5
On one frosty morning hurled up in a breakfast cafe I had picked up the local Observer and, propped over a cramped plate of croissants and crumpets, I spotted an article about the object I'd found - stamped here as 'mysterious artefact'. It was something or other about 'police stepping up investigations'. But it was the end of the article that caught my attention. A note about how the last person to encounter such a thing - a man named Jayson Kahn - had been asked for a comment. I finished up and headed out.
At this time of day, the row of houses seemed much less sinister - and this time when I knocked on the door, Jayson himself answered. This was finally somebody my age who had suffered the same experience as me, yet every impression I got was that he had not fallen into the curling obsession I had come to. Jayson appeared quizzically - yet with feint amusement, as if he had been laughing moments ago - at the door, a young adult with thick and messy hair. Mimicking his mum, he said, 'Can I help you?'
Instead of letting him invite me into his house, I quickly stated why I was here and suggested we could take a walk. Jayson obliged, and we crunched through the thin frost layer down the road as he spoke.
'I was stupid to go after it. I guess it was curiosity. I panicked when I saw my younger sister playing amongst dangerous rocks, but she had come back in awe over the 'rock pool' she said she'd seen further on. She went on about it enough to get my attention, and I went to see for myself. That's when the tide came in.'
'But you got a good look of it?'
'That was the moment I got a good look of it, yes. You probably don't need me to tell you that this artefact felt eerily lifelike on my fingers, Lyla, and my sister agrees with me. We try to forget about it, though.'
Jayson was about to provide me with the answer I needed to straighten out my head, and now I was going to ask for it.
'Nothing unusual has happened to you since, has it? You haven't found yourself anywhere you can't really recall very well?'
Jayson looked right into my eyes. Then, a quizzical expression once again broke across his brow.
'Unusual? No. I've spoken to a reporter from the Observer twice, just very briefly. Other than that, no. Why do you ask?'
Could my soul really float? Was this a moment for it to float away? My spirits had jumped at this comment, because I felt that without another who touched the artefact to have suffered an episode, Mr Inagi's must have a different explanation. I had shackled myself to the idea that I was on a direct course for psychosis.
Still I had some reserve, somewhere in the chasm of my mind. Jayson was unable to provide anything else meaningful, and so I thanked him, and was back in my car once again. Jayson, it turned out, had encountered his artefact very shortly before me. I can't remember the exact figure, but it was on the magnitude of weeks, whilst Mr. Inagi's involved a reasonably longer lapse of time between his encounter and his episode. No, I was becoming obsessed. Becoming? Had definitely become. I needed to know for sure.
I kept in contact with Jayson for much of the rest of the winter, but there was no news. My mind drifted to ease.
Along the Darkening Coast | Jamie Campbell