Chapter 5 – Warming up the reception

Chapter 5 – Warming up the reception

Trying to ignore the intrusive thoughts that suggested that she had a ‘People Under the Stairs’ situation, Danni wrapped her coat firmer around her and ventured back outside. Sure enough, there was a shed around the side of the house and when she peered inside, she found, wonder of wonders, a pipe!

Just above it, there was sign, made of metal.

Want to get warm? Insert logs here.

Always keep the lid on when not in use!

Eager to get warm and not wanting to think about who was leaving her strange notes, who could see what she was doing in every room of this house, she shoved three good sized logs inside and closed the lid on it, making sure to lock it. She was never one to disobey signs that ended in exclamation marks. Usually, they were there for a good reason.

She didn’t hear anything like an engine or a motor starting, but when she went back into the house, she was relieved to pick up a noticeable uptick in the heat.

“Oh, thank goodness…” She breathed, feeling the warmth of the floor under her feet when she pulled off her shoes. Looking out into the expanse of the kitchen, she shifted uncomfortably on the spot for a moment. “Uhm… To whoever left me that note… thank you! Uh… I hope we can be friends and… eeh... please don’t attack me.”

Who was she talking to? The house? She honestly didn’t know. She was too relieved to be out of the cold to care.

Now finally able to feel the ends of her fingers, she set to work. The inventory was the first on her list, and, to her surprise, was finished quickly. Tawney hadn’t brought much in the way of decorations her and mostly, she was checking off furniture and the utensils in the cupboards, pots and pans in the drawers and the towels hanging from the racks, the list was pretty short. Danni, content with her work, stripped the beds next and, loading them into a washing basket she discovered in a cupboard under the stairs to her room, she piled it all into the machine and set it to run.

Whilst waiting for it to finish, she dusted the hard-to-reach places, swept the floors, throwing open a window when it proved to be a little too hot and ran the vacuum over the carpets.

It was strange how such seemingly pointless busy work cleared her mind. In reality, she had just wanted something to do whilst the washing was going so that she wouldn’t creep into her own head. But now that she was able to think again, she brought her laptop down to the living room and opened it. Instead of being presented with the brick wall that was her usual lack of inspiration, her fingers flew over the keys. It wasn’t a concrete story yet, but the plans were beginning to turn. Of that, she could be certain. There was something exhilarating about the creation of a new story. How the settings bloomed on the page like a painter creating a magnificent landscape of expansive greens and browns and blues, picking out characters like a sculptor built tiny humanoid golems from clay. The story became a song, breathed into existence from the throat of a godlike invisible bird.

Ever since her first story, a tiny thing barely five pages long and scrawled in her messy ten-year-old script in a mixture of pen and pencil and crayon, Danni had been in love with that feeling. She was Prometheus, Galileo, Mozart and Shakespeare all put together.

Of course… that was a thought she kept to herself.

She could only feel really good about herself when she got something published and for that, she would need to get something finished. Her computer was full to bursting with the beginnings of stories, fragments of character and narrative devices and they kept calling out to her, beginning to be breathed into life. Only… That was where her inspiration died. The first story she had presented to her parents, the fruits of what felt like days of labour, had been thoroughly dismissed. They hadn’t even looked at it. They had been too consumed with their next business meeting and she had retreated, downtrodden to her room.

There she had kept it. Hidden away in a drawer in her desk and as the years would go by, she would return to it from time to time. Trailing her fingers over the markings her grubby fingers had left on the pages, rereading her attempt at what she had thought was brilliant prose, revisiting the little figures she had crawled in the margins and around the bottom of the pages. She wasn’t much of an artist, but a blazing sense of pride erupted anew in her chest when she would pull it out. When she was finished with her reminiscing and her spirit had been revitalised, she would tuck it away in its hiding place and return to whatever she had been doing before.

The washing machine beeping broke her from the ebb and flow of her thoughts and, seeing that she had made a surprising amount of progress, she set her work aside. She could come back to it another time. She threw what could be dried into the tumble dryer and everything else went over the drying rack that she set up in the corner of the kitchen that lay opposite the dining table. Making herself a sandwich and relaxing with her back against the counter, she breathed in and out, feeling, for the first time that day, content. She was alone, set up in a house that was shockingly nice, there was a town down the road that she could visit if she got bored or lonely, all her needs were taken care of for the most part and it was all hers… at least for a month.

