“Come on, let’s open the shop,” Max said as they got back into the Emporium and Cal locked the back door. They were both shaken, but there was no question that the best thing for them to do was to get on with the day.

Cal nodded. “I’ll do that. Can you put the kettle on?”

“I think that’s probably a good idea,” Max said. He swung the kettle over the hearth and washed the teapot out while Cal went and opened the front door. There were some people passing outside, and the shops in the street were opening up for the day. The homely scene helped Cal to relax after his strange experience. He took a deep breath of the fresh morning air. Maddie’s apprentice passed on the other side of the street. She waved to him and headed into her shop.

Maddie, Cal thought. She’s the one to ask about my creepy neighbor.

At that moment, Cal heard a shout coming from the bakery next door. It was clearly Alyn’s voice. That in itself was nothing new - the wall between the Emporium and the Bakery was pretty thin, and Cal could often hear Alyn singing or laughing with customers - but this time the baker sounded frustrated and angry, and that was unusual.

“Max?” Cal called. “I’m going to pop through and see Alyn for a minute.”

He stepped out into the street and went round to the bakery door. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. Alyn stood behind the counter, a loaf of bread in one hand and some coins in the other. An irate customer - a small, grumpy-looking human man with a bald head and long gray side-whiskers - stood with hands on hips glowering at Alyn.

“And this is the second time it’s happened!” the man was saying as Cal entered.

Cal took in the scene. Alyn looked angry, but he also looked frustrated and possibly even a little frightened. The baker pushed two small silver coins over the counter to the irate customer, who snatched them up, pocketed them, and then turned and addressed Cal.

“I wouldn’t recommend you getting your breakfast from this place, young man,” the irate customer said with a sneer, jerking his head back toward Alyn. “This man calls himself a baker, but that’s the second time this week I’ve found hair baked into my bread. It’s disgusting, and I won’t stand for it. Hygiene is the most important thing. I want bread for breakfast, not hair. Though I must say,” he added, suddenly thoughtful and reaching a hand up to stroke his own shining bald dome, “that anyone with such strong hair must be in pretty robust health… No, it’s not worth it. Disgusting! Avoid this bakery, young man!”

Cal took a breath to reply in defense of his friend, but the little man stumped out of the bakery and marched off up the street in the direction of Market Square.

Poor Alyn was nearly in tears. He was red in the face, his eyes gleaming, the offending loaf of bread still in his hand. Bertha came out from the back of the shop.

“Alyn?” she asked. “What’s the matter, love? Oh, hello, Cal. What’s happening? I heard raised voices.”

“It’s happened again, Bertha,” Alyn said, exhibiting the loaf to his wife. “And that’s the third time this week! Oh, if it had just been that one time I could have borne it, but the business won’t survive if this carries on, and I’ve no idea what the cause is!”

“Let’s see?” Bertha asked. Alyn handed her the bread. The loaf had been broken open in the center, but Cal, watching from the front of the counter, couldn’t see what was actually wrong with it. Surely a single hair in the bread wouldn’t have caused so much drama? It was unpleasant, of course, but surely Alyn’s bakery was more hygienic than this. There was something more going on here.

“Ooh, that is bad,” Bertha said, looking at the loaf. She glanced up. “Uh, Cal, maybe now’s not the best time. I think we might have to close up this morning. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ll be able to do the breakfasts as usual today…”

“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” Cal said hastily, “but I heard that Alyn was upset, and I came through to see if there’s anything I could do to help. What’s the issue with the bread? Why was that man so angry?”

Alyn looked torn between venting his frustration and keeping a concerning issue under wraps.

“You can trust me,” Cal said, seeing Alyn’s hesitation. “I don’t want anything but to help. In fact,” he added, “why don’t you come next door and have a cup of tea with us, Alyn. Max was just putting the kettle on next door. It might be good to get a change of scene, and maybe talking things over with Max and I might help to resolve whatever the problem is?”

Cal met Bertha’s eyes as he spoke, and she gave him an imperceptible nod and a flicker of a wink.

“That’s a good idea,” she said firmly. “You go on with Cal, love, go and have a sit down and a cup of tea in the Emporium and talk things over with the enchanter. It’ll be good for you to get out of the bakery for half an hour and talk things over with someone new.”

