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He brought the hare into work the very next day, early enough in the morning to try and catch Steven before his morning classes. No matter the fact that Richard wasn’t expected back at work for at least another few months – he needed a second opinion on this matter.
Within only half an hour of setting off from the farm, he was walking into the college, cardboard box in his arms. Greeting staff as he passed, he made his way through the building, up two flights of stairs and through several classrooms, before he found who he was looking for.
Richard was certain there’d been flesh growing on the hare – tendons, arteries, muscles and the like – and that it wasn’t just a figment of his imagination, grown wild with grief.
Showing the box to Steven, then, broke through that fragile hope like a brick through a single-paned window.
Within those first few seconds of opening the box in the college’s staff room, he knew he’d fucked up somehow. Steven was looking down at a plain old hare skeleton, instead of the miracle of nature he’d intended to show him. Richard turned to his colleague, already apprehending the look in the other man’s eyes. What he saw there didn’t surprise him.
Confusion, of course, was the first emotion he noticed in Steven’s expression. However, that swiftly gave way to dreaded pity. Richard had grown to know that look intimately, in the face of every person he talked to, over the past few months.
Deciding to ignore his colleague’s expression, he turned back to the skeleton and assessed it from every angle.
"…some fungus starting to attack just here- ", Steven gestured at one of the hare’s hind legs, "-but, uh, what am I suppose – what am I supposed to be looking for?"
Unable to bear the humiliation of his colleague’s concern any longer, Richard repackaged the box shut, muttered out a quick "Sorry about this," and didn’t wait around for Steven’s reply.
Back in the car, he placed the box on the passenger seat with utmost care and, first checking to see if anyone was looking in at him, opened it back up.
The hare in the box was still as bare as the second he’d dug it up. Its exposed skull grinned at him in malicious glee.
It grinned at him, just so, the entirety of the way back to the farm.
Setting the box aside in the office upstairs, he took a moment to berate himself before heading downstairs. He was being ridiculous, bloody ridiculous, taking the hare into work like that. Now, he expected he'd get concerned looks all week—at least a week, probably longer, unless he could convince Steven that he was alright. But how to do that? He couldn't say it was a prank, that wasn't like him, and would only sew more doubt over his state of mind.
He couldn't focus on that right now, though. He needed to rest after that shitshow of a day. He needed something to help him settle down, make him feel like he didn’t need to doubt his senses…
Something to eat. Toast would work. Yes, that would help—at least for now.
He’d just finished slathering butter on the toast when Jules appeared around the corner of the kitchen door. She startled, probably not expecting him back so early, and then leaned up against in the doorframe as she observed him with a wary eye.
Richard knew it was rude of him, but he really couldn’t be bothered to get into a conversation right now, the unexplained appearance and subsequent disappearance of the hare’s flesh still weighing heavily on his mind. Besides, she had invited Mrs Forde in, with all her drivel and mumbo-jumbo about helping Owen’s spirit pass on.
Not like it had worked at all, really. Richard still felt him here, as ludicrous as that seemed, and he was pretty sure Jules did too.
"Harrie made curry."
He ignored her, cutting into the slice before putting it in his mouth. Harrie’s curry was pretty great most the time, but he was in a spiteful mood, and so stayed silent rather than inquiring about where in the kitchen it was.
He couldn’t see Jules’ frustration, being as he was still mostly turned away from her. Still, he could sense it on the edge of his perception, like when traces of her perfume lingered in the air after she’d left the room.
"Richard. Come on."
He couldn’t exactly refuse to turn to look at her now—she was in the doorway after all, and he was finished in the kitchen—but he shied away from meeting her eyes as he grabbed his plate off the side.
"Please, I’m sorry—"
"Okay—"
"—Richard. Listen to me, just for a moment. Please."
He paused before his raised foot hit the next step of the stairs, turning sharply to look back down at her. Jules took that as confirmation, and jumped at the chance to speak.
"I… I can’t say I completely understand why you don’t like the idea of Mrs Forde being inside the house. You’ve not really, fully, explained to me why you dislike everything that she and Gordon keep mentioning. But I’m aware her presence made you uncomfortable—and for that, I’m sorry."
Here, Jules took a moment to hesitate, clearly waiting to see what his reaction would be.
