Patreon Exclusive Fiction: Dunwich Revisited by Julia August

Nothing happened that autumn, except we got kittens. It was a crisp, clear season, the grey days interspersed with skies...

Dunwich Revisited

By Julia August

Nothing happened that autumn, except we got kittens.

It was a crisp, clear season, the grey days interspersed with skies of startling blue, a bumper year for apples and white-rumped rabbits. I walked round the valley with the wind in my hair, trying to catch the blackberries in that precious moment between unripe and rotten. Along the top road, through the coppery bristles of the hedge, the sheep streamed down the jagged hillside.

Houndsmore Cottage was silent except for the death rattle of a pheasant in the hedge. I almost missed the bored, barking dogs that used to hurl themselves at the shuddering fence. I never saw them. I’d imagined them bodies, something big and labradorish, but who knows? The place stood empty for a year before the new people moved in. Now the drive was occupied by the silver sports car that made my parents drive cautiously around corners.

The windows were still blind, though. I always hated those angles.

Down the hill and round the corner, I slammed into a long glassy view of the valley, all intersecting curves blurring into the blue misty distance, a single plume of smoke puffing up somewhere over the village. The sluggish tips of the wind turbine turned just over the crest of the hill. There had been a barn there once. It disappeared while I was at university and no one ever wanted to talk about what happened to it, although three hundred miles away I woke up in a familiar freezing sweat full of unreasoning presentiment and had to sit up with my dissertation notes until dawn. I never did hear the tale there.

I wandered through the Whites’ ruined farm and remembered the stone streaking down from the sky however long ago, but everyone knows that story. Down in the village, a huddle of houses around a crossroads holding two hundred people with three surnames between them, they talked about nothing else for weeks. My mother still says it’s why she can only grow kale.

Just past the farm, what had been old Mr. Sugar’s cottage had mushroomed almost beyond recognition. Every time I came home, it had thrust up another extension: our local celebrity, some TV personality, making her personality felt behind her padlocked gate. Someone had seen a truck carrying off one of the two garden houses, though, so she might not stay. You could live here twenty years and still feel like an outsider, the incomers said. I don’t know why. I’d said hello to someone I thought was probably her daughter the other day, but she hadn’t replied.

They had the inquest on the young man who died digging her lake two years ago, crushed by his own digger, or so it was said afterwards. The blame was attached to the company, apparently. Prosecutions might follow. “Poor boy,” everyone said, and left it at that.

But that was none of my business. I’d just come back from university for the last time and was waking up slowly to the need to find a job. I wouldn’t have minded some local drama to distract me, but nothing was happening. Nothing, I thought, peering over the gate, at all.

So home I went to help press apples for cider and fresh, sharp apple juice. We drank up the first of it in our draughty old farmhouse, ignoring the skittering behind the skirting boards. The kittens should soon put a stop to that.

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Julia August’s work has appeared in F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, The Dark, Unlikely Story's The Journal of Unlikely Academia, the anthology Places We Fear To Tread and elsewhere. She is @JAugust7 on Twitter, j-august on Tumblr and j_august7 on Instagram. Find out more at juliaaugust.com.