She was, truly and honestly, content.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so horrible…

Seeing as she had some time before the washing was finished, Danni found herself in an odd position. She couldn’t remember the last time she had so much free on her hands. When she was at home, she was always hiding away in her room, trying to avoid the eyes of her parents just as they would do everything that they could to ignore that she was there. It was a tense, unpleasant atmosphere to live in. University had been a wonderful three-year break as she worked towards her degree, but when graduation day had loomed upon her, it hadn’t felt like a celebration.

She could remember standing there, in her cap and gown, walking across the stage to shake hands with the headmaster and wishing that she could stumble into a wormhole that could teleport her back to the beginning of her course and have another three years all to herself again. Her parents hadn’t even been there, and all the while as she walked from one side of the stage to the other, her hands trembling with all that she was experiencing, she could feel their disapproving eyes upon her. It had all felt so… pointless. Her parents weren’t there and now, after three years, she was going to have to go back to that house where she would be under their eye all the time.

At times, late at night when she was bone tired from spending hours with all her attention focused like a laser on an assignment, high off relief at finally finishing the damn thing, full of a good dinner she had gotten as a reward, she had wondered why her parents had ever had children. They certainly didn’t act like they wanted her. When she wasn’t being ignored, they were focusing all their disapproval and disappointment on her. Nothing she did seemed to impress them, and they would never let her believe that she had a future in their business.

When she had asked, once when she was young and naïve and had yet to accept that the cold tundra she lived in originated in her parent’s, if she could ever work for them, she had been swiftly set straight. They had stonewalled her, rushing off to every country on the globe that could accommodate them and leaving her to pick up the pieces. She didn’t feel like their daughter. She felt more like a roommate or a stranger in the walls.

If they had ever shared a family dinner, she couldn’t remember. What few extracurricular activities she had done, they had never shown up except to drop her off and pick her up again.

When she had read the Yellow Wallpaper, it had clicked for her. She was the girl in the walls, trapped there by an uncaring figure. She was just waiting to be discovered by another figure. In truth, it was a miracle that her parents had never had a second child, or she was positive that she would become one of those stories read by A.I. on the internet. She would receive an unpaid promotion to parent or vanish in the aether of the background.

All of a sudden, the house felt too small. Like it was breathing around her. As if she had stepped into the hollow belly of an enormous creature of brick and metal and plaster and iron chairs and long curtains. She was standing here, in its stomach and she needed to be… so where else. The machine and warm air would do the drying for her; she needed to be away from this place.

Wrapping herself up in her thickest coat, gloves and scarf, Danni went outside. Her stomach was in knots as she locked the door behind her, shoving the keys in her pocket for safe keeping and as she turned around, facing the garden and the village, she felt incrementally better. The village lay down below… if she was going to stay here, she should go and investigate it. She had been so sleepy, and the night sky had been so dark on the car ride to the house yesterday, she had barely been able to take in anything the driver had been saying, much less the signs on any of the shops along the way. Out here, in this brisk cool air of January, an adventure through a strange new town sounded like just what the doctor ordered.

Literally.

It was the nuclear bomb of a secret that she kept sequestered away in the back of her mind but in the depths of her second year, when deadlines were crashing down upon like towering dominoes, when she had not been able to take a second longer, she had crossed the unspeakable line of her family and gone to the school for help.

That was not something done in her family.

If there was struggle, it was worked through with blood and sweat but never tears. There was only work. You just get over it, just get through it.

But she had bucked that trend. Well… perhaps bucked was the wrong word. She had treated the entire set up as if she were about to undergo a mission as a sleeper agent. No one could ever know what she was doing.

What she was doing would have been enough for her to be completely disowned. It wasn’t just showing weakness, it was writing it out in the sky in neon bright letters, impossible to ignore.

