Short Stories For Older, and Not Quite So Old, Children

by Dandi Palmer

  When he woke the moon was high and the puffball even larger than ever, glowing now as though it had a lamp inside it. Lee rubbed his eyes and sat up. The fungus seemed to be hollow. The skin of the smooth sphere was now patterned like a stained glass window and, gradually, the surrounding nettles, bushes and the tent were spangled with luminous colour.

  Lee became alarmed, but Damien was nowhere to be seen. That dog had got cowardice down to a fine art. But this was no time to run and wake your parents. Something incredible was about to happen, so why waste time telling people who wouldn’t appreciate it?

  Something else was going on. As Lee got to his feet… he walked right through the tent. He was no longer standing quite on the ground and felt even less happy about this when he turned to see himself still fast asleep just inside the tent. Perhaps it was time to go back? If only he knew how.

  Inside the giant puffball a shape was forming. The kaleidoscope colours cleared to reveal a small figure seated inside the sphere. Balanced on its lap was another sphere about the size of an orange surrounded by a bright halo of light. Two webbed, three-fingered hands enclosed the small sphere and the light dimmed so Lee could clearly see the creature holding it. The head was elegantly domed, covered in neat silver curls and the torso short and sturdy, dressed neck to ankle in a rippling diaphanous robe. At first there didn’t seem to be any feet - but as the alien rose it appeared to be standing on points, rather like the ballerinas Lee’s great grandmother drew. The creature was so like her pictures she must have seen it as well. That was one of the reasons the family had her put in a home; that and breaking the speed limit whenever she managed to get her hands on some car keys.

  Apart from standing up, the creature in the puffball remained still, watching the ten-year-old as though coming to a decision. "Who are you?" Lee eventually asked, a little disconcerted by the penetrating gaze of its deep mauve eyes.

  "I’m sorry if I disturbed you," it said in perfect English.

  "It’s alright. If I hadn’t woken up I would have got a crick in my neck anyway."

  "But you haven’t woken up."

  Lee looked back down at his slumbering body. "No, I haven’t, have I?"

  "You wouldn’t be able to see me if you were awake."

  "Why not?"

  "I can only travel in other people’s dreams."

  Lee was puzzled. "I don’t get it."

  "You understand that distance is a dimension?"

  "Yes."

  "Time is a dimension?"

  "I...think l do."

  "So are dreams." The alien lifted the small sphere. "This is my ship. It takes me into the most convenient shell available. When I visited your ancestor I always used to appear in the mirror on the dressing table."

  "Used to?"

  "It has been removed for some reason. There is no other furniture through which I can communicate."

  "I think the mirror was broken. Great gran was taking practice putts in her bedroom." Lee pondered. "Will any mirror do?"

  "The larger the better."

  "OK then." The alien started to fade. "Hey! Just a minute."

  "What is it?"

  "How do you do that? ... I mean will I ever see you again?"

  "Oh yes," smiled the alien, "when you reach 80."

  And the apparition faded.

  Lee woke next morning with a crick in his neck and the spores of a giant puffball all over the tent, himself, Damien and the cheese and radish sandwiches.

  Lee had never seen the point in having two mirrors in his room. They did help you look into infinity, but he suspected that the one screwed to the wardrobe door was a device to remind him in duplicate that his room needed tidying up. He persuaded his mother that the spare mirror would be better screwed to the front of the wardrobe door in his great gran's room in the home.

  Lee's mother was surprised at the old lady's reaction. The occasional pot plant had never received the same appreciation. Perhaps it had something to do with the small picture of the alien Lee had taped to a corner of the mirror.

  THE GHOSTS OF THE GREASY SPOON

  Deepa led her dog, Bengi, over the footbridge and down to the deserted roadside café. It had been closed ever since the bypass opened; now only the occasional cyclist passed this way.

  A sign still swung in the breeze on its one remaining hinge. Its faded words declared defiantly, "Burghers, Fries, and Full English Breakfasts". It sounded very greasy.

