fiction • #12
The Soul Cages
Inspired by a 19th-century Irish story in which an isolated farmer in the middle of nowhere discovers that the land has a very long memory.
By Arden Boshier
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Jacob lived about as far from the ocean as anyone could get. He didn’t like the sea, he didn’t like deep and mysterious things, he liked things he could touch and hold and see clearly as through a pane of glass. But the waters of the valleys where he lived had something marine about them, which he didn’t like, something rebellious and consuming. The low stony bridges which crossed it often flooded. Buy a house too near the water and you could spend months bailing water out of your cellar—or your living room, if you were particularly unlucky. So most people sought higher ground, houses up in the woods or by the moors which could look down on the river and the fields knitted beside it.
Jacob was a farmer working such fields, and the river ran through one of them. He watched, from down below, the old women on buses clutching their hats. He watched the young people kicking pebbles into the water before they caught the train south, where there might be a university place or a job for them. He felt that he was the only real person left—the only person still working, still living on the land. And, one June afternoon, he watched the gauzy clouds knit themselves into a bandage so thick that he knew rain was coming soon, and coming hard.
He did his trade in cattle, Jacob. He was tall and tough enough to stand before a bull and lower his eyes without fear. He had only two such bulls, but a fine herd of heifers, sweet-tempered if rather stupid. Jacob did most of the work with his own two hands, the rearing, the butchering. It was a small herd. He employed some farmhands seasonally, anonymously, grey-faced and grey-haired men and women, although usually younger than him. But they had families to feed. He didn’t. Whatever it was that made some people suitable for falling in love with, God had not bestowed it upon him.
Fine. He did his work. He could get the cattle in before the rain. They were small, tender and lean. They had long black-and-white coats; sometimes Jacob would tug his hand through the fur and feel the warmth hidden there like a secret. On a sunlit morning, they gleamed.
He’d kept them on the field with the river for a few weeks. It was cheap land because of the inconvenience. Jacob used the water sometimes to rinse his hands and welly boots because it was usually so slow there. He looked back towards the stream as he guided the herd into the barn with its corrugated metal roof. The clouds were surely an omen now, dark grey as a pigeon’s wings. He thought of the time as a child that he’d found a broken nest in the woods, fallen from a pine tree in a storm, a mass of white feathers and cracked eggs. He hadn’t dared to look closer at the bodies. He’d been so sensitive as a child.
It must have been as he’d turned to look at the water that the calf had slipped from the herd and gone running. Jacob saw that flash of black-and-white and felt the first spots of rain reach his forehead at the same time. He shut the gate behind the herd, hearing them groan with dissatisfaction. He wasn’t sure if the mother had noticed or cared that her calf was missing. He went as quickly as he could while keeping steady. He couldn’t afford to frighten it more.
It was usually so easy to drive the cattle. Jacob envied the animals sometimes, the way they could lounge all day in the sun, bending their big dopey heads towards the grass in the hazy golden light. The mud and the insects hardly bothered them.
By the time he reached the calf, it had almost reached the water and the rain was vicious. Jacob reached a hand to its neck to still the creature, to calm it, but it turned its head suddenly and looked at him. Its black pearly eyes wavered. That intelligent look, that hostility, Jacob had never liked. He preferred them sweet.
Jacob was proud to know each member of the herd. He took it all seriously. This was his life, his vocation. This one had taken the longest to wean, had kept beneath its mother’s cavernous belly until it grew too big to fit. He wondered what had made it flee so suddenly.
And then the eyes shivered, the pupils wavering up and down, and it slammed its head into Jacob’s chest with unmatched fierceness. Tall, strong Jacob did not fall but took its head in his arms and wrestled it back. It kicked. He tried to turn it, to redirect its frantic energy elsewhere. Cattle were naturally submissive; he’d never had trouble mastering them. But something had sent it mad.
It kicked at his leg and he bowed in pain, losing his grip on its fur in the rain. What a sad old world this was; he, a grown man, struggling with a calf only months old. It nipped towards his arms; he pushed its jaw away.
And was that something at his ankle or was it just the pressure of the rain? Jacob looked down. In the torrent, he could barely see. He couldn’t spare a hand to wipe his eyes. Mere shadows moved below him. The cow shoved again and he felt his boots slipping on the crag, and he saw a flash of the beast’s eyes before they both dropped like stones into the river.
Gone, he was gone. Jacob, the cattle-man, the lonely farmer, was swallowed up by the river. Water in his boots, in his clothes, in his nose, foul-smelling and foul-tasting for all it looked sweet and sedate from above. And below the surface it was rapid, swilling him around, separating him from the bloody animal, and so dark, so dark. He felt stones against his body but couldn’t tell where. In the confusion of the water, he didn’t know which way was up, didn’t know which part of his body was which.
