🕰️ Virgil Twobyfour — Saturday Morning Dispatch from The Edge of Reason

Good morning all (I think),

Woke this morning to the sound of the gooseberry nets flapping in an entirely windless dawn. Something's off. The light was wrong — too clean somehow, like everything had been boiled, bleached and badly stitched back together. Even the crows have stopped their usual chorus of swearing and bone-throwing. They're just watching, the lot of them, from the fenceposts, blinking slowly like judges at a village fete custard contest.

The Travelling Fayre continues to insinuate itself into our every crevice. Last night, a new stall appeared behind the postbox. It wasn’t there at 7pm, but by quarter past, a striped awning had unfurled like a venomous flower, and there was a man in a velvet waistcoat offering "Consultations of a Nostalgic Nature." I do not know what that means. I asked, and he simply replied, “It’s not for you, Virgil,” and patted my arm with a hand that was somehow very cold and very warm at once.

Children are still congregating by the Punch & Judy stall. No one has seen the puppets move, yet they all insist it has been “on”. Their little faces are blank as tablecloths. I tried waving. One of them blinked. That was it.

There is now an entire quadrant of the cricket pitch occupied by mirrored funhouse corridors. No doors, no windows, just the humming of a cheap generator and the rustle of paper streamers. The ducks are refusing to go near it. And I trust the ducks. They knew about the vicar’s bad knee before he did.

Terry remains entirely absent, and now Mrs Allbut’s nephew Dean reports that the clocks at the garage all read 1996 and cannot be adjusted. This may explain why my milk has curdled pre-delivery and I’ve just found a copy of the Radio Times from that year behind the breadbin.

The scent of toffee apples, scorched hay, and — yes, a hint of formaldehyde — is now a permanent fixture in the air. I’ve had to shove a clove-studded pomander up each nostril to function.

There’s a rising hum under everything, like a distant engine idling in your own spine. Something is coalescing. I don’t know what, but I’ve told Keith to get the good netting out and start stacking the emergency jams in alphabetical order, just in case.

I will continue to monitor the situation from the relative safety of my bean shed.

Hold fast, dear villagers. Avoid reflections and anything that asks your name twice.

Yrs in anticipatory dread,
Virgil Twobyfour
Shwami, retired pastry chef, Fayre-adjacent correspondent