The Butcher's Daughter
The Butcher’s Daughter
Jane E James
Contents
Also By Jane E James
Information Sourced from Wikipedia
The House By The Sea
1. Little Downey
Chapter 2
3. Thornhaugh
4. Little Downey Beach
5. Little Downey
6. Little Downey
7. Little Downey Beach
8. The House By The Sea
9. Little Downey Cemetery
10. Little Downey Beach
11. The House By The Sea
Chapter 12
13. The Whitewashed Building
14. Little Downey Beach
Chapter 15
16. Little Downey Coast Road
Chapter 17
18. The House By The Sea
Chapter 19
20. The Whitewashed Building
21. The House By The Sea
22. Little Downey Beach
23. The House By The Sea
24. Little Downey
25. Little Downey Slaughterhouse
26. Little Downey Beach – Natalie
27. The House By The Sea
Chapter 28
29. The Black Bull
30. The House By The Sea
31. Little Downey Beach
32. The House By The Sea
33. The Whitewashed Building
34. The House By The Sea
35. Thornhaugh
36. Little Downey Cemetery
37. Thornhaugh
38. The House By The Sea
39. Thornhaugh
40. The House By The Sea
41. The House By The Sea
42. Thornhaugh
Chapter 43
44. Little Downey Beach
45. The House By The Sea
46. Little Downey Beach
47. The Whitewashed Building
48. Little Downey Coast Road
49. The Whitewashed Building
50. The House By The Sea
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
53. Little Downey Beach
54. The Whitewashed Building
55. The House By The Sea
Chapter 56
57. Thornhaugh
Chapter 58
59. The House By The Sea
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
64. Little Downey Beach
65. The House By The Sea
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
68. The House By The Sea
69. The House By The Sea
70. The House By The Sea
71. The Whitewashed Building
72. Little Downey
73. The House By The Sea
74. Little Downey Beach
75. The House By The Sea
Chapter 76
77. Little Downey Beach
Epilogue
A note from the publisher
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Acknowledgments
Copyright © 2019 Jane E James
The right of Jane E James to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Bloodhound Books
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
Also By Jane E James
The Crying Boy
Information Sourced from Wikipedia
Little Downey is a picturesque old fishing village situated at the southeast corner of Bride’s Bay, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Here, you will find a shingle beach and a tiny untended cove. At low tide, the bay widens out to form a coastal walkway to more accessible family-friendly beaches. With a mainly older population of 1,300 and the nearest town thirteen miles away, the village is self-sufficient, boasting one pub, a post office-cum-grocery-store, a butcher’s shop and slaughterhouse. It even has an asylum on its doorstep! Up until 1911, Little Downey was a popular holiday destination for families, but a spate of unexplained cliff-top suicides gave rise to its gruesome new nickname of Suicide Bay, which saw the former seaside resort go into decline.
For Robert Charles, who died too soon…
The House By The Sea
Its pitched roof and gothic windows look down on the beach and Suicide Bay, where people come not to enjoy the view, but to deliberately step off the crumbling cliff edge and topple to their deaths—or at least that’s what the regulars in Little Downey’s only pub, The Black Bull, would have you believe. Perhaps it is this macabre history that gives the house by the sea its melancholy air, as if it yearns for happier times.
A nicotine-stained porch wraps itself around the half-timber, half-brick dwelling and the decking creaks with every tentative step. A child’s swing, left to rust, sways eerily. You know without being told that nobody has sat in it for a long time. The stillness of the place is unsettling. Even the birds do not rest long on the dilapidated picket fence that zigzags its way around the overgrown plot. The spell is broken only when a rat scurries out of an old tin barbecue and takes off down the well-worn path to the shingle beach. So off you go, following the same trail of grey sand that it took. First, you must pass a derelict outdoor building whose whitewashed walls have turned a rotten-tooth yellow.
There are rusty bars at every small black window and nothing could persuade you to peer inside. Bad things happen to those who do. You do not know how you know this. You just do. So, you keep your eyes averted. Only when you are safely by do you notice that the sky is duller than it should be and when you arrive at the beach and look up, you can at last fully appreciate the dramatic hilltop location of the house. Now that there’s a little more distance between it and you, the shadowy windows do not feel as menacing; until you see the silhouette of a woman with long black hair standing dangerously close to the cliff edge, looking down on you, and then you become paralysed with fear.
