The next morning we felt a little worse for wear. Alison had had three double hot toddies, and I had two, (still drove home in the time honoured tradition of pub goers, “I’m fine! And anyway, PC Plod changes shift in half an hour so won’t want to be working through the night doing paperwork, will they?”) Stupid. I know.
And I agree…. My apologies, but it is what happened that night.
Alison was looking frazzled by the time we left the pub, but was putting on a stoic face and smiling as much as she could. Her conversation had come in truncated mouthfuls of words, either running in to each other, or leaving such gaps between as to think she had stopped talking. It was quite funny, but I felt very similar, so was completely with her.
We got home safely and once in the house we had showers, made a brew and met up in bed at 23:48 exactly. We hadn’t really talked about the evening walk while in the pub, too many villagers and distant neighbours wanting to ask about this and that. But we were definitely shook up by it.
Soon we were sat up with backs up against our bundles of pillows. We had our cups, did our last ‘cheers’ of the day and both had a long gulp of red hot tea. Alison prefers coffee really, but I made an executive decision that we needed to sleep, so tea it was.
After a couple of minutes of silence, I casually asked if she was ok.
“Are you ok?”
“Think so.”
“Mad evening wasn’t it?”
“Oh my God. Ken, we saw a woman and a hare transform into other things…. Mad is the only word I will accept!”
” We definitely weren’t drunk or high were we? I mean I feel fine now, apart from a slight whisky headache building up, and tired. I feel so tired.”
Alison spent a few seconds pushing her blankets down, then pulling them back up, before saying anything more. She picked her cup up and finished the cooling liquid in it, slammed the cup back on the bedside unit and turned to look right at me.
“I was terrified. And I was also so excited. And I’m tired now too. And I’m a bit tipsy too, and a feel just a tiny bit sick..”
“It’s a lovely picture you’re painting!”
“Don’t be a knob Ken!”
“Sorreee!” I spluttered in a passing resemblance of Ronnie Corbett.
“Any way, any other thoughts to share. What do you think we saw? Some sort of play or show for Halloween? Real Ghosts? A Prank? I just can’t get my head around it at all. All I know is that it felt real. I really think we saw what we felt we had seen. The figure. The hare. The otter. The birds. The bloody chicken, what the hell was the chicken all about?”
“I know. the one that really got me was the chicken too. So surreal.”
“You finished your tea? Want anything else?
“No I’m done now thanks. Just want to close my eyes and sleep. Cuddle me..”
“Want the telly on low?”
“No, I don’t think so. Turn the light off and cuddle me – that’s all I need.”
“Message received and understood!”
“Knob head!”
I awoke around 7:30am. Straight wide awake. Alison was snoring, loudly. Her arms everywhere, blankets kicked onto the floor and her legs thrown across my hips.
I needed a wee.
Ten minutes later I reappeared by the bed. Coffees, buttered toast, yoghurts and some raspberries on the heavy brass tray I was holding. Honey and jam too, but that was just for me. I placed the tray on her side table, collected my stuff from it and wandered round to lay back on the bed, mug and plate and jars all within my reach. I started with the yoghurt, it was lovely. I had grabbed some paracetamol while downstairs and my headache was just beginning to ebb, but I could still feel a chill right at the front of my brows, which felt like it meant to stay for a while. The toast was great, laden with sweetness from the jars, and giving a satisfying crunch as I bit into it. I love toast, I had thought to myself. Any time of day, and anywhere. Toast was always the best answer, whatever the question…
“What is that smell?”
“Morning beautiful”
“Is that coffee and toast?”
“Yes my love!”
In answer Alison made, what can only be described as a growly sigh. I remember thinking that it sounded like a good noise and a very bad noise all at the same time.
Apparently it had been a good noise, as she sat up, burned her tongue on the coffee, and gobbled down the toast in seconds. Followed by her oaty and fruity yoghurt. Then, the rest of the now slightly cooler coffee. No words spoken.
“How you feeling?”
She turned to look at me.
“Not quite as starved now – thank you, that was just perfect.”
“Good, I really enjoyed mine. Did you sleep ok?”
“No idea, which I assume means yes. God, I was so tired when we came to bed”
“Well, I need to get on and get down to David and Glenda’s to have a look at their attic and give them a price, said I’d be there around 9:30am. Shouldn’t be more than an hour, so you can have a lie in if you fancy. I can make you another brew, get you a book or something…?”
“No, I’ll get up when you’ve gone, have a tidy round and then when you get back we’ll talk about last night. I think we need to.”
“OK!”
I finished at David’s house and walked back to the car. Glenda had been out shopping apparently, so between the two of us we had agreed on three days work to decorate their newly completed loft conversion, argued about the price and shaken on a deal. David had a small engineering firm in the next town, something to do with the aircraft industry, he had even shown me the parts he manufactured once, ages ago, proudly holding up five or six pieces of steel made into various shapes.
