The Road To The Lodge

The morning brought a constant shower of thin rain that still managed to soak her through within minutes and a long walk up and out of the cluster of half a dozen houses that passed as a village towards the Lodge.

The P.I had given Marcy some more info about the group and the Lodge. The actual building itself had been fairly small, a house built by some rich prick a hundred years ago that was worth more for the massive sprawl of land around it than the building itself. Eventually, however, the family had fallen on hard times or drank the money away, and the place had wound up empty. Until The World Family arrived on the scene that was.

The World Family had begun as a project in Canada, a bunch of First Nation folks who got sick of getting shit on realised that while they might all be different species, they were all getting shit on from the same place. So they banded together and started working on getting better rights for everyone. Turns out you when you added up all those little groups you had a pretty decent chunk of the population. The kind of lump that makes politicians nervous about pissing them off and so the problems of the First Nation started to get listened to, and things began to improve. Before long, The World Family was a franchise with versions of the project popping up all over the world.

That was nearly thirty years ago, and since then the whole thing had fractured and morphed so much that you could find anything from “Human Purity” terrorists and “One Soul” Anarchists calling themselves World Family. So it was hardly surprising that a commune-like this would pop up. It was just that she had never expected someone like Karmin to fall in with them.

She didn’t know what to expect of the place. The P.I had snapped the pictures at a farmers market that had been held back at the village, so he had never seen the place and all the Google Maps images were out of date by about five years and showed just a run-down old house and the bones of a few crofts.

So when she crested the final hill and got to look down into the bowl of the glen and see the place she found her breath catching in her throat. It wasn’t the old house, that was now wreathed in scaffolding or even the brightly coloured gift shop that sat at the bottom of the hill.

It was the houses.

Dozens and dozens of low bungalows filled the hills around the Lodge, some of them grouped into circles and others standing alone or maybe with one or two others. Some of them were tiny while others looked big enough to house a dozen people. Streets of gravel marked out the roads between them, and she could see even from here people moving around among the houses.

She had been expecting maybe the Lodge to have been rebuilt and packed full of the kinds of and insane people that joined communes in the arsehole of nowhere, not this.

Looking down the glen, she could see the gift shop was open, and she could just read the sign that hung on the wall outside.

Take a tour of our historic lodge and wonderful community.

That seemed like as good a way to find out about the place and maybe see if she could find Karmin.

Then again, she could always just try wandering through the place herself, granted she would stick out like a sore thumb in a tiny community like this, but she might save herself some hassle.