Recovered from: “Fugitive Memoirs Volume III”
When I first came to the clandestine villa, the church bells grated on my nerves like steel wool. I suppose their effect is easier to understand in the context of what I had endured in the months before. Running for your life non-stop for weeks on end takes a toll, and one of the costs it extracts, apparently, is a lack of tolerance for church bells.
Several paranoid and anxiety-laden weeks followed. It was not impossible, of course, that I had been followed, or that someone had somehow learned of my purchase of the isolated mini-estate, even though I use a brand-new Liechtenstein Anstalt and worked hard to cover my tracks. Fortunately, the approach to the villa was mountainous, difficult, and easily watched, particularly for someone as apprehensive and with as much time on her hands as I had.
Slowly, weeks without incident melted into the first months without any kind of disturbance. In hindsight it is easy to indict any deterioration of vigilance with the most vicious critique, but in practice the sort of vigilance that would make a difference is impossible to maintain for such an extended period, and sanity is the first casualty of any attempt.
As the hot summer settled in I found myself out on my patio more and more often, enjoying the sound of the wind stirring through the more outlandishly overgrown bits of the wild garden. True, I was exposing myself to observation, but the ridges opposite the patio and garden were the only direct views, and they were both far away and unpopulated. I first turned on the exterior lights one evening a few weeks later.
At night I would gaze up at the stars, and occasionally my thoughts turned to the Southwest, to The Enclave, and to all I had loved, and lost. By then, and though the realisation was a slow dawning of awareness, the quarter hour chimes of the church bell were a particular kind of soothing, calling out to me (or perhaps the distant moon) softly, fighting the warm summer breezes that cascaded over my little villa in the quiet darkness. Resonant tones clocking the time through my land-bound middle watch with the assurance of the regular, and permanent. “Four bells and all’s well.”