Rule 54

A Willerby Story

“Will you stop going on about it now,” said Cassie, frowning. “It was half the price of everything else we saw, and the photos are lovely.”

“Just a minute, listen to this,” Tom said, from the passenger seat, reading from his phone. “This is brilliant. It says, ‘Rule 21, you are welcome to use the washing machine, but no more than once every two days.’”

He put his phone down on his lap. “What happens if someone has an accident? Do we have to handwash in the sink?”

“It’s just to keep bills down. Please just leave it now,” said Cassie, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, “We haven’t seen Greg and Alice in ages, never even met Tabby, and I don’t want this entire holiday to be about you holding court over those rules.”

Tom shrugged and went back to reading.

But he couldn’t help himself.

A minute later, he snorted.

“Wow. Cass’, listen to this -”

“No! Enough! No more! That sort of thing – making a fuss over stupid stuff like this – it just isn’t as funny as you think it is. Just drop it, please. Put down your phone and look how pretty it is around here.”

Tom shrugged again but did out it down to look at the landscape rushing by.

It was beautiful.

The July sun painted the rolling, endless green-gold fields of corn in warm light, lending the air a heaviness that spoke stillness and peace. Trees on either side of the road rose up and leant in, meeting high above them and framing the road a cathedral’s nave.

Every now and again they passed dirt-track turn-offs threading through well-tended fields to neat, whitewashed farms that glowed softly in the gentle late afternoon light.

“Yeah, nice,” said Tom, after a while.

Cassie rolled her eyes. “Nice,” she repeated back to him. “Poetry. We can’t be far of now – how long does google say we’ve got to go?”

Tom checked his phone again. “Signal here is bad but I don’t think it matters. We’re almost there. The turn off should be coming up on the left in just a mile or so.”

It was longer than that though and Cassie was beginning to think they must have taken a wrong turning when – finally – she spotted the sign for Willerby.

“They’ll be there already,” she said, checking the time. “Oh. That’s weird. It’s only five. I could have sworn we’ve been driving longer than that.”

Tom looked up from his phone again. “No idea,” he said, “I haven’t been keeping track of time.”

Cassie took the turn down Willerby’s only surfaced road, peering at the village curiously as they idled towards its centre, taking in the old church and the swam of tumuli around it, past a small pond, then to a village green with a rusting bandstand and a crowd of men and women drinking and smoking around the entrance to the Green Man pub.

It was all just perfect - exactly like the photos online, on the website that described Willerby as “deeply historical with just a touch of the weird,” down to the lines of swallows on the wires and the watchful white cattle in the surrounding fields.

Then – with no warning at all – Cassie felt an unease – a sense the tame domesticity was only a veil over the dark, and that cunning, clever old things were watching her from behind it – the wolf beneath the dog – the wild in the cat.

Not necessarily threatening.

At least not now.

Just there.

Aware.

And then - just as fast - the feeling was gone.

By the time they were in the cottage with Greg and Alice, one-year-old Tabby cooing in her highchair, halfway through the evening’s second bottle of merlot, she’d completely forgotten she’d felt anything strange at all and was ready to see the funny side of the numbered house rules – all fifty-four of them.

“Seventeen,” said Greg, “all men to wipe down the toilet after every use.”

“That one I agree with,” said Alice, laughing, leaning over the table to scoop peas into Tabby’s open mouth.

“Forty-seven,” Tom said, “NO PARTIES.”

“What counts as a party?” Wondered Cassie out loud, “Are we breaking that rule right now?”

“There’s just so many!” Alice said, pouring herself more wine. “They must have walked through the whole weekend minute-by-minute. Thank goodness it isn’t winter anyway. The rules for the wood-burner are a manual all by themselves. They’ve even broken down the process into substages.”

“Have you got to Rule Fifty-Four yet?” Tom asked. “It’s crazy.”

“Read it out?” Greg asked.

“Every night leave good bread and a small glass of cold milk by the cave in the boulder in the garden. For a smooth stay this is the most important rule. Do not forget.”

There was a moment of silence and then they all burst into laughter, with even Tabby gurgling along.

“What for?” Alice asked, when she’d got her breath back, “a hedgehog picnic?”

“Let’s go and find this cave,” said Greg and then, taking their drinks with them, Alice bouncing Tabby on her hip the two couples went from the kitchen through the back door and into the open, where the old tall trees were casting long shadows on the neatly mowed lawn.

In the gloaming – thought Cassie, uneasily – they looked like bones.

