The Poet's Shack

The safety of Brown's Hotel seemed miles behind me, though the pub was but a five-minute walk. No sliver of moon lit the old dirt path that wound its way to the cliff-side shack. Cefin and the others could hear me scream from there if they weren't engaged in song, or some boisterous game of cards. But the note had said come alone, and the messenger, a scrummy boy whose name I never learned, was adamant that the sender stressed "alone".

"He said he'd be gone if you brought anyone," the boy croaked, out of breath from running with the letter. "Said he'd be put off. The man said there'd be a fiver in it for me if you showed though," he added, scurrying from the pub before I could question him further.

The yellowed folded parchment with the hasty scrawl that I held in my hand said as much. It was simply signed D. M. T. I had no idea who D.M.T. might be. I did half expect some concocted surprise though, as it was my birthday. Besides, I knew of no one in Laugharne, unbalanced or otherwise, who might wish me harm, so foolish as I was, a stranger in a stranger land, I discretely slipped from the pub.

Dusk had long faded, but still the jackdaws cackled at me from the black treetops as I left the safety of King Street, to walk the road that passed the chapel and graveyard a short distance from Laugharne Castle. Behind the mocking laughter of the black-capped birds the soothing sea sounds of Carmarthen Bay bathed the mudflats and estuary on the other side of the hedge grows in a crisp autumn peace. September's blue and cloud puffed Shakespeare days had long since given way to chilly October nights suited more for the tales of Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker. I shivered beneath my heavy woolen shawl as my breath made ghosts in the close night air.

Halfway up the cliff face was the shack, a former bicycle shed I'd been told. To combat my unease I let my eyes follow the path's outline to a gate where a garden sloped down to the famous Boat House. Here the path became a switchback. I imagined walking on the veranda of that house. Built over the sea wall as it was, the image of the deck of a ship at night came easily. The hoot of an owl and darker shape of the shack against the bat-black night pulled me back down the path to the door I stood before. As I reached for the latch I knew someone waited inside. There was neither light nor sound within, but a plume of white smoke seeped from the chimney caressing the darkness. I expected Cefin and his mates to pop out at me, but I'd left them behind at the pub. They couldn't have gotten here first.

Slowly with my left hand I reached for the latch, the right clutched a stone under my shawl in case. Before I could knock, or even draw breath, the door swung open on silent hinges and someone stood in the darkness before me. At first I could not make out any features. Just a shadow figure about five foot six, the pink lit tip of a cigarette glowing in the right hand, and I supposed the other hand was in a pocket. He was not fat, I thought, and though it was dark I could almost see a face. This man was nobody I knew, yet somehow familiar to me. I waited on the step unable to speak. The darkness had become thicker some how. This was the darkest night I'd ever seen. The Welsh rain started falling, and the Jackdaws had suddenly gone quiet. I trembled there on the doorstep, feeling his smile in the gloom. The sound of the sea frothed in my ears and I could not move.

"Do come in now girl. You'll catch your death out there. " He stepped aside and held the door with the cigarette hand. Slowly I stepped over the threshold holding tighter to the stone in my hand. The room was warm, but smelled of coal, cigarette smoke, alcohol, and something more; dampened earth perhaps?

"You'll not need that," he laughed, gesturing to my hidden arm. "Even if you did, I don't think it would do you much good."

The remark was cryptic enough that despite the heat and faint light from the small stove I still shivered.

"Light the lamp and relax you now." He pointed in the darkness. The faint light glinted off of something made of glass. "Go on then, the lad who cleans here left a packet of matches there for you."

With a shaking hand I reached out to find a box of wooden matches. I set the stone down close by, fumbled a match out of the box, and struck it. In the glow of the tiny flame I could see an oil lamp, and lit the wick. The kerosene added to the acrid coal smell of the stove, making the air somehow older. With trembling fingers I placed the chimney on the lamp and looked about the room. It was furnished only with a bare wooden table, a couple of chairs and the anthracitic stove. After a moment I drew in a breath and turned to face my summoner.

