Chapter 39
When I reached the village, I barely recognised it.
Bright pastel bunting hung from every gutter and every lamppost, casting fluttering shadows over the road and pavements.
Buckets of lobelia and pansies clustered at the foot of every café, restaurant and pub, filling the air with a pungent floral aroma that caught in the back of my throat.
Every window was dressed in frilled gingham.
Every table sported a polka-dot wipeable cloth.
It was as if the Hallmark channel had thrown up all over the place.
There was no mud. All the grass was uniform.
The cobbles were clean. It was so extreme that all inferred cosiness had been burned away and all that was left was a monoculture of pastel plastic.
It reminded me of Disneyland. Of costumed characters.
Of the brand emails I was so very good at writing.
As I crossed Bodach’s Brig, I saw Maggie from Maggie’s Café, all pretence of a smile gone now, trying to knock down one of the seven hanging baskets clustered around the café windows with a broom, and scowling as she did.
The teenagers were nowhere to be found.
The village was quiet.
I stared at the aggressively cheery decoration.
Flowers were wound around every lamppost until you couldn’t see the lamppost anymore.
The planters and pots made the paths nigh-on unusable.
I wanted to laugh. It felt like something to laugh at.
But I couldn’t. It wasn’t just the feeling of threat underlying it all, the thin veneer of respectability over something truly unhinged. There was something else.
Something sad.
I reached out with my good hand to one of the flower baskets Maggie had knocked to the ground. This one was filled with daffodils, small and delicate, with white almost see-through petals and sunny yellow trumpets. The petals were cold and soft in my fingers.
Poor wee thing, I thought. You’re supposed to be cheerful, but you’re just frightening everyone away.
I straightened up. It was time I got to the bottom of this, before the madness spread across the whole village.
I picked my way through a line of sunflowers and ducked up the lane toward The Curtyard.
I stepped inside the pub and found most of the other villagers hunkering within.
Everyone jumped and turned to the sound of the door as if I’d popped a balloon.
The place was packed and yet eerily quiet.
No one spoke louder than a whisper. Viv stood behind the bar staring toward the rippled windows, the light from the sunny pastel colours dancing over the zebras marching across her T-shirt.
The zebras on the balcony seemed to look on with much disapproval.
The red-faced man—Dave, I think Rowan said his name was—was here as well, practically clinging to the edge of the bar.
I found the teens, huddled together in one of the booths.
Fergus saw me from the other booth and ducked his head down.
The only faces I couldn’t see were Rowan’s—I imagined he was up among the trees, sat among the saplings, watching the clouds come over the glen—and the old man’s.
“Look. The dog woman’s arrived,” said the boy from earlier.
For once, no one laughed.
“Shut up.” Dave glowered in the boy’s direction. The boy sank down in the booth and scowled.
I shuffled through the crowd toward Viv. She was on her phone, speaking in low, angry tones about when someone could come out to “hack the jungle down”. The line of zebras up on the shelf seemed to cower back.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for—”
“Yeah, through the door by the fireplace.” She pointed me across the room, not even looking away from the window.
Sure enough, there was a door next to the fireplace. I’d never seen a door there before. Perhaps there was a private dining room.
“She said to keep an eye out for you.”
Of course she was waiting for me.
I shuffled through the crowd to the door and slipped inside.