Amen.
The very second she finished her prayer, she heard knocking on her door.
‘Markus! My son has come home!’ she ran as a sense of sheer happiness overcame her. She opened the door widely to see a police officer and the blinking lights of his car.
‘Ma’am I apologize to disturb you this late in the evening, but there is an important issue which needs to be brought to your attention.’
‘Have you found my son?’ A glimpse of hope still remained within her. But the officer crushed it like an eggshell.
‘Your son is dead. He died in the bus collision.’
She could no longer control her emotions. She ran into the street, sobbing.
‘No!’ she screamed. She was miserable, almost as if in a trance of despair. She was alone now, she had nobody to even console her. Her heart was drained, her mind dead. Her tears like two brooks. She saw a shadow walk slowly towards her. It was a man.
‘There is no need to cry. Wipe away those tears.’
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Your new friend. No need for details.’ He said as he smiled. ‘Come with me, and I will show you my group of friends.’ She wiped away her tears. She was no longer alone.
‘Ok. What’s the harm?’ she said as she walked away with the stranger.
Green Eyes by Ceri Hughson
‘Why do you think this world is so messed up?’
The question hung in the air. The only other occupant in the carriage was quite successfully ignoring the impromptu query.
No eye contact, that was the key. Just stare straight ahead and the nutter won’t attack you, or so she fervently thought.
‘Because we’re in hell, that’s why!’ the same voice retorted.
Oh, not just any nutter then, a rugger. It’s not enough that I get accosted every time I go down the street by the charity sort. The one day I go home late and I get a religious mugger on my case. The muscles under her eyes twitched with concentration. Don’t look at him it will only encourage him. Don’t look at him, don’t look at him, don’t look at him, became a repeating mantra in her mind.
Obliviously the man on the opposite seat carried on. ‘I hate this bloody planet. Do you never wonder why it is such a hell hole? Why everyone is in it for themselves, the poverty, the crime?’ He was straining in his seat now. As if leaning forward would persuade her to his way of thinking.
The soothing, repetitive sound of the train had been keeping her calm up until now, only twenty minutes more and she would be home safe - just her, her cat and the TV, safe. …but the train was slowing down.
She looked out of the window as the train came to a complete stop in what was clearly the middle of nowhere. Wonderful!
‘This is your conductor speaking, we are sorry to report there is a problem with the line. We should be moving along again shortly and I will keep you informed as we find out more.’
In the reflection she saw the man glance out the opposite window and took the opportunity to look at him properly. He wasn’t bad looking she supposed, though his clothes were slightly strange. Not any one single piece, mind you but it definitely confirmed her opinion that he was a first class weirdo. His black cotton suit trousers were complemented by a hoodie and a matching suit jacket. She guessed he was tall, he had long legs anyway but it was his eyes that stood out the most.
They were the most amazing colour green she had ever seen. They were almost translucent. Green-eyes turned and caught her looking at him. He grinned.
‘Don’t you wonder?’
Caught staring, she had to reply now. Huh, What? Ah yes, ‘Not really it is just the way it is.’
‘Only here.’ The stranger replied sadly.
‘That’s a strange thing to say.’ Go on, might as well get it over with, she thought. He’s going to talk at me, no matter what I do.
His eyes lit up and Paige inwardly groaned. What had she done?
‘I have a wife you know. We’ve been married for years. She’s the kindest, most gentle woman I know. She was convicted of fraud. I don’t believe it though. I’m on my way now to see her.’ He shook his head.
As if changing the subject he added, ‘Hypothetically, say there was a civilisation that was perfect, everything managed well, no poverty and barely any crime…’
‘Not possible.’ She interjected.
‘To make it perfect,’ he continued, ‘all the criminals would have to be removed. But you don’t want any prisons where they can escape from or any come-back from humanitarian issues. You don’t want to spend a fortune on unproductive trouble makers either. What would you do?’
Drawn despite herself into the strange conversation, she replied, ‘You can’t do anything, that’s why there are so many prisons.’
‘This civilisation would be far more advanced than this one. Anyone found guilty by his peers would be sent away.’
‘Sent away? Where to? Wouldn’t people wonder where they went?’
‘Not really, it’s been dealt with. Why put your perfect life in jeopardy for a criminal? You know they are guilty, they’ve had a trial. You know they are not kept in a tiny cell or restricted by the state. They are just gone’
‘Where are they?’ She asked, curious despite herself.
‘They do go to a prison but it is on a whole planet. Completely left to themselves. As soon as they are declared guilty, they are taken to a room where their life force is transported to the planet. They are then born there never knowing what they left behind...’ His voice trailed off.
Paige’s eyes narrowed, ‘You actually believe that?’ her voice accusing.
‘It’s all hypothetical remember. But still, if this were to happen, that life force would be trapped on the planet and would just keep on being reborn, again and again. Trapped forever in a cycle that can never be broken.’
He sat back, staring once more at the darkened fields through the window. ‘Would you think that’s fair?’
‘Well I suppose, if they were really criminals, then removing them would kind of remove the problem really.’
‘There’s always the possibility of error though. What if the convicted felon is not really guilty?’
That’s easy, she thought, ‘If it’s such an advanced world, wouldn’t you have mind readers or something? There must be a way to tell.’
He turned the full force of his green eyes back on her, ‘There are always mistakes. If good people were to be put on the prison world then they would naturally try to make it better. The fact that this world is not as messed up as it could be shows that there were mistakes, and you, my wife, were one of them. I’ve come to take you home.’
A School Story by MR James
Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. ‘At our
school,’ said A., ‘we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase. ‘
‘ What was it like?’
‘Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn’t somebody invent one, I wonder?’
‘You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own. There’s a subject for you, by the way - ‘The Folklore of Private Schools.’
‘Yes; the crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.’
‘Nowadays the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon.’
‘No doubt: they weren’t born or thought of in my time. Let’s see. I wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, ‘I’ve seen it,’ and died.’
‘Wasn’t that the house in Berk
eley Square?’
‘I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me think - Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a horseshoe mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also; I don’t know why. Also there was the lady who, on locking her bedroom door in a strange house, heard a thin voice among the bed-curtains say, ‘Now we’re shut in for the night.’ None of those had any explanation or sequel. I wonder if they go on still, those stories.’
‘Oh, likely enough - with additions from the magazines, as I said. You never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school? I thought not, nobody has that ever I came across.’
‘From the way in which you said that, I gather that you have.’
‘I really don’t know, but this is what was in my mind. It happened at my private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven’t any explanation of it.
‘The school I mean was near London. It was established in a large and fairly old house - a great white building with very fine grounds about it; there were large cedars in the garden, as there are in so many of the older
gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields which we used for our games. I think probably it was quite an attractive place, but boys seldom allow that their schools possess any tolerable
features.
‘I came to the school in a September, soon after the year 1870; and among the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to: a Highland boy, whom I will call McLeod. I needn’t spend time in describing him: the main thing is that I got to know him very well. He was not an exceptional boy in any way - not particularly good at books or games - but he suited me.
‘The school was a large one: there must have been from 120 to 130 boys there as a rule, and so a considerable staff of masters was required, and there were rather frequent changes among them.
‘One term - perhaps it was my third or fourth - a new master made his appearance. His name was Sampson. He was a tallish, stoutish, pale, black-bearded man. I think we liked him: he had travelled a good deal, and
had stories which amused us on our school walks, so that there was some competition among us to get within earshot of him. I remember too - dear me, I have hardly thought of it since then - that he had a charm on his watch-chain that attracted my attention one day, and he let me examine it. It was, I now suppose, a gold Byzantine coin; there was an effigy of some absurd emperor on one side; the other side had been worn practically smooth, and he had had cut on it - rather barbarously - his own initials, GWS, and a date, 24 July, 1865. Yes, I can see it now: he told me he had picked it up in Constantinople: it was about the size of a florin, perhaps rather smaller.
‘Well, the first odd thing that happened was this. Sampson was doing Latin grammar with us. One of his favourite methods - perhaps it is rather a good one - was to make us construct sentences out of our own heads to
illustrate the rules he was trying to make us learn. Of course that is a thing which gives a silly boy a chance of being impertinent: there are lots of school stories in which that happens - or any-how there might be. But
Sampson was too good a disciplinarian for us to think of trying that on with him. Now, on this occasion he was telling us how to express remembering in Latin: and he ordered us each to make a sentence bringing in the verb memini, ‘I remember.’ Well, most of us made up some ordinary sentence such as ‘I remember my father,’ or ‘He remembers his book,’ or something equally uninteresting: and I dare say a good many put down memino librum meum, and so forth: but the boy I mentioned - McLeod - was evidently thinking of something more elaborate than that. The rest of us wanted to have our sentences passed, and get on to something else, so some kicked him under the desk, and I, who was next to him, poked him and whispered to him to look sharp. But he didn’t seem to attend. I looked at his paper and saw he had put down nothing at all. So I jogged him again harder than before and upbraided him sharply for keeping us all waiting. That did have some effect.
