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  For the patrons, proprietor, and bar staff

  of the Railway Inn, Fairford.

  Prologue

  IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, life in the little Cotswolds market town of Lychford had become a lot more complicated.

  Much of this complication had happened all at once, in that extraordinary half hour when a shower of rain had given everyone who’d got the water on their skin the ability to see magic and monsters and much else that was terrifying and wondrous—all of which was, apparently, real. All that stuff, the inhabitants of Lychford had subsequently been told, had in the past been noticed, confronted, and defeated by a select few. Now it had become everyone’s problem. Which was . . . better? Possibly? At any rate, everyone now had a story about how their cat or lottery ticket or uncle had gone missing back in the day, and how that all now made so much more sense.

  Another great dollop of complication had arrived with what everyone now tended to call “the incident,” that time with the, err, angel and oh dear perhaps Satan, and you know, the end of the world.

  These complications were reflected, as a lot of local life was, in the conduct of the meetings of the Lychford Town Council.

  Loz Watson, the town clerk, had been in the role for nearly two decades, and part of her was sort of pleased that her job had, in the last year or so, taken a pronounced turn toward the inexplicable. Another, bigger part of her was absolutely bloody appalled by it. “Any other business?” (which was what the Chair said once they’d got through the agenda at every weekly council meeting) had previously been her favorite phrase. It had meant that in five minutes they could all go down the pub. Now it was an invitation to partake in mystery and imagination, a phrase akin to “once upon a time . . .” and it regularly signalled the start of three hours of surreal group therapy.

  The looks on the faces of her fellow councillors at this particular meeting told her they had all started to feel the same way. Apart from Jim, of course. Jim was the sort of older gentleman who favored russet trousers as if that made him a bit of a rebel and wore his bushy antenna-like eyebrows and sprouting ear hair like badges of pride. At this precise moment he was doing that most awful of things in the moment after “any other business”: he was grasping the lapels of his tired old jacket. Oh, he had other business all right. “Madam Chairwoman . . .” he began.

  Loz minuted it on her tablet as “Chair” as said Chair literally rolled her eyes.

  “. . . I have tried to deal with this situation. I have tried to find common ground with it. But it is with much sorrow that I now see no alternative but the ultimate sanction. I wish to have it recorded in the minutes that I’m against.”

  “Against what?” said the Chair, Carrie Anne Christopher. Her voice had inclined, as it always did in reply to Jim, toward the full Importance of Being Earnest. She had recently left the Lychford Festival Committee in order to join the council and had looked vaguely suspicious when most of the existing members had immediately encouraged her to become Chair. Now she was clearly discovering what all that had been about.

  “Against all these changes. Against the so-called magic. And the strangers. And the way our lives have been turned upside down. And how none of it has done a damn thing to fix the potholes.”

  Loz kept her usual calm expression on her face as she tapped in the exact words, because Jim always read the minutes, and would send her notes. She had been recording his thoughts for the best part of her two decades, and though she had been tempted, and never more so than now, she had never added an adverb of any sort. She was starting to feel that alone should put her in line for a CBE. How Jim could refer to seeing strange beasts flapping their way overhead, the woods lighting up like a celestial rock concert, and the random appearance in their town of everything from a rain of frogs to baked goods which hummed Gilbert and Sullivan as “so-called . . .” Well, hers was not to reason why. And “strangers” was one hell of a way to refer to the weird beings that every few weeks ventured into the town, sometimes at night, sometimes in the broad daylight on market day. Unless Jim was referring to the tourists from Bristol and London, and dear God, Glastonbury, who’d heard about the impossible things that were whispered to have happened here and came to seek them out while not buying anything. Loz thought that what the new “Wise Woman” Autumn Blunstone and her friend the vicar Lizzie Blackmore and that new one behind the counter at the magic shop, Zoya Boyko, said was simply true: that Lychford lay on the borders of many mystical realms, accessed through the woods, and that those borders were now wide open. She could understand someone who hadn’t felt the rain still not getting that. But Jim had been standing there outside the chip shop in that downpour with his eyes bulging out of their sockets. It was perhaps more a matter of perceived duty for him, she thought. It was as if he felt who he was demanded he be angry at anything new. The rain and all that had come after had been just too much of an affront to his aging self-image. It had, it seemed, put a sort of reality other than his own at the centre of the world. And that would never do.

  “I’m not sure,” fellow Councillor Sunil Mehra, another new recruit in the wake of “the incident,” carefully began, “how one can be ‘against’ something that was literally the weather. It’s just how things are now.”

  “To be fair,” said Jackie Parker, who ran the nail salon, “Jim’s against a lot that’s just how things are now.”

  “Sunil, my friend,” said Jim, “you are not an objective commentator, considering your . . . relationship with the late so-called ‘Wise Woman’ whose shenanigans with the so-called supernatural started all this—”

  “Before you say one word about Judith,” said Sunil, sounding dangerously mild, “consider how often she saved your behind and that of everyone else in this town and the world. And the great service you’ve always had at my restaurants. Previously.”

