Short stories to read on a bus, a car, train, or plane (or a comfy chair anywhere). Includes the novella «Duck Creek»

Excerpt from Charlies’ Diary

29th June 2001. Her face was radiant as she slept. It always is when she is asleep – the face of an angel. We’ve been here for a week and I haven’t missed the city, she hasn’t missed her social crowd even though she painfully reminded me on a number of occasions before we left of all the parties and events that she would miss by coming here with me. Still, we had a beautiful dinner last night – romantic and exotic, simplistic and erotic, as she so eloquently put it. She is much better with words than I. Maybe she should have written this diary for me? It would be so much more exciting to read and perhaps things would have turned out differently? Tomorrow. Tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow I will end it all. Finished. End. Finito. No more mulling over the fate of whether we are in love anymore or not. The climax will be catastrophic.

Charlie turned the page slowly and squinted at the brightness of the page. He lowered his pen to the blankness of today.

30th June 2001. Okay, I’m ready to do it, end it once and forever. Here she comes now, she’s up early as she knew this was going to happen. Goodbye.

She flowed out onto the balcony, the mid-morning light retaining and even highlighting her angelic features. She lifted the Diary from Charlies’ hands and promptly sat in his lap. ‘Good morning Mr. Daniels’ and kissed him full on the lips. Charlie wrapped his arms around her and returned the kiss and when she pulled away he looked into her gorgeous grey eyes.

‘Good morning Mrs. Daniels’ he responded lightly.

‘You ready?’ she asked.

She looked at him steadily and even if she had not voiced the question he knew what she wanted to know.

‘Yes. Let’s do it,’ he nodded to her.

They both rose and walked hand in hand off the end of the balcony where a small bonfire had been prepared in the dunes, and after a quick glance at her husband, she placed the current, and last Diary on top of the other fifteen volumes already strategically arranged. Fire lighters were in place beneath them and Charlie lifted his Planet Hollywood Zippo and flicked it into life. They both watched the spluttering flame.

‘I should never have bought you that diary’ she told him, without reproach but with a hint of sadness, sympathy perhaps, in her voice. Charlie looked at her and back to the blue and yellow flames that were beginning to consume over fifteen years of his life; a solitary tear slipped down his cheek. ‘Good bye,’ he whispered.

* * * *

THE STORY TELLER

Some of them pointed unkindly, selfishly. As children they were taught that it was rude to point yet now they do so as poor examples to their own children. The subject of their rudeness appears oblivious to their behaviour and he trudges past even though most of the children call his name. His eyes are hooded and look straight down at his feet as he painfully and laboriously places one foot in front of the other, slowly and inexorably aiming for his target destination like a giant Galapagos tortoise. The children revert to the silence exhibited by their gathered mothers.

He disappears into the Library front door and it is a signal for the waiting mothers to gossip about him in excited babbling voices. The children are eager to go and the crescendo increases with their pleas to unhearing parental auditory circuits – if mothers were men they could be accused of domestic deafness. Finally, as if some magic volume switch has been triggered, a solitary mother responds to her child.

‘Just sit down and wait Rebecca. You know they won’t let us, you in until he, he is ready.’

‘It’s Mr Cole Mommy, his name is Mr Cole.’

‘Yes, yes dear’ her child is dismissed. ‘Where do you think he comes from?’ she asks another of the Mothers who by some miracle is not already engaged in conversation.

‘Don’t know. Nobody seems to know.’ The rest of the mothers have also stopped talking, just in case there has been a breakthrough about the mysterious Mr Cole – there was no way any of them wanted to miss the smallest tit bit of information. ‘Even Mrs Stevens the Librarian doesn’t know.’

‘So how long has he been coming here?’ a third mother asks, one who has only recently moved into the area but whose child had been attending this library session with a friends’ daughter for over four years.

‘The Library opened in 1996, September I think it was, and it was only a matter of weeks after that,’ Rebeccas’ Mom replied.

‘A man, that man Mr Cole, has been coming here every Saturday for nearly six years and nobody knows anything about him?’ the third mother asks with a mix of absolute wonder and total disbelief plain as day on her face.

Instead of a reply almost all of the women look at each other and simply shake their heads.

