Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The mayor.

I cued up the footage and fast-forwarded for several minutes until I found the figure of the mayor entering the building. He seemed to be moving at a brisk pace. I watched as he disappeared from that camera and showed up in another one, navigating the pathway and crossing a little bridge to get over the river. The camera switched again to show him walking into the hedge maze.

He seemed to navigate the maze with ease. The tape didn't show his end destination, just that he disappeared into one of the hedges--it looked to me like he opened a door. I rewound the tape a few times and made note of the directions he went, and then I set off to look, myself. I'm sure it's been long since he was there, but he must have gone there for a reason. He looked in such a hurry...

It took me awhile, but I navigated through the hedge maze and found the middle. I checked my watch and it was a half hour later. Piers made it look so easy, but he also looked like he had done this hundreds of times. As I had suspected, there was a door hidden in one of the hedges. It was concealed by a curtain of ivy, but it moved easily.

The center garden was really quite pretty. There were flowers and hedges everywhere, of course, but there was also a statue in the middle. Right next to the statue was a round, flat white table, and some elegant white metal chairs that went with it. I moved over to examine the statue a little bit closer. It was a statue featuring two men, their arms linked and their smiles both jovial but somehow underhanded. Their likenesses seemed to me to reflect brothers, so I looked down to the plaque. Sure enough, the names underneath revealed my suspicions to be correct.

"Teddy and Peter Culling, founders of Cullingville", the plaque read.

It was at that moment that I realised I didn't know those names. We had never learned about our hometown at school. My parents didn't even tell me, if they knew. It was one of those things that no one ever thought of, so I didn't think to ask, and I doubt anyone else did, either. I thought of all the times in the past that I had been to these historical gardens, and realised that it wasn't mentioned anywhere else, either. Why would it be mentioned here, out of the public eye, of all places? You'd think that something like that would be important enough for everyone to see.

After a cursory look around the garden, I found a second plaque in among some flowers. I'll transcribe it.

"It must be noted that the Piers will say that a plague overtook the town in 1921, and though this is incorrect, it is our duty as Five Petals to uphold this and safeguard the information."

Seems odd, and not very descriptive. I never heard anything like this from my parebt

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WHAT DID I JUST SEE?