Before we left, the Council of Elders stopped me. “If you wish to stay here,” Elder Simonson intoned, “we must ask you not to go out at night, especially during various phases of the moon, and that includes tonight, for tonight is a new moon.” There was something about the way that he said it that betrayed that this was a serious concern. What was it about the moon that made them not allow me to go out?

I followed him out of the village hall and down through the streets. Looking around, I noticed that the houses looked very nice indeed. There was a pub, sure enough. It was a black-painted building called the Arms of the Moon. I looked around to find, strangely enough, that there was no church anywhere near the place. This was absurd. How could a village not have a church? Every village in England, Scotland and Wales had a church of some kind, and the fact that this village didn’t have one stuck out like a sore thumb.

Clarence nudged me in the rubs to remind me to keep going.

We eventually reached the same cottage I’d seen when I first arrived. Clarence fetched a key from the pocket of his overalls, and unlocked the door. The cottage had no latch on the door, and I was shocked to find out that people there used keys at all. When we entered the cottage, I was met with a living room with a traditional fireplace with a fire in the grate, a carpet on the floor (albeit one not large enough to cover the entire floor as many carpets did nowadays) and against one wall, a small television set that looked as though it came from the nineteen-fifties.

Clarence bowed and said that he would get the kettle on. He walked over to a doorway on the left-hand side of the fireplace, which apparently led to a modern-looking kitchen. I seated myself on a battered old sofa and looked around the room again. The room had its charm, I suppose. The ceiling had roof beams on it, big black wooden things. The television set wasn’t on at the moment and even if it were on, I wouldn’t have been interested in watching anything anyway.

Clarence eventually returned from the kitchen, bearing two steaming mugs of tea, one of which was decorated with the writing A GIFT FROM STRATFORD. He handed me another mug with the writing GOOD MORNING, I SEE THE ASSASSINS HAVE FAILED and I proceeded to drink it. It felt warm, and I felt safe. I could trust this man. Back on the council estate where me and my family lived, often we didn’t really drink tea. This was despite the fact that Dad worked in a tea factory, for relatively poor pay. I wasn’t really allowed to drink beer, which is what most of the men around there drank, so all I did was make do with some water. But to be given actual English tea! Ah! It was heaven.

“I s-s-see you l-l-like it,” observed Clarence.

I nodded my head.

“G-G-Good, b-b-because I l-l-like it t-t-too. You c-c-can’t go w-w-wrong with t-t-tea!” There was silence for a moment, before the pair of us burst into peals of laughter. I don’t know why we did it. I suppose it was a sign that we were starting to get along. Clarence eventually got up and announced, in his quivering voice, that I was expected to help Mrs Nollys and Mrs Scratch, whoever they were, tomorrow morning.

I eventually found my room. It was a very small cell, with barely anything in it, except a wooden-plank floor, walls of faded white, a small camp bed, and a window on the far wall, through which I could see the street outside. I walked forward and relaxed on the camp bed, feeling that it was well and truly earned after a long day of travelling.

For some time I lay back peacefully on the bed and then, my eyes started to become somewhat misty. Slowly, darkness came upon me as my eyes closed. I found myself in dark surroundings. It was hard to make out what was really going on for a moment and I could see nothing except for some kind of silvery light.

All of a sudden, a voice could be heard. “Lies,” it said, in what could be described as some sort of ethereal shriek. “Lies. Don’t let them in! Don’t let them in!”

Then, another voice could be heard. It wasn’t shrieking, but the sound of singing. It wasn’t a song I’d heard before, though, but then again, other than the bawdy songs that the men sang down in the pubs, I hadn’t heard many songs.

This ae neet, this ae neet

Any neet and all

Feir and fleet and candle-leet

And Christ receive thy soul.

It was a deep, echoing sound, and whatever it was, it warned me of something. Something that was where it shouldn’t.

The following morning, I awoke, feeling very sick indeed. I stared out of the window of my new home at the village square, as the first rays of first light settled on it. There was a knock at the door. I went and opened the door. Clarence was standing at it, a plate full of bacon and eggs in his hand, upon which a knife and fork also rested.

“I’ve p-p-prepared you b-b-breakfast,” he said. “Y-You’ll n-n-need it for your first d-d-day of errands.”

I thanked Clarence, and returned with the plate to the bed, where I wolfed it down, even though I was using cutlery. I will admit it took me a while to become accustomed to even using cutlery, since, back on the Andersen Estate, we would eat food with our bare hands, like the Romans used to do. Once I’d eaten, I cleared the quilt of all the crumbs and put on my raincoat.

I went down into the village. The first item on the agenda was a house inhabited by a little old woman by the name of Mrs Nollys. She was a very thin old woman, who looked in some ways like a witch in the fairy stories. She wore a Russian headscarf, similar to the ones common country women are accustomed to wearing, and she dressed in a brown coat. She lived in a beautifull thatched cottage out of a fairy tale book with a woman called Mrs Scratch. Both were considered spinsters, and perhaps had been back in the day.

I went down the street, went to their house and knocked at the door politely. The door opened with a jerk and there stood Mrs Nollys, looking down at me and staring. “You’re late!” she snapped. “Get on with you upstairs! Our toilet needs scrubbing!” I reached to this with some confusion. Mrs Nollys gave me a very hard stare, which made me swallow and barge past her straight upstairs to the toilet. The moment I set foot in the upstairs bathroom was when the oddity began to become evident. They had a proper working toilet, true enough, but they didn’t have a working bathroom – they just had what was little better than a metal tub that looked like it came out of the Edwardian era. The toilet bowl was filled to the brim with poo – obviously one of them had been pooing in the bowl the other night, probably while constipated. I collapsed on the floor in defeat, since I hadn’t the slightest clue how to clean a toilet. I put my head to my forehead, desperately trying to think of a plan. How should I take care of this mess? How? I didn’t know how to do this, but I needed to do it. My income depended on it. Eventually I decided to think, oh to hell with it.

I grabbed a roll of toilet paper and used it to clean the lavatory. It was very messy work, and incredibly humiliating, but once the job was done, I washed all the strips of paper which had been used to wipe the toilet down the toilet itself. I got up and washed my hands, not because I understood that that’s what you should do once you’re done using the toilet, but out of a sense of decency.