by Noel Hynd
She looked at it for several seconds, a sea of thoughts and emotions overcoming her.
“There’s at least one story that goes with it. Franz Liszt once owned it and gave it to a woman he loved.”
“Wow,” she said. “That’s priceless.”
“So are you,” he said.
She looked at him and nearly melted.
“I want you with me all the time on this tour,” he said. She blinked.
“All twenty-nine more dates?” she laughed.
“It’s a much longer tour than that,” he said. “Time was when I thought I’d retire once I did this tour. Well, I don’t know if I’m going to conquer the world in thirty shots. And if I do or I don’t, it doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to retire. I want to share music with you and I want to share a life with you. So it’s a long tour, Diana. It’s more than seven months.”
She was not able to speak. She gave his hand a squeeze. Intimacy eight miles aloft, 880 feet per second now over Scotland, pondering a rapidly accelerating future.
“If you accept, try it on.”
She did. She held out her hand to see how it looked. It looked better than any other ring possibly could have. She leaned to him and kissed him.
“I love it,” she said. After several moments she noticed there was no marking on the box.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“In a jewelry store on South Molton Street.”
“It’s a beautiful ring,” she said.
Diana looked upon it with fascination. He looked at the thrill and glow in her eyes.
“I hardly know what to say,” She said.
Then she thought further about it.
“What made you go there?” she asked. “How’d you find that particular store?”
He smiled. He told her a short ghost story, one involving a white-face clown with a violin and a funny polka-dotted outfit. She recognized the name of Laura Aufieri.
It was a story that she listened to with rapture and which he would retell to her again over the course of many years. But it was their story, a private one, and a footnote to a larger episode of restless spirits, a grander tale which was not as pleasant as the shorter one that it contained.
It was a story that only they could share and completely understand.
Their section of the aircraft became bright with the sun. The engines eased to a quieter hum as the aircraft settled into its cruising speed. The sky around them was a limitless blue, and like the sky, the tour before them stretched without limit.
THE END
To the reader:
Thanks for reading The Prodigy. Your thoughts and comments are always appreciated. You can contact me at [email protected] or on Facebook. I welcome communications. If you found errors or format problems in the text, please advise me. Through the ‘miracle’ of e-publishing, fixes can be made in subsequent downloads.
Noel Hynd
And, if you enjoyed this book, you might consider…
Ghosts – 2014 Edition
The classic ghost story by Noel Hynd, perhaps one of the scariest books ever written. Re-edited for e-Readers.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Sleepy Nantucket Island has become a homicide hotspot, with two unexplained deaths. While the murders appear to local cops to be unrelated, Detective Timothy Brooks, a recent transplant to the island, sees similarities in the corpses’ wounds. Meanwhile, spectral disturbances, including sightings and eerie moving furniture, are plaguing both locals as well as the summer crowd. Hollywood star Annette Carlson, who bought a place following a stint in drug rehab, is besieged by visitations that she is certain are not figments of her overtaxed imagination. Brooks begins to see parallels between the recent killings and Carlson’s bizarre accounts. He contacts his buddy, Lutheran minister and spiritualist George Osaro, to help identify the evil spirit—the ghost of Henry Flaherty, a no-account lothario and stage actor who was killed in the late 1920s. Soon, Osaro, Brooks and Carlson are pressed into service as “ghostbusters” to save Nantucket from a paranormal meltdown. Alternately playful and somber in tone, written in spare prose, Hynd’s story will arouse fear and suspicion in any reader who has ever heard things go “bump”—day or night.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A malevolent spirit is haunting the Nantucket house of actress Annette Carlson. It has killed at least three people with sickening viciousness. It now insinuates itself inside the head of policeman Timothy Brooks, a skeptical investigator forced against his will to recognize the existence of the occult. Brooks must lay this spirit to rest before it tires of toying with him and Annette and kills them both. With this novel, espionage writer Hynd makes his debut in the realm of the supernatural. A ghost novel needs to convince unbelieving readers against their will and scare the liver out of them, and Ghosts does this in spades. The atmosphere builds steadily, moving from reality to an utterly convincing realm of the supernatural. Public libraries need to buy this.
–Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
(Six reasons to leave the light on at night)
The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd:
Ghosts
Cemetery of Angels
Rage of Spirits
A Room for the Dead
The Lost Boy
The Prodigy
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one