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Welcome to Our Town

Briar Speckles.

It had the kind of strange, indefinable name that Kelly Tunwick struggled to clearly associate with. The first word made her think of brambles and scratching her arm as a child when she tried to climb through the hedge at the back of her grandmother’s house. The second, however, made her think about children’s confectionery; the kind of sweet that would pop and fizzle on your tongue, giving you a sense of excitement before later surreptitiously settling in to rot your teeth.

Together, ‘Briar Speckles,’ if she had to define it, sounded like an embroidery pattern, maybe for a tablecloth or a wall hanging. Something that definitely would be modern art rather than classical. The kind of thing you would stare at and try to interpret in a meaningful, intellectual way while simultaneously wondering if it had been created by an elephant or a small child.

In actual fact, as she had learned the previous weekend at a meeting with her boss, Robert Walsh, the long-term editor at The Brentwell Daily newspaper, Briar Speckles was, in actual fact, Devon’s self-styled centre for paranormal activity.

Indeed, shortly after she turned her little car down a road that didn’t look wide enough for four-wheeled traffic, she passed a road sign for Briar Speckles, with beneath it a wooden billboard cut into the shape of a billowing ghost with the additional information:

Welcome to Devon’s Haunted Capital

Capital it might consider itself, but Kelly had driven on for another five minutes through meandering, mazelike country lanes before she even saw the first house: a little cottage tucked against the roadside with a grinning jack o’ lantern standing on a wooden table outside the front door.

As she drove past, she must have triggered some kind of hidden trip switch because she caught a faint cackle of witchy laughter through her half-open window. She slowed her car, wound her window down the rest of the way, and then reversed back up.

There it was.

Screwed to the frame above the front door was a little blinking LED light. As she moved the car gently forwards, the cackle of witch’s laughter came again.

It made Kelly smile.

Perhaps a little dangerous for traffic, it was nevertheless unique. She wondered whether it might be worth getting an interview with the house’s owner while she was passing, but as the front door’s hinges creaked and it cracked open a few inches, she caught a glimpse of a greenish goblin face beneath a pointed witch’s hat peering out of the gloom.

Genuinely disturbed, she stamped on the accelerator, concerned that this might not be a person in costume, which logic suggested it was, but an actual goblin wearing a witch’s hat.

‘Phew,’ she muttered to herself, fingers drumming on the wheel. ‘Close one there.’

Maybe she would check back tomorrow, but certainly in broad daylight, if of course it ever reached down into these treelined, gloomy lanes.

A couple of minutes later, she reached the bottom of the hill. The road flattened out, winding through woodland, for a while following the line of a pretty river. Up ahead, a bluff protruded out of the valley, a towering cliff of rock topped with trees. Both the river and the road arched out around it, the road cutting through a tangle of trees that created a bridge over the road. Someone had hung a string of orange lights through them, and as Kelly’s car emerged out of it, the village of Briar Speckles opened out across the valley floor in front of her.

At first, she thought she’d entered a theme park because every house looked like it had come from the set of a Halloween movie. Stone walls, latticed windows, drooping eaves, and stone gargoyles on the corners of the roofs.

Her car bumped over a tiny humpback bridge crossing a gurgling stream and passed a raven sitting on a wooden pole that turned to watch her as she passed. Fat, burnt orange pumpkins stood in stacks outside front doors, some carved into jack o’ lanterns sitting on stone walls around gardens, or on old wooden chairs beside the road.

There was a scarecrow standing in the corner of a field, its hideous face turned not inward to deter birds, but towards the road, where Kelly had to slow down as she passed, only to trigger another hidden trip switch and have the scarecrow suddenly jiggle and cackle with laughter.

By now, Kelly’s nerves were shredded, and she’d only been in the village for about five minutes.

She pulled over by the side of the road, took her flask out of the cup holder, and took a swig of plastic-tasting, lukewarm coffee, wishing it was something a little stronger.

She wanted to get out for a look around, but the road was so narrow that only a small vehicle would be able to pass. In any case, her lodgings, at a local tavern, couldn’t be much further ahead.

As she drove on a little further, the carefully hidden normality of the village began to reveal itself.

She noticed cars in garages, neat gardens hidden behind fences adorned with Halloween-themed orange and black fairy lights, and strings of plastic spiderwebs hung like curtains over them.

A couple of children playing football in a back garden. An old man mowing his lawn. As a group of plastic bats on springs bounced up and down from where they were attached to the edge of a rooftop, in the window below a woman could be seen folding washing.

Supposedly haunted though Briar Speckles was, at its heart it was a simple country village, and Kelly began to feel a little less nervous.

And then the road made a turn, and she found herself facing what she could only describe as a miniature Gothic cathedral.

Clearly the village church, it looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie, with its stained-glass windows all orange and black, and a jack o’ lantern peering out of a window in the bell tower.