Now that the story featuring the craft shop is written, it’s clear that the place contains a dark sinister secret. For all its twee china birds and pretty watercolours of local landscapes, its air of having been by-passed by the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first, despite the ordinariness of its current owner, it cannot completely shake off the history of evil that still lurks in a forgotten corner.
Ooooh, scary!
This is the kind of scary that happens in a children’s book I once read called ‘Frog and Toad are Friends’, in which the protagonists get scared together, and I think the final line is ‘It was a good feeling.’
It isn’t the kind of scary where you’re running down a dark alley being chased by a mad axe murderer, or on the bus late in the evening wondering if the two horrible drunken men in a seat between you and the door are going to do anything violent. Or even the kind of scary you feel when you’ve done something very stupid either at home or at work, realise it with a sinking feeling and wish you could re-wind time and correct it.
No, it’s somewhere between the Frog and Toad good feeling and the satisfaction of having finished an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Or at least, that’s what I hope to convey in this story, now entitled ‘Conclusions’.
Cecilia Peartree - woman of mystery 