He looked ordinary enough I suppose. A mess of curly brown hair crowned him, and a baleful stare came from equally mud brown eyes. He seemed pale in the lamplight, with thick lips and a puffy face. He was dressed in a rumpled brown suit that looked slept in several times over.

"D.M.T. I presume?" I said, mustering a bravado I couldn't feel. It seemed someone had gone to great lengths with this folly. Who was I to disappoint them?

He smiled and bowed; I noticed that one front tooth was broken.

"Welcome to the Water and Tree Room." He paused dramatically. "I had the town lad light a fire and bring a couple of other things you might want." Again with the cigarette hand he gestured to the table. There sat two pints of dark stout side by side that I'd not seen before.

"I don't drink much these days, but your welcome to them. Drink a pint for me won't you then?" Again the cryptic tone was there. Casually he straddled the chair in front of the stove. He rested his wrists on its back facing me, and steepled his fingers. I must have been staring into those muddy orbs and looked where I shouldn't. Just as I felt I almost knew him, something brushed the inside of my skull, a thought, a word, a mental slap of some sort. Whatever, it was a brief but powerful rebuke. Just as abruptly I was all too aware of my surroundings. I swayed and staggered.

"Steady on now," he quipped as if unaware of what had just occurred. "You've not even touched those lovelies and you bob like a boat on the bay. Sit you down and have a drink."

I pulled the other chair out from the table and sat down, reaching for the beer. By this time I needed a drink. I lifted the pint to my lips, sniffing its welcome scent and drank deeply, licking the froth from my upper lip when I was through.

"Do tell me of the taste won't you?" he asked longingly.

"Tell me who you are first," I said. I didn't like to be the mouse in such a game, and there seemed to be nothing to fear here. This had to be Cefin's doing.

"You know me well. Think on it." I stared again, and again something brushed my brain, fleeting madness. I knew who this man portended to be, but that was impossible. Still, I was not going to give into the joker's whims by protesting. I thought I'd play out the scene; see just how far it would go.

"What would you want with me Mr. Thomas?" I asked.

"It's your birthday of course," he said as if the statement needed no explanation. "And call me by my given name." Now the punch line would come. Friends would pop out from somewhere. They probably listened outside the door. But none did. He continued. "It was my birthday three days past, on the twenty-seventh. But I've no use for birthdays now Still, with some things there is no choice."

I shook my head. Surely something had to give. He seemed genuine, a truly good actor.

"I had a wish for my birthday this year," he continued as though we chatted daily. "At first I just wanted a drink. So I sallied forth to Brown's just to watch the patrons. As I said I can't drink anymore. There I chanced to see this lusty girl cursing a storm at some device she wrote upon." Again he paused dramatically. "Such wicked curses I never heard from such a pretty head." He hissed and shook his index finger at me like a preacher from the pulpit, then took a drag of the everlasting cigarette. "My birthday wish changed from having a simple pint, to having one with that young lady. And here we are."

"That explains everything. " I said unable to keep sarcasm from my voice.

He held up his hand to stop my ramble before it started. "There's more to it then that. Much more. God forbid, you'd have to be in my place to understand. "

"I don't understand." I said stupidly.

"But you do, and you must. You will too in time. The words are your gift now. And that machine, oh it's a curse."

I remembered working on my palmtop a couple of days earlier in the pub. I was jotting down some things as I often did, and it died on me. I did indeed curse.

"My palmtop died, I lost my work. It is a curse."

"A shame. I'm sure it was good."

I shook my head. "Nah, just stuff that piles up in my head. I have to set the words down somewhere or go mad."

He nodded understandingly.

"Now, we've not much time. Tell me about the pint."

I looked from the glass to him, and back. "Why?" I asked.

"Because girl, I'm a drunkard and I cannot drink. Only with your words can I get my wish."

I nodded. Surely the game was about to end.

"Why don't you just drink it?" I said hoping to speed things up.

"I will not, ever again." His voice turned cold, angry. "Nothing will I ever again know. Just the moments when I can. I was a lover of life, of beauty, and that was stolen from me somehow. I won't remember you tomorrow, or this night. But while I am here I know what is."

I shivered again despite the heat of the stove. Doubt crept over me.

