Day 44: Coming home

Back from the country. We weren't kidnapped by locals and experimented upon and changed. Unless part of the process of being changed was taking out bits of our brains so that we didn't remember being changed. Maybe I'm not myself. Maybe none of us are ourselves. But what can you do? You just have to carry on, hoping that it all makes sense, that there is some force for good moving you beneath your conscious awareness, that you are not a secret sleeper agent for a malevolent cult growing out of a small village near Holmfirth biding your time until you are activated as the first phase in a plan of world domination and terror.

You just have to carry on carrying on. So that's what I'll do.

We woke up at a decent hour this morning and stripped the bed (Fran) and washed the last dishes (Fran) and put everything back where we'd found it (Fran) and drank instant coffee (me), then folded the dog into a taxi, sat in around him, and drove to the railway station away from our idyllic little retreat.

On the train we sat largely in silence, watching the little towns roll by, with Mish up on the seats opposite, my hand on Fran's knee, Fran playing with her zombies on her phone, me reading about trade deals on the New York Times app.

We went for lunch in the Rutland when we arrived back in the city. Fran had a vegan patty, with cheese to confuse the bartender. I had a fish finger sandwich. The chips were real chips, fat and glorious. Fran had a pint. I had an orange drink. Fran's pint looked good, as do they all.

We hauled our bags to the bus stop in a thick drizzle as Mission padded along daintily beside us, head up, drawing looks, as always. I saw Fran onto her bus and then hurried off for my own.

I've done very little back at the house. Listened to episodes of the Serial podcast, which is fascinating and illuminating and I recommend highly, had some snoozes, eaten tea.

Gentle day, and an early night, with work again in the morning (all the hisses).

As of tomorrow I'll have been writing this blog for 45 days. halfway to my target of 90. I've still got a long way to go, but just for a moment I'll allow that right now, thinking about how far I've come, it feels pretty good.

Night night.

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...

Day 42: Hooves

We awake on the edge of the village, to forests of nettles swaying gently in the breeze. Between the nettles bees bumble around bright flowers and blackbirds peck hungrily at the grass. Clouds slide by overhead, the washing line bobs in the moving air, and we sit on plump tasseled cushions, drinking tea and feeling at peace.

As we're making breakfast the nice lady from next door comes by. She wants to show us the pendant that her son brought back from the Eastern European country in which he was stationed during "the war". The pendant glows preternaturally, and emits a strange humming as we lean in. Fran has reached out her hand towards it, a faraway look on her face, but just as she is about to touch the stone at its centre, the wild-haired bookshop owner raps on the door and we all look up.

"Thought I'd stop by to see how you youngsters were settling in," he says amiably, his kind, olive-green eyes shining in the morning light. "Deidre--" he nods to our neighbour "--I expect you'll need to be getting back to your, ahh, meat stock. Smelled to be burning, as I passed."

Our neighbour smiles sweetly at the bookshop owner, showing a long row of teeth, and retreats beyond the threshold back onto the lane. I notice the pendant has been stowed back inside the folds of her long shawl.

We chat to the bookshop owner, but after a short time he says he must be getting back to his shop. "Can't be too careful, eh?" he says lightly. "Anyway, it's good to see new faces round these parts. The village of late has been... Well, I'm glad to see you, is all."

He leaves, flattening down his wiry hair. I wonder to Fran what brought him out our way. His shop is on the other side of town.

After eating we decide to go for an amble to the surrounding countryside. We can't find any walks online -- reception on our phones is intermittent out here -- but there is an old frayed map Fran comes across in the back of a cupboard upstairs, and inside its yellowed folds what looks to be a route marked in deep red leading into the hills away from the village.

"Must be directions of a walk left by a previous visitor to the cottage," Fran says.

There is an area on the map ringed in the same red, with cursive script beside it, though neither of us can make out the words, or even what language it is written in.

"Hungarian, perhaps?" I say.

Fran nods. "Probably pointing out a good picnic spot."

We pack a rucksack and put on our walking shoes and set off.