“I charge three grand for each of these pieces Ken. Make around eighty every single week. Contracts signed for the next ten years. I employ eight people on the shop floor, and three in the offices. Staff’s been the same for nine years now, ’cause I pay them well and treat them even better. I’ve made over two-hundred K every year for the past decade, and the only thing that ever alters my profit is energy costs! No-one can touch my quality or output at the moment, so hopefully we should be ok for a good while.”
“You certainly seem to have cornered a market in – whatever those lumps of metal are Dave, they look like oversized jacks, you know, from the game ‘Jack Straws’! did you invent them?”
“No, my Uncle Sam did, copy-written and patented and given to me when I bought his company when he got sick. I was dead lucky. Neither of my cousins were interested in taking the business on, I asked, started working for him and when he got sick, as I said, I got a bank loan and bought the lot. Paid off in the first twelve years. Mind, my cousins hate me now!” he had chuckled. I had laughed with him. He was likeable, very open and loved to tell you stuff you had no reason to want to know. He was great in a pub quiz.
I drove around the part of the village we had been on the night before. I was busy with kids late for school, mums shopping and delivery vans. No strange figures. No animals apart from the ginger tom, who was lay, as usual, in the doorway of Jenkin’s Butchers. We had once stopped and watched that cat for twenty minutes in the same place. customers just walked round or over him. Everyone knew him, and he never moved. He never entered the shop though. Ever. Old Mr Jenkins had told Alison a couple of years ago that he had asked around once and no-one seemed to know where the cat lived or who owned him. He was friendly if someone petted him, and would even roll over for a tummy tickle on a good day. All the local kids loved him.
I drove to the street where the gate post was, to check, out of curiosity, that there was no grain of anything on the top of it. There wasn’t.
I drove home.
‘Hey, there you are. Did it go ok with David? I’ll pop the kettle on.”
“Yeah, all sorted. Three days should do it, starting in about a month once the electrician has finished and tidied up. The attic space is a fantastic job.
Anyway, on the way back I drove and had a little look around Rhuddlan Street and the others. Saw nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Well in a way I’m glad about that Ken, but in another, It makes me feel it was all imaginary… and that is NOT what I want to think at all!”
“Agreed!” I told her in agreement. By this time we had settled in our chairs at the dining table. Mugs of steaming coffee in our hands. Alison was fidgety I noticed, and so I put a hand over hers and asked,
“What’s wrong? You seem kind of edgy.” I waited for her usual female outburst of denial….
Wrong.
“I feel edgy Ken. I spent a few minutes looking up the scenario we saw last night. It is a very specific sequence, and I found it easily ont’web. It is part of the story of ‘Ceridwen‘. She is a Welsh Legend. A Myth. Maybe a Goddess even. Her legend is quite fascinating, and the part we witnessed was her chasing a young boy because he had eaten some potion intended for her ugly son. The tale gets even madder afterwards, with her getting pregnant and trying to kill the baby.”
‘Wow, you have done your research. How does it end, AND, why the hell were we seeing the chase last night?”
“Her whole story is nasty. And I don’t know. I couldn’t find any references or recordings of anyone seeing anything like it before. I’ll look more into it later, depending on how our day pans out. What we got on today?”
“Nothing I know of! I was thinking we could do a bit of our famous nosying around the village, have a word with people, subtly like though, we don’t want people thinking we have lost our marbles..”
“Little do they know!” Alison replied, with a grin. She grabbed the mugs and went off to tidy up, again. That woman loves tidying things up.
An hour later we were in the library in the next town over, with a name neither of us could pronounce without giggling, due to the Ys, Ls and Ds. Ten years here now, and still inherently racist, but only about lots of things, and not in a bad way we had convinced ourselves. We weren’t the only invaders in the village from the west though. There are a couple of Norwegian nationals who had moved in a year ago. He paints pictures of sheep in the snow, and she writes children’s stories based on her heritage and folklore. They were a great couple and we really liked them. Then there is a Polish family who had been here years now. He was one of David’s team and she looked after their two sons and helped in the pub in the cooking at weekends. She was beautiful and had the softest voice, and loved to tell anyone who was in earshot how many recipes she knew for potatoes and cabbage. There are two other English families. We don’t really know either of them other than to say hello, and then there are the small contingent of families from Asian backgrounds who run an Accountants, the petrol station and garage, and the newsagents. I couldn’t say whether they were one family or four, but they worked all the time, would help out with anything if asked and had helped to keep the small village school in operation. Everyone else in the village seemed to have been either born there or married into it. The joke was that every now and again the local gene pool needed a bit of a shake up and so they allowed some more ‘foreigners’ in, and to the Welsh, we were all lumped together.
