Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

A small thud woke Patricia in the middle of the night. Her first thought as her consciousness rose to the surface was Alfred, her second May... but no, the thud had been on her balcony. She shivered; since the rabbit appeared, she had avoided the balcony and hadn't even looked down at it when she opened the blinds the past two mornings. While she wanted the sunlight, she did not want to deal with the thought that someone she did not know had dropped the bunny off on her balcony.

Or she assumed someone had. The whole plot bunny idea really didn't seem to fit with the note that had been pinned to the cage's blanket.

The note. She hadn't thought about the note since she read it originally, she realised.

Another thud, louder than the first, and Patricia shook herself. She needed to get up and check that out, not lie in bed and woolgather herself back to sleep. She pushed herself up and winced at the loud creak of the bed. Somehow it always seemed louder in the dark, which was one of the reasons she no longer got up early in the winter months. In the orange-ish-yellow glow filtering through her blinds from the streeetlights outside, Patricia swung herself out of bed and reached for her dressing gown.

No sounds from the couch where May had rolled herself into a blanket at the same time as Patricia had gone to bed. Perhaps her granddaughter hadn't woken up from the thuds – she wouldn't be as familiar as Patricia with the night sounds of the building. She would have to try to investigate without turning a light on, but she wasn't about to be so stupid as to open the currently-latched balcony door. She carefully picked her ring of spare housekeys out of the top drawer of her end table and slipped the keys between her knuckles as makeshift brass knuckles. Alfred had taught her that trick for when she walked herself home after dark. They both knew it would make little difference to a determined attacker, but it made her feel more confident, and that was likely to help avoid an attacker from picking her as a target in the first place.

She breathed in deeply and moved to the window, taking care not to bump into the rabbit's cage.

Another heavy thud as she moved past the cage, and she nearly fell over. The thud was not outside at all. It was from inside the rabbit's cage. It was also far louder than the rabbit could possibly be – even if it had dropped from the top of the cage down to the buttom of it, or jumped full force, even, it would barely have registered in her apartment.

The folks downstairs wouldn't have been happy, though.

Wool gathering again, she thought. Well. Time to turn a light on and see what was going on in that little cage... Except the rabbit didn't like light. Perhaps if she left the light off she could find out more than if there was light.

But before Patricia had pulled the blanket from the cage, she heard a harsh ripping sound. She quicly pulled the blanket back, to see the rabbit in the process of tearing a blank white paper.

"What are you doing, Mr. Rabbit?" she asked, trying to keep her exasperated voice soft.

The rabbit stopped mid-tear, and Patricia retreated a startled half-step as it turned towards her and rose on its haunches. Surely it couldn't - but perhaps it was just reacting to the sound.

Strange, she thought. For a moment she was certain the rabbit had a second set of ears.

It was likely just the light, though, she thought. It made the rabbit look decidedly creepy, almost haunted, with the faint orange sheen on the curve of his fur the only thing differentiating him from the darkness.

She shook her head. She didn't know how the rabbit had made the noise. She could think about it in the morning. Patricia yawned.

"No more loud thumps, ok, Mr. Rabbit?" she scolded him softly. "However it is you're making them."

She was already replacing the blanket over the cage or she would have seen the rabbit slowly shake his head, as if in reply to her request.




The light was nearer its usual brightness for Patricia's waking schedule, although the morning sun was shielded by clouds and a heavy spattering of rain. Patricia sighed, rubbed her eyes, and pulled herself up and out of bed. She had a heavy certainty that she had just dreamt something incredibly important, but she had no idea what it was, but its importance kept dragging her into her subconscious and kept her from being fully aware of her surroundings.

What was she doing already in her dressing gown, she wondered, before half-remembering the bump in the night. That rabbit... But that was almost harder to remember than paying attention to her current surroundings. She yawned widely. No, she was not going back to bed. She tightened the belt around her waist and went to put the kettle on. A nice flavoured Earl Grey would chase these cobwebs out of her head, she thought decisively.

Patricia had walked right past May and filled the kettle before realising her granddaughter was up and seated at the computer. Patricia, now-full kettle held upraised in one hand, turned to look at her granddaughter, who smiled and gave her a wave, then turned back and plugged the kettle into an outlet and turned it on.

"Good morning, May," she said, with a smile over her shoulder as she reached in the cupboard for her supply of Earl Grey Blue Star. This was definitely a morning for the good stuff, and for a full pot, split with her granddaughter.

"Good morning grandma," said May, not sounding at all like she was suppressing laughter. Really. What a good granddaughter.

"Do you know the ferry schedule, love?" asked Patricia as she measured the bergamot-heavy blend into her tea basket.

"Yes, grandma," May answered. "If we leave after lunch we'll be in plenty of time."

"Right," Patricia said.

"I've been typing up our novel writing from last night," May told her after a pause. "I woke up early and felt well-rested, so I thought I might make myself useful."

"Thank you, May!" Patricia said, doing her best to muster some energy into the phrase. It was Wednesday - she was never at her best on Wednesday mornings. She didn't go over to the seniors' centre until after lunch so she usually took the morning pretty easy.

Thankfully she had already told the ladies at the centre not to expect her until at least Thursday on account of her granddaughter's visit, so maybe after she dropped May off she could take the afternoon slow.

Except for needing to get her day's writing in. Well, after that.

"How'd we do, wordcount-wise?" Patricia asked.

"You did quite well, grandma," May answered. "You did 803 words, and I did 713."

"I did more than you?" Patricia wondered aloud. She knew her fingers had been stiff from writing so much by the end of the evening, but she hadn't expected she had been able to match, let alone exceed, her nimble-fingered granddaughter.

"Well..." May said slowly. "I took out a bunch of my false starts from that first hour, but I left in everything you wrote. It was good, grandma! I quite enjoy your writing."