He started and seemed to wake up, and then very quickly he scribbled about a couple of lines on his paper, and showed it up with the rest. As it was the last, or nearly the last, to come in, and as Sampson had a good deal to say to the boys who had written meminiscimus patri meo and the rest of it, it
turned out that the clock struck twelve before he had got to McLeod, and McLeod had to wait afterwards to have his sentence corrected. There was nothing much going on outside when I got out, so I waited for him to come.
He came very slowly when he did arrive, and I guessed there had been some sort of trouble. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you get?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said McLeod, ‘nothing much: but I think Sampson’s rather sick with me.’ ‘Why, did you show him up some rot?’ ‘No fear,’ he said. ‘It was all right as far as I could see: it was like this: Memento - that’s right enough for remember, and it takes a genitive, - memento putei inter quatuor taxos.’
‘What silly rot!’ I said. ‘What made you shove that down? What does it mean?’ ‘That’s the funny part,’ said McLeod. ‘I’m not quite sure what it does mean. All I know is, it just came into my head and I corked it down. I know what I think it means, because just before I wrote it down I had a sort of picture of it in my head: I believe it means ‘Remember the well among the four’ - what are those dark sort of trees that have red berries on them?’
‘Mountain ashes, I s’pose you mean.’ ‘I never heard of them,’ said McLeod; ‘no, I’ll tell you - yews.’ ‘Well, and what did Sampson say?’
‘Why, he was jolly odd about it. When he read it he got up and went to the mantel-piece and stopped quite a long time without saying anything, with his back to me. And then he said, without turning round, and rather quiet, ‘What do you suppose that means?’ I told him what I thought; only I couldn’t remember the name of the silly tree: and then he wanted to know why I put it down, and I
had to say something or other. And after that he left off talking about it, and asked me how long I’d been here, and where my people lived, and things like that: and then I came away: but he wasn’t looking a bit well.’
‘I don’t remember any more that was said by either of us about this. Next day McLeod took to his bed with a chill or something of the kind, and it was a week or more before he was in school again. And as much as a month went by without anything happening that was noticeable. Whether or not Mr Sampson was really startled, as McLeod had thought, he didn’t show it. I am pretty sure, of course, now, that there was something very curious in his past history, but I’m not going to pretend that we boys were sharp enough to guess any such thing.
‘There was one other incident of the same kind as the last which I told you. Several times since that day we had had to make up examples in school to illustrate different rules, but there had never been any row except when we did them wrong. At last there came a day when we were going through those
dismal things which people call Conditional Sentences, and we were told to make a conditional sentence, expressing a future consequence. We did it, right or wrong, and showed up our bits of paper, and Sampson began looking through them. All at once he got up, made some odd sort of noise in his
throat, and rushed out by a door that was just by his desk. We sat there for a minute or two, and then - I suppose it was incorrect - but we went up, I and one or two others, to look at the papers on his desk. Of course I thought someone must have put down some nonsense or other, and Sampson had gone off to report him. All the same, I noticed that he hadn’t taken any of the papers with him when he ran out. Well, the top paper on the desk was written in red ink - which no one used - and it wasn’t in anyone’s hand who was in the class. They all looked at it - McLeod and all - and took their dying oaths that it wasn’t theirs.
Then I thought of counting the bits of paper. And of this I m
ade quite certain: that there were seventeen bits of paper on the desk, and sixteen boys in the form. Well, I bagged the extra paper, and kept it, and I believe I have it now. And now you will want to know what was written on it. It was simple enough, and harmless enough, I should have said.
‘‘Si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te,’ which means, I suppose, ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you.’’
‘Could you show me the paper?’ interrupted the listener.
‘Yes, I could: but there’s another odd thing about it. That same afternoon I took it out of my locker - I know for certain it was the same
bit, for I made a finger-mark on it and no single trace of writing of any kind was there on it. I kept it, as I said, and since that time I have tried various experiments to see whether sympathetic ink had been used, but
All Destiny MoON Fiction: A Mix of Old & New Short Stories Page 16