Short story · 6 min read · Set in The Callum Valley ·
Call Out, Come Back
In the high valley above the Sorrow cairn a shout returns eleven years later in your own older voice. Today the valley is answering out of order, and one of the answers has come early.
The maps say Callum Valley, and the walkers say the Sorrow, and both are correct, the way a name and a marriage certificate are both correct.
I have kept the wardenship of it for the Trust nine years now, which means I count the crossings, mend the stile by the plantation, and keep the ledgers. The ledgers are the real work. The valley answers calls — anybody's calls, made anywhere inside the fold of the ground — and it answers them late. Not late the way a letter is late. Late by eleven years, to the year, and in the voice of the caller as they will have become, and each caller gets one answer, one only, and the valley does not repeat. Walkers have kept notebooks on it since before I was posted — there is one under the flat stone at the cairn now, pages of dates, a man's handwriting losing a war against the wet at the edge. You shout something at twenty-six and climb back up at thirty-seven and stand at the cairn, and the far slope gives you your own words back, tired-voiced, warm, older by a whole decade of being you. Eleven have recorded the pairing, original and reply, word for word matched. The voice never matches.
It is a place people treat better than they treat churches. Nobody ever has. I have watched a forester stand at the cairn and cup his hands and say nothing — simply not spend it, saving the call for a day he could trust himself to mean something — and walked away lighter.
I made my call in 2015, the year before I took the wardenship. I will write it down here because the ledgers exist for exactly this and because I am the one writing them: I stood at the cairn at twenty-five years old, the week after the funeral I am not going to describe, and I shouted with cupped hands into the fold of the valley: Tell me there is time.
The valley is due to answer next year. I have it in the book. I have been, privately, professional, keeping my ear untrained for it the way you keep a birthday unexamined.
Then came this autumn, and the out-of-order.
The first of it was the Tuesday. At ten in the morning, in clear air — the valley answers in all weathers, there is no fog about it, this is not the sea — a reply crossed the glen and it was mixing decades. I keep a log of every answer the valley gives: date, the phrase, the estimated age of the voice. That Tuesday, between breakfast and dusk, the valley returned fourteen answers. In a quiet year it returns forty. That was not the wrong part. The wrong part was the pairing. A young man's shout of I'm coming up, wait — I heard him, a lad among the hostel party, eager and twenty — and four minutes later the far slope brought back, in an old woman's voice, dry as the cairn: You always did say that when you were about to sit down. Words no twenty-year-old had spent. A pair broken, an answer delivered to the wrong call. The lad laughed and looked around for the woman, and I wrote it down with my hand not working properly, because in nine years the valley has never once mislaid a sentence.
By the Friday it was worse, and worse in a particular direction. The valley was answering the people who never came back.
You will want that explained and I am going to fail to explain it, because it is the one thing in the ledgers I have never had a column for. Some callers do not return. They die in the eleven years, or they move, or they simply do not believe, or they cannot face what they said. The valley answers them anyway. We know because the answers can be heard by strangers — an unfenced answer, hanging in the fold of the ground with nobody standing where its owner should be. There were six on the Friday. I heard a man's voice, pitched across the whole glen, saying gently: It was the dog that frightened you, love, it was never me — to nothing. To a call made somewhere, by someone, some eleven years gone, who is not in the valley today and never will be. And no stranger standing there will ever be told whose voice it was answering, or what was asked, the way you are never told at a strange funeral whose the flowers are.
I did my rounds all week with the ledger under my arm and a feeling in my chest like the step that is not there in the dark.
It was on the Thursday dusk, coming down from the plantation, that it answered mine.
I want to be exact, because exactness is the only rope I have. The answer was in my voice. It was my voice exactly as I will own it, pitched how I will pitch it, and I recognised it the way you recognise your own front door — but the words were not the words I have ready. I have spent eleven years keeping ready. I have the reply rehearsed, the one due to me, the tidy one about the wardenship and the long service and there is plenty of time yet. The voice over the glen said: There was.
Not there is. There was. Two words, warm in the way my own voice goes warm when I am being kinder to someone than they have asked to be treated, and it crossed the valley at full dusk, and no falcon was in it, and the far slope did not repeat it, because it never repeats, and the answering voice was mine.
One call. One answer. That is the law of the ground there, and the law has held for every ledger-keeper back to the first notebook under the stone. I shouted in 2015. In the ordinary order of that ground I had a year to wait, and the reply I have been assuming — the comfortable one, the one I had already, shamefully, drafted for myself — is not what came, and what came is spent.
I have written the entry into the ledger. Date wrong but received; phrase: There was; voice: mine, aged. And then, because I am the keeper and no one else would dare, I have added a line under the entry in pencil, which the Trust can strike out if a form exists for it — and no form will, I have checked, the Trust having politely stopped answering me on the subject in 2019.
The line says: If I have been answered eleven years early, spent out of turn while I stood on the plantation with my hands in my pockets, then one of two things is true. Either the valley has stopped being a valley that answers. Or there is, up in the fold of that ground, someone who has finally, after all these years, agreed to answer in person — and they have begun at the newest calls, and worked backwards, and mine was the first they could reach.
What I would like to know, and I am a warden, and I am asking it in the only ledger anyone currently reads: whose turn was it that I took — and where were they standing, in what decade, when the answer that was kept for them crossed the glen and found me instead.