They found the cave smaller than they expected – not really a cave at all but a jet-black hole about two feet off the ground in a chunky sandstone boulder, incongruous amongst the bushes and shrubs of pretty but otherwise quite unremarkable cottage garden.

Below the hole was a ramp of loosely packed earth forming a trackway up to the dark opening.

“Some animal lives there, right?” Said Greg.

“Yeah,” Tom said, turning on his phone torch as he crouched down to get a closer look.

“Don’t get too close,” said Cassie, “you might startle whatever’s in there.”

“It’ll be fine, Cass’,” said Tom, “Don’t fuss. Hang on - that’s weird.”

“What is?”

“Have a look – there are carvings all the way round the hole.”

And there were – interlocking whorls and spirals speckled with very faint flecks of green and red that might once have been bold and bright.

“It’s just a wind-up,” Tom said, shaking his head as he got to his feet. “All of it. This and all the other fifty-three silly rules. The owners of this cottage having a laugh at townies like us.”

“I think it’s cute,” said Alice, “we can pretend a little fairy or pixie lives in it. It’s fun.”

“Yeah,” said Cassie, “but something does live in there – maybe a badger or fox – perhaps that’s who the bread and milk are supposed to be for. Perhaps it’s just a nice way of saying ‘feed the creature.’”

“You don’t feed animals bread and milk,” Tom said, “it can make them ill.”

Alice swung Tabby of her hip and held her towards the hole. “Look, Tabs’, she said, ignoring Tom, “there might be badger babies in there – we might see them later!”

“B’dger B’by”, Tabby said back, pointing and smiling.

“We can spare a slice of sourdough and a splash of milk,” said Cassie, “it can’t do any harm.”

“Well, I’m not doing it,” Tom said. “It’s stupid.”

“Don’t worry about it then,” Cassie said, “I’ll do it later.”

And, hours later, the boys drunk and getting drunker on whiskey, after helping Alice put Tabby to bed, tipsy enough herself to feel only slightly ridiculous, she did.

She put the milk in the best glass beaker she could find, the bread on a Peter Rabbit saucer she found in a cupboard by the sink and then carried them to the bottom of the soil ramp that led up to the hole.

She thought about taking a photo for Insta, captioning it with something witty about rural life, but something stopped her – an echo of the same strange feeling she’d had when she’d first driven into Willerby and then forgotten.

As she turned to go, she caught what sounded like the tiny tinkle of bells.

“You’re welcome,” she said, before she knew she was going to say anything at all.

When she went back into the kitchen Tom and Greg were laughing at a joke she didn’t understand, and she realised straight away she didn’t have a place at the table now Alice was gone.

She said her goodnights and went to bed, hoping the two boys wouldn’t make too much of a mess of themselves or the kitchen before they themselves turned in.

…

Cassie woke early, woken by Tom’s snoring, grimacing at his smell of stale beer and sour whiskey.

She slipped out from under the sheets and padded to the cool of the ensuite. Realising she wasn’t going to get back to sleep again she brushed her teeth and went downstairs to make a start on last night’s washing up.

To her mild astonishment the kitchen was immaculate.

Not only had all the plates and glasses been cleaned, they’d also been dried and put away.

The surfaces had been wiped down and the tiled floor looked more polished than swept and mopped.

The range – left spattered in butter, fat and oil from the sirloins they’d griddled – shone white and black in the morning light.

Cassie felt guilty – Alice must have been woken by Tabby even earlier and got onto it. She went to the kettle to make coffee – the least she could do – but found a full cafetiere steaming beside it.

She sighed, smiled ruefully – allowing herself to be happy she didn’t need to do anything after all - then poured herself a cup.

She was halfway through it when Alice came in through the door, blearily rubbing at her eyes.

“Enough for me?” She asked. “It’s not been the easiest night with Tabs. She’s down now at least.”

“Yeah,” Cassie said, “there’s plenty. Thanks for making it, and for cleaning up too.”

Alice pulled a face at her. “Sorry for not being much help but I’ve been a bit busy – honestly Tabs has been up half the night.”

Cassie looked back at her, confused. “Hang on,” she said, “I wasn’t having a go. I thought you’d done it all. I didn’t.”

Alice looked round the spotless kitchen. “The boys? Greg and Tom? Honestly?”

Cassie shook her head. “Good on them then,” she said, “first time for everything I suppose.”

Alice gave a tired half-laugh, leaning against the counter and wrapping her hands around her mug. “Either they’re hiding something or they’re doing a podcast.”