She had reached out to the school, and they had set her up with a counselling session for three hours every Friday. But there were some things that she dared not even think about. Those were for later, for the moments when she would slip under the cool shelter of her covers, close her eyes and she could sweep them under the rug, never to be dwelt on again. They would be forgotten in the mists of sleep.

University was over, she would never have to think about her moment of weakness again.

Her immediate thought was that she could walk down to the village, but when she approached the end of the doorway, she swiftly retracted that thought.

The journey down might be fun when the streets were clear and the weather was warmer, without such a constant reminder of the possibility of rain, then a jaunt down the lane would be ideal. But the grey clouds were foreboding, the quiet of the world outside seeming to be only the prelude to an earth-cracking thunderstorm. It might not have been so bad if the trees curling over either side of the road created a natural wind tunnel, sending the bitter cold breeze directly into her face. She was going to have to find alternate travel plans.

“Okay… What can I do?” It wasn’t like she had a bike or something. She certainly couldn’t skateboard, she had never learned and on a road like this, slick with dead leaves and the remnants of winter storms, it was a sure-fire way to break her neck, and she didn’t have a drivers license, much less a car. What a predicament…

Thinking that she might as well shove in a few logs through the hole to keep the house warm for when she returned, she collected some and, carrying them in her arms, she walked to the shed. As soon as the door swung open, she discovered, much to her delight, that there was a bike! Leaning against the wall, it was a large robust model, painted blue with chipped paint and a large wire basket attached to the handlebars.

“Where did you come from?” She asked, putting the logs down and walking over to investigate. It looked like something that Mrs Gulch would ride across Kansas to scold Auntie ‘Em and Dorothy. With big wheels and when she swung her leg over it, finding it to be a shockingly comfortable sit, the handlebars were firm to the touch with white rubber covers. As lovely as it was, the real problem was that it shouldn’t be there. Danni was positive that she hadn’t seen it when she had come in here before. It had only been the pipe for the heating in here. So… Just like the message, she had thought of needing something and it had appeared. Discovering something previously unnoticed in the house once was a lovely surprise, but finding something that you knew hadn’t been there twice had more sinister connotations.

Now she was positive of it. She had someone else living in the house. Someone who could see her and, on a more concerning note, hear her. They were also curiously generous and helpful. That was just plain off putting.

No one was that nice for no reason.

But she had been all through the house when she was doing the inventory. She hadn’t seen a single soul, aside from Joey. As much as a painfully shrill voice in the back of her head was telling her to get off the bike, tell Tawney to shove it and run screaming for the hills, she really, really wanted to see the village.

If there was someone in the house, she justified to herself, that they hadn’t done anything to hurt or threaten her. All they had done was leave some messages and fix a bike. But… what if this was just the calm before the storm? What was it that she had heard it to be called? Love bombing? Was this person just buttering her up so that she would be easier to control? What had Tawney set her up for? Maybe… She cast a look towards the village again. Maybe there might be someone who might know something about what was going on in this house.

She had read enough small-town stories to know that everyone knew everyone else’s business. There was nothing else to do, other than work, eat, go home and, most importantly, gossip. How much truth would there be in that? Even clad in her thick jacket, Danni shuddered.

Dismounting, she went inside and sank down into the kitchen nook. She wanted to go home. But the idea of what her parents would say when they found out chased that thought from her head. She couldn’t. Try as she may, it was clear where her parent’s attention and affection lay. It had never been with her. The only time that she had ever seen her mother smile in her direction was when Tawney had been standing beside her.

“What am I going to do?” She breathed, running her hands over her face. “Can’t go home… don’t know if I should stay…” Then she realised that something new had been written on the whiteboard.

Thank you for the wood.

Have no fear

You are in no danger.

Please lock the windows and doors if you going to leave.

Just like that, her mind was made up. Whether for a moment or forever, she had to get out of here. She was positive that she was seeing things and the only cure for that was to get the hell out of this house! The yellow wallpaper was creeping in close around her, and she was determined not to stay where the woman inside could reach her.

Barely remembering to follow what the person had said about the locks, she climbed onto her bike and took off. Without realising that she had forgotten all about the small kitchen window that sat between the front door and the fridge.