They did not. Truth be told, they didn’t look like “places.” Just splotches of bright paint.

Except for one. One had bright paint, but it had something else.

“Hey, Doug.” He waved a fellow over. “Look at this, will ya?”

Doug took the device and appeared to be having trouble focusing.

“What the fook is that?”

“Does it look familiar?”

“It looks like a migraine.”

He tossed the device back to Stuart.

“Look again, you great scrotum,” said Stuart. “I think I know this place.”

“It’s a place?” Doug took it and looked again. “On earth? Poor ones.”

“Not just on earth, down the road.”

“You’re pissed,” Doug said, but continued to study the picture. Then his eyes widened and he looked at Stuart.

“Speculation, lad.”

“Aye,” said Stuart. “I thought so too. It’s cosmic.”

*   *   *

Next morning, Constable Stuart got up early and drove six miles north. The sun was just coming up and burning off the mist when he parked the car and got out.

He changed into rubber boots and took his cell phone with him. Studying the photos Gamache had sent, Constable Stuart set off across the grass.

Once away from the road, the land dipped and he found himself in a gully where the mist and fog pooled. He wore a sweater, but suddenly wished it was thicker, heavier. And he suddenly wished he wasn’t alone.

Constable Stuart was not given to flights of imagination. Not more than any other Celt. But standing there, all color drained from the world, most color drained from him, the ghouls of his maternal grandmother’s tales came back. The warnings of his paternal grandfather came back.

The ancient ghosts, the restless souls, the malevolent spirits came back. They took all the colors from the world, and in the drained mist they settled around him.

“Pull yourself together,” he told himself. “Do this quickly, then get back in time for a coffee and a bacon butty.”

The very idea of the bacon sandwich cheered him as he walked carefully through the fog, his feet testing the ground in front of him.

He kept the image of the bacon butty in the forefront of his mind, like a talisman. A charm. A replacement for the crucifix his grandmother once wore.

Pulling out his device, he paused to send the Québec fellow a message.

“It’s cosmic” he typed, and got no further.

His foot slipped on the grass, wet with dew. His arms pinwheeled, trying to move backward in time. To before the misstep. To before he arrived. To before he’d decided to come to this God-forsaken place.

His right leg slipped out from under him. Then his left. His hand opened and his iPhone flew away. It went sailing through the air, to be grabbed by the ghouls in the mist. For an instant, Constable Robert Stuart was suspended in midair. Flying.