Cassie grinned, picturing Greg and Tom, wielding late-night sponges as though they were weapons of conquest, pumped and pompous in their drunken self-righteousness. “Maybe they’re hoping we’ll let them off cooking tonight.”

Tom and Greg emerged a couple of hours later, hangover morose and taciturn.

“Is the coke in the fridge?” Tom grunted, opening it as he spoke. “Oh. Good – thanks for putting it in.”

“I didn’t,” said Cassie. “You must have done it while you were cleaning up last night. Thanks for that by the way,.”

Tom slumped into a chair. “We were going to do it,” he said, sullenly. “Didn’t know you were going to get up so early. You should have just left it.”

“I did,” said Cassie, surprised. “Greg did you do it?”

Greg turned round from the kettle. “No,” he said.

Cassie looked at Alice.

“Alice – you said you didn’t?”

Cassie shook her head back at her. “Honestly, I didn’t,” she said. “It never even occurred to me.”

Alice frowned. “Well, someone must have, Greg, Tom – might you have been so drunk you forgot doing it?”

Tom looked at Greg. “I know I didn’t,” he said. “Greg?”

Greg shook his head. “No. I had a few but neither of us was blackout drunk.”

Cassie looked around the kitchen. “Who was it then? The mess didn’t clean itself up.”

Nobody said anything and then, from an upstairs bedroom Tabby began crying.

“And so it begins,” Alice said, “her majesty is up. While I’m gone someone just own up so we can get on with the day.”

But nobody did and nobody knew what exactly they were supposed to do about it.

“It’s weird,” said Tom, as they left the house for a stroll, “but someone must have snuck in and done it, the house owners or a neighbour who works for them or someone else for some weird country reason. And we can hardly complain, can we? Imagine ringing the police. ‘Hello, officer, yes we’d like to report a breaking and tidying.’”

Cassie was the last to leave and just as she turned the key in the lock, again she thought she heard a tinkle of tiny bells.

"Thank you," she said, once again before she was aware she intended to say anything at all.

…

It was a strange sort of day, the boys hungover, Alice exhausted, everyone a little out-of-sorts and uneasy.

None of the adults could settle to any of the local sights – not to the quaint church and graveyard with its odd carvings and Romano foundations, not to the fenced off tumuli and not even to the ducks on the weir that delighted Tabby.

When, after charcuterie, cheese and olives in the kitchen for lunch, Tom suggested they have a drink in the Green Man pub. everyone agreed enthusiastically, and there – installed in a green-leather upholstered booth in a private room, they allowed themselves to settle in.

After the second round of drinks, they were content to let the day get away from them.

By the time they left – after a tandoori mixed grill and naan dinner – it was getting dark, and they were all too bleary and tired for more than half-an-hour in front of the TV before bed.

While Tom was brushing his teeth Cassie cut a slice of bread from the olive loaf left over from lunch and opened the cupboard by the sink for a plate.

“Well, I’ll be..,” she said, seeing the Peter Rabbit saucer back where she’d first found it, the glass beaker sitting neatly on top.

She turned round to say something, but nobody was there.

And then again, a suggestion of tiny tinkling bells.

Cassie thought for a moment.

Then she put the bread on the saucer, filled the beaker and took them to the hole in the carved hole in the sandstone boulder.

“Here you go,” she said. “Thanks again for cleaning up. Sorry, there was so much to do.”

And again, as she turned away, that same suggestion of tiny bells.

…

The next morning – their last full day – Cassie, Tom, Alice and Greg all woke better rested and in better moods.

Tom and Greg even went for a pre-breakfast run, leaving Cassie and Alice to fry bacon, toast bread and fold mushrooms into posh omelettes.

“Did you arrange the plates in size order?” Alice asked Cassie, pouring boiling water into the teapot. “They were that way when we got here but I haven’t been bothering as we went along – I know it’s Rule Twenty-Two or something, but I figured we’d just do that in the final tidy up tomorrow. It can’t matter until we check out.”

“Yeah,” Cassie lied easily, “I dunno why though. Of course you’re right.”

Alice shrugged, smiling as she set down, the steaming pot. “Some people just like things a certain way, I suppose. Maybe it’s a cottage tradition, or just a quirk. We’ll make sure it’s all just right before we leave.”

After the boys returned and showered, Alice strapped Cassie into a sling and all of them went for a walk, following a path that went from the main street into the woods and then up to an old Roman watchtower on top of a hill.