The map tells us to follow the road down the hill, past the fish and chip shop with its closed shutters and the pub with its closed shutters and the arcane trinkets store, which, though it appears open from far away, as we reach we find is, also, shuttered.

"Guess they value their lunchbreaks here," I muse.

At the bottom of the hill we cross a stone bridge and then turn down a path overhanging with ivy, and squeeze through a small gate into the woods. It's hard to make out the public footpath signs, or even if they are there at all.

We ascend through the trees, following a bubbling river below us on the left, beyond a clearing with ground that almost looks scorched out, and beyond some discarded rubbish, hospital gowns, grip ties, blades from agricultural equipment, just nondescript stuff, until finally we break free of the tree line and come out into the fields overlooking the village.

The hamlet looks funny from up here, almost like the streets have been designed to allow the houses to point inwards at one another in a shape that resembles... a symbol of some kind, though I can't quite think what.

The earth below us is trembling, there must be diggers nearby, perhaps they're putting up another of those churches -- there seem to be so many churches for such a small place, and obviously they don't have the staff for them, as the doors of each that we've tried have been locked shut with large iron chains.

We are nearly at the place marked on the map. There is a definite vibration in the ground now, and a strange smell, and a weird humming noise, like the one we heard from the pendant, only rounder, more encompassing. One more field, and we'll be there. There is some sort of structure just over the lip of the hill. We can see pillars, a gateway, a chainlink fence.

And then we see what is causing the ground to tremble. We see why we can go no further.

Cows. Hundreds of cows, trotting down into the field to block our path. They flood over the hill, their dark hooves clattering over the hardened soil, their inky eyes staring straight at us.

The animals in the centre of the group carry on approaching, while the outliers fan out to either side. Flanked by old, weathered creatures, I spot the bull. He has a jet-black hide, a tail like anchor rope, bony horns scratching at the sky. Yet his eyes are so full, so expressive. They shine even from that far off, bright and brilliant and olive green.

The mooing starts up. It fills the air. It fills all our senses. Louder, louder, a low guttural moan warning us back.

We turn. We run.

We've spent the rest of the day huddled indoors with the blinds down, the television blaring, trying to connect to the internet on our phones. I can still hear that mooing, I don't know if I will ever get it out of my mind. Send Snapchat pictures. Send Whatsapp memes. Send anything at all. Are you still out there, civilisation? Or is it now only the cows?

Day 41: Cottaging

Oh boy am I tired? That's a rhetorical question the rhetoric of which is designed to teach you that, yes, I am tired. I'm really so tired. So I needs to come here and write this now because I'm going to pass out in about seven minutes and I need to do this first. I'm in a cottage in the countryside with Fran and the dog. We've had fish and chips, wrapped in real newspaper -- good to know print is still useful for something -- and Mission has pooed by the side of the road, which poo Fran had to pick up with the newspaper from her mushy peas pot because she'd forgotten to come out with any bags, which process of picking up the poo with the newspaper was overseen by all the noteworthy folk of the village, who were sat out front of the local pub discussing village matters and drinking Strongbow cider and plotting nefarious schemes. They're always plotting nefarious schemes, right, the villagers? Old Tom from the Post Office, and Debbie who won best turnip at last year's school fete, and Father Tunbridge -- he of the neat little smile and the too-clear eyes and the immaculate yet waxen skin. What are you up to, Father Tunbridge?

Well anyway they all watched Fran pick up poo in a newspaper, and then amiably pointed out the nearest bin and we all chuckled, and I said, "We'd better not get that mixed up with the mushy peas," and they laughed again, and waved us on. But underneath, I know what they were thinking underneath, telepathically, towards Father Tunbridge, sitting unmoving at the centre of his invisible web. They were thinking: "Prepare the antechamber, call forth the disciples, for this weekend the ritual shall begin anew."

Meh, as long as I find somewhere tomorrow to buy some decent coffee, they can do what they want with my eternal soul. Not like I was using it anyway.

Bye!

P.S. It's very nice here.