Dreams of dissolution and decay seem to come with the season, as the year turns towards its stagnant time, the leaves fall and rot, the berries wither on the brambles. But this year the dreams are persistent, with a nightmare edge to them.
Hilda Candelton stock-checks in her sleep, a task she will perform the next day in preparation for driving into Drychester to the cash and carry for winter supplies. Carefully, she lists the tins, the cans, the bottles, the packets, but there is a pungent smell amongst the vegetables: and one rotten potato can infect all the rest. With a sigh she reaches into the paper sack, feels only the earthy tubers, whole and hard. So what is making the terrible smell? She tumbles the contents of the sack out on to the floor.
Amid the rain of potatoes falls an animal, hitting the tiles with a dull and frigid thud. It is small and hairless, and its eyes are shut. Its limbs are curled around its torso. Its skin is covered in a fine, dusty mildew, but pale white shoots are already beginning to sprout from its chest. Hilda picks it up and cradles it and takes it back up the stairs to the bedroom to show Reggie.
*
In a big house on the other side of the village a sleeping woman touches her mouth. She parts her lips, investigates a tooth with one finger. It wobbles. She prods at it again, and it comes away in her hand. Her eyes fly open and she stares at it in disgust. As she does so, another tooth comes loose and slips down through her long black hair and into her lap. Her hands fly up, horrified, as if to hide the damage, but the unrooted teeth flow round her fingers.
They fall softly, like snow.
Mrs Anscombe, a big woman in a salmon-pink anorak, feeds the ducks at the pond, watching the birds fight over the bread she casts upon the weed-netted waters, and soon there is none left. With a sigh, she starts to pluck at the anorak until it disintegrates into tiny gobbets of material. The greedy ducks swallow the pieces down avidly until there is none left, and, beaks working furiously, demand more. Poor Mrs Anscombe, a martyr to all, tears at her flesh.
Soon there will be nothing left of her, either.
*
The orchard is enclosed by a high brick wall, the courses of which were cleverly inlaid with twined initials, all looping curlicues and flourishes, as if the designer’s intent was as much to obscure as to lay a signature. Marvelling at its artistry, she sets afoot into the curve of an ‘S’, takes hold of the top of the wall and hoists herself up and with an effortlessness that surprises her even as she sleeps, she slips down over the wall into the damp grass on the other side. The mist swirls up, disturbed, around her knees and shoulders and presses itself clammily against her skin. The fruit is all about her – its scent so powerful that she experiences it as a physical taste on the back of her tongue. Sweet, very sweet; then as musty as death. She reaches up and suddenly a single medlar lies in her hand, soft and brown, as small as a curled mouse. When she bites into it, it bursts upon her tongue, all juice and rotten flesh, and she hears a man’s voice cry out in agony.