  Deepa pushed the door and, to her surprise, it swung open. She apprehensively looked about and couldn't believe what he saw. The interior was immaculate, considering how long it had been closed. Chairs were neatly arranged at tables with scrubbed plastic tablecloths on which condiments sat in strict formation, and the counter's teaspoons gleamed on the ends of their chains.

  Deepa stepped inside. Bengi whimpered apprehensively. He might have remembered that dogs weren't allowed in cafés, or perhaps something else was bothering him? Deepa was too intrigued to wonder what it was. The café should have been derelict.

  Bengi refused to follow her in and remained on the doormat, shivering.

  Deepa confidently went to the counter and would have bought a packet of crisps if there had been anyone about.

  Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed something sitting cross legged on the juke box. When she turned it had gone.

  By the counter were some swing doors that must have led somewhere. Deepa pushed them open and walked through. Filling one wall of the huge kitchen was a cooking range. It had been blackened with years of burnt fat and the occasional uncontrolled fire.

  Then Deepa realised why Bengi had stayed outside shivering.

  Hovering over the scene of a thousand culinary disasters was a dense smudge the size of a duvet. It had arms, a tapering tail, and face with a wide greasy grin. The harder Deepa stared, the more solid it became.

  A white table with a vase of flowers looked very out of place in this hell's kitchen. The contrast with the blackened cooking range was so striking, Deepa didn't immediately see the slender, airy shape sitting beside it. Too tall to be a fairy, this entity had an aura of celery about it and wore a wistful expression, like a flower that needed watering.

  Deepa turned to run out of the kitchen. The greasy smudge snatched up a huge iron frying pan and blocked her way.

  “A customer! A customer!"

  Deepa was alarmed. Ghosts weren't meant to recognise the living, let alone threaten to cook for them. "Well - I wasn't stopping - actually."

  The smudge wasn't going to allow the interloper to escape that easily and hovered closer. "But you must!"

  "I only have enough money for a packet of crisps."

  "You're the first customer we've had for years! We wouldn't dream of making you pay!"

  Deepa thought fast. "Anyway, I'm a vegetarian."

  This dampened the greasy smudge's enthusiasm and, obviously offended, it backed off a little.

  Deepa recovered her curiosity. "This place has been closed for years. I remember the last owners leaving. Who are you?"

  "Me? I'm the ghost of a million burnt burgers." The greasy smudge spun on its tail and flourished the frying pan in the direction of the white table. "And there sits the spirit of side salad."

  "And what was that creature I saw crouching on the juke box?"

  The two ghosts glanced at each other apprehensively.

  "Oh that creature," moaned the spirit of side salad. "I'd rather you didn't mention it."

  The smudge gave an evil chuckle. "Daren't sit in the same room - those two."

  "Well who is it then?" insisted Deepa.

  "He's the cholesterol goblin."

  The spirit of side salad floated from its seat. "Well, as you're a vegetarian, what could be better than a nice salad?"

  "With chips," insisted the greasy smudge. "And I know I have some vegeburghers somewhere about." The smudge threw open a freezer's lid and rummaged through its contents like a whirlwind.

  "No, really," protested Deepa. "I'll hav
e a meal when I get back - and I said I wouldn't be long."

  The smudge tossed a large bag of frozen chips and a catering size box of strange coloured burghers into a deep fryer full of boiling fat. "Won't take a minute!"

  Hot oil spattered the walls and grated carrot flew as the two cooks attempted to outdo each other.

  "Will you be more careful!” chided the spirit of side salad as it chopped cucumber and made fancy flowers with radishes.

  Between them the ghosts were preparing enough food to feed a convention of lapsed dieters. There was no way they were going to get that meal onto one plate.

  The greasy smudge tossed the chips and burgers in the hot oil as though it was flipping pancakes.

  “You'll start a fire!" Deepa warned.

  "Fire!" laughed the smudge. "Used to have them all the time. Happy days!"

  No sooner were the words out of its wide greasy mouth than the deep fryer slipped from its nebulous fingers. The contents fell onto a red hot element of the cooker and a ball of flame hit the ceiling.