‘He’s good lookin’, I know that!’ squeals Rebeccas’ Mom, and they all break into excited laughter and babble now about how he is probably great in bed, but he does what he does because he used to be married and his own wife and kids were tragically killed. ‘Bec Honey’ her Mom asks, ‘has he ever said anything about himself at all, you know, where he comes from or anything like that?’

The women are immediately quiet again. They all wait as if their next breathe is dependent upon little eight year old Rebeccas’ response to her Mother.

‘No Mom’ the babble begins again at once, but almost supernaturally ceases as Bec speaks again. ‘There was this one time when Billy Smithers cried.’

Rebecca stopped talking because she realised that there was over twenty pairs of adult eyes peering at her, searching her face, hanging on once again for lifes’ breath. She was only eight and her little lips pursed – the attention was scary. A tear scrabbled down her cheek from one eye and her lips began to tremble.

‘It’s alright Honey’ her Mom squatted down and wrapped her arms around Bec. ‘Go on, it’s okay.’

‘Billy Smithers he cried and … sniffle … and Mr, Mr … sniffle … Cole just said to him that it was okay to cry … sniffle … to go ahead, cry and that we would all cry too so that Billy wouldn’t feel so bad. He, he … sniffle … said that he, Mr Cole … sniffle … had seen too many tears already, but we should all still go ahead and he would try too, for Billy…. sniff.’

After a moment’s hesitation the verbal analysis began again. This time they stopped only because the horrible realisation dawned upon them all at once. Billy Smithers had been going to the library on these special days for only a month. He only went for a month because he had died – his whole family had died. The entire Smithers family perished in a house fire which only their Burmilla cat, Bungendore, had survived. Soft murmuring reminded those in the crowd who had forgotten, as if it were possible that such a horrendous event could be forgotten.

‘What did Mr Cole do to Billy to make him cry Bec?’

‘Nothing Mom’, Bec’s confidence was mostly restored now. ‘He just did what he always does – tells stories.’

Before any more patter could eventuate, Mrs Stevens herself opened the front door.

“Good morning ladies, morning kids’ she chirped, and began counting infant heads as they excitedly filed past her. ‘No running’ she warned, though none of them had shown any sign of doing so.

Mrs Stevens had been the Head Librarian for almost three years and a Council Librarian within the local municipality for a total of 34 years. She had never seen so many kids regularly attending any Library service. As she had told many mothers over the years, she knew as little as they did about the mysterious Mr Cole and she couldn’t even tell them about the stories he told the kids because neither she nor any of her staff were allowed to be present either. Sure, some parents had been uncomfortable with this and withdrawn their children, forbid them to attend, but those children kicked up so much of a continual fuss about missing out that within a week or two, the parents usually relented and allowed them to return, if there were any vacancies still available that is.

And the results spoke for themselves. Every single child who attended became remarkably well mannered, improved at school in some cases to the extent that the local Primary School Assistant Headmaster showed up and wanted to attend a session ‘for the information of the Education Department’, he had pompously announced. That session did not proceed – Mr Cole was adamant that NO adult, in fact nobody over the age of twelve could attend. He displayed no anger, only futility, he was not argumentative, simply obstinate. His only answer to the question of ‘why’ was that it was not possible for him to tell his stories in the same way if there was an older child or an adult present. For the children, it just would not be the same. And his results were indisputable.

The only other session that had been delayed was when Mr Cole ‘discovered’ a video camera secreted in ten year old Jamie Sinclair’s bright yellow Digimon back pack. Mr Cole stated the discovery resulted from the low battery warning bleeper activating itself on the camera as the children had gathered and sat down excitedly awaiting that weeks’ story. Mr Sinclair told a disbelieving Mrs Sinclair later that night that he had fully charged the battery pack as she had asked.

Apart from the occasional mother making surreptitious flirtatious suggestions to Mr Cole (he was indeed a handsome man and he did not wear a wedding ring), it was his results with the children that remained the prime motive behind the continuing sessions.

