’Firstly, Ian’s butcher shop,’ Wee Renee asked.
’I’ve not been there since we found him hanging up in the back, dead,’ Bob said.
’We can’t really count that one so much because it could just be for the raw meat. I think we all agree with that,’ Wee Renee said. ‘Next, the Chippy?’
’Not for a while. Not inside. I walk past every day though,’ Bob admitted.
’The Coffee Shop?’ Wee Renee asked.
’No never,’ Bob said.
’This red car up here?’ She asked.
‘No, I’ve not been there for about ten years. I have only been up there when I was little with Dad. There is no reason to go up there. Only if you want to go to the quarry.’
’Right, that’s true enough,’ Wee Renee said. ‘The Pub.’
’A few weeks back but that was with all you a lot,’ Bob said.
’The canal?’ Wee Renee asked.
‘Not since last summer,’ Bob told her.
‘The School amphitheatre?’ Wee Renee asked.
‘Well yeah when I went there, but again that’s about three years ago now,’ Bob said, scratching his head.
’So, we have all these places that you weren’t even close to,’ Wee Renee said to him.
‘The million-dollar questions is, what’s there or who was there? We don’t know what the beast wants,’ Wee Renee said. She had come to a natural break in the proceedings and needed sustenance to forge on.
’Can we have another cuppa please?’ Wee Renee asked. ‘I’m parched.’
Hazel, Ann, Brenda and Beryl all went out to make the drinks. This only took about ten minutes but gave everyone time to think. When they were fully refreshed. Wee Renee spoke again.
‘No need to look at the map for this. We had all better sit down for this one,’ Wee Renee said cautiously.
They all sat down and felt like they were going to hear something that they wouldn’t like. They had good senses for that.
‘Some of you may be aware that I have a special friend. Terry calls him the midge and so does Pat sometimes. That is how he might appear to some people, a single midge. Unlike a midge, he is about even in the winter, not just in the summer. In fact, he isn’t a midge. He is a Faerie, A tiny wee Faerie and I love him to bits,’ Wee Renee said.
Those that did not know about all this thought that the others might at laugh at Wee Renee’s revelation. After a little thought though, it was understandable in this area, with everything else.
‘We would not have been able to do what we did this winter without him and his advice. He gave me the courage and information about what to do. I trust him implicitly, but he has said some very concerning things about all this,’ she said.
Pat couldn’t imagine what he had to say. She thought he used her friend to do his dirty work. Pat wasn’t 100% sure about him.
‘Firstly, the Wee Faerie finally gave me his name. He gave me several names for things but none of them really matched anything in English. So, I picked the nearest word to it. From now on my Wee Faerie will be called Sid,’ Wee Renee said.
‘Nice,’ Maurice said. Wee Renee nodded once.
’So, Sid told me that this creature is after their mate. Their dead mate. They were skinned. The insides of these creatures are apparently a very lucky charm, which grants wishes. The Moorston vampires are aware of an evil predator that is gathering items like this in the Melden Triangle. Sid told me that this is one of the things he has taken,’ she said.
All of a sudden, the whole matter seemed a take a turn for the worse to the inhabitants of the Dark Pennine Tale room.
‘Now this creature, The Barbara as it’s called, wants its mate. It wants the skin back, and the skin is somewhere in Friarmere. I was told that Bob was the key to the skin. Bob had the key to the skin. Sid told me that. So, the skin is somewhere here. It’s in something that has a keyhole that fits this key. Pat?’ Wee Renee asked. Pat took her cue and lifted the key up from her cleavage. It had a piece of fluff on the part that would go inside the lock. No-one mentioned it. ‘That is one matter,’ Wee Renee stated.
Everyone was transfixed to Wee Renee words in the firelight. Some of them looked at her, some of them looked at the fire. This was an awful lot to take in.
’Now all The Barbara wants is the skin back. Yes, I know it is murdering people, but apparently it is for food and probably would be keeping more to itself upon the Moors if this other predator hadn’t killed the other one,’ Wee Renee said.
Bob scratched his nose. He felt like he was off the hook now. However, this still seemed to be going down bank for all of them.
‘Does this other thing have a name? Currently, I’ve met Sid and Barbara. Who’s next? Kenneth?’ Pat asked sarcastically.
‘I’ll get to that later,’ Wee Renee said. If Pat thought Sid and Barbara were funny, she would split her sides at the next name. Tonight, wasn’t the night.
‘So back to The Barbara. I’m also led to believe that she seems to only come out at certain times and for many years in between, we will not see it. I don’t know whether this is some kind of hibernation or not. But rest assured once she has done her work, she will go back to that state.’
‘So, it’s a girl?’ Adam asked.
‘Yes. That has been confirmed,’ Wee Renee replied.
At the back of her mind, Our Doris all of a sudden knew where this was going and didn’t like it. Sally too hoped she would hear another change in Wee Renee’s direction. She didn’t like killings to go unpunished.
