Day 43: Imperfections

Dearest friends,

I hope this missive finds you well. It is our third day in the village, and country life is continuing at its own sedentary pace.

I love the cottage we're staying in. It's an old tumble-down brick building, snug and comfortable and relaxing, the perfect antidote to hectic city life. The pillows are soft, the breakfast counter is inviting, and the top room's supporting oak beams are sufficiently gnarled and sturdy.

But the place isn't perfect. Everything tarnishes with time, and desire can never truly be sated. What looks immaculate at first glance soon becomes something less than that.

Here are a few points I've noticed.

- There are no full length mirrors in any of the rooms, so to see what your day's outfit looks like you have to take a face mirror off its hook and scan it up and down your body.
- There's an expensive looking coffee machine in the kitchen, but no ground coffee, and none sold in any of the shops nearby.
- Some of the crockery has a decidedly royalist bent to its design.
- The bathroom walls are painted in a drab shade of taupe, and between the hours of seven and eight each night bleed a translucent ectoplasm that vanishes by 8:01 pm.
- The TV flickers occasionally and the channels change rapidly, settling on a grainy image of the room in which the TV is placed, two people watching the screen visible from the back, a masked figure approaching from behind slowly, before the set flickers again and regular programming is resumed.
- The copy of the popular board game Battleships left on the shelf is a nice touch, and exactly as I remember from childhood, except that every time one of us lands a "hit" on one of the other's ships we hear a blood-curdling scream from the woods off behind the house. This is a feature I do not recall from previous versions of the game.
- Nor do I remember copies of Guess Who? in the past being comprised of pictures of local children who have gone missing over the last fifty-year period.
- The cupboards are stacked with food and there are bowls of fresh, bright fruit on the tables, yet behind a bookcase in the attic we have found a covered picture portraying the very same food as downstairs, only now it is rotting, liquefied, covered in veins of rancid fat and splotches of hirsute mold, releasing clouds of hissing spores as maggots writhe around the decomposing innards.
- All the electrical items have a second cable, after the power supply, that snakes around skirting boards and along banisters and leads eventually under the door to the spare room, which door has remained locked for the duration of our visit.
- Next to the radio is a seemingly innocuous houseplant which has for reasons I cannot fathom been encased within a metal prison from which it grows its hanging tendrils yet can never escape.
- By the stairs there sits an ornamental rabbit on a tiny chair, its head tilted and staring up to the next level at a varnished gnome hiding under a table of which the gnome himself, in some kind of cosmic existential irony, is the central support. The gnome is peering up at an ostrich lamp beside the television, the ostrich skewered clean through by the pole on which the lampshade hangs. This sorry bird gazes across the room at two porcelain dog statues on the windowsill facing one another, yet with heads turned so that their eyes never meet. Although the figurines are clearly fixed in their poses, even when you swivel them so heads should be pointing inwards, still somehow they are not. I cannot explain this phenomenon. What messages pass between this collection of silent creatures? From where do they originate? What master do they serve?
- The visitors' book has plenty of entries from guests upon arrival, praising the cottage and the surrounding village, yet there are no records of anyone leaving. There is young Ms Flopsy, so looking forward to bounding round the countryside, Mrs Stuthio, sounding uppity but polite, old Mr Gardener, noting his excitement at getting to escape the family for a bit of fishing, and then a newly-wed couple, the Pointers, so desperately in love, writing how they never want to spend a moment apart. Such sweet sounding guests. I wonder what happened to them all.
-None of the taps in the house seem to work, except that when you turn them associated lights flash on a giant radio tower standing on a hill far in the distance overlooking the entire valley.
- Having a door to the garden is pleasant, I just wish the garden onto which the door opened was always on the same astral plane, and not periodically a hellscape cut through with rivers of blood and gargoyles spitting flame.
- I've just thought, perhaps if the dog statues are not looking at one another, I should determine where exactly it is that they are looking. Well, placing them in their original positions, then getting down on the floor and putting my head between theirs, they appear to be staring up at a painting on the wall set in an ornate gilded frame. The painting is labelled La Chasse, and depicts the nobility from the surrounding regions gathered in preparation for what seems to be an important hunt. The lords are on horseback and mill around festooned in finest regalia as impatient dogs roll and jostle in packs on the ground. There is a clear excitement and energy to the scene. But in the distance at the edge of view are two foxes, male and female, with remarkably lifelike features, one with a face appearing disconcertingly like Fran's face, the other a visage like mine own. The foxes are looking at one another in fear and confusion and, perhaps, dawning realisation at their plight.
- The doorbell is very loud, and rouses us when we are relaxing -- as has just happened. Fran is going down to answer it. Craning my head I think I can just make out the hunched figure of Father Tunbridge, the village's benevolent leader, on the porch. He appears to be wearing some kind of red tunic and riding boots, though it is hard to make out in the dark. I do wonder what the good reverend wants at this late hour...