“Exactly,” Cal said. “Who knows, maybe I can put my enchanting knowledge to use to help fix your problem?”

Alyn nodded glumly. He followed Cal out of the shop, still carrying the offending loaf of bread.

Max was a little surprised to see Alyn, but he immediately understood that something was wrong. He didn’t ask any questions, just filled a third cup with tea and handed it to Alyn before guiding him into the armchair by the fire. Alyn slumped down, his shoulders bowed, the loaf in one hand and his tea in the other.

“Can I see the loaf?” Cal asked gently, sitting himself in the chair opposite Alyn. Max drifted out into the front shop and took up his place behind the counter, as the door opened and a goblin in the uniform of a telepathogram delivery agent entered, asking about warmth-enchanted hats. Cal smiled. He could rely on Max to keep an eye on the shop while he discussed things with Alyn.

Wordlessly, Alyn handed Cal the loaf of bread that seemed to be the cause of all the trouble. Then he lifted his mug and took a big swallow.

Alyn’s eyes brightened as he tasted the tea.

“Wow,” he said, “that’s nice.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s Honeywell’s blend. Max got it from the market a while ago and we’ve been drinking it ever since,” Cal explained. “But what’s this in the bread? It’s not hair, surely?”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Hair is the only word I can find for it,” Alyn said, “but I agree with you that it’s not a very good word for it. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Hmm,” Cal said. “Yeah, this is pretty weird. Mind if I take it over to my workbench and have a closer look?”

“Be my guest,” Alyn said despondently. The baker watched as Cal took the loaf over to the work table. Cal placed the bread on the table, took his knife from his belt and cut into the bread more deeply, then broke it apart, exposing more of the strange stuff that was baked into the middle of the loaf.

It was a thick clump of thready, stringy stuff, all tangled up into a ball like wool. The stuff did resemble hair in a way, but it was thicker, and it was a strange, mid tone shade of gray. Cal pulled the clump out of the loaf, and it came whole, bits of baked bread dough adhering to the trailing threads that hung down from the central mass. The clump of stringy stuff was big enough to fit into Cal’s fist.

Setting the bread aside, Cal took his spirit light from the shelf and clicked it on, shining it on the clump of stuff and leaning over to have a closer look.

“You say this has happened a few times?” Cal asked as he examined the mysterious hairball.

“Three times this week!” Alyn said in a despairing voice. “But it’s happened twice before. It happened once last week, and then a few weeks before that it happened once as well, but that time the hairball was smaller.”

“The time a few weeks ago, that was the first time?” Cal asked. He was thoughtfully peeling a few of the strands away from the main mass to get a better look. They were curiously elastic, but seemed very strong.

Curiously elastic, but also curiously strong… Sudden understanding hit Cal like a bucket of ice water, and he was glad he had his back to Alyn so he had a moment to recover himself.

He tugged harder on the thread, a sinking feeling pulling his stomach down toward his boots. The thread showed no sign of breaking, but as soon as Cal touched it with the edge of his knife, it cut neatly and perfectly through.

Webbing. He was looking at a thick clump of webbing from the enchanted spiders that inhabited the floor space between his shop and the apartment upstairs. Somehow, thick clumps of spider web were getting into Alyn’s loaves.

Cal closed his eyes and took a deep breath. This was bad. The spiders were one thing when it was just himself being affected, but when he realized that his keeping them around was affecting his neighbor, it became a very different prospect. Cal didn’t want Alyn’s business to suffer, but if Cal wanted to keep the spiders around, he was going to have to take a more proactive approach to dealing with them.

“Tell me, Alyn,” Cal said, “what’s your workflow for baking the bread? How does it work? What does your morning look like?”

Alyn thought about it for a moment. “Well, I get up early,” he said slowly. “The bread takes the longest of all the things I do, and it’s the main seller, so I do it first. The night before, I mix up a batch of yeast and leave it overnight, somewhere warm, covered, of course. In the morning I get up and mix the yeast up with flour to make the day’s dough. Then I knead the dough, break it up into loaves, and leave it out to rise.”

“How long does it take to rise?” Cal broke in.