When they first started it had only been with five children, so Mrs Stevens’ predecessor had informed her. Within a month that figure had grown to 25, and in the second month, they had to cap the number of attendees to 60 as no more could comfortably fit into the annexure where Mr Cole told his stories, and there was no other suitable venue within the Library and Mr Cole himself refused to go elsewhere. The library was the only venue that he could ‘do what he did’ he advised them. Consequently, there was a waiting list of more than a thousand children waiting to get into the sessions but as almost all the children currently attending had been going since the first year, and only ceased to attend when they either moved away or became too old (there was usually a huge farewell celebration whenever one of the kids reached the age of thirteen and could no longer attend the sessions. Remarkably, but not surprising to their parents, the kids themselves accepted that they could no longer attend with all the aplomb of an university student on graduation day, and each and every one of them went on to be in huge demand by big business and political parties alike, even before they had finished school), or as in the sad case of the death of Billy Smithers. The vast majority of that thousand names on the waiting list would never get to see or hear Mr Cole tell one of his stories.

Mothers and Librarians, the long, long waiting list and even Billy Smithers was forgotten now, inside, the annexure secured. The children sat in a semi-circle facing him, their faces quietly and eerily intent as they knew he would not begin until there was absolute silence.

The annexure itself was designed to be a relatively noise free environment so that 20th century technology of videos, satellite and pay television showing documentaries and wildlife programs and even audio books could be enjoyed by patrons without being interrupted by the obstreperous behaviour of normal library life. Anybody who still believes that libraries remain a haven of peaceful solitude has not recently attended a public library, so the annexure was included as a popular addition to the original plans.

Strangely, there were no documents, no minutes of committee meetings, no council records or even a single solitary person that could recall who had actually first muted the idea of the annexure. The population did not warrant it and the council budget had not extended to its inclusion, but somehow, somewhere during the planning stages, it had miraculously appeared and been unanimously accepted without query or derision, the additional funds scraped up so that it was constructed and opened at the very same time as the rest of the Library.

The children knew none of this. They were here for one reason and one reason only. The Storyteller. Mr Cole was The Storyteller. In the outrageous silence surrounding them all they saw him lift his head, and a rapid sweep of his eyes showed that all was in order and he could begin.

His eyes were a piercing blue, the mature age lines across his forehead and the mirrored crows feet at the corner of his eyes the only signs, beside his ponderous walk, that he was older than he looked. Much, much older. His handsome face and head full of thick jet black hair aged him somewhere in his mid-thirties and it was no wonder that some of the mothers’ swooned over him, indeed fantasised sometimes late at night when the beer and cigarette stench of their overweight husbands engaged them in their wifely sexual duties. Mr Cole was more than just The Storyteller – to some he was their marriage saviour. The man himself smiled now and all the children smiled back.

‘Shall we start with a prayer?’ His voice was deep and mellow, and though he had not spoken loud, the attentiveness of his subjects ensured they all heard him clearly. ‘Rebecca, please, if you would begin’ he nodded to the eight year old.

Bec stood up immediately. There was no apparent hesitation, no nervousness portrayed on her young face, and her parents would have been gob smacked if they had seen their shy and timid Rebecca react so confidently. They would have been more gob smacked at the words she now expelled with full conviction. She started and led from her standing position and all the children followed. They remained seated and smiling as they chanted.

Mr Cole himself did not join them but his eyes quavered. As they progressed his whole body trembled, as if the words were pinching him in some insidious way. Their voices did not waver.

‘Oh almighty Diablo, cast off from Heaven

Come to us now and preach of the Dark Light.

Show us the enlightenment, Show us the pain,

Show us the way of Evil,

For we are your servants Diablo.

Let not the purgatory good inhabit our spheres

After your return Diablo.

We are your servants

and We await your return in the perfect form.

The evil and mighty Diablo

Our precious Dark Lord.

‘Again’ voiced The Storyteller, except his voice was deeper now, very deep, and the blue of his eyes had made way for a crimson hue like a blood moon and as the words caressed him once more, the crimson darkened further to a black red, pearlescent black that shone red highlights which ricochet across the room so that every single child also reflect that evil glow.

Coles’ skin was pulsing ….

‘Show us the enlightenment, Show us the pain,’

…huge blisters appeared to be pulsing and bursting across his skin but instead of…

‘Let not the purgatory good inhabit our spheres’

…an aqueous putrid eruption, a dark scaly armour was growing to replace …

‘We are your servants and We await’

…the human form. From the crown of his head two large eruptions resulted in …

‘The evil and might Diablo’

.. two short moss stained ivory horns that steam arose from as if they’d just been …

‘Our precious Dark Lord’

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