The Long Field

Synopsis

They hired me to drain a field that the village has spent two hundred years keeping wet. I should have read that as a warning. I am a drainage engineer, I trust numbers, and the numbers are wrong: the water drops faster than physics allows, and at night something in the peat breathes when I breathe and asks me, very gently, to stop. This is the village where my little brother died when I was eight, where the grain took him through my fingers while I screamed. The locals say the field is owed one. They say the long sleep. They say, when they have had a drink, that nothing down there has ever died, that the ground keeps everything it swallows awake forever, and that the field has been waiting a long time for a Hollis to come home. The lower I take the water, the closer the buried come, and the faces under the turf are not rotting, and one of them has my brother's eyes, and it knows my name. When the air is gone and the earth has closed over you, do you finally stop, or does the stopping never come. I am about to find out which is worse.