The bathroom was deserted. There was no one in the stalls, and both the bath and the shower cubicles were empty. Not only empty, but cold, and silent, and dry. I walked back to the room quickly, my head feeling much clearer already. Strangely clear, in fact: it generally takes an hour or so for my head to start recovering from a hangover. Hands on hips I looked around the room and tried to work out where she’d be. Then I noticed the shade of the clouds outside, and suddenly turned to look at my watch on the table.
It was twenty to four in the afternoon.
For a moment I had a complete sensation of panic, as if I’d overslept and missed the most important meeting of my life. Or even worse, perhaps, as if it were just starting, this minute, on the other side of town. The feeling subsided, but only slightly, as I scrabbled round the room for some more clothes. Normally I have to bathe in the mornings, will simply not enter company without doing so: which is part of why I say now that I already knew something was wrong. Perhaps something that had happened the night before, something that I had forgotten, told me that things were amiss. A bath didn’t seem important.
It took five minutes to find the room keys where I’d dropped them, and then I locked the room and walked quickly down the corridor. I ducked my head into the bathroom again, but nothing had changed. As I passed one of the other doors I flinched slightly, expecting to hear some sound, but none came. I wasn’t even sure what I was expecting.
The lower floor of the guest house was equally deserted. I checked in what passed as the breakfast room, although they would obviously have stopped serving by late afternoon. I stood in front of the desk and even rang the bell, but no one appeared. Pointlessly I ran back upstairs again, checked the room, and even knocked timidly on one of the other doors. There was no response.
Downstairs again I wandered into the sitting room, wondering what to do. There was no reason for the increasing unease and downright fright I was feeling. Susan wouldn’t have just left me. She must be out in town somewhere, with everyone else. It was Festival day, after all. Maybe she’d wanted to see it. Maybe she’d told me that last night, and I’d been too splatted to take it in.
The two cups we’d drunk tea out of the night before were still there, still sitting on the table next to the Festival pamphlet. Frowning, I walked towards them. Guest house landladies are generally obsessed with tidiness. And where was she, anyway? Surely she didn’t just abandon her guest house because a poxy town Festival was on?
As I looked at the cups I experienced a sudden lurching in my stomach, which puzzled me. It was almost like a feeling I used to get looking through the window of a certain pizza chain, when I saw the thick red sauce that coated the pizzas on the plates of the people inside. When you’ve seen and felt that same sauce coming out of your nose while you’re buckled up over a toilet in the small hours, you tend not to feel too positive about it in the future. The reaction has nothing to do with your mind, but a lot to do with the voiceless body making its warning clear in the only way it can.
A feeling of nausea. Why should I feel that about tea?
I moved a little closer to the table and peered into the cups. One had a small amount left in the bottom, which was to be expected: Susan never quite finished a cup. My cup was empty. At the bottom of the cup, almost too faintly to be seen, the pottery sparkled slightly, as if something there was irregularly reflecting the light. Feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach without warning, I kneeled beside the table to take a closer look.
I hadn’t had sugar in my tea last night. I never do. I gave it up three years ago and lost over half-a-stone, and I’m vain enough to want to keep it that way. But there was something in the bottom of the cup. I picked the other cup up and tilted it slightly. The small puddle of tea rocked to reveal a similar patch on the bottom. It was less defined than in my cup, but it was still there.
Something had been put in our tea.
I looked up suddenly at the door, sure that it had moved. I couldn’t see any difference, but I stood up anyway. I stood up and I ran out of the house.
As I walked quickly down the front towards the square I tried to make sense of what I’d found. To a degree it added up. I’d felt very, very strange when I’d gone upstairs the night before, strange in a way I’d never experienced through alcohol before. I’d hugely overslept too, which also made sense, and the hangover I’d woken up with had passed differently to usual.
As I approached the square I slowed down a little. I realised that I’d been expecting lots of people to be gathered there, celebrating this benighted village’s Festival. There was no one. The corner of the square I could see was as empty as it had been the night before.
Susan, on the other hand, had got up early. Which also made sense: she’d thrown up immediately after we’d drunk the tea. Less of it would have made it into her bloodstream, and she’d not have experienced the same effects. That made sense. That was fine.
But two things weren’t fine, and didn’t make sense whichever way I added them up.
First, most obviously, why had someone put something in our tea? This wasn’t a film, some Agatha Christie mystery: this was a small village on the English coast. Who would want to drug us, and why?
The second question was less clear-cut, but bothered me even more. Susan had an iron constitution, and could hold her drink. She could drink like a fish, to be honest. So why had she thrown up, so long after drinking, when I hadn’t?
Perhaps she was supposed to. Perhaps the drug, whatever it was, had different effects on different people.
The square was completely deserted. I stood still for a moment, trying to work out what to do next. There was no bunting, no posters, nothing to suggest a town event was in progress. I turned around slowly, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rise. It was unnaturally quiet in that rotten, decomposing square, abnormally empty and silent. It didn’t just feel as if no one was there. It felt like the fucking Twilight Zone.
I walked across to The Aldwinkle and peered in through the window. The pub was empty and the lights were off, but I tried the door anyway. It was open. Inside I stood at the bar and shouted, but no one came. Something had happened in the pub after we had been there last night. Some of the chairs had been shunted to the side of the room, and others put in their place. They looked like the chairs in the guest house, ugly and misshapen. Their occupants had obviously had better luck when trying to buy a drink: a few of the small glasses lay scattered on one of the tables. One of the Festival pamphlets lay there too, and I irritably swatted it aside. It fluttered noisily to the floor and fell open, displaying its ridiculous inaccuracies. R’lyeh iä fhtagn!, for example. What the fuck was that supposed to mean?
It did at least make me think more clearly. The Festival had started at three o’clock. I knew that. What I didn’t know was where it had started. Presumably it took the form of a procession, which began at one end of the town and ended at another, possibly in the square. Perhaps I was here too early. I was now hopping from foot to foot with anxiety over Susan, and felt that anything had to be worth trying. If the Festival wouldn’t come to me, I’d bloody well go and find it.
I launched myself out of the pub, slamming the door shut behind me, and ran off towards the opposite corner of the square. I carried on up the little road, past yet more dilapidated houses, casting glances down narrow side roads. When the road began to peter out into cliffside I turned and went another way. And another. And another.