The librarian was very helpful when we enquired about books on Welsh legends, and we found some really interesting ones on Ceridwen herself. We borrowed a couple and took surreptitious photos of pages from the ones we could take with us.
Next we went for a look around the area from the night before again. Alison made a fuss of the cat, and we managed to con several local people into a conversation about local myths and legends. Ceridwen was mentioned a couple of times, but only in passing, and with little actual knowledge. We did hear a tale from one elderly chap who told us about a giant snake or reptile called the ‘Gwiber’, which was a great story, but unrelated to ours we felt.
We decided to lunch in the ‘Quiet Woman’s Head’, and see if alcohol aided anyone with their memory retrieval.
When we walked in through the back door, from the carpark we found about a dozen customers dotted around the pub. There were the usual quartet of old soldiers who bagsied a table in the alcove, and spent most of the afternoon playing cards, telling increasingly outrageous tales of deadly deeds from which ever war they had fought in, and keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the village, through the large window. At the bar a couple of lads were nursing a shandy for lunch, warily checking their watches and phones for messages and the time. At a table sat a family of four who were all eating what looked like Spaghetti Bolognese with an abundance of garlic bread, all homemade by Anna at the weekend. And finally, two ladies around my age sat in the middle of the tap room with a pint of lager each, a sandwich each and both doom scrolling whilst conducting a heated conversation with the other.
We each ordered a drink and a sandwich and some crisps, and selected a table roughly central to the other customers. Johnny, the Landlord, gave the order to his wife in the kitchen and brought us over the drinks and napkins etc.
“Nice numbers of clientele in last night Johnny” I said to him. “Nice atmosphere too!”
“Yes, thanks, it was a good day all said and done. Quite busy throughout.’
“No-one reported anything out of the ordinary did they, I overheard someone in the library this morning mention a fracas, or chase or something?”
He looked thoughtful for a minute, not a good look on him, then answered,
“No!”
“Oh well, probably got his stories muddled up” I decided to keep it easy, for now, so we offered ‘cheers’ to Johnny and cracked on with our crisps.
The crisps were superb. Crunchy and tasty. Just as God intended. My hot sausage sandwich on rye bread was delightful too, but Alison’s simple cheese sandwich with a side-salad looked just perfect! We ate on, chatting between mouthfuls about this and that, and watching as other clientele came in and left. The pub was busy.
Half an hour later, with full bellies and empty bladders, we decided against bothering any of the other clientele, who looked mostly to be visitors, which we thought was strange. Our village was a beautiful place, but hardly a massive draw for tourists.
Once we had got back in the car, we had looked at each other waiting for inspiration, and hoping the other would be hit by it.
“So where to now Dr Watson?” I asked. Knowing she would raise to the bait. Too easy!
“Oh I see, you’ve decided you’re Holmes have you?” I chuckled. Too easy.
“Not at all, just thought we needed a focus. You are usually good at focussing. And Watson was really the one with focus wasn’t he?” From experience I knew that if I could distract Alison from the main topic, she would pop up with a really succinct idea or statement very soon. Clever huh?!
“What the hell are you going on about? Oh I know what you’re doing, trying to be clever… Well it’s not going to work this time!”
It would.
It did.
An hour later when we had spent forty minutes in the small ‘tramp’s garden’ behind the bowling green, chatting to the WI ladies as they tended the garden, Alison suddenly stopped talking, mid-stream of an interesting conversation about brambles and roses. Pat, the lady we were stood with and chatting to, looked aghast. The blackberries were rubbish this year, it was true, and she had been listening fervently to Alison’s explanation…. until it had just, stopped. Alison’s face was as if she had just caught one of the ‘Weeping Angels’ twerking.
“I’m terribly sorry about that Pat, I just remembered something important. Catch up with you tomorrow, maybe…”
She grabbed my arm, turned us both and frogmarched me off in the general direction of the car. I shrugged and waved at poor old Pat, left in our wake, who was waggling her index finger around at her own head, and mouthing “Is she ok??” to me.
I nodded, smiled and shrugged again and ran to catchup with my wife…. holding back on the laughter and struggling to do so.
In the car, I said nothing, instead choosing to wait for the river of information and insight to break through. Alison got comfy, put her seatbelt on and sat looking through the front windscreen. I waited.
“We need to find a reason that Ceridwen would manifest here, now. There must be a trigger of some sort, that has made the conditions perfect for a replay or echo of what happened!”
“What is said to have happened in the mythical story.” I amended.
“Well, yes, agreed. But. How could something that didn’t happen manifest itself in a Welsh town in front of us, LAST NIGHT?”
It was a very good question.
“Good question!” I said to her. She smiled at me. “Shall we set about trying to find the answer then?” I asked her.
“Yes please!”