"You can walk the earth, laugh with friends, and taste the stout. I can only watch, and forget." Tears welled up in his eyes. The tears of the poet nearly brought on my own. The sound of the rain pounding on the shack's roof grew louder.

"I'm sorry." I said.

"Don't be sorry. Just live. Once this room was strewn with papers, and cigarette packets, books and notes. Now it is an empty memory. People traipse through uninvited to see my place. There is no peace for me here now."

I nodded. I had purposely avoided the shed, and boathouse higher up on the cliff for that very reason. I would have felt like an intruder.

"That is why you are here," he said as if hearing my thought. "You would not come uninvited."

I felt my own tears begin to well up.

"No tears on your birthday. You'll cry the year through."

I smiled. My grandmother always said that.

"But why me? Why did you ask me here?"

"Oh! This from the girl who named her puppy after me?"

I felt my face flush at the memory of my Irish Wolf hound. My Dylan. No actor would know of that, nor would Cefin. My doubt became a prickling certainty.

"Enough. We understand each other. Now tell me about the beer. "

And I did.

"Like a summer day or winter night,

Cool and frothy on the tongue,

A beer that is so fine,

Dark and so delicious,

A brew that tastes of wishes,

A glass filled with black wine,

A pint a day to keep you young,

It takes away the thirst just right."

I thought it was a bit lame, but the poet licked his lips and his eyes glazed over as if savoring a distant memory. When I finished he stared past me for a moment, then snapped back to himself.

"The time is short. But I've a gift for you too."

He reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled jacket and withdrew a fountain pen which he extended to me.

"For you."

"I couldn't."

"You can, you must. It is the one material thing I can still touch. Take it."

I reached out and touched the pen. It was indeed solid. The hand that held it though was not. A chill went through me as I brushed the insubstantial fingers.

"May it be a good long time before you know that class of cold my dear," he said reaching for the remaining pint on the table. He raised it to me.

"Use that well, and trust it. Know that the mistakes made with it are your own, and not some "machine". Know your craft better then yourself."

With a smooth familiar motion he drained the glass, and set it back with a thunk.

"Ahhhhhh" he sighed.

"But you said...how?" I stammered.

"The magic of words my girl, powerful thing. "A taste that's made of wishes," I think that's what did it."

There came a hush over the room and he looked to the door.

"Footsteps on the path. I must go now," he whispered. In the village the Market Street clock struck midnight. I heard no other sound.

"Remember me now," he said with a bit of a wicked grin and a twinkle in his eye. "I owe a certain town lad a few quid and the price of two pints. He'll be by at dawn."

A quiet knock came to the door, and it opened a crack.

"They said you headed up this way." The door opened wider and there Cefin stood, an umbrella dripping over his head. He stepped through the door and closed the umbrella. "Thought I'd come to see what became of you." There was no hint that he knew what had transpired.

"I was just." I was about to blurt out what I had just been doing, but something blocked my words; an invisible but gentle hand clamped on my mouth. As I turned my head, the poet's chair was empty. "Thinking," I finished

"Well now, it's late luv, and a nasty night. Best get you home to bed."

I stood and stretched, raised my glass in a silent toast to Dylan Malais Thomas, then drained the pint, setting it beside the other empty glass. Before trimming the wick I glanced one last time at the poet's empty seat, slipping a ten-pound note under my glass.

"I suppose your right," I said moving toward the door.

Cefin raised his eyebrows at the curious sight in the poet's shack, but said nothing. Turning to the night, he popped his umbrella and stepped outside. I joined him on the doorstep pulling the door closed. Slowly we walked in the Welsh rain down the muddy trail from the poet's shack to the sleeping town of Laugharne.

Bio: Wanda Fizgerald is a 36 year-old businesswoman and mother of three living and working in Toronto, Canada. She is currently co-editor and contributing writer for a Canadian national periodical and works part time for Post Citymagazines, a series of local monthlies. Although she has a background in journalism, her first love is writing in the genres of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.

E-mail: wandaf@alternativefocus.com

URL:

Visit Aphelion's Lettercolumn and voice your opinion of this story.

Return to the Aphelion main page.