Queit Places: A Novella of Cosmic Folk Horror

PROLOGUERight now:They were waiting for her on Dundooan Road.Sally turned the corner and there they were—an older woman and a young boy, who looked very much alike. They were obviously mother and son. Neither of them noticed Sally, they simply stared straight ahead with glazed eyes.The mother was short and thickset, wearing a woollen hat, a long raincoat and carrying an old cloth shopping bag. The son was about twelve years old, skinny and pale with black hair. He wore a hoodie, jeans and trainers.There was no expression on their faces, their jaws were slack and their mouths hung open. The son was standing a few steps behind his mother, his right arm swung backwards and forwards in a shallow arc. The mother was swaying slightly, as if the shopping bag was about to overbalance her. There was nothing going on behind their eyes, no mental faculties of any sort. They were completely soulless, everyone in Dunballan was. Everyone except for Sally.She walked over to the mother and

CHAPTER 2Sally opened her back gate and stepped into the garden. She glanced at all the unplanted rows she and David had dug when they planned to make an allotment.The beans she’d planted had begun to sprout. The warm weather was good for them. The little row of canes was half-finished, and the rest of the trench was empty. Sally was sorry now that they hadn’t completed it. Like so many things in their relationship, it was left unfinished.A sudden wind sprang up from the west. It bent the trees in the fields next to the cottage, but it was neither hot nor cold. It ruffled the grass, rattled the hedges, and lifted Sally’s hair and skirt, but she couldn’t feel it on her skin, nor could she smell any of the scents that a wind such as this usually carried. It was almost entirely bodiless, you could see and experience its effects, but you couldn’t feel them.The leaves in the hedgerow made a dry, scratchy noise as they scuttled about in its wake. The hedgerow itself rustled, as if fi

CHAPTER 4Three weeks ago:Sally had popped into the library to cheer herself up. A coffee-morning at the community centre had emptied the place of pensioners and Jane was all by herself behind the desk. She waved Sally over when she saw her come in.“I have something for you,” Jane said.Sally wasn’t too sure about this, she didn’t feel like chatting with Jane, but she was excited to see what Jane might have picked out for her, it might be an Audrey Niffenegger or a new Jennifer Egan she hadn’t read. Jane nipped into the back room and appeared a moment later with a thick, green pamphlet.“I think you might find this very interesting,” she said, handing it to Sally.Sally found it hard to mask her disappointment. “Oh,” was all she could say looking at the battered green cover. It had an old woodcut on the front, showing a hare by a riverside, looking up at a smiling moon. The title, printed in crude block letters, was Highways, Havens and Highlands by James Hendry.“It’s by a lo

CHAPTER 6First weeks in Dunballan:David had no problem selling his apartment, it was snapped up after only a few viewings. He sold most of his other possessions and was ready to move in a matter of months.Sally did not have it so easy. She found a buyer, but got caught up in a property chain that dragged on interminably and seemed like it would never be resolved. She would have pulled out and put her flat back on the market, but the buyer was offering her so much over the asking price that she didn’t want to lose him.She gave notice at the primary school where she worked as a teacher, but there wasn’t time to find a similar position in or around Dunballan.“I’ve no idea what I’m going to do for an income,” she said to David over the phone, soon after he’d left for Dunballan. “Maybe I should wait a bit before coming up, at least until I’ve sold my flat.”“No, don’t do that.” There was a hint of alarm in David’s voice that wasn’t like him, nor was the needy undertone. “I’ve got

CHAPTER 8Sally became less frightened of the Beast, but not less wary. It seemed to be less nervous of being seen, creeping closer and closer to the house.She glimpsed it at the edge of the forest, coming a little farther out from the trees each time. Then she caught sight of it behind a hedgerow in the field next to her garden. Finally, while she was standing at the back door to the cottage, looking out over the gentle slope of the garden, she saw its long, sinuous tail flicking backwards and forwards over the top of the garden wall.It never made the slightest noise and disappeared from view almost as soon as she saw it. Sally sometimes wondered if her eyes were playing tricks on her, but she knew David was aware of its presence too, even though he refused to acknowledge the Beast, let alone discuss it.Sally took to leaving knives, axes, and anything else she could use as a weapon, around the cottage and garden, hidden in strategic places so she was never far from something sh