Chapter 8 – The Strange Becomes Familiar

Chapter 8 – The Strange Becomes Familiar

Sadly, as time ticked on, her question went unanswered. The letters, now faded in their blue ink against the stark white board, went neglected. Strangely, however, Danni couldn’t find it in herself to care. The past seven days had been some of the busiest that she’d ever had away from home. Every day, she would rise with the sun, cook a simple meal, as she still had yet to throw off the insecurity around food that came with being a perpetually broke university student, clean what she could in each of the rooms, and, despite the siren song she could hear coming from her laptop, would go out into town.

The bike had turned from a stranger to a close companion the more she used it. Now, she was even keeping her bag in the wire basket and daring to lift her hands from the bars! There was something freeing, almost exhilarating about knowing that it would not slip or fall with her atop it. That was, however, until a large pile of leaves got caught in the chain and she was almost thrown headlong over the bars. From then, she kept her hands firmly attached and slowed down along the unkempt streets. Usually, when she arrived, only Joey would be awake, tending to his wares like the dedicated shopkeep Danni was delighted to discover him to be.

“Good morning Miss Danni!” Joey called to her when her brakes let out that characteristic squeak and she slid to a stop, directing her bike around the side of the shop and dismounting. Jogging up to him, she noticed that he was cradling a large cauliflower with the tenderness of an infant and the sight was so bizarre, it took all her willpower to keep from breaking down in gales of laughter.

“Good morning Joey! Is this the new arrival?” Her lips pressed together hard to keep the giggles held back, but Joey seemed to catch her meaning without.

“It’s a beautiful bouncing Brassica Oleracea, isn’t it lovely?” Joey shoved the vegetable under her nose and the dam inside Danni broke, laughter erupting out of her, shattering the quiet of the morning.

“Stop it! Stop it! She pleaded as he continued to try and push the cauliflower on her, a face-splitting grin on his own face. “Stooooop!” She begged, tears welling up in her eyes, her hands weakly batting it away, though she looked more like she was trying to swat away a cloud of pesky insects.

Eventually, he pulled it away and placed it atop the pyramid of produce he had been organising before, but not before he had reduced Danni to a shuddering, giggling mess, barely holding onto the wooden frames that held a gleaming display of red and yellow apples. “That… was… mean…” It was a struggle to speak, but one big breath brought her upright again. Joey dusted his hands off on his well-worn apron, his face tinged with a pink that hid his freckles, and spread his arms open wide.

“Allow me to apologise for my cruelty by helping you select whatever you need.” As it happened, he refused to take no for an answer, following her around the space like a golden retriever that had learned to walk on its hind legs. Though there was no ignoring that, with him so close, there was the ever present smell of lavender too. Whenever she would pause by a box, he would seem able to grab the best from the selection with just a moment’s glance, offering it to her without so much as a word but with all the charm of a fairy tale prince. He had the curious ability to know just what she wanted from his shop and never failed to give her a good deal for it, carrying everything without even a hint of struggle to balance it and somehow the conversation starter slipped out of her.

“I’ve noticed that you don’t charge a lot for everything you sell here, don’t you ever worry about affording rent on your place? The prices have to be… absurd, especially for a shop in a village this nice. And then there’s a place to stay. Do you live down in the city?” She asked, but Joey just gave her a carefree shake of the head.

“This country mouse could never live in amongst all that noise. As far as I can see, it’s just the recipe for a constant headache and I don’t need that. Did you see the door on the side of the place when you were coming down?” He inquired, pointing towards whence she had come.

“Yes?” Danni replied, unsure of where he was going with this.

“That’s the entrance to my house. I live above the house, got a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and all.”

“You… Oh my…” Danni breathed, wondering what it must look like. “You must pay a fortune in rent!”

Now it was Joey’s turn to burst out laughing.

