I waited a couple of minutes and then climbed back to the bush. From my hiding spot I could see Mr Jones’ expression – a smile of depraved savagery, as though the murder of Charlie Raymond, the only friend I’d ever had until now, was a fun activity he and his friends enjoyed, which it surely must have been. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, regardless, but rather the kind that stretches from one side of your face to the other, the smile a murderer has when he’s about to murder you in a dark alley.

I found myself thinking back to the time when my father slapped me across the face for coming home late from school. It hadn’t been my fault – school was an absolute mess, as it always was. Thatcher clearly hadn’t done us any favours. I found myself barely two steps over the threshold when all of a sudden, my father slapped me across the face. Blood came down my cheek. He contorted his face into a smile – not a smile that betrayed that he was happy to see his son, but more a smile of malicious glee. I couldn’t tell my mother about any of this. She was away from the house, and taking an unusually long time to come back. Whenever she came back, she couldn’t even be bothered to give me any attention anyway. She spent a lot of time talking on the phone and whenever I did try to get her attention, she would yell at me so loudly I would run away, find myself a little nook to curl up in, and cry until I fell asleep.

The cultists, or so I now understood them to be, then moved on to other things, things that were so disgusting that if I told you, the marketing department at the publishing house would have a heart attack. All I understood was that, having been reminded of my trauma, I felt like crying even harder than I had when Dad used to hit me, when he used to drown me in the sink for his grotesque amusement. All this time I thought I’d be living in a lovely village full of kind, friendly people who’d gladly take care of me, but as it turned out, these people weren’t very kindly or friendly at all! In fact, they were little better than depraved savages! I sighed and slowly walked home through the forest, not caring whether they would see me. I thought back to the proverb I’d used on the train, when I was speaking with the gentleman. “It takes a village to raise a child.” I wanted to raise my head and wail my agonies to the waxing moon, because it was a lie. It had all been a lie! No village this awful could raise a child, let alone ten of them! Who knows what other villages, deep beneath the surface, have secrets as dark as this?

They hadn’t been very nice to me, as I understood it. You call bossing somebody around and making them do errands for them nice? None of them had ever expressed any sort of affection towards me, and now – and now! – I was beginning to realise that everything made sense. How could they show any tenderness or care, being the horrible people that they were? Their behaviour had seemed off, right from the beginning.

That was where the hands for the meat pies had come from. That was why they had piled so many corpses in the forest instead of giving them a proper burial. That was why they were so hesitant to answer the police officer and that was why I had found his corpse! They had sacrificed his body in one of those rituals, and left it in the forest. Afterwards, they had probably taken his hands, for their meat pies.

I turned back and found the lights all going down through the trees. This gave me the perfect opportunity to inspect the altar. I was now hoping against hope. That man can’t be dead, I found myself thinking. He just can’t be. I went up to the altar and drew steadily close to it, and was shocked when I came across the dead body of Charlie Raymond. His throat had been slit, and an immense amount of blood had come spurting out of it. His fancy suit and starched shirt were now ruined beyond all hope of cleanliness, and his eyes were wide with terror. Where his hands had once been, there remained bloody stumps. I cupped both hands to my mouth, still trying to properly process the shock of what I’d just seen. I looked around the clearing. Tears were pouring down my face, like a tap you couldn’t turn off. Even though he was a member of the aristocracy, the man did not deserve to die this way! Nobody, rich or poor, deserved to die this way! I raised my voice to the sky and cried out, “Have you drunk the blood yet?”

I got no answer. At that moment, I was foolish to expect an answer. Nevertheless, an answer was given, although much later than that point. I wondered if the Duke of Somerset would ever discover what happened to his son. I inhaled and exhaled, and all of a sudden, anger fuelled my veins. He had to know! Everyone had to know what went on here! As soon as the Duke got wind of all of this, he would launch a thorough investigation of all of the depraved hamlets of the English countryside, and every single one of their residents would go to prison! It’s not something I wished on them at the time, but I knew that it was an inevitability either way. One way or another, the truth just had to come out. This village, and doubtless countless others who worshipped foreign gods, just HAD to be brought to justice. What a naïve kid I was!

“I don’t know what you’re doing now up there!” I wailed, as I stared up at the sky. “But if you’re seeing this, then please don’t let this go on! They’re all liars! They killed my friend, the only friend I ever had in this world!” Then I covered my face, in order to conceal the tears, in case the Lady of the Moon were watching me from above – it wouldn’t be seemly, even at that vulnerable age, to let her see me like this. I turned and went back the way I came, back towards the village, where I snuck into my bedroom in Clarence’s cottage through the window and cried myself to sleep.

For some weeks afterwards, I had recurring nightmares about that night. I would watch Mr Jones intone that rant about the goddess Chang’e, and I would hear the choking of Charlie Raymond in his final moments as his blood was spilled, and I would wake up screaming, in a cold sweat. Afterwards, I would try and get back to sleep again, crying into my pillow. Eventually, I forgot the trauma and moved on, but even if I did so, I would still occasionally cry into my pillow. Even now, I sometimes wish I had a proper mother, one who would be nice to me, to comfort me. But beggars can’t be choosers, and that is a much truer expression than “it takes a village to raise a child.”