Richard… wasn’t so sure what so say, exactly. He couldn't shut her out for too long—that would be needlessly cruel. Still, he wasn't exactly overcome with the need to tell her the truth. About Neil, about the book he’d uncovered upstairs, about the childhood memories of being left outside in the fog and the incessant rain and the unyielding frosty nights, whilst his father looked on, waiting with bated breath for his own son's soul to give in and be devoured by the monsters he claimed existed out there, ready to be set free.
He couldn't tell her that. Not now, not yet.
So, Richard looked her in the eye and gave a weak grimace, which was pretty much the most he could manage as an answer.
Jules watched his reaction with a slight exasperated air—it was quite obvious to both of them that he wouldn't crack just quite yet. Then she nodded, seemingly satisfied for the time being, and turned to head into the living room, evidently planning to bring this up again later.
Richard watched her disappear round the corner, and suddenly realised in a flash that this was probably the best time to mention something else to her. Something that, if she saw and understood, might calm his nerves down enough so that he'd be able to manage having that other, tougher conversation with her.
Also, she deserved to know what was making him so irritable, so on edge. It was only fair—he didn't want her walking on eggshells around him. That wouldn't be fair on him, much less her.
With that thought, he stumbled back down the stairs and reached for her shoulder.
"Wait—Juliette. I need to show you something."
Jules followed Richard into the study, where he’d already picked up an inconspicuous box off the desk. It was a plain cardboard one, the kind she’d seen him ferrying back and forth between the college and home for the past couple of years. She was fairly certain it was the same box she’d seen him take to work that morning: an unused, peeling label on its side, and a lid that didn’t entirely match the box’s size. Stained with dirt around the lid—probably filled with some specimen he'd found whilst out digging.
She expected Richard to bring the box over to the door, maybe take it downstairs so he could set it all out on the dining table. Instead he’d stood there, smack dab in the centre of the room, fiddling with the box’s label and avoiding her gaze. He seemed unsettled, as if contemplating setting the box back down on the desk without showing her what was inside, or maybe even throwing the box out altogether.
Jules hadn’t seen him look this conflicted in weeks, not since the funeral—she’d taken to simply referring to it as "the" funeral, not Owen’s, because otherwise she doubted she’d be able to get up out of bed for the next several months—and it more than unsettled her. She’d seen him fall into some kind of aloof, neutral state recently, ignoring all emotion except his fervour for his latest excavation. This look, the agitated expression he was sporting in this moment, took her by surprise.
Just before she could ask him what it was, Richard snapped out of his thoughts and turned to her.
"I should explain what I’ve been doing, during my excavations out t' back." He nodded out the window, where the trenches he'd dug were just in view. "I’ve been digging up this… this tree that grew in the corner, way back there. People’ve written about it—including my father—about how it was some important community meeting place a few centuries past. Obviously, it’s an interesting archaeological site, and when Ow—when I remembered it existed, I just knew I had to look into it."
He paused for breath, and finally met her eyes. Jules wasn’t sure what he saw in her expression, but she noticed a spark of confidence ignite in his, and he carried on.
"When digging, I found several things. Some occasional bundles of fabric, a few assorted bones, mice and things, and this—a full hare skeleton, deep down and almost buried between the roots of the tree."
He levered the lid off the box and dropped it onto the desk, aligning the box carefully on top of it. Jules slid round the desk to look over his shoulder at the contents. She flinched at what she saw.
He was right—it was a hare skeleton, but that wasn’t all it was. There was a sparse web of veins wrapping its body, trapped under paper-thin skin. Wispy gristle and tendons stretched between its joints, and Jules could see the remnants of eyes within its sockets.
It was horribly, certainly, not entirely dead.
Jules found herself swallowing bile as she tore her gaze from the sight, and turned back to Richard, who was gripping the box with trembling hands. He seemed absorbed by the sight, barely breathing.
"Explain. Please." The command tore through her, effortful and lacking in any sort of confidence. The two words seemed to come out hoarse, as if her voice had been unused for days, the vocal cords going stiff from disuse. She closed her eyes briefly, and tendinous lines kept around behind her eyelids, accompanied by exposed bones and veins.
Her eyes shot open again in disgust, to reveal Richard's concerned face. He hesitated and continued talking.