  Deepa ran for her life, back out through the swing doors into the cafe.

  The round, wicked looking cholesterol goblin was sitting cross legged on the counter, shrieking with laughter.

  "No insurance! No insurance!" Then it rolled onto the floor and bounced up and down like a yo-yo.

  Deepa seized Bengi's lead and they ran. Neither dared to look back until they reached the safety of the footbridge,

  A column of smoke and fire was billowing into the sky.

  The fire service answered her emergency call in minutes, though by the time they arrived there was nothing left of the café. As it was due to be demolished, not many questions were asked about the cause of the fire.

  Despite what had happened, Deepa knew that its odd occupants were still out there, in some other cafe, boosting the nation's cholesterol level.

  HOT CHOCOLATE

  Suki at last had gathered enough slivers of rock to put into her mineral analyser. The other fossil hunters thought she was wasting her time on the thin dark strata: the tar deposits their dentists frequently removed from their molars would have produced better samples.

  Suki fed in the crumbs of rock. The mineral analyser's display blinked as though baffled. Several minutes passed before the machine reluctantly admitted its conclusion. Suki's thin rock seam had been formed 65 million years ago from a sea of chocolate - with traces of hazelnut. Did dinosaurs not only browse on cycads and devour meat running with warm blood, but have a sweet tooth as well? Suki doubted it. Her mineral analyser must have developed an embarrassing glitch, which she daren't let the other part-time palaeontologists know about, so she discreetly left as they chipped away at their own allocated fossil beds.

  Suki also decided not to declare her unlikely find to the party's organisers before she had checked that a sea of chocolate had not really flooded the late Cretaceous continent.

  Technology was a wonderful thing; with it you could count the grains of sand in your favourite holiday desert, or calculate the chemical composition of your current pimple. There were also amazing travel cubicles that could take you to any time or place like magic carpets - even fly you over the minarets of ancient Baghdad.

  Suki was old enough to realise that these excursions were only illusion, however real the holographic technicians made them seem. All the same, because the Cretaceous era of 65 million years ago was filled with fierce creatures, Suki had to use her palaeontologist's permit to enter the cubicle programmed for that period. Some travellers had been pulled out of them gibbering about aliens, dragons, and gullies running with gore. The shock of seeing another reality was often too great for the modern mind to cope with and many of them didn't totally recover. A permit was meant to guarantee that its owner's mind was too well-balanced to be unhinged.

  Though it had never happened, the technicians were aware that if there was a powerful enough malfunction in the cubicles' control system, illusion and reality could merge. Their wonderful travel facility worked because of a quantum anomaly even they didn't totally understand. However unlikely, the chance of being trapped in a dimension riven with wars and lacking outside toilets was enough to fill the antiseptic, adult mind with dread. The 12-year-old Suki still had an outlook open enough to trust illusion. Other young people just wallowed in the wonder of it all.

  The children entering the cubicle next to hers were about to enter the ultimate dentists' nightmare, Confectionary Wonderland. They weren't bothered by their parents' irrational anxiety that they would be swallowed by a giant marshmallow or carried off by a marzipan magpie.

  Nat, aged eight, was careful to keep the control box out of his four-year-old sister's reach. Temptation should have been Angelina's middle name.

  Suki closed the door of her cubicle and watched its monitor count towards the supposed date of the Cretaceous chocolate sea. Then she paused the program to slowly edge it forwards until the world on the other side of the cubicle screen came into focus. As soon as the scene resolved itself the safety shutter rolled back. Suki stepped through the screen into a prehistoric valley filled with cycads and ferns.

  As she walked towards a volcano it was like entering the hatchery of her uncle's ancient chicken farm, only not many of the creatures here chirped in quite the same manner. There was just the grinding of gizzard stones and munching of huge molars.

  Suki felt the footsteps of something massive shake the ground. However safe the system was supposed to be, she still glanced about nervously to make sure she wasn't being hunted by a Tyrannosaurus rex. She was surrounded by nothing more aggressive than a herd of herbivorous hadrosaurs.

