Theodora

 

The sign on the door says Thatched Cottage, Second-hand Books and Antiques shop, but those in the know call it The Lucky Coffee Shop. Anyone who stumbles upon it—mostly tourists in the old town of this ancient borough deep in the English countryside—find that their favourite cake or savoury treat was baked just this morning. Even if it’s not normally on the menu. As if the owner anticipates her visitors’ tastes.

 

It’s just a coincidence, the staff will tell you. And not the only coincidence, either. Visitors to this little shop often report the strangest things.

 

“I was browsing the shelves and thinking of my boyfriend, and just as I picked up my phone to call him, it rang. He was calling me! It was so weird! Like he read my mind from all the way back home!” 

 

Some tell darker tales.

 

“I was drinking my coffee and suddenly saw an old high school friend walk down the street—but that couldn’t have been true. On holiday here in England, hundreds of miles away from home! I hadn’t spoken to her in years. I immediately went to message her online and ask, was she really here? We could meet and catch up! On her page there was a note from her mother. My friend had died that morning.” 

 

There is no such thing as psychic abilities. That’s what the shop-owner says. Well, no one actually ever sees Theodora, so it’s her staff who say so. The only indication of her existence is the way the curious ticking objects and brown parchment tomes in the Antiques section, often seem to have slightly shifted positions or switched places overnight.

 

Theodora is the only one who can open the heavy glass doors of those frightful display cases, in the back of the shop, framed with carvings of odd symbols and inlayed with animal skulls, that seem to squirm in the shadows. Because there’s no keyhole, or handle, or button, or switch, or any unlocking mechanism visible on those strange cabinets. If things have moved in there, she’s been here. But most customers sit at the coffee shop and don’t notice either way.

 

Then there’s the flickering gleam in the attic windows after midnight. The coffeeshop staff insist the boss lives in a cavernous attic flat inside the roof, but no one has found any stairs anywhere in the cottage. So it’s curious how, in the small hours before dawn, footsteps resound from the hollow of the thatched roof, and even more unsettling when eerie melodies of hymnal songs permeate the night.

 

But the sound is sure to chill you to the bone; the clang of rusty iron keys, a certain harbinger of death. It rings in the witching hour from the coffeeshop’s back terrace, where a blood-red climbing rose has obscured the garden wall in twisting vines of hidden thorns. The screech of a creaking gate is the only proof of a door to a walled garden.

 

No one hears it in the dead of night, but still it wakes the neighbours’ cats, ears twitching behind curtains up and down the cobbled street. The shop staff say Theodora grows unique healing tea leaves in the secret garden; they find fresh herbs bunched up in baskets each morning for the day’s tea menu and cup soups.

 

Yet other rumours say Theodora grows poisons.

​

There are far too many Funeral Directors in this town—certainly more than its size would warrant. It’s the death toll, you see. Unexplained. Indisputable. Historically, natural deaths occur here with nine times greater frequency than anywhere else. And it’s not just the casualties. Often the unsuspecting visitor is met with a fate worse than death: Local hospitals record it as idiopathic nervous failures. People go deaf, blind, mute or paralysed in varying degrees, from unknown causes and seemingly spontaneously.

 

But still the Thatched Cottage buzzes with cheerful crowds of tea and coffee drinkers. How does everyone know to find it? Does it feature in guidebooks or any travel blogs? Never. Yet the little silver bell above the door tinkles practically nonstop all day long.

 

Lady Luck plays strange games with visitors in this place; some have the loveliest day to treasure forever, an unfading, beautiful memory to warm them in their darkest times and protect them from their worst days to come like a loving, powerful hug.

 

Others, well... not so much.

​

And there’s that little rhyme everyone’s heard somewhere but no one knows where:

​

Locals laugh and say beware,

Theodora reads your mind.

Do not ever drink her brews

If you’ve got something to hide.

Like some ancient Sphynx, her cat

Sits and watches passers by.

And if

you catch

a glint

in her eye,

Pass

her silent

Test

or die.