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Back Bad Apples Save as PDF
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  65. Acknowledgements

Julia agrees to keep my Hilux locked away in her garage for as long as I need it there. She helps me put on the mask I bought from the wood-carving sisters. I pull on a black ski hat and she checks the coast is clear before I head out the front door. She places her rinsed-out pasta saucepan by her step and looks back to me and winks and says, ‘All clear.’

My mask smells of goat skin, even though the sisters told me it’s boar. I adjust the eye slits and try not to let my lips touch the fleshy side of the leather.

‘Thanks, Julia,’ I say.

She pushes me toward the road.

‘Don’t let them bully you. Don’t eat anything. And don’t, whatever you do, do not go inside the Hive tonight.’

18

The streetlights have been covered over with rough sacks. There are slits and holes cut into the sacks so they let out some light, but it’s weak and it moves around with the breeze.

Visberg town square is a dark place tonight.

The next thing I notice as I approach the side of the dental surgery is the smell. Bonfire smoke and grilled meat and rancid old apples. The air is thick with the sickly sweet smells of autumn.

I adjust my mask and walk past a fire basket and on towards the Hive. The wood spits and hisses. The bee on the roof is illuminated like it normally is, but it’s spinning at least twenty times faster. I’m mesmerised as it turns. Blurry. Its squeak has sped up to a buzz. A low hum. The thing looks like it might fly off the roof at any second.

No cars around. No vehicles of any description.

I’m twenty metres from the square when I hear it.

The howls. The cackles and the chanting and the manic laughter. How many locals have gathered for this? There are three-thousand residents or so in this town. Take away the kids, and the grandparents looking after the kids, and that must leave almost a thousand souls.

I walk past empty pans. Saucepans with glass lids and cast-iron cauldrons as tall as my knee. Bowls of peeled eggs left beside some of the pans. Peeled and white and sat in clear liquid.

My vision is impeded by the fog and the wood smoke and the darkness but most of all this hog-hide mask. It smells of the wilderness. Of rotten meat.

A couple walks toward me.