

“Sam,” whispered Mira, smoothing his hair back from his flushed face. “Sam, wake up.”

The boy opened his eyes and looked at her. Mira felt a jab of uncertainty in her gut, but the relief of finding him subsumed it and washed the feeling away.

“What happened?” she asked, insistently, flooded at once with the urge both to shake and embrace him. “Are you alright? Where were you?”

“I was here. I was right here,” said the boy. “I’m sorry for scaring you.”

“It’s alright,” said Mira, cradling him to her chest. “You gave me a fright. I was terrified I’d lost you.”

“You just didn’t see me,” he said, with a smile she hadn’t seen before, “but I’ve been here the whole time, waiting for you to find me.”

*

Alice Gwynn writes short stories, poetry, and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in Prachya Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Consequence Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, and elsewhere.