  “Everybody!” shouted Carrie Anne Christopher. “Please! We’re only two minutes into Any Other Business. Your protest at the rain has been minuted, Jim”—Loz allowed herself a little smile at that—“and we are moving on. Anyone else?”

  “I think this situation has a lot of upsides,” said Matt Coomby. Matt was a Liberal Democrat who’d moved into one of the more upmarket New Builds a few weeks before the rain. He’d been in London on business for the downpour, and so hadn’t been affected himself, but his partner and their toddler had been, and ever since he’d been finding bloody upsides about the situation on a regular basis. “We need to think about making the most of our tourist potential, give those who come to see spooky stuff a focus, so they don’t go wandering about with the wrong expectations.”

  “You mean . . . create a place for them to mill about aimlessly that actually makes the town some money?” Carrie Anne Christopher sounded as if, to her surprise, one of her fellow councillors had actually had a good idea.

  “If you want,” said Matt with a shrug. “Also, more electric car points.”

  It was at that moment that Dave the Mayor entered. Dave Awlish was a builder, with the slim muscular body typical of his trade, the sort of physique that seemed weirdly impervious to beer. Loz always perked up when he made his entrance. He was actually meant to be here for the whole meeting, but with only a few weeks of his term left to go, he’d started to arrive later and later. His rather wonderful shoulders looked to be carrying a greater burden with every passing week. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, his accent redolent of the town, the countryside around it, and the particular working-class wealth of the subculture of builders who made Lychford their home. “Are we in . . . any other business?”

  Carrie Anne Christopher looked daggers at him. “Oh we so are. There are things you need to sign off on, Mr. Mayor, Jim is protesting at the weather, and Matthew has had a good idea.”

  “Oh ah,” said Dave, sitting down with a guilty schoolboy look. “So what’s the general feeling about the gnomes?” The meeting fell entirely silent. The councillors looked at each other in puzzlement. Loz wondered if and how she should record this eerie moment in the minutes. Dave’s expression grew solemn. “My fellow councillors,” he said, “has nobody mentioned the gnome in the room?” And he nodded toward a corner.

  Everyone looked over to the corner where indeed there stood a gnome. It had in its hands a tiny notepad and seemed to have been caught in the act of taking its own set of minutes. It looked as surprised at having been noticed as Loz was at its existence, presence, and the fact that up until now none of them had noticed it. “Oh,” it said, “please, don’t let me stop you.”

  1

  OWEN TRAFALGAR WAS THE OWNER and landlord of the Station Inn in Lychford, and the owner of a couple more gastropubs in villages where they were both the only local business and the only source of parking difficulties. His life was largely spent on his phone, often while standing in crowded car parks, an
d when he wasn’t doing that, he was snatching moments at his riverside home with his husband, Tobin, who was something in the City and on a weekly commute. They had a pet tortoise called Pie. All that meant that, oddly for a landlord, he actually enjoyed those rare occasions when he was serving behind the bar at the Station.

  Usually.

  This evening, however, he was staring at Councillor Matt Coomby over a pint of Acid Biker Jolly IPA with a gathering mixture of horror and incredulity. “You’ve done what?”

  “I’ve invited the Unworldly podcast to visit Lychford. They’re very interested. And they need somewhere to stay, and I thought, since we’re on the same side when it comes to bringing tourists into town—”

  “What’s this now?” said Mick the mechanic, from just down the bar, where he and Paul the builder had been propped every Thursday since an altercation with their last local over having too many Americans in. Mick especially had history with the weird happenings in this town, having, at the moment of greatest peril, when the world was in jeopardy, given the vicar a lift in his truck. That had now become, for him, a full-fledged anecdote. Paul’s party piece, on the other hand, was his adventures with a metal detector. He had a couple of pieces in museums and could be relied upon to put a Roman coin in someone’s hand if there was a lull in conversation. Some of his collection, he reported, now shone with weirdness and felt so haunted that he’d started to sell it off on eBay, Autumn Blunstone, the new Wise Woman, having first taken a look to make sure there was nothing malign he might be passing on to the unwary. These two stalwarts were typical of the Lychford old guard’s reaction to the strangeness: it had unnerved and changed them, made them feel vulnerable, but it had also strengthened them and given them new purpose. These guys tended to assume they were part of the conversation if it was anywhere along this stretch of wood, and Owen felt they had a perfect right to feel that and was glad of their intervention now. Local people, he’d had to point out to the first manager he’d appointed here after he’d taken over, were a feature, not a bug. The stereotype in town was that the new, flashier people, those from the high-end families in the New Builds, hadn’t been in the rain and hadn’t experienced “the incident.” Owen knew that to be only about half true. He tried to steer the conversation in his bar away from that assumption, because it was hard on those older local folk who didn’t tend to go out in any sort of rain, and thus didn’t share in what was quickly becoming a badge of community. Also, he himself wanted to be part of that community, and he hadn’t experienced the rain.

