Friday: The Shine Reaches Unholy Levels

The situation, I’m afraid, has escalated beyond even my most cautious predictions. Ethel-our once charmingly dishevelled Ethel-now glows faintly in the moonlight. Glows, I tell you. It’s not a healthy glow, mind you, not the sort of glow you get after a good scrub or a brisk walk. No, it’s the sort of glow that makes you question your very existence, as though she’s absorbed a bit too much of the wrong kind of energy. She smells, too. It’s not the comforting scent of lavender or freshly baked bread. No. Ethel now smells of old linen and ozone, like a forgotten attic after a lightning storm. Frankly, it’s the kind of smell that would make your grandmother’s wardrobe seem positively fragrant in comparison.

It seems that the villagers are beginning to feel the effects of her newfound radiance. They’ve been reporting strange occurrences. One gentleman, Mr. Scrivens, woke to find that his cupboards had been tidied overnight. Tidied! Every single mug, every tin of baked beans, perfectly arranged. His socks were folded, as though some small, incredibly organised fairy had decided to do his laundry while he was sleeping. The worst part? Mr. Scrivens could not remember a time when his regrets had been so gently reordered. He says he woke up, for the first time in years, with the strange, unsettling feeling that perhaps he hadn’t made all the wrong decisions in life.

Keith, naturally, is deeply unsettled by the whole affair. Keith, who once tried to install an air-conditioning unit in a garden shed, now believes the duck pond is the root of all evil. “Firewall protection,” he muttered in that tone of voice I only hear when he’s on the brink of one of his “great ideas.” It seems Keith’s plan is to install an actual firewall around the duck pond, to “contain the digital spread of the supernatural.” I can’t imagine what he’s expecting to block-perhaps he’s worried the ducks are going to start tweeting about their newfound powers or livestreaming their cleansing rituals. Whatever it is, he’s taken to pacing around the pond with a drill and what looks like a dozen extension cords. It’s best not to ask questions at this point.

Now, I, Virgil, have taken to a more traditional approach. A cautious, slightly paranoid approach. I’ve dug out my mothballed “Anti-Clean Trousers”-the ones I wear only for the most dire of situations. They’re made from the finest, most repellent fabric known to man, with a subtle blend of mud stains and the faint scent of tobacco. I’ve begun writing a counter-spell, a powerful and foolproof method to reverse whatever this is. It involves goose grease, mud, and a copy of Woman’s Weekly from 1982, which, as anyone in the occult will tell you, is the most potent ingredient when combating unnatural tidiness.

This counter-spell may take a few hours to complete (it’s remarkably fiddly work), but once it’s done, I intend to cast it with the precision of a man who has absolutely nothing to lose and a great deal of unresolved laundry. After all, I’m starting to wonder if Ethel’s “cleaning” is, in fact, just an elaborate plot to make everyone forget the true purpose of their own dust bunnies. If that happens, I may have no choice but to face the terrifying truth that this village-our village-may never know the sweet, comforting chaos of a cupboard full of mismatched mugs again.