The Thin Place

A Tale of Sogmarsh — Mr Prewitt is right a second time, and cared about even less.

Buoyed, perhaps, by his triumph over the cow, Hollis Prewitt took on the Thin Place.

The Thin Place is a hollow west of Mucklecombe — a bowl of soft ground walled round in reeds, where the fog pools of a morning and will not lift till late. Folk keep out of it; and those who don't come back saying the voices there arrive from the wrong direction. You will hear your own name called from behind you, and turn, and find no one. You will hear a neighbour speak plain and close, a neighbour who is home in bed a mile off. The parish holds that the veil is thin in that hollow. That the dead make use of it. That the absent leak through.

Prewitt went in on a foggy morning, notebook under his arm, to have it out with the place. And it is only fair to say the hollow gave him its best: he heard a woman say his name clear as a bell at his very shoulder, and turned, and the reeds stood empty, and the fog sat there like a thing that knew something.

But Prewitt, this time, had the right of it. He paced the bowl. He clapped his hands and counted, and listened for the clap to come back off the far reed-bank a beat too late and a quarter-turn wrong. And he worked out — and he was correct — that a hollow of soft ground, walled in standing reeds and brimful of fog, will bend a sound, and hold it, and hand it back to you off its true line; that the voice at his shoulder had been a neighbour right enough, out calling her hens two fields over, delivered to him by the fog along a curve. No veil. No dead. Only a hollow shaped, by pure accident, like an ear.

He wrote it up handsomely. He was believed by three people and disbelieved by the rest — which is the going rate for a dull truth set against a good ghost.

And here is the whole of the realm in one man and one season: Hollis Prewitt, who was wrong about the cow and right about the hollow, and could never once get Mucklecombe to care about the difference. They kept the cow's magic and the hollow's ghosts, both, because a place that will not give you an answer is worth more, in the long telling, than a place that will. Prewitt carried his umbrella, and held his tongue, and lived, on balance, contentedly, among people who were wrong in most of the ways that make a winter shorter.