Twelve Down: A Dozen Stories for Young Readers

by David Smith

  And the children roared...

  Gilbert, uncharacteristically, felt a pressing need to be believed. He didn’t want to be thought a liar anymore, and wondered at his own stupidity for ever thinking that lying might make him seem more interesting. With this in mind he went to the park the next morning, hoping to see the alien again and to obtain some evidence of its existence. He hid himself in the bushes, taking photographs with his mobile phone when the alien finally appeared, which he then uploaded to his Facebook page.

  Gilbert’s classmates were incredibly impressed with his “fake” pictures, congratulating him on the lengths he had taken to back up his elaborate lie. The more Gilbert protested the more convinced they became that he was having them on, the final confirmation, in their eyes, coming when Danny came into school to report that he too had seen the alien while queuing for a Curly Wurly at the local sweetshop.

  Desperate to prove he was telling the truth, Gilbert concocted a plan to capture the alien and bring it with him to school. Armed with only an angler’s keep net and a packet of HobNobs for bait (who doesn’t like HobNobs?) he set off again to the park that very evening.

  And that’s how he got himself abducted by aliens...

  Until today nobody but I knew the truth of Gilbert’s disappearance. Most people believed he had simply run away, unable to live with the shame of being caught out in what they thought of as an obvious and massive lie. His parents thought he had gone in search of Tex Speigelmyer, his imagined and imaginary millionaire father. Distraught, they had jetted off to Texas to spend their life savings looking for him there.

  Yes, until today only one person knew the whole truth of Gilbert’s disappearance, and that was me. And how do I know what really happened, dear reader? BECAUSE I WAS THAT ALIEN... Mwahahahahaha

  Now, where did I leave that anal probe...?

  The Girl Who Bought the Moon

  By Philip R. Holden

  Tonight it was a perfect silver disc.

  If Jem held her head really still, she could see it moving. Slowly but very clearly, it was making a gentle arc across the night.

  Sitting on the windowsill in her bedroom was cold. Her breath fogged the window, blurring the silver light for a moment. Then it cleared and Jem could make out the fine blue-grey lines and shadows that were mountains and craters in the face of the moon. She didn’t feel the cold though. She was wrapped in the grey dressing gown which had been Dad’s. Before.

  At first she had been angry. Very, very angry. Mum had been angry that Dad couldn’t help pay the rent on their tiny flat on the fourth floor, even though he didn’t live there. But Jem had been angry about everything.

  The little TV had gone, kicked off its stand. There had been a mirror in the hall and Gran’s old side table that had been around for as long as Jem could remember. It had been thrown across the room. There was still a moon-crater in the wall of the lounge and a rip of wallpaper where the table had crumpled as it hit the mirror. Mum cried over the table but hugged Jem anyway.

  In the sky the moon still moved relentlessly. It was like a time bomb. There was nothing you could do to stop it turning, marking off the months and years. It tricked you into thinking it was still, but Jem now knew it was slowly moving. Counting down.

  The windowsill was too narrow to sit on comfortably but Jem had built a wall with the largest books she owned on the floor and the rest carefully stacked in size order, leaning in under the window. There were hundreds of books and she stretched her legs out across a pile of thick ones about law, some medical dictionaries and a set of encyclopaedias.

  Jem leant back, her eyes still fixed on the moon. She knew from one of the books, somewhere in the middle of a stack, that the moon wasn’t silver and that it wasn’t round. Dad had told her and then shown her the page. At the age of six, Jem had reasonably pointed out that the pages themselves were flat, so there was no way to prove the moon was a sphere like they said.

  Jem remembered the long, steady gaze Dad had given her, his eyes fixed on her before he winked and smiled.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Don’t believe anything. Don’t accept anything anyone tells you. Unless...’ he was now deadly serious.

  ‘Unless you can prove it.’

  It became their ‘thing’. Even when Mum and Dad weren’t speaking and Jem had to phone him, there was always something, some moment when they were talking about something at school or in the news and they would stop. They didn’t need to say it; they just thought it together. Prove it.

  Mum didn’t like it. But then sometimes Mum wasn’t keen on anything that Dad did or said. Dad would tell Jem not to worry; some people just don’t understand, and he would wink.

  Jem started to get into trouble at school. Maths? Prove it. Biology? Prove it. History, especially. How do you know? Don’t just tell me, prove it.

  Soon after, Jem and Dad had been watching something on TV. It was a report from a country where thousands of people were trying to escape a war. Gangs of people were shown firing machineguns from the backs of trucks. The reporter was saying how much food and medicine was needed and a politician was saