Short Stories: The Garden Dance, Part II

It took less than a minute for Jimmy and I to drink our ice cube-filled hot chocolates, though strangely I found myself dozing off for a moment after swallowing my chocolate, but I was able to quickly remove myself from the brief bout of sleepiness. Not wanting to be lazy, we then carried our empty cups with us when we got up from our chairs and made our way over to what appeared to be a small gap in part of the tall hedges surrounding the entire garden. The gap seemed to get bigger the closer we walked towards it, until we were standing at a large gate wooden gate. Curious at its sudden appearance, I unbolted it and we both stepped through.

On the other side of the gate lay seemingly endless grass fields, but about twenty yards in front of us was a path surrounding a pond. We went left on the path and walked to the other side of the body of water before we heard voices; Jimmy and I spun around to see several other people entering through the gate.

"It looks like everyone else has arrived," I remarked. "Perhaps we should return to the garden."

We continued on our previous direction around the path and made it back to the gate. At that point, everyone else in the pond area had decided to leave as well, meaning I had to hold the gate open for them all until only I remained. I shut the gate and re-bolted it once I was back in the garden.

There were now a hundred other people in the garden, but they all appeared as though they had been here for hours: they were talking, singing, eating, dancing, laughing...glancing at my watch, they could barely have been here for more than ten minutes, but no one would know that from the activity now taking place. Still, everything was just making sense to me somehow, and I stopped my brief bit of thinking on the matter to go to the centre of the garden as I had just noticed something hidden there within the middle hedges. I looked around for Jimmy on my way, but I quickly assumed he had wandered off.

Situated within the central hedges was a courtyard, and although people were dancing all over the vast garden, the flat flooring of the courtyard was the "main" dance floor. There were tables filled with food and drinks located to the sides of the interior of the courtyard, as well as slow jazz music playing although I could not see or hear exactly where the music was originating from. I put my empty cup from earlier down and began to think.

Just a few minutes ago, everything made sense and only briefly did I think about the mysteries of Ketterland Mansion: now I found myself realising what an enigma it was all turning out to be. There were several aspects of the place that were completely out of the ordinary or outright contradictory; but as I looked around I could not see a single frown or any indication that anyone other than myself found anything suspicious. One other thing came to mind: where was The Landlady herself in all of this?

As I was thinking, something else then ended up drawing my attention away from trying to figure out what was going on.

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This was supposed to be a one-part story, but I have had a really pleasant time in writing it; I hope you are looking forward to the third part as much as I am!