The Body in the Count

The opening had narrowed to the width of my shoulders. Beyond it, the villagers stood in a loose ring, each of them facing the white cloth laid inside the Shepherd’s Bed. The sun was low enough to put their shadows across the grass, but none crossed the stones.

Tadhg held his notebook against his coat. He had not asked me to come in. The place had been prepared, he said, and the receiving remained unfinished. His voice carried the same calm he might have used to explain a late delivery.

Rachel stood nearest the gap. Declan kept a pace behind her, watching the stones as if they might move in a way he could report. No one had brought my recorder or the other equipment I’d lost along the route. I had my hands, my ears, and a remaining sense of what my own name meant.

“Once I’m in there, can you bring me out?” I asked Tadhg.

He looked at the white cloth. “The count has to finish.”

That answer left every part of the question open. I looked at Rachel. She had dirt on one knee from the road and a fresh scrape across her palm. She’d kept moving when the route found another way to carry us. Now she was watching me with both hands closed at her sides.

“Stay outside,” I said.

“I know where I’m standing.”

There was no promise in it. She didn’t offer one. The gap narrowed another inch, though I couldn’t tell whether the stones had shifted or my eyes had finally measured them properly. I stepped through before there was less room to choose.

The circle changed the sound around me. Wind fell away first. Then the soft movement of clothes and feet outside the stones. I could still see the others, but their voices came to me as if from the far end of a long hall. The white cloth covered a flat patch of earth. It had been folded at the corners, carefully, like a bed made for someone expected to return.

I stood on it. The ground gave slightly under my weight, enough to register through my soles. I tested it with one heel, then the other. Packed soil. A hollow space below, or a patch of deeper, looser earth. My mind kept offering measurements, simple checks to perform. The body stayed useful even when the explanations stopped.

Four low pulses moved through the ground. Three followed after a pause. The pattern reached my ankles as pressure and climbed through bone. I counted it again, then again. It was regular, but the pause shifted by a fraction each time. I had no microphone to separate the frequencies. My jaw felt the lowest part of it.

Rachel called my name. I heard the shape of it, though the sound arrived without its ordinary edges.

I turned toward her. The stones between us seemed closer than they had been. She was still outside. Her mouth moved once before I caught the words.