"How could I hope to explain it? It was… it was a skeleton, when I dug it up. It isn’t really anymore. I thought I’d gone mad as a, er, hare—" here he nodded towards the box, chuckling nervously, and Jules felt her mouth form a thin line "—and decided to take it into work, to see if one of my colleagues—Steven, it was—could take a gander at it and work out what was going on. That only told me that I was going barmy, 'cause when I opened the box it was a skeleton again. And now it’s back here, it seems to have returned to… this. This horrid, impossible form."
Jules glanced back at the hare, barely swallowing back the bile crawling up her throat. "What do you mean by that?" she asked. "That—that this thing only looks this way on the farm? Or that Steven just couldn't see it like this?"
Richard shrugged at her, then glanced apathetically back down at the box. "The first of those, I'm pretty sure. I couldn't see it like this in town, either. It’s also definitely more, uh, progressed than it was earlier before I took it into work. But honestly I… I’ve no idea what’s going on with this."
"You wanted to see if I could see the hare myself. So you knew you weren’t imagining it?"
"I suppose so."
Jules reached out and, hesitantly, lightly touched his shoulder. She supposed she meant it in a comforting way, but she was too unnerved by the hare to place any internal feelings except for dread.
She wondered if Richard had felt the same way seeing it for the first time. Both of them had seen similar sights hundreds of times before – both growing up on farms, both aspiring to run their own together, both used to the cycles of life and death—even now, when they were so awfully present in every thought they’d had for the past few weeks. This, however, was something different entirely.
She began talking before she’d fully arranged her thoughts.
"I’ve seen my own, um, supernatural things. Recently, on the farm." Jules could see he was about to scoff with derision and so quickly continued onward. "I saw Owen."
Richard was silent, suddenly still. His hands once again tightened on the box’s edge with a steely grip.
"Richard, you have to believe me."
He grunted in affirmation. "I believe you."
"Mrs. Forde didn’t put me up to this. I wasn’t her doing, I saw him before she arrived—"
"Okay–"
"Richard."
He sniffed, glanced up at her briefly, and returned to glaring into the box.
"I shouldn’t have shown you this."
Jules felt ire rise through her. "Glad to see you have such a high opinion of me."
That caused Richard's eyes to shoot back up to hers in alarm, his body tensing slightly. She watched him stumble over his words as he tried to come up with an adequate response.
When he didn't end up reaching one, she scoffed lightly. "Don’t worry, Mrs. Forde didn’t ask me to swindle you with spooky stories—if that’s what you’re worried about, I mean." He voice softened. "Please believe me, Richard. I wouldn't lie about this."
"…Okay." This response was far softer than the previous ones. "Sorry."
She sighed. "Do you really believe me?"
He looked back down at the box, but nodded in affirmation. "Mhm."
That would have to do, for now at least. "Okay. Well… I saw Owen, a couple days ago. I was sat with Hattie downstairs and he just—" she raised her arms in a half-shrug, half-gesture to the side "—just was stood there, behind the TV. Hattie didn’t see him, or at least she hasn’t mentioned it to me."
"You sure you weren’t dreaming?"
"Pretty sure. Yes."
"Mhm. Okay." Richard paused, leaning on the desk, before a trickle of laughter wormed its way out his mouth. "Seems ridiculous, doesn't it?"
"Which part?" Jules' voice also began to crack with nervous laughter.
"All of it. We're both being haunted in our separate ways—and somehow a hare's resurrecting itself, or being resurrected—"
His voice stopped suddenly, and his head bowed low. Jules felt a hint of panic and reached out to grab his shoulder.
"Richard—"
"Funny how this place works, eh? There's what, magic, or something else out there, but all it can do is show you memories of Owen. And yet this hare's returning to life—or something close to it…"
It's not fair. His words remained unspoken, but Jules could place them in the air just as easily as if they had been. She drew in breath, and a wave of thoughts crashed over her. What if it was different? What if it wasn't the hare this was happening to, but Owen? Could that be possible—returning him to life even just for a short time?
Looking back over at the hare, her thoughts were quelled by the disgust that hit her. As much as they wanted him back… it wasn't right. Not like this. Not his body being rebuilt, bit by bit, organ by organ, until the rot was lifted off his bones by the sheer force of time, and the flesh taking its place. Not in that way, where sinews and muscles would be laid bare to the world. It couldn't be like that…
But even as she held Richard round the shoulder, burying her wet face into his shoulder and feeling his sobs, some traitorous part of her whispered: but if you could do it? You'd do it in a heartbeat, wouldn't you?