I got my answer that night, when I awoke from my sleep to find two people leading away an unfortunate person gagged and screaming. He didn’t look like he came from this village. I looked out of my window when I saw this, and I couldn’t help but gasp. So they kidnapped people from the nearby villages as well. In the dim light I could make out the outline and could deduce quite well that it was in fact the barman who had informed me about the village when I first arrived. I found it difficult to sleep. The waxing gibbous hung in the sky, and it was covered by the clouds sailing past it. The very sight of it made me want to retch.

That morning, I got up and dusted Mr Wilson’s grandfather clock. It was an heirloom he said. He’d inherited it from his mother, who had recently passed away. Due to everything that had happened to me, I doubted that his story was true. Even if he did have a mother, there remained a distinct possibility that she didn’t pass away, but was sacrificed. A thick cloud of dust burst out of the grandfather clock all of a sudden, and it made me cough. There was something odd about it. Dust couldn’t just come spewing out of a grandfather clock. Such things were impossible.

When I returned to Clarence’s cottage, he was watching the news on the television and groaning. “This c-c-country has really gone d-d-downhill in the l-l-last hundred years,” he lamented. He was sitting on the sofa, drinking beer. There was definitely an image of Arthur Scargill on the television, but it was definitely difficult to make out because the image was black and white and it constantly flickered.

Indeed, there was something odd about him having a television at all, now that I thought about it. That television had to be stolen as well. Suddenly, it dawned on me. Nobody else in the entire village had a television set, and those had advanced significantly in the last thirty years. As far as I knew, Clarence was the only person in town to possess one.

“The goddess is hungry! The goddess is hungry!” Those were the four words repeating themselves in my head, over and over again.  To clear my head of all these words, I went for a walk in the forest. The sun had gone over the trees by that point, and I was desperate to feel the last of its heat before the rain came on. I looked around, and came across the part of the forest where the corpses were laid out. There lay Charlie Raymond’s corpse, sure enough, and the sight of it made me want to retch, but there was another corpse nearby. The sight of that also induced some kind of sickening feeling. Having had breakfast that morning, I finally fulfilled these urges and threw up all over the corpse. Inspecting the corpse, I could see that it wore a very familiar-looking policeman’s helmet and uniform and that it had recently started to rot, especially somewhere around the face. It was at this point that I definitely understood what they were capable of.

They wouldn’t have let that policeman go, certainly not alive anyway. The fact that he turned out to be a good resource of fuel for their sacrificial fire was definitely a factor, though. Every single sacrifice must have wandered into this village by simple chance. That’s all it had to be. I looked up at the sky and noticed that the first drops of rain were falling. There was a sound of thunder. It didn’t sound like it did in the films – after all, thunder and lightning almost never do – but it definitely sounded like a big rumble in the heavens. It was as though the heavens themselves were weeping at the very sight of these corpses. To be fair, it almost made me wish to weep as well. I did nothing but I merely stared up at the sky for a few seconds.

“HAVEN’T I TOLD YOU NOT TO WANDER OFF?”

At the sound of that shout, I started. I turned my head and I found Clarence, staring at me. Then he exploded into one of the rambles that I could have come to expect from him. “You silly, silly boy? Don’t you know this area is forbidden? Prohibited, restricted, verboten, taboo, unauthorised, unsanctioned, tapu, outlawed, zakazany, interdit, kielletty? The point is that you’re not even allowed to set foot here, and the Council forbids anyone to enter any part of the forest that isn’t the site of the altar. Come, come, I need your help. Mr Harris’ lintel needs to be repaired and I need you on site as my assistant.” He grabbed my arm in such a way that made me feel uncomfortable, in a way that I couldn’t really understand. He dragged me out of the forest, and shoved the new lintel into my hand.

We travelled to Mr Harris’ house and were greeted by him with a scowl. Clarence retrieved his tools and put up a stool. He climbed onto the stool and asked me to hand him the new lintel. I did so on his orders. Clarence did not use any modern tools, such as we use – electric drills and all that. He did use a drill, but it required some kind of rotating crank to work, and he had me hold the lintel in place while he drilled holes in it. Then he told me to get some nails, which I did, and I also remembered to retrieve the hammer without being ordered to do so. Clarence hammered these nails into the lintel, with such great dexterity that I really could believe that he was the village handyman. Once the job was complete, Mr Harris somewhat reluctantly thanked me and Clarence, and we departed for our next job.

Our next job was to repair the gazebo in the back garden of Elder Willoughby’s mansion. It had blown down in the night. Soon after I fell back asleep, there had been an unusually strong wind, which had blown apart the wooden structure. When he’d awoken in the morning, Elder Willoughby had been extremely annoyed, which is why he’d sent for Clarence and me. This job was considerably more difficult, since it involved me holding several parts of it together. The wooden parts of the gazebo had splinters, and the fact that Clarence grunted and cursed as he worked didn’t help matters much. Furthermore, please be assured that the job was eventually done. What was interesting to note was that I had barely been paid at all since I first arrived in the village. The total amount was a grand total of ten pounds, which is barely enough money to live on. I daresay Clarence made more money than I did, but I didn’t know, since I had no idea where he kept it all. I checked around the village and I couldn’t really find a bank or anything.

On our way back, I had the misfortune to run into Mr Harris’ granddaughter, who was running in the street. She tripped, and dropped the doll she was carrying. Clarence grinned. He did something really bad to her, and she screamed in response, a horrible, deafening shriek that sounded less human and more like the cry of a banshee when someone’s about to die. I won’t describe exactly what he did, but if you have some measure of experience with what people like him have done, then perhaps you will recognise it. Nobody helped. No policeman came rushing to arrest Clarence. I found myself feeling even more terrified of Clarence than ever, even though I couldn’t clearly see what on earth he was actually doing. Of course, I remembered that he was my host, and that I had no other option but to stay with him. Nobody else was willing to take me in, and the Council of Elders’ word was the law. Cassandra Barraclough passed by, and when she did, Clarence looked at her like a wolf. Cassandra rushed off, pretending that she hadn’t noticed.

“You can’t do things like this!” I cried. “English law forbids it!”

It was here that Clarence immediately returned to that same meek neurotic façade he would often pull around people like me. “L-L-L-Like what?” he asked. “I haven’t done anything,” he added, once again launching into those ridiculous rants. “I’m sure I remember I must have done something, but not the thing you’re even thinking of, I’m afraid, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Your accusation that I might have done something wrong, any crime is silly. Anyway, what law could apply to us? There are no laws around here. Nasty, ugly, bothersome things, laws, they always try to impose limits on you and it’s not very conducive to a particularly enlightened universe, where the only law is the law of the immortal gods. Don’t ever forget that, dear boy!” He said this last one in a mockingly-gentle tone that made me even more unnerved.

That night, while Clarence was asleep, I did some looking around, trying to find something. I found a loose floorboard, which is a classical sign of money. I lifted the floorboard and true enough there was such a large heap of banknotes such as you’ve never seen. I took the privilege of pocketing some. I felt like Jack stealing the giant’s treasure. Since it just wasn’t satisfying enough to take a mere twenty-pound note, I then pocketed a fifty-pound note, as well as multiple twenty-pound notes, so that once I had finished, I wasn’t necessarily a millionaire, but at least had enough money to comfortably live on. Then I quietly replaced the floorboard and went back to bed, quietly walking on tiptoe. I stuffed some of the money into some pocket on the inside of my raincoat that I hadn’t previously noticed was there and I hid away in my bed.