From there they could the village stretched out beneath them – the green, the pond, the pub, the weir and the Norman church amid the swarming tumuli.

There, Cassie again felt another wave of strangeness – again the sense that under all the bucolic domesticity lurked deeper and darker things of which it would be wise to be wary.

On the way back down to the village the sense of oddness dissipated as Tom and Greg went ahead, bantering and competing over bonuses and bouldering grades, 5k times and promotions and their many other self-defined achievements, leaving Cassie and Alice, going slower and more carefully with Tabby, who nodded off halfway down.

Cassie watched the boys disappear as they rounded a bend in the track and thought of the future – about how different life was today to what it was five years before when they’d all left university, and how different it might be once they were all five years further on.

She wondered whether they’d all still be friends, whether they’d do this sort of holidaying often or whether this might be the last time.

Back at the house they split up – Tom and Greg to the pub, Cassie and Alice to the green so Tabby could practice her walking on the mossy grass in the shadow of the rusting old bandstand.

Mid-afternoon they joined them for a drink and then left them to it, returning to the cottage to drink wine while reclining in deckchairs in the garden while Tabby napped in her travel cot upstairs.

“It seems a lot of hard work,” Cassie said to Alice, “like you never get a break.”

Alice sat up and sighed. “Yeah,” she said, “it is.”

“Does Greg help much?”

Alice sighed again. “A bit, but not as much as I hoped he would. He was never much good at housework stuff before we had her so I suppose I shouldn’t have expected much from him, but for whatever reason, because he was full of promises about what he’d do when she came, I did. It’s been disappointing.”

“Tom doesn’t do much either and when he does anything it’s like he wants a medal for it.”

Alice took a long sip of her wine. “They don’t change much you know, Cass’,” she said. “Just remember that. They say they will, but they don’t.”

There was a long, deep silence between them.

“You going to stick to Rule 54 tonight?” Alice asked, more to break the tension than anything else.

Cassie laughed.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean why not? Maybe that’s why the house got cleaned the first night.”

“It must have been one of the boys, or both. They must have done it and forgotten whatever they say about not being blackout drunk. Right, I better go check on Tabby.”

Cassie followed her in, knowing that Alice would not come back down.

She thought of joining Tom and Greg in the pub, but she knew they wouldn’t want her there and by now would be for too into their cups for her to follow the conversation.

So, instead, she put the kettle on for herbal tea and poured some milk from the half-full carton in the fridge into the glass beaker. She carried the Peter Rabbit saucer to the bread bin but was frustrated to find it empty – she remembered they’d used the last slices for bacon sandwiches that morning.

There were a handful of biscuits left, and she considered using one of those instead.

But the rules – and particularly Rule 54 – had been very specific about what was required.

So instead she WhatsApped Tom:

“Can you scrounge a bit of bread from the pub for the fairy hole and put it out on the saucer with the milk?”

Tom never replied but he did thumbs up her message.

She knew he’d think it stupid, but she didn’t care.

She read for half an hour and then went to sleep.

…

Cassie woke just after dawn, once again to the sour smell of stale beer and whiskey coming from Tom snoring beside her.

Wrinkling her nose and pulling a face, she swung her feet onto the cold wooden floorboards and padded down the stairs, trying to place a strange humming noise she’d not noticed before.

Instead of fading away as she left Tom behind, the smell worsened and when she opened the door to the kitchen, with a gasp she saw why.

The whole room – the surfaces, floor and table – were strewn with rubbish.

Beer cans; empty wine bottles; dirty plates; empty food packaging – everything they’d used and discarded since the start of their stay, taken from the bins and dumped everywhere.

No – she saw looking at the floor – worse than just dumped – smeared over the floor in huge, lurid arcs, spirals and whorls.

Worst of all – Cassie saw – the drift of refuse was studded with stinking white balls, which she recognised as Tabby’s dirty nappies.

Above it all hung a lazily moving cloud of plump-bodied flies – the source of the weird hum she’d heard from all the way upstairs.

She opened her mouth to scream but before she could she retched. Desperately choking down the gorge rising from her stomach she whirled and sprinted up the stairs to the bathroom where she threw up in the toilet.

She rinsed her mouth and pressed her forehead to the cool tiles, breathing hard, the memory of the kitchen’s rot and chaos clinging to her tongue. For a moment she sat shivering, her fists pressed to her eyes; then she forced herself upright.

She found Tom still sprawled in bed, now awake, blinking at her with puffy eyelids. “What’s the matter?” he mumbled, scratching his stomach.