“Oh, no more than an hour,” Alyn said.

“And what do you do while you’re waiting?”

“Well, to be honest I usually spend the hour getting my own breakfast. I get some food and a coffee, I tidy up a bit, and I read the early edition of the paper for an hour.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where do you read your paper?”

“Why, in the front shop, by the counter. I find it too warm to sit in the back near the oven.”

Cal nodded. “But the loaves of bread that you’ve left to rise, they stay in the back, near the oven?”

“Of course,” Alyn said. “They need the warmth to rise. I have a special table where I rise the loaves and rolls in the morning.”

“But no one’s in there with them.” Cal turned to face Alyn.

Alyn shook his head. “There’s no need to watch the bread rising, Cal,” he said, giving Cal an odd look.

“Anything else odd that you’ve noticed recently? Anything else unusual, anything going wrong?”

Alyn shook his head. “Everything’s been fine, Cal,” he said. “Everything except this weird hair. It’s going to sink me if I can’t tackle it! If word gets out that there’s hairballs in Alyn Longjaw’s bread…!”

“We’re going to fix this for you,” Cal reassured him. “I think I understand what’s happening here, Alyn. I’d like to have a look at the place where you leave the bread to rise. I think I might be able to find a solution to the problem.”

“Really?” Ayn asked in amazement. “What kind of solution?”

“I don’t know for sure yet,” Cal said, “but let’s go back through. I’d like to see the bakery and the place where your bread rises.”

Alyn shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “If you think you can stop this happening, I’m happy to show you whatever you wish. Come on. I’ll get you a coffee while I’m at it. At least that doesn’t have any hairballs.”

They went back through the front shop. “I’m just going next door with Alyn for a minute,” Cal said to Max.

Max waved a hand in acknowledgement. He was involved in discussing pendants with two fashionably-dressed young women who were admiring the enchanted bowls and mugs. They also seemed to be admiring Max, and the young man didn’t seem to mind Cal leaving the shop to him for the moment.

Cal rolled his eyes, grinning at how quickly Max appeared to have gotten over the fright they’d just had visiting their creepy ghostly neighbor in the empty lot next door.

Alyn showed Cal the bakery in the back of the shop. Cal was interested to find that though the front of Alyn’s place was - like Cal’s own - small and compact, the back was easily three times the size of the Enchanter’s Emporium.

There were a few different rooms in the back of the bakery. In one, Alyn had a store room for his gear and ingredients. In a second, he had set up a prep room, where he did most of the kneading and preparation of the food for each day. In the third, he kept his big, wood-fired oven, and near to the oven there was a long table with a stack of clean metal trays.

“That’s the rising table,” Alyn said, pointing to the table with the trays. “I let the bread rise on the trays then stick it straight into the oven.”

Cal looked up at the ceiling, running his eyes along the edges. Quickly, he found what he was looking for; a small hole, no bigger than a mouse hole, strategically placed just above the rising table.

“Give me a moment,” Cal said. He walked over to the wall under the little hole and looked up. The wood around the hole looked pale, as if it had only recently been cut. Cal narrowed his eyes and looked down at his feet, then crouched down. Alyn had said that the first incident had been a few weeks before. Then there had been one last week, and three this week. There was a thick coating of flour on the floor, piled up at the edges of the room.

“How often do you sweep this floor?” Cal asked.

“Not very often,” Alyn admitted. “Perhaps once a fortnight. It doesn’t really do much good, you see, so I leave it until there’s quite a lot of flour on the floor before doing it.”

Cal nodded. “And the last time you did it was about two weeks ago?” he asked.

“About that. What are you getting at?”

Cal leaned over and brushed the layer of flour gently back. Yes, it was as he thought. Hidden under the recent flour, there was a little pile of wood dust, like fine sawdust. Directly under the little hole in the ceiling.

Cal stood. There was no doubt in his mind. For some reason, it was desirable for the spiders to put thick clumps of webbing into rising loaves of bread. To get access to the rising bread, the spiders had chewed a hole in Alyn’s ceiling.

There was no question; this was Cal’s responsibility. If he wanted to keep his spiders- and if he wanted to keep them quiet, he’d have to solve Alyn’s problem for him, and fast.