Little Downey
Natalie
Sixteen Years Earlier
I was seven when my father took me to see the animals for the first time. Although I had been promised piglets and newborn lambs, the first animal I met was a grey pony with the kindest eyes I ever saw. Far kinder than my father’s, whose were steely blue and insistent on me being the boy I was not. The pony had bits of straw stuck to its coat and stood in an outdoor pen with its head held low. It must have carried many children on its back because when I stroked its ears, it breathed on my fingers and looked for a treat in my pocket.
The sound of snorting and shuffling coming from inside the grey windowless building up ahead was all the encouragement I needed to go in search of more animals. For once, I did not object to my father’s rough handling as he prodded me forward.
Together, we passed through double doors that clanged noisily even though there was no wind and I saw my father’s shadow stretch onto the ground in front of us, turning him into even more of a giant than usual. Once inside, he instructed me to “wait” while he went off to take care of some business. This was not unusual nor entirely unexpected. I was used to being left on my own but I wasn’t known for being particularly obedient, so it wasn’t long before I wandered off, drawn to the sound of pigs squealing.
/> First, I had to conquer my fear of the shadows that crowded around me. The darkness had never been my friend, but I was not fond of sunshine either, preferring to remain indoors. As a result, my pale white skin and big black eyes made children younger than myself nervous. My classmates already thought me odd and were one of the reasons I hardly ever went to school. My father said I needed “curing” but I did not know what he meant by that; not yet anyway.
The grunting of the pigs made it sound like they were having fun, a game of tag perhaps, so I shuffled forward in my too-big wellington boots along a sloping wooden walkway with metal rails around it. It felt restrictive, as if there would not be room to turn around if I wanted to. A feeling I did not like. The smell of fresh animal dung reassured me I was getting closer. In the distance, I could hear the muffled whine of a saw and a cow frantically mooing; sounds that puzzled me because they did not seem to go together.
Then, from behind me, I heard the whinny of the pony. It sounded frightened. So, I stopped walking. Stopped breathing. Stopped feeling. By then I was as frightened as it was. If I did hear something else—a single shot perhaps—I have long since erased it from my memory. The silence afterwards was even more unbearable and it felt as if the blackness had pushed itself right into my face, like the clenched fist of a school bully, yet I refused to call out in fear. I had stopped wanting or needing anyone’s help a long time ago. At seven, I already knew about suffering in a way that I shouldn’t.
After a while, I became aware of a greasy burning smell that reminded me of the hot bacon rolls my mother used to hand out on Sunday mornings before church, her hair still in rollers. It was the kind of smell that made me want to cover my nose with my hand, but my boots noisily squelching in something sticky helped take my mind off it. When I eventually came up against a metal door that had spongy fist marks in it, I pushed it open and was greeted by a different smell—one I had no trouble identifying—my father’s bed reeked of it. “Working men’s sweat is something to be proud of,” he would protest whenever he caught me wrinkling my nose up at it. I already knew not to believe a word he said.
The powerful overhead lighting made me feel dizzy after the dark but I could see enough to know that the inside of the building matched the outside—it was sterile and cold. Everywhere I looked, splashes of red, purple and green showed up against grey concrete and gleaming metal. All around me there was laughter as if the three adult men standing in front of me couldn’t have witnessed anything funnier than a little girl’s confusion on stumbling into their unfamiliar world. Judging by the expression on their faces, they took pleasure in it.
One of the men was known to me. Bob Black used to be a regular visitor to the house, always speaking more to my mother than my father, whispering things in her ear that made her blush. She never laughed when he was around, which was out of character.
Short and ordinary looking, with round spectacles that sometimes slipped to the end of his nose, I could tell by the way Bob stood with his hands on his hips that he was in charge. His surprisingly large hands were wrapped around a saw that had more teeth in it than I did. I was still waiting for two of mine to grow back. The missing ones had been thrown away. There was no point keeping them as there weren’t any tooth fairies in Little Downey.
When I finally saw what the men in overalls wanted me to see—the head of a bullock sitting in a puddle of its own blood—I felt as if I had been punched in the face. The bullock’s eyes were black, like mine, and seemed to call out for help as though it thought it was still alive, but I knew this to be impossible because the rest of it was dangling from a hind leg strung up on a heavy chain. Blood pumped out of two gashes cut into its massive chest and dripped into a concrete drainage area below.