"Thank you dear," Patricia smiled mischievously. "When do I get to read some of yours?"

She laughed softly at the expression on her granddaughter's face, and turned to make the tea.



Nothing had disturbed May's final morning of her unplanned trip. No strange thuds, nor even scrabblings from within the rabbit cage, nor phone calls. Patricia beating May five games out of seven on the air hockey table did come as a bit of a surprise, but not disturbing.

All in all, it had been quite relaxing, Patricia thought.

Patricia had dropped May off at the ferry terminal in plenty of time for her ferry, and upon returning home, called Laura and left her a message detailing the ferry's arrival time. She had made a nice big pot of caramel banana flavoured Rooibos tea and was halfway through her day's word count and a scene in which the rugged police officer came quite close to harassing her poor widowed protagonist into doing something stupid. Patricia was finding it difficult not to have the widow express romantic thoughts towards the police officer, which would be highly inappropriate both to the novel and to the widow's character. She had loved her husband and he had barely been buried in the ground - she would never be so insensitive. She could also tell that any such infusion into the novel would end up with a love triangle - she could feel the plotline waiting for her - it was the sort of thing her husband would have been more likely to write than she ever would. Where were these ideas coming from? She wondered fleetingly if she would see rabbit ears on her own head should she look in a mirror.

Rabbit ears... she thought suddenly of the noises she had heard the night before. The piece of paper in the cage.

Well, she would never finish this scene if she didn't satisfy her curiousity.

Patricia pushed herself out of the chair, wincing as her aches reminded her she had missed a set of stretches, and moved to the cage.

She rearranged the blanket so that it freed the top of the cage while continuing to block the sunlight from reaching the shade-loving rabbit.

The soft brown fur quivered and Patricia guessed she had woken him up. She smiled, with a "Hullo Mr. Bunny," before opening the top of the cage. White crumpled paper littered the floor of the cage. Oh dear. The empty food dish caught her eye as something easier to deal with. She had hoped solving the mystery of the paper would be simple and she would be able to get back to Edna, who she had been trying to imbue with spunk rather than romance.

Patricia filled the dish with small brown bites of food, before sighing to herself and reaching in to begin collecting white bits of paper.

Except that as she reached for each bit of paper, the rabbit was suddenly in her way.

It surely didn't help her cause that her joints were stiff from her time at the computer, but surely she could sneak just one piece past him. Patricia said crossly, "You know, you could be eating those lovely, probably stale, hard-as-rock, but designed for bunnies food pellets. Why on earth would you rather pounce athwart my goal of gathering these scraps?"

After trying one last feint, Patricia stopped. "I should have asked May to help with this," she said to the rabbit conversationally. While she thought, at least she could do her stretches, she decided. Then she could pretend this little venture to the rabbit's cage had been productive.

She started cracking her knuckles and working the aches out of her arms. Strange, she noticed. The rabbit was up on its haunches, watching her.

When had she seen that before?

She couldn't quite seem to remember. But no matter. She finished her stretches, then reached down to pet the rabbit - she thought she could remember friends commenting that cats would get in your way if they thought you weren't paying them enough attention.

Such soft fur. The rabbit dropped to all fours again and seemed to enjoy the attention, but bunnies, unlike kitties, do not have purring mechanisms with which to express their enjoyment. Patricia kept stroking for a little longer, then reached for a bit of paper - but no, the bunny was in the way.

"Alright, fine," Patricia said. "You win. At least for now."



The next few days went smoothly for almost everyone. Patricia left the bunny alone, focusing instead on her regular commitments. She kept her mornings to herself and her novel, and by the time she was ready to face the world, she had written her daily count and eaten her lunch. The afternoons she spent at the seniors' centre, and in the evenings she made notes for her next day's writing and did the day's crossword. May had called her Wednesday evening to let her know she had arrived at home and that she had managed to get almost all of her homework done for the next day, so not to worry too much about her school work. She was hoping to avoid Alex and Chrissie by spending her breaks the next day working either on homework or on her novel. Friday evening Patricia went to the write-in downtown, but she didn't know any of the others there - none had been at her table at the kick-off - so, while she wrote a decent mess of words in her favourite green notebook, she didn't discuss rabbits with any of the other participants. At one point, however, while glancing up to stare into the distance in search of a word that was on the tip of her tongue and which was absolutely necessary for the sentence she was writing, she noticed rabbit ears wavering over the heads of one of the other writers. They faded as her focus intensified and she let slip the focus on her own writing. Strange... no, she thought. Athwart. And she bent her head over her notebook again, not noticing whether or not the rabbit ears reappeared.

The only other thing of note in Patricia's life was that she was finding it harder and harder to wake up in the mornings. Something was happening in her dreams that she really wanted to know about – but as soon as her consciousness was too engaged and she woke up, she lost the thread.

The bunnies seemed to have settled down to much less noticeable levels of disruption, and Flopsy had started worrying about making sure that they were disruptive enough, rather than about blowing the mission in the first few days. However, she was also certain that the elder archetypes would take into consideration the information she had brought back from the Office of Letters and Light: that Week Two was the best week to strike, for it was the week when everyone apparently tended to get bored with characters or frustrated with the lack of plot thus far or started to realise just how much of their time they were wasting on this whole stupid book idea. In other words, it was a perfect time for plot bunnies to mess with their plot lines and convince them that a completely different plot line was where they really wanted to go with this book – to the extent that the characters and setting that they had so far fleshed out simply didn't go, and that they needed to start over. Given that they were already a quarter of the way through a time limit most of them considered too short to start with, Flopsy had evinced the opinion that rather a lot of novelists could be convinced to drop out during Week Two. It was Sunday already: soon, she expected to hear an order from on high that the plot bunnies were to step up their nuisance.