  “A podcast,” said Matt. “About unexplained happenings, like ghosts and UFOs. It’s also on Radio 4.”

  “Oh ah,” said Paul. “And what would they want with us?”

  Matt paused for a moment, as if trying to formulate a calm response. Owen recalled how Paul had been caught in “the rain” while in the garden of his former local, or at least that was how Mick told the story. He’d started to yell “Look at the sky!” over and over until Mick had slapped him. “They’re interested,” Matt said finally, “in our . . . unusual creatures. You know, like the gnomes.”

  Paul looked suddenly shocked. He put down his pint. Mick put a cautioning hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off. “Now you listen to me,” he said. “When I go on a job in Lechlade or Cirencester, I always get people asking if what they say about Lychford is true. Because you know what they think of us? They think we’re nutters. Oh”—he glanced at Linda behind the bar, who had ADHD—“no offense.”

  “None taken,” said Linda, who often used that word about herself. “And I agree, I’ve changed where I’m from on all the dating sites. I get some right weirdos.” She glanced at Meg with the tattoos beside her. “No offense.”

  “At any rate,” said Paul before Meg could reply, obviously worried about getting caught in some endless loop of vaguely understood social anxiety, “I tell ’em it’s all put on. And I don’t want to have someone come here and say to Radio 4 and all the other podcast wankers that in this town we wander about screaming at stuff they can’t see.” The look of someone who’d done exactly that passed over his countenance. “This place”—he indicated the bar—“may have a theme park these days where the beer should be”—by which he meant the range of draft designer IPAs—“but Owen keeps the Guinness on for us two, and he’s a good sort for someone who can’t see the weird shit, and we don’t want this place spoilt by a lot of London fuckwits.”

  “None taken,” said Owen, maybe a bit too quickly. “And yeah, I agree. Obviously, Matt, your guest can stay here, but I’m not admitting to him there’s anything supernatural going on.” There was a noise of general agreement from all around the bar.

  Matt looked around, stunned. “I thought—”

  “And,” continued Paul, “there’s one thing above all we won’t be mentioning to him.” He actually stepped forward and put his finger under Matt’s nose. “In this town, we do not talk about the gnomes.”

  * * *

  The Reverend Lizzie Blackmore of St. Martin’s church, Lychford, was lying on her vicarage sofa, staring at the ceiling, panicking.

  She wasn’t panicking about anything in particular. Which was bloody annoying. The anxiety had started more than a year ago, just after Russia had invaded Ukraine. It had arrived in waves, reacting to the routine of a week by making her think about the worst possible consequences of every single event. She had printed out the wrong hymns for Mr. Gregson’s funeral and had had to run back to the Vicarage as the mourners were arriving: oh no, everyone was going to hate her. Her favorite brand of flavored coffee had been discontinued: oh no, her tastes must be so weird, and how would she live without it? The human race was heading for extinction because of climate change and every single action humanity took seemed to make things worse: oh no, that was . . . as bad as it seemed, actually. And it woke her up at night and made her pray and pray, too hard, too demanding.

  The people who said shit like “your faith must be such a comfort” had no bloody idea what faith was.

  Plus, of course, all that “oh no” now had a magical dimension. She had actually asked her dear friend Autumn, at one point of enormous fight or flight, if she couldn’t use magic to fix climate change. Autumn had said, “Well done, that’s my quota of being asked that question fulfilled for another week, and no, because: magic costs! I do not have enough blood or souls or putative first-born children handy to even begin to do that, not that I would sacrifice anything I didn’t own, before you ask! And hello, good morning, by the way. God, what is up with you these days?”

  Lizzie, not being able to help herself, had deflected the whole matter of what was up with her to the question of whether Autumn had meant that she and Luke were thinking about having children, and Autumn had at that point, as Lizzie knew she would, deflected back by saying she still had some of that foul hazelnut and marshmallow coffee Lizzie liked.

  She hadn’t told Autumn about her anxiety. She hadn’t told her best friend about much of anything that was important to her lately. She had made the mistake, on the evening of Autumn and Luke’s wedding, when up late having a whiskey with Zoya, of admitting her own sexuality. Or her own sort-of sexuality? What she took to be her sexuality? What she now really had trouble facing up to because it was mostly about Autumn . . . and sometimes about Brie Larson . . . but mostly about Autumn? Maybe that was why she’d started panicking soon after. And that was ridiculous, because what was to be done? Autumn and Luke were great together, were happy together, and Lizzie refused to be jealous about that. She saw jealousy in the distance of her mind and she absolutely would not let herself go there, because that was self-harm, that was something that would eat her up, that was sin.

  What wasn’t a sin was fancying women. Her belief system said nothing about that, because Christ had said nothing about that, and being omnipotent, if he’d wanted to, he would have. She’d fancied women even when she’d been with Joe, though it had taken her decades to realize that. Given the existence of Ryan Gosling, she supposed she was bi, not gay, but . . . gah. All of it. Just gah. Maybe the knowledge that even among her lovely parishioners there were a handful who would object was what had unconsciously pushed her toward panic?