There was once a man whom no one knew. He lived in a cottage on a quiet, quaint and quintessentially British street, where multicoloured fairy-lights were wrapped around trees in winter for the village’s annual christmas celebrations and fashionable, rustic glass bulbs filled with blazing orange filament were hung alongside hand-made bunting or wrapped around wooden beams and archways and shone lush incandescent light upon the mosaic pavements, the public vegetable garden, the flower pots and villagers themselves who strolled leisurely around the communal areas to enjoy the ambience of festivity and charm that never seemed to cease all throughout the calendar year.
The façade of his cottage was far from unkempt, nor was it unseemly to the eye, the villagers oft remarked to one another. To all appearances, it was no different from its neighbours, nor the abode across the street, and yet it was heartily agreed to have an unusual air of strangeness and mystery; for within its walls a nameless shadow lurked, a lonesome man lived in absolute isolation. The eldest member of the village once famously recalled – during an afternoon of English tea and fresh scones with hefty dollops of thick cold milky cream and an assortment of organic jams, sweet strawberry and sour raspberry, marmalade glinting in the glorious sunshine and jelly-textured cherry jam, all in gorgeously painted glass jars – that her first memory is one of being pushed slowly in a pram around the village and her mother and father having a polite conversation with the man about the beauty of his garden and the sale currently on at the local flower shop and the man affectionately offering her parents a loaf of freshly-baked sourdough bread before they bade farewell to one another. It was momentously riveting to all concerned that the only living memory any of the villagers had of this mysterious man was one so commonplace and ordinary.
The local legend of the seemingly-invisible recluse had, by this point in time, bloomed into a peculiar myriad of rumours and swirls of secret whispers, it became the blank canvas onto which people could project their maddest musings, their most fantastical dreams and visions, releasing the full force of their imaginations – which were mostly somewhat-restrained for the sake of good orderly day-to-day life – but which enjoyed unbound freedom to hurl every strange and magical conjecture they so wished at the modern myth: the man whose name no one knew and whose face had long passed out of memory and sight and who lived on their oh-so-normal street. Never was a word spoken of this man at public events or village parties, only in one’s private dwellings and quiet nooks and crannies around the village, most of which are to be found in or around the local church, with its immortal-seeming archaic stonework and hushed sense of holiness and serenity and confession.
Some said he was a painter, so devoted to his creative pursuit, his artistic odyssey, that he never left his studio, that he slept on the floor dreaming of Van Gough and clutching rolls of canvas and paintbrushes, that his every waking moment was spent developing and evolving his craft and that he never even took the time to eat a single morsel of food. Some said he was a doctor who was one day shocked with such intensity that he suddenly stopped aging and every tiny follicle of hair on the entirety of his body suddenly fell out, leaving his whole naked body from head-to-toe as bald as a bowling ball. They reasoned his complete isolation was due to the shame and embarrassment he felt about his appearance and that he spent all his time studying himself, using his medical knowledge, in an attempt to discover the secret to his immortality. Some said he was a scientist from the future and his little home on their ordinary street was a kind of safehouse, used by people from the future, cosmic adventurers, who had access to inconceivably-futuristic and highly-advanced technology which allowed them to move through time using portals and gateways, this particular one of which he guarded and operated. Others said he was an ancient vampire who had built a matrix of underground tunnels beneath the entire county and prowled through the cavernous subterranean darkness all day and night, the dank and musty passageways his true home, the brick and mortar house above simply a charade behind which his evil is maliciously veiled.
With each passing year the odd fantasy tales people ascribed to him became more and more ridiculous, surreal and inconveniently-interesting. In earlier days now long gone by, many villagers took a moral stance that opposed this such behaviour, which they spoke of in the same breath as gossip. Eventually, however, that alluring and inescapable sense of curiosity overwhelmed them and they, in turn, began to muse upon the true nature of this mystery, offering up their own convoluted and fanciful theories.
Except for the fact that it was unseasonably hot for early Spring, and the villagers had therefore taken the opportunity to open up the doors and windows of their houses, so that fresh, clean air could sweep through the hallways and the bedrooms and over the carpets and into the cellars full of antiques and memories and brush the cobwebs from unreachable ceiling corners and flush out the winter dust; with this as the sole exception, it was an ordinary day, like many that had been before. No one knew, however, when they awoke that morning, that this day was in fact like no other that had been or would one day be. It was a resurrection. As all the villagers were happily going about their day, a glorious symphony of operatic singing began to stream from the house of the man whom no one knew, in great gushing torrents of beauty, his voice so exquisite it was said that many fainted on the spot, hearing, as they did, such mellifluous and sonorous waves of sound pour into their ears and swim through their mind. Others were shocked so much so that their entire bodies fell still, not a single muscle twitching nor eye blinking, almost paralysed by the grandeur and awe of his voice as he sang his heart out into an achingly, nay hauntingly, poetic ode to innocence and suffering. So powerful and yet so delicate was his song and his operatic voice that crying babies suddenly stopped screaming and listened with keen intensity as they were coddled back into a state of pre-birth peace and tranquillity; so strong and yet so tender it was, so much so that squirrels which were at that moment scurrying up trees with freshly caught grub and birds perched in trees behind dense leaves peering up into the sky scanning the environment for predators, were gripped with an unstoppable instinctual urge to be as close to that strange, angelic sound as they could; so personal and yet so universal, so expansive and yet so complete, that every villager’s spine tingled with euphoria as his great tidal wave of singing washed over them.
Short Story by Stamos Mardou