Overview

An Englishman purchases a retirement home in rural France, close to the medieval town of Eymet, seeking quiet and renewal. Instead, he finds evidence of a sealed dugout-an underground refuge built during the Hundred Years' War-buried beneath his garden. Compelled by curiosity and an inexplicable pull, he opens the space and begins returning to it, drawn into its cold dark as if it is calling him by name. In the dugout he meets Eucabeth, an ancient spirit: once a serving girl taken from the Niger Delta and brought to Europe to serve an English master in wartime. Eucabeth is both presence and force-mystical, intimate, and unsettling. She offers him visions and sensations that exceed memory; the dugout becomes a threshold where time folds, and the Englishman slips into other selves. Through Eucabeth, the Englishman is made to relive and reframe his own life-his private failures, his family pain, the torments he has avoided naming. He experiences the violence of the Hundred Years' War as if he is a soldier inside it, and this lived immersion becomes a route to a different inheritance: the death of his great-grandfather in the First World War, a man who served in the Northumberland Fusiliers. The dugout does not merely show him history-it traps him in it, forcing him to feel the costs that men like him have paid and inflicted across generations. As the Englishman weakens-physically and psychologically-Eucabeth strengthens. Their encounters transform her from the ""humble"" girl history tried to erase into a powerful woman who refuses the roles imposed on her. Across episodes and identities, she emerges in multiple forms-slave, mermaid, warrior, entertainer-each aspect another way of reclaiming agency and rewriting the meaning of captivity. She learns to dominate the men who once subjugated her and to shape the Englishman's longing, fear, and obedience into something she can control. The relationship between them becomes the engine of the novella: a haunted intimacy where desire is inseparable from power, and where each descent into the dugout strips away the Englishman's certainty about who he is and what he deserves. Through ghostly presences and historical echoes, their story binds personal biography to wider atrocities, asking how history lives inside the body-and what it means for a woman like Eucabeth to survive the centuries unseen, shaping moments of fear and force.

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