The apothecary's second customer

Turn 1 of 7

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

You have already turned the sign. The little glass lamp on the counter is trimmed low, and the shutters are half-drawn against the cold that comes off the Underwood at dusk. The shop smells of dried chamomile and the mineral tang of your grandmother's salve pots, still warm on the back shelf. Your hands are still damp from washing the mortar and pestle. It is past time to be closed, and then the bell goes.

The man who comes through the door is apologising before it has shut behind him. He is well-dressed — a good wool coat, city cut, but soaked to the knee as though he has walked through wet grass for a long while. His face is the kind of pale that comes from missing sleep rather than from cold, and his eyes keep sliding past you to the darker corners of the shop, the shelves, the doorway behind you that leads to the workroom. He puts money on the counter. The coins are wrong — heavier than they should be, stamped with a mark you do not recognise, a tree with its roots showing.

"I need something," he says, "for a thing that follows." His voice is steady and practised, the voice of a man who has rehearsed this in his head for miles.

"Not to kill it. I don't want it killed. I want it to be able to rest." He does not look at the coins. He does not look at you. He is looking at the door he came through, and his hands are shaking where he has planted them on the counter to stop them doing it.

You know what you stock. Willow bark for fever, valerian for sleep, comfrey for bone, yarrow for bleeding. Tinctures and salves and teas, four generations of Harrow knowledge bottled and labelled in your own handwriting. You do not stock anything for a thing that follows. You do not know what it would mean to give such a thing rest. But the coins are real enough under your fingers — heavy, old, and warm — and the man's fear is real too, the kind that sits in the shoulders and does not leave.

From the back room, you hear Iris shift on her stool. She is meant to have gone home an hour ago, but she is sixteen parts curiosity to one part obedience, and she will be listening through the doorway. You are aware, with the instinct of someone who has lived in Little Halloway all their life, that whatever this man has brought to your counter, he has also brought to your town. The Underwood sits at the edge of everything here, patient and dark, and things that come from its direction rarely come alone.