’The fact is that we have to let it carry on. It has to find the skin to stop. We can’t kill it, we can’t even touch it. Just as its mate was lucky, so is that one. As long as it resides in this Village, we will have good fortune or comparatively you might say. But the consequences if we kill it are too grave to even think about. A terrible catastrophe will befall us, much worse than what is happening now or what happened in the winter!’ The large group of people listening to this were shocked and horrified. This was not the way they wanted it to go down.
’So, after much thought, I have come to this conclusion. We stop hunting it and instead try and find that skin, the other Barbara. We find that skin and hand it over, and all this ends. The quicker we do that; the fewer people will be killed, and it will just go back to sleep. Then we leave it. We leave it at that, and we try and forget about it, until the next time. We also hope that this predator doesn’t find it or something else doesn’t skin another one of them for a lucky rabbit’s foot. Which leads me back to the question before, what do we think this key fits?’ Wee Renee asked, hoping that her swift change of subject hadn’t been noticed. It had. But what could people say, considering the choice they had.
Most of the others were too shocked to comment or think, after what they had just heard. However, those that particularly agreed with what Wee Renee had said were already thinking hard.
’It doesn’t look like a door key to me,’ Ernie said.
’It looks a bit like a bureau key to me, maybe a bit bigger,’ Terry said.
’Yes,’ Pat said, ‘something like that.’
‘So, we all think that it would belong to something inside a house not outside. Let’s go and look at this evidence again,’ Wee Renee said. ‘Come on everyone, let’s examine the map, knowing what we do now.’ Everyone got up from their seats and stood around the table again.
‘We can get rid of this now. I think it if the skin was in here, The Grange or in the graveyard at the back it could have got it easily. What does everyone else think?’ Wee Renee said.
‘There has been no breaking in at The Grange. I am certain of that,’ Ernie said.
’Yes, that seems to make sense Wee Renee,’ Freddie said.
She removed the condoms off The Grange and then moved on to the next one.
‘Sue and Tony’s house was all about the key, so I think we can get rid of that one.’ She moved it aside. ‘Hmmm … the amphitheatre. I can’t imagine something else being at the Primary S
chool, but I will leave that one there. After all, it has been open to all and sundry through the winter. No-one knows that better than us. There could be countless things in there, waiting to be discovered,’ Wee Renee said.
‘That’s a comfort,’ Ann said.
‘Now the Secondary School. Maybe something’s inside. I don’t think so though. I think it was watching Bob that time,’ Wee Renee commented, removing the marker.
Without even saying a word, she took away the condoms that covered Ian’s Butchers Shop and the Chip Shop.
’Does anyone know if there are any locked boxes or antique items, something like that, on display in the Coffee Shop?’ Wee Renee asked.
’They do have some antique looking items in there,’ Sue said. ‘Whether they are faux or real, I don’t know.’
’Well, we need to take a visit to there tomorrow when it’s open. Have a good look around and look for any keyholes. It’s got to be something big enough that will hold one of those things skin. It won’t be tiny,’ Wee Renee reasoned. Everyone agreed with this.
’The last one is the car on Mount View. I can’t understand why it was a car and not a house. But for all intents and purposes and as we won’t know which house it is in, I’m going to discard it. One things for certain, keys like that don’t fit into any kind of car. The canal the same. No boxes. That’s a weird clue altogether.’ Wee Renee took a deep breath, she was at the end of her conclusions.
’So, what we are left with is the Primary School, the Pub and the Coffee Shop.’
’From what you said about the pub, there seems to be more marking on there,’ Joe said. ‘It sounds very likely that it could be there. Can you think of anything that might be in there, Lauren?’
’Nothing really,’ Lauren said, ‘not with a little keyhole. I’ve been there a couple of years, that’s all. I don’t think I have seen anything in there, but of course, there might be.’
’Tomorrow we’ll investigate all these places,’ Wee Renee said. ‘I think it’s got to be in one of these somewhere. The Primary School will be difficult to look around, so we’ll try that as a last resort.’
A loud howl seemed to come down the chimney, and it echoed through the walls. It was really close.
‘I vote we all go home now and get behind locked doors,’ Alan said.
’Yes,’ Gary said, ‘but at one point we are going to have to confront it and give it this skin if we can find it. We can’t hide forever.’
22. A Place for Renewal
When the creature awoke that evening, it decided that it would give its two main places of patrol a miss. It would get to them in time. From its previous experiences, there would be lots of people watching, after the other night. Especially that place. The small one couldn’t hold the key forever.
It decided to keep well away from those areas and concentrate on finding somewhere warm and dry to perform its work. It would have loved to do it in its lair, totally private and never to be found, but that wasn’t the way of these things.
It had to find a private place and a container for the work. There were other items to gather too. On its way around Friarmere, it had noticed a few abandoned buildings and thought that one of these would be ideal. The last one that it had had to use, over eight long sleeps ago had gone now.
It would have to get some food for its new mate. He would be starving and need to eat lots of calories before they both went back into their long sleep. The calories only ever would come from one source - a human. They needed to mate first, that would take up a lot of energy too. The mating was critical, and it couldn’t wait for that to happen. It had been a long time since it had been close with another one of its kind.