Cassie couldn’t even find the words. She gestured toward the stairs, voice raw. “Go look.”

He shuffled down, grumbling, and she heard his first muffled “what the—” followed by a long, low whistle. Then, “Greg! Alice! Get up!”

“Oh my god,” said Alice, her hand over her face from the doorway. “We’re going to lose the deposit.”

Tom shuffled behind her, now in his dressing gown. “I’m not touching any of it,” he said, “we didn’t do this. It’s another stupid prank – like the cleaning on the first night. The cottage owners or someone else.”

Cassie shook her head. “We can’t leave it like this,” she said.

“Of course we can,” said Tom, “and I am. Suit yourself if you want to play along with some freak’s stupid game but I’m not.”

“It’ll probably be easier to do it than deal with the hassle of not doing it, mate,” Greg said, “to be honest. Who’s going to believe us if we say what happened? I wouldn’t.”

Tom shook his head angrily. “No chance.”

Cassie thought for a moment and then shook her head back. “Fine then,” she said, “but at least give me the car keys and get out of the way so I can go and get the stuff we’ll need.”

Tom stomped upstairs, then back down.

He thrust the keys into Cassie’s hand. “Knock yourselves out”, he said, “I’m going back to bed. I didn’t do it. It’s not my problem.”

Cassie waited until Tom’s footsteps receded, then let out a trembling breath.

The others hovered in the narrow hallway, uncertain, the morning sharp and unwelcome. Greg scratched at the stubble on his cheek, glancing at Alice, who managed a weak, sideways shrug.

“This has been the weirdest few days. I’ll do what I can around Tabby,” she said, “sorry if I end up being no use.”

It took the three of them four hours of hard work to return the kitchen to the state they’d found it in.

Greg – to Cassie’s surprise - worked hard in grim, uncomplaining silence and she respected him more for it. From the way Alice looked at her husband she could see she was pleased too.

This sort of work – she thought, as she grimaced her way through the armfuls of rotting food, the sweeping, the wiping, the bleaching and the mopping – must be brutal with a hangover.

They finished the final mop and wipe just half an hour before the checkout time, which had them frantically rushing to pack up all the cars.

Tom was up by then, in time to slump into the passenger seat of their Prius.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he sulked, already on his phone, “you didn’t need to. It wasn’t our problem.”

“You never put the bread by the fairy hole, did you?” Cassie asked, lightly, as she put her car into drive, “like I asked?”

“What?”

“I messaged you last night.”

Tom shrugged. “No, I forgot,” he said, “why does that matter?”

“I just asked you to,” Cassie said, “that’s all.”

Then she put the car back into park and turned the engine off. “Just hold on a minute,” she said, “I forgot to do something.”

“Can’t we just go home?” Tom moaned.

“I won’t be long,” said Cassie, as she rummaged in the boot for the bread she’d bought while buying the cleaning supplies.

…

The hole was as dark and inscrutable as ever as Cassie approached it with the glass beaker of milk and the Peter Rabbit saucer with the tiger bread roll on it.

“Sorry,” she said, as she put them down, “we cleaned up as best we could.”

A tinkle of bells and then – so brief she almost believed she might have imagined it – the sight of something so unexpected and startling that Cassie told nobody about it for the rest of her life.

There was no point. She would never be believed.

She was quiet all the way home – allowing Tom to snooze and scroll on his phone whenever he wanted without comment.

When they got to the house Cassie kept the engine running as he got out.

Are you coming?

“No,” Cassie said. “I’m going to my mum’s. This is it, Tom. This is goodbye. The last one.”

Tom stared at her, his face shadowed and gaunt in the gathering dusk as he worked out what she meant. “Is this because I didn’t help?”

Cassie looked back at him and smiled without anger.

“Sort of,” she said, “but I know you’ll think this silly but it’s more to do with Rule 54. Look, I don’t think you’re awful – not even bad. But you don’t always do what you say. You never did but I thought it mattered less than I do now. Maybe you’ll change. But I can’t take the chance. What’s coming up is going to be harder than before. Life’s too short. It’s been mostly good, you know. Good luck with everything. I mean that.”

Tom looked as if he were about to say something.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he sighed, reached for his bag and began to walk off.

Halfway to his front door that had been theirs just three nights before, he stopped – finding the words for what he wanted to say - and turned around.

“You probably won’t find better than me, you know.”

“I don’t want better, not in the way I think you mean anyway,” Cassie told him. “I just want a chance at different.”

Then she drove away without looking back.