Drip. Splat. Drip.
In a world of stainless steel, where sounds echoed and intensified, that is exactly how it sounded. A short drip followed by a louder more ominous splat and then another high-speed drip. I watched in horror as the river of blood found its way to an overfed plughole that belched greedily with every swallow.
My eyes darted back and forth between the headless carcass and the three men who were shouting "Beef coming” at the tops of their voices, and I finally understood why my father felt the need to remind me I was a butcher’s daughter before allowing me to set foot in this place. Clearly, he had been afraid I would get upset and make a fool of him. Rather than face up to his latest betrayal, I watched spellbound as a line of bobbing black and white heads and swishing tails were herded single file through a gangway. These cows were much smaller than the dead bullock and appeared docile, as if used to being handled. Their swollen udders swayed from side to side, leaking milk and turning the air sour. Without knowing much about cows, living cows that is, I could tell these were “old gals”. I could also tell that they did not want to die, because every one of them looked frightened. Yet they waited in an orderly line as the lead cow was loaded into a galvanized steel stun box; jumping only when the hiss of the pneumatic gate slid down in front of her.
All by itself, my thumb found its way into the deepest corner of my mouth as I watched the men advance on the cow. She was shaking as much as I was. In my head, I named her Daisy, knowing all along that this was not a good idea. I later found out my father was watching from a short distance away; waiting to see how I would react. To Father, this was just another one of his tests. But it was a moment that would irreversibly seal all our fates in a way he could not have anticipated.
Chapter 2
There was more laughter as each of the men took it in turns to try to kill a beast that plain refused to go down. I could tell by their sweaty red-faced excitement that this did not happen often but when it did it broke the monotony of their day. Daisy’s distressed bellowing meant the rest of the herd were becoming increasingly anxious, pawing at the ground, defecating and rolling their eyes. This made the men nervous too, so they renewed their efforts to bring Daisy down. As they waited to see if they could stun her once and for all, she and I glanced at each other and I saw the terrified whites of her eyes acknowledge my existence. I sensed that the poor creature was disappointed with humans and felt she had every right to be. I knew such shame, I wet myself right there on the spot, not caring that my boots were splattered with my own urine.
With hands as big as shovels, Bob aimed a bolt gun at Daisy’s head and this time it worked. The powerful crack made both me and Daisy jump, but the latter would never get up again. As soon as the side rail was released, her body slid out on its side, steam coming off it. Words like “beyond the farm gate” and “the killing floor” were not new to me but now that I had witnessed them for myself, they took on a sickening new significance.
Instead of waiting to see the next cow being loaded into the stun box, I ran out of the bloodied room, which stunk of freshly slaughtered meat and followed a gruesome conveyor belt being used to transport the wet bodies of unborn calves into a chilling room. There, I hid behind a tank overflowing with blood, while workers in white overalls and hairnets wrestled with the carcasses of butchered cows. When I was sure no one was looking, I ducked out back into an animal holding area, which reeked of ammonia and fear.
Everywhere I looked, pink-bottomed pigs lay on their branded sides, tongues lolling out of their elongated snouts. If I had not already witnessed the slaughtering of the cows, I would have assumed they were simply sleeping. Though dead, they were much nicer to look at than the angry pink-cheeked men who worked there.
One pig had managed to escape the massacre and was scrambling to get out of the pen. I did not try to reassure it that it would be all right, because that would have been a lie. And no matter what anyone else in Little Downey said, I wasn’t a liar. Ignoring the pig’s frantic squeals for help, because there was nothing I could do, I crept into an adjoining steam-filled room. Through a gap in the awful mist, I could see another pig, much cleaner than the one I had left behind, being whisked around in a huge metal machine containing boiling water. The same gre
asy burning smell from before was at its worst in there. The stench was unlike anything I had ever come across. A combination of boiling meat and burnt hair.
As if it happened only yesterday, I can see myself standing there—a little girl with black unbelieving eyes—watching in horror as the pig turned over in the broiling machine; cloudy eyes bulging and bloody hooves flaying. I was only seven, but there was no one to wipe away the blood smears from my own face; nobody to remove me from a place of bloodshed that no child should find themselves in. My mother did not come to rescue me that day or on any other because she had toppled to her death a few weeks before; becoming the latest victim of Suicide Bay’s so-called cliff top suicides.