  The time and location on her control box was correct, but there was no chocolate to be seen anywhere. The old mineral analyser must have been faulty. It was a family heirloom made in 2050, long before Suki had been born. Some palaeontologists claimed these models were the most reliable ever produced; now she could prove them wrong.

  ***

  In their world of candyfloss clouds, marzipan flowers and toffee trees, Nat and Angelina were blissfully unaware of the dinosaurs in the travel cubicle next door. The sight of castles sculpted in iced coconut and surrounded by lemonade moats was enough to rot the teeth of any adult. To Angelina's sweet tooth it all made glorious sense. Nat wasn't quite so sure. His maturing taste buds now preferred the savoury, and he had actually started to like broad beans and broccoli. This was the last time he wanted to experience Sugar Candy Land. Soon he would be old enough to just eat the cake and leave the icing.

  Nat dawdled after Angelina as she skipped through fronds of liquorice ferns, only stopping to insist that he instruct the control box to conjure up macaroon mountains and lakes of golden syrup. To keep her happy, Nat obliged, wondering how much it would take to overload the system controlling the travel cubicles. The control box's needle was dangerously near the red side of the dial, and he really didn't want to find out. But Angelina next bullied him into calling up a pineapple pizza over an acre wide. The needle began to tremble towards DANGER. Immediately after that she demanded a hill of peach ice cream to slide down.

  Nat decided that this was enough. "Give it a rest, can't you! Sit down for a moment and be quiet!"

  Angelina pouted petulantly, but her brother held the control and she had no choice but to obey sulkily. Nat leaned back on a cushion of Turkish delight and foolishly closed his eyes to bask in the sickly rays of the marzipan sun. This was all the opportunity Angelina needed to understand how the control box worked. It was simple; she just needed to tap out the letters of the item she wanted and, above it, how many and how large. Like most four-year-olds, Angelina knew how to spell chocolate.

  Unfortunately, she wasn't so good at arithmetic.

  ***

  Suki climbed the pumice slope of the volcano to look out over the landscape. The hadrosaurs were still browsing on the ferns and cycads. None of them seemed to be craving anything sweeter.

  Then the ground shook. For a cold, clammy second Su
ki thought that the volcano was going to erupt.

  The screen on her control box was flashing. The system controlling the travel cubicles was going into overload. If Suki didn't get out of the holographic program before illusion and reality merged she would be trapped in this prehistoric world forever.

  The portal was on the other side of the valley. Suki ran for her life back down the volcano.

  ***

  Nat was woken suddenly by a horrible sense of foreboding. "What the..?"

  He found himself surrounded by towering cliffs of hazelnut chocolate. The needle on the control box was vibrating at "danger" and Angelina was looking suspiciously angelic.

  Somewhere, deep below them, the travel cubicle matrix was about to explode.

  ***

  Suki hurtled down the volcano's slope as the distant mountains started to melt in the fierce heat.

  Without warning her prehistoric program merged with the one in the next cubicle. Surprised hadrosaurs found themselves crunching barley sugar branches and marzipan leaves, passing triceratops' horns were caught up in the caramel twigs of pear drop trees, and pterodactyls' wings became stuck in candyfloss clouds.

  Two children were dashing towards Suki. They were shrieking at the tops of their voices as they tried to outrun a tide of liquid chocolate.

  Suki's path to the portal was now cut off by the hot brown river and she only just managed to catch the children and pull them back up the volcano's pumice slope.

  "Why didn't the safety cut-out cancel the programs?!" Nat almost screamed, unable to comprehend what had happened.

  Angelina was too guilty to panic. What she did really couldn't have been that terrible. She looked sheepishly at the waves of chocolate licking the slope. "What does 'ten hazelnut chocolate bars to the power of 1000' mean?"

  As though to confirm her question, huge lumps began to rise to the chocolate's surface. They weren't only going to drown, they were going to be pulverised by giant hazelnuts as well.