“Own it outright. Shop and house both. It’s a marvel, but I confess, I’m extremely lucky. I came around at just the right time to snatch it up before someone else could. Since then, sweet lady business has blessed me.” He explained to Danni, once he had calmed down enough to speak.

“You deserve the blessings.” Danni praised and Joey, turning positively beet red, waved her away. There was no missing the dazzling white of his grin, though, even as he tried to turn his head away. For all his good looks and splendid manners, the man was astoundingly humble. Was that an effect of living here?

What was this feeling?

The longer she stuck around, the closer she came to a real definition. She collected the paper bag holding her things and had been about to head back to her bike, when Joey called her over again. A white delivery trunk had rolled in whilst she had been lost in her contemplations. “Let me help!” She insisted, setting the bag down and hurrying over to where the van was idling. Though Joey seemed surprised, he did not begrudge her help. For the next ten minutes, she followed his every direction, hefting boxes of fruit, sacks of potatoes, sweated under bags of flour and sugar, balanced tins that she carefully arranged into pyramids on the scrubbed wooden counters, never once giving heed to the panic that crashed down on her like a wave when she finally stopped.

She had been so eager to jump from her bike, she had forgotten all about her things! Her bag! Her phone! Only her keys, tucked in her pocket, were safe but what if!

Running around to where she had left her bike, convinced that she would find it snatched, her belongings missing, all manner of disasters, she was shocked to find that her bike was not only still there, but at some point, Joey had snuck off and decorated the basket with flowers!

“What is this?” She asked, touching the petals of one of the flowers with pure wonder on her face.

“Consider it a little welcome present from me.” Joey clapped on her shoulder and Danni swore that she couldn’t feel a single cool breeze. Not while her face was burning! What kind of cheesy, romantic, cliché was this? Moreover, why did it make her so impossibly happy?

“I thought that the food delivery you made was my welcome present?” Danni asked, still admiring the beautifully woven gift.

“Oh no, that was just something that I did at your friend’s request.” Joey explained, bending over the basket to undo the weaving and gathering all of the flowers into a bouquet that he wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. Danni swore that her heart was racing as she accepted it, making her hide her face behind her scarf. “This was just my way of making you know how glad I am that you chose to stay.” Bless him, he swept his hat from his head and held it in both hands, as he spoke. “It must be quite the shock to live somewhere so quiet, compared to the city. I just wanted you to know that I-we! We are glad that you’re here.”

“It’s working.” Danni was fighting not to squirm. Why had she had to come out to the village with a grocer who’d leapt straight from the pages of a romance novel! Why did he have to be so perfect?!

As it happened, that wasn’t the only welcome gift she received that day. By the time she was pushing her bike home, the gifts were too numerous to count. There was a book on recipes from the butcher’s wife, an invitation to come around and indulge in a cup of tea and gin, the game not the drink, from a farmer’s wife and her friends and she had begun to extend some of her own. The butcher had told his wife all about her invitation to visit the house and Danni had been grateful for the recipe book.

Aside from the tomato soup, all her first attempts at baking were… unpleasant to say the least. What the recipe said were cupcakes came out shrivelled, black, looking fitter to roll down the heating pipe than something you were meant to eat. A cake that refused to rise, bread that she could probably used as a bludgeoning weapon, all were consummate failures. What was worse was that, not wanting to inadvertently detonate her heating system by putting them in the log pipe, Danni’d had to force them down with liberal amounts of jam, chocolate spread and more tea than she was proud to say. On a somewhat lighter note, the stranger who wrote her the notes dogged refusal to show themselves had fuelled her determination to put on a good show for her visitors, whenever they may come and she set to the task of baking something delicious with renewed vigour. Granted, she would have settled for halfway decent or, at least, edible, but when she slid out the first cake that didn’t smell of charcoal and inspected pale yellow sponge for burn marks, she almost jumped into the air and whooped!

Something about this small victory brought out a new, careful, touch to her cooking and though the walls and counters were soon covered in flour, jam and the air had been turned a fetching shade of blue whenever she splattered cake mix all over herself, she kept at it. It took more tries than she was willing to admit, but each time she pulled something delicious out of the oven, that victorious feeling grew all the stronger. If it also meant she had to pay Joey visits every morning to restock her supplies, all the better.

Carrying the dish bearing her newest creation into the living room, where her laptop lay, she cast about for something to write. But, unfortunately, unlike her cooking, she was making no progress. All she could do was stare down at the blank white page and hope that the great mist of ideas in her head would find their way onto the page. If Tawney had thought her writing would be improved whilst she was here, she was very wrong. She hadn’t even been able to use the different route by planning first, all her ideas seemed to be blocked by something. All those ideas that had formed in the steam of her bath were gone, disguised by the mud of her overly relaxed mind. But what could it be that was keeping her from putting her fingers down?

Of course, she had never been great shakes at writing in general, as much as she claimed that she wanted to make a career out of it. The longer she stared down at the page, the louder her parent’s voices became in her head.

‘You need to give up these flights of fancy and get a real job.’

‘You’d be better off finding a nice office job. You wouldn’t even have to tell them about that worthless degree you wasted so much time getting.’

‘You’d never catch Tawney wasting time on this.’

Eventually Danni had learned to tune out what they said and just tried to focus on what she could put down. That is, unfortunately, after the constant condemnations of her interests had burrowed into her subconscious like termites and were threatening to eat her alive.

When the sun approached the horizon, she forced herself to put the writing, or lack thereof, down. Instead, she lost herself in cleaning, dusting, mopping the floors, looking for anything that she could do to stop thinking about how painful it was for her to be failing so hard at something she loved so much.

During one of her visits into the village, she stepped into the butcher shop, the bell over the door dinging loudly to announce her arrival. She had been aiming to collect a fresh pack of pork chops for dinner, but when she approached the counter, taking in the deep reds and pinks of the cuts nestled safely in piles of ice, she found that it had been abandoned. Curious to see where Mr. Tine had gone off to when he usually could be found watching over his shop like a lighthouse keeper in the dead of winter, Danni peeked around to see if he had gone into the back, a space she had never felt the urge to see before but, as she pulled her headphones off, pricking up her ears, she swore she could hear something going on back there.

What was… going on?

Not wanting to incur an incidental charge of trespassing, Danni slipped out of the front door and moved around to the back of the shop. There, she could see Mr. Tine and one of the farmers, a man who’s name she had yet to learn, talking together in hushed tones. Mr. Tine’s face was grave, as if he were hearing horrible news of a loved one, but the farmer was positively smoking around the ears. He was broad through the shoulders, with thick arms hidden under a well-worn, off-white work shirt and denim overalls, a shaven head under a newsboy cap that did little to conceal the red spreading along the back of his neck.

“I just don’t understand! They don’t seem bothered by it but it’s every night! I’ve set dogs, I’ve got men watching every night and we haven’t gotten a hint about what’s doing it?!”

“What’s doing what?” She hadn’t meant to say it. She hadn’t even meant to overhear. Why couldn’t she just keep her nose out of these matters?

As she was chastising herself, both men jumped in surprise, a behaviour she had thought neither of them were able to do with anything other than a level of cartoonish energy unbecoming of men of their stature. When they spun around to face, Danni stepped back, feeling like a mouse caught in the eyes of a pair of hungry foxes.

“Miss… What are you doing around here?” Mercifully, Mr. Tine didn’t seem angry to see her there. The farmer was looking down at her from his generous height quizzically, clearly wondering what she was doing there in tandem with his companion.

“You weren’t behind the counter. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear from there.” She tried to backpedal, but her legs had become glued to the spot. She would just have to take what was coming to her.

“Foolish thing, sticking your nose in places that it’s not welcome.” The farmer’s voice had lost all it’s fire, to be replaced with something so much worse. Disapproval.

Don’t be so crass, the young lady just wanted to see.” Mr. Tine interjected, disarmingly.

“Curiousity-…” the farmer tried to say but was cut off by Mr. Tine.

“Killed the cat. Yes, I know. But that’s only half the story, as my wife likes to remind me.”

Unsure of what to do now but hoping to dissolve the tension, Danni spoke up in the silence. “Uhm… what was it you were talking about? Is everything alright?”

The farmer looked ready to keep his mouth shut or throw something scathing at her for being a city-slicking, know-it-all trying to poke her nose into farm business, but Mr. Tine gave him a look. The kind of look that Danni was sure had originated from his wife.

“Sadly… not. I don’t know what you know about the countryside miss but we’ve been waking up to find that a fair few of our animals are coming up with bites on them.”

“B-Bites?!” Danni’s hand flew up to cover her mouth, her mind conjuring savage images of cows with their throats slit, gleaming bone and streams of blood flowing over the farmyard.

“Only small ones, mind! Barely there! Tiny nibbles at most!” Mr. Tine interjected quickly, clearly having seen the horrified expression on her face.

“Small, aye, but worrying. Could be something as simple as a board that’s been rubbed against and scratched something or…” the farmer drifted off, looking irritated.

Mr. Tine and Danni waited for him to speak and under their gaze, his determination to remain stubbornly silent wilted.

“My wife… she’s been… she’s got this mad idea in her head that we have bats somewhere in the barn!”

“Did… Bats? Are they common in this part of the country? I wasn’t even aware that we could have such a thing, especially not in this season of all times. I mean… do bats hibernate? And why would they want to bite your animals?” Danni stopped, now realising that both men were looking at her as if she had suddenly sprung a second head. “That was… I said all that out loud, didn’t I?”

Mr. Tine smothered a laugh, giving her a wordless nod, but the farmer still looked dazed.

“I’m sorry… I do that a lot when I’m alone. It’s how I work out story problems. I guess, it’s become more than just a habit.”

“Tell me, Miss Danni. Do you fancy yourself as an investigator?” Mr. Tine asked, folding his arms.

“Oh no! Never! I just… like working out problems. I’m just that kind of person, I like to help.” She explained, twisting her fingers.

How many times had her mother or father overheard what she was saying and barge into her room to scold her for it? One time, they had even threatened to take her door away when she had closed it in the hopes to keeping her sounds inside, claiming that she was risking their ability to trust her. What did they think she was doing? Planning to burn the house down? It sounded like it whenever they would start banging on the door to make her stop.

“It’s a remarkable thing.”

Danni stopped. Had she heard him correctly? “Pardon?”

“It’s quite a unique thing, thinking aloud. I’d love to see what you come up with.” Mr. Tine’s encouragement lit a fire in Danni’s chest that surely would have lifted her off the ground.

“You’re… You’re the first person to ever tell me that.” Danni confessed.

Now it was Mr. Tine’s turn to blink.

“If we’re all finished with all this investigator talk, I need to get back before my boys decide to start climbing on the roof.” The farmer interjected impatiently.

“They wouldn’t!”

“They would. They’ve been suggesting it for a while now. They think they can knock down any bats hiding in the rafters.”

“But the roof is all corrugated steel. I’d like to meet the bat that would enjoy such accommodations.” Mr. Stone laughed, his great body shaking under the force of his humour. He waved the farmer away and he and Danni went back into the semi-warm of the shop.

“Planning something special for the evening?” He asked, using tongs to pull the meat Danni desired out and wrapping it up tightly in plastic.

“No, just going to try and do some more reading. It’s just about the only thing that’s made me feel like I’ve accomplished anything, since my writing is going nowhere.”

“You know, my wife still wants to come and visit you for a housewarming.” He mentioned, handing over the plastic bag containing her purchases. Thanks to Tawney’s payment and Danni’s own frugality had led to her savings growing better than she had expected. It made shopping considerably less of a stressful affair for her. In truth, Danni hadn’t wanted to try and invite any around until she had gotten better at cooking.

“Well, I’ve been practicing my baking skills, perhaps now would be a good time for me to host.” Why had she said that? What was it about this place that made her say all of these insane things?

“I’ll pass that onto my wife.”

Rather than say anything else that might dig her into a deeper hole, Danni tucked her purchases into her bag, hopped back onto her bike, and pedalled back to the house.

Storing the meat in the fridge, Danni took a seat before her laptop. But rather than try and write anything new, she clicked on her web browser and began to search. First, she googled what bat species lived in the north of England and was surprised to find that there were at least 9 of them.

“Common and soprano pipis-… how do you say that? Noctule? Brown long-eared… whispered and Brandt’s, Natterer’s… Interesting…”

Clicking on each of them in turn, she scrolled down to where it talked about their diet, hoping that she might turn up something promising. Unfortunately, her search only pulled up insectivores, none of them would have gone after animals on the farms.

“Okay… that answers that. But… what about blood drinkers?” She pulled up the Wikipedia article on vampire bats. “Hmm… Central and… South America… I guess that makes sense.” Chewing on her bottom lip, Danni pushed her hair out of her face impatiently. She didn’t know why, but there was something about this that didn’t make any sense. If something was biting the animals in the dead of the night, what could it be?

Without realising it, she got up from her seat and began to pace around the room. Tugging her bottom lip free from the grip her teeth had on it, her voice started to ring around the room.

“Vampire bats are out of the question… but what could be small enough to take a bite out of an animal that a farmer could notice? I mean… there are mosquitos, but you would never find them in this season… maybe some kind of parasite? Like a whole bunch of them? But they’d be found. These cows were being raised for their meat… they would need to be inspected before slaughter, right? Anything that was biting them would be noticed… Damn it…”

Nothing about this connected, nothing seemed to make any sense. The only thing that it could be would be bats, but it didn’t make any logical sense that there would be any in this weather, much less in this country. What could it be?

Deciding that she needed to do something to take her mind off this, Danni went into the kitchen and started prepping a Victoria sponge cake, just like that which she had made that morning. Something about the robotic, learned by heart motions of it all relaxed her brain and she trusted that this would give her the space and down time for some kind of secretive information to eek itself out of the darkest recesses of her brain.

Sadly, as she pushed it into the oven and crossed her fingers for a success story, she still had no idea.

Unless…

There had been those robberies…

Was the farmer certain that the marks had been made by teeth? What if, in his shock at being his animals bloodied, he had simply jumped to conclusions? What if this was just another step taken by those mysterious intruders? What if it had been a prank… that had just gone too far?

She needed more information.

Had the farmer or any of his workers been victims of this breaking and entering trend?

Could one of them be behind it?

Despite herself, she had begun to pace again. Only when the timer went off and she realised that she didn’t smell any smoke did she stop. Grabbing her oven mitts, thankfully unscathed despite her culinary catastrophes, she pulled out the cake and was amazed to see that it had come out looking just like it did in the book! Barring the cream and jam in the centre, of course. Taking a tentative sniff, Danni’s skin broke out into a storm of goosebumps at the tantalising aroma. Setting it aside to cool, she went back to the living room to grab her phone. She needed to get a photo of this, her very first, bonafide success story.

Maybe, if she couldn’t hack it as an author here, she could put together a food blog?

That was an intriguing idea.

Wasn’t it said that the best creators always had more than one arrow in their quiver?

As she snapped photos of the yellow sponge, hoping to capture some of the waves of steam coming off it. If only she could have captured some of the sunlight in them so they would stand out more. But she didn’t want to risk it accidentally falling into the sink.

She was jerked out of her reverie almost painfully by a sharp rapping at the door leading to the kitchen. Looking up, she saw several faces peering in through the glass and blanched. When she had said that the butcher could send his wife, she hadn’t meant ‘with the whole village behind her’!