His mother had taught him to swim, he remembered, dazedly. He didn’t see her enough these days. He tried to recall how it was done, tried to jolt his limbs back into life, putting his arms out, pushing his legs.
But there—right there—there was a light. Jacob reached towards it and felt something come towards him, saw a pair of green eyes like baubles, fragile and of an ecstatic colour.
A hand almost perfectly like a human hand took his, placed a ring around his finger, and Jacob tumbled down the river for a timeless span, deeper and deeper, until they came to a sort of cove and he found air once more. His skin itched from terror and from the dirty water. His heart struggled inside him.
A shape came over Jacob. His eyes stung from the water and he could see little. He felt skin against his shoulder—a hand, yes, a hand, but such a cold one, so wet, so rough, almost scaly. Jacob shivered but was too exhausted to move.
The hand passed over his chest and he thought that he might have met death in an unusual guise. But then it passed and the shape retreated. Still coughing, Jacob struggled to open his eyes, but did so after a few moments, and what he saw was vast and terrible: a cavern full of shells upon shells, conches and oyster and clams, open like mouths begging for food, and barnacles, and coral in every colour, and in the rock-pool by which they must have entered, brightly coloured fish, garishly phosphorescent. Row upon row of living thing, all serried together, so much that it became unbearable to see it all and Jacob had to close his eyes before he took in the creature which had taken him.
Jacob missed the land, its stability, its rootedness. He felt as if he were swaying, as if he were still captured in the tumult of water. He turned to the side and vomited, pushing himself away from the mess and wiping his mouth exhaustedly.
Back into the past he let his mind drift: his father, his mother, his elder sister, back into his youth, into his school-days, into the earliest childhood, until he had conjured a feeling of complete peace and distance. He almost slipped away.
But the creature came towards him, and a light shone through his eyelids so that Jacob was forced once more to open his eyes and to almost see it, at least the hands which came close to his head. They were a mottled, oily green, and carried a large wicker cage like an animal trap. Like the lobster pots he’d seen, when he used to visit Blackpool with his parents. As it came nearer, Jacob felt in his chest a kind of tug, and he heard a cool, gentle laugh.
“That’s it,” said the creature, in a croaking kind of voice. “There you go. I’ll keep you warm. It’s been so long since I’ve had a soul of my own.”
Jacob felt his body revolt against the pull of the creature’s cage. He raised his head suddenly and pushed himself up to his knees. The creature sighed. It was so bright that he could not focus on it, could not tell what it looked like. Each time he saw a glimpse of its skin he found himself shivering and turning away.
“I’m going,” Jacob said.
“You’re half dead,” said the creature, not unkindly. There was a sound of scraping teeth. “I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”
And it pushed the cage towards him again, with its terribly scaly hand, covered in cockle shells and barnacles and rows of fluttering gills.
Jacob whimpered, feeling his soul head towards the cage as his body rebelled, and seized it in his hands. He tore at the cage, snapping one of the beams, which released a bright light and then fell into shadow.
The creature sighed and leaned over to touch him, but Jacob was standing before he knew he had done it, unsure how he had the strength to do so, and running to the rock-pool.
“You won’t make it,” said the creature. “And I won’t fetch your soul back this time.”
But Jacob gave himself up once more to the water and swam for as long as he was able, dreaming of his mother, his father, up out of the underground caverns, up through the deep, dark sea, back into the familiar river, back to the living world.
He could see daylight by the time he lost consciousness. When he awoke in hospital, Jacob was told that he’d been speaking of mermen and cages and an ocean under the land. He shivered at first, and then he laughed, saying that he must have been dreaming. But he sold the farm and one of the bulls and took out a loan for higher land. The calf had been found drowned. He was very lucky it hadn’t taken him with it. So the women at the bus stop and the young people at the station would see him looking down at the river and put it down to the trauma.
Jacob would never confess what he’d seen. But he would say, sometimes, that the world remembered better than people, and perhaps the world remembered that this valley had once been an ocean, and perhaps the ocean remembered a stranger time, a time before people were people.
And only when he reached the very end of his great, long life did Jacob return to the river. He was seen one night watching the light on the water. And when they found him in the morning there was a smile upon his face like he was peaceful, and a noise like strange, old laughter coming from down in the deep, dark river.
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"Safety's Maw" originally appeared in The Derwent Press #1.
Arden Boshier is a writer from the Midlands who also edits the Derwent Press magazine. She runs a literary criticism blog called Moments of Being on Substack, and her poetry has been published in Pekes and Polliclesand Perfumed Pages. She has a BA in English Language and Literature and an MSc in Gender Studies and is working on her first novel. ardenboshier.wordpress.com