It would wait until later to visit the two premises it favoured. One last check to make sure it was right.
First, it walked along a secluded part of Friarmere. Past Bob’s den, through Mark’s blood farm, though he had already set off to Moorston. And down to the top end of the Village. No-one came up here anymore. There was even less chance when it was dark and cold. It was still not Spring, and humans feared the cold, it seemed.
At some point, it would get someone. It could wait. Tonight, or tomorrow night, it didn’t matter as long as it got the right items in the next few days.
About 9 pm a teenage girl was just coming back from meeting her boyfriend. Her mother had told her that she had to be in early tonight anyway, as she still had some more homework to do.
She didn’t want to do this. She was a sulky, miserable girl who knew she would never amount to anything in life, so why try to. When she got off the bus, she decided to have a crafty cigarette before she went in.
The creature squatted nervously in the darkness, three feet up the entrance to the footpath that travelled to Mark’s blood farm. It thought it would have to reach out for a victim, but instead, she just walked and offered herself up - very convenient. She was so easy to break too. Thin and weak. Its luck was changing.
After securing the first part of its mission tonight quite early, it looked towards the second part. It needed this for the ritual of transformation, and it couldn’t be done any other way.
It thought that the ritual would work anyway but this was just tradition, and it didn’t want to mess anything up. This had been hard enough. Every time something found out how lucky they were, it ended like this. The Berberer had been hunted close to extinction.
It only took a short while to get what it wanted. As it was midnight on the same day, that was very fortunate. A stray dog, a dog on the loose. It probably would have been knocked over by one of those fast-moving things, The Berberer thought. They grabbed it and quickly broke its neck
Now it considered carrying them both all the way back all to its lair. Then she would carry them to the place for renewal, when she was sure she had found it. Then she thought it would be easier to take them there now if she could. So that’s what she decided to do.
She pushed them to the back of some bushes and saw that now it was dark enough to try and get to the place.
She was nearly caught a couple of times. The late bus had gone out slightly earlier than usual, and two cars had driven past. She had to hide very quickly.
Once inside a shop doorway. Once inside an alleyway down by the side of the Chip Shop. One of those cars had been a Police car. How differently this could have ended if it had seen her.
She had checked out a likely building from the outside but not the inside, which was the old Printworks. This was a massive building just off the High Street, but on the outskirts of the Village.
It had not been used for so long and its windows had been left uncleaned. Being on the main route where buses and trucks drove past, the windows were caked with dust on the interior and dirt on the exterior. No one could see what was inside.
It walked around to the side of the building and rattled the wooden doors. A chain passed between the two front doors, secured with a padlock. It kept pushing and pushing against them, forward and back, forward and back, for about fifteen minutes.
The Berberer didn’t get tired or bored. At last one of the links burst and it pulled the chain through to one side, dropping it to the floor. Inside the place was very dark and even with its superior sight, it struggled to see. The floor was covered with a thick layer of dust, and it smelled good to the beast. This was the right type of place to get work done.
It looked around the room. Its eyes were getting accustomed to the black. There was a faint glimmer of street light through the filth on the windows, and these picked up various old printing machines, and storage containers pushed to one side of the large main warehouse.
It started to open and close them. To look inside, to see if the container could be secured. It had to make sure that the match would not get out. After a lot of banging around and experimentation, it finally found a way that it could use a container, big enough to hold everything it needed and put another on top to secure it. There was just enough ventilation that the transformation could work,
and the subject would not die inside. This first place had everything it needed. It wouldn’t try anywhere else.
Now was the next stage, it had to fetch the meat and the dead dog down here.
The later it got, the better. It listened to the last few cars out there, standing back against the wall of the Printworks in the darkness to give it the best chance of not being seen.
It thought about bringing them both at the same time but knew that it would slow it’s progress immensely. After last night’s blood loss, it wasn’t feeling as strong as usual. If it were bulkier, carrying the two dead victims, it would have less chance to hide. It decided it would have to be a two-journey job.
First, just in case, anyone was looking for her, it took the girl through the streets. Her parents currently thought that she was probably drinking at someone’s house again and she would be in an awful of trouble when she got home.
She had twelve missed calls off them. The phone lay in her bag under the bush. They would only worry tomorrow when she didn’t turn up to School.
The Berberer carried the girl to the old Printworks and placed her in the container that it intended to use as a wedge against the renewal container. It would not sully that one, with any leakage from the girl.
She made its way back up to the public footpath and got the dog, throwing it over her shoulder. This was lighter than the girl and but far smellier.
The beast walked down quickly with this one. It knew its way now and was confident as even more time had passed. There was no one in Friarmere in the wee hours to notice a huge hairy monster with a dead dog over its shoulder.
It put the dog’s body into the renewal box so it wouldn’t get lost. This was a good place, and it was determined to use it soon.
On her way back, the third piece of luck occurred. She caught another scent of the match. This was unexpected. She didn’t know he had been here too. When she was here last, she had been looking for something else. She knew the best way to get in here. If only she had her tool with her. She would spend some time making a hole to get him.
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