Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom

by David Neilsen

  But unlike the other children of the neighborhood, these three had been unable to forget Dr. Fell.

  And so as the days wore on, they were less and less inclined to be seen cavorting on the playground at the end of Hardscrabble Street. Less and less inclined to be seen playing with the other children. Less and less inclined to smile at all.

  And more and more inclined to feel that something was wrong.

  “I wish we didn’t remember him,” said Gail, and not for the first time.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” agreed Nancy. “Everybody else is forgetting him.”

  “Everybody else was under his spell,” Jerry pointed out. “Maybe, since they were in a dreamlike state when he was here, they’re now all sort of waking up. Like how it’s harder and harder to remember a dream the farther away from it you get.”

  “But we weren’t dreaming,” said Gail. “So we remember.”

  “Right,” agreed Jerry. “We were wide awake.”

  They sat a moment longer as a small leaf floated down the trickle of a stream in front of them.

  “Do you really think he’s dead?” asked Gail, voicing the question that was on all their minds.

  “He’s survived for over five hundred years, my dovelings,” said a voice they all immediately recognized as belonging to Old Lady Witherton. “I promise you, he survived this.”

  The children looked up and found the old woman standing on the opposite shore of the tiny trickle of a stream. They shifted in place and prepared to stand, but she waved them back down as she stepped over the foot-wide brook and joined them.

  “Now, now, don’t get up. I just came to say good-bye,” she said.

  “Good-bye?” asked Gail, standing.

  “You’re leaving?” asked Jerry, also standing.

  “I needed some time to get everything in order, but now, yes,” she announced. “I’m leaving.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Nancy, who had already stood up.

  Old Lady Witherton took a deep breath and looked up at the cloudless sky. “Out there,” she said.

  “You’re going into space?” asked Jerry.

  “No, dear. Sorry. I was being dramatic. What I mean to say is—”

  “Please don’t say that,” said Gail.

  Old Lady Witherton stopped, then nodded, understanding. “What I should have said is that I don’t exactly know where I’m going. I just know it’s time to go.”

  The children frowned and kicked absently at the dirt. “You’re going after him, aren’t you?” asked Gail at last.

  “Oh, my sweet little dovelings. You mustn’t worry about such things. You have years and years and years of life ahead of you. Don’t waste it worrying about him.”

  “But he could come back!” cried Nancy.

  “Not here, dear,” Old Lady Witherton assured her. “He never returns. Only arrives. Hardscrabble Street shall not see Dr. Fell ever again.”

  With that, Old Lady Witherton patted each child affectionately on the head, then turned and walked back over the foot-wide trickle and off into the woods on her way back to her little house on Turnabout Road.

  Just before she disappeared into the trees, Gail called out one last time. “Will we ever see him again?” she asked.

  Old Lady Witherton paused a moment, then turned her neck only partly back around, so that rather than looking at the three children, she gazed down at the ground just behind her.

  “I suppose that depends on whether or not you stay on Hardscrabble Street,” she said.

  Then she melted into the trees.

  —

  On the darkest of nights, in the darkest of back alleys, in an especially dark city, there appeared a vast darkness. The darkness was followed by a roar. The roar was followed by a bright yellow-purple light. The bright light was followed by a grunt. The grunt was followed by a thud. Then the bright yellow-purple light disappeared.

  As the light retreated, a man remained behind—lying facedown in a small puddle.

  The man turned his head to the side to clear his nose and mouth from the murky water and breathed in, then out, then in again. He then pulled his arms up, placed his palms square in the muck, and pushed himself to his hands and knees. A few seconds passed as the man struggled to regain his breath.

  Had anyone bothered to duck down this particular dark back alley in this particularly dark city on this particularly dark night, they would have seen a handsome young man slowly gather his feet under him and stand, breathing heavily from the effort. They would have seen this handsome young man wipe his dirty hands on his blacker-than-black suit pants. And then they would have seen this handsome young man carefully bend over and pick up a purple top hat.

  “Well, that was distinctly unpleasant,” they would have heard him say before he set off into the night.

  But of course, nobody was there.

  Acknowledgments

  A huge thank-you to Ann, Phoebe, and Griffin for encouraging me, and allowing me to barricade myself upstairs from time to time to write. Thank you also to my editor, Emily Easton, for pushing me to answer some questions in the story while allowing others to remain a mystery. I am grateful to Eric Myers for believing in my work, and to Chris Grabenstein for deciding I was worth passing along to Eric in the first place. Thank you to Jerry, Judy, Abbey, Elisabeth, and Sahalie for giving me critical notes on earlier drafts—your feedback shaped this into what it has become. Finally, I am forever indebted to the late illustrator Trina Schart Hyman for taking an obscure four-line rhyme from 1680 and turning it into an illustration that inspired me to bring Dr. Fell to life.

  About the Author

  David Neilsen is a classically trained actor/storyteller, a journalist, and a theater/improvisation teacher. During the Halloween season, David can be found telling spooky tales to audiences of all ages, or performing one of his one-man shows based on the work of horror author H. P. Lovecraft. David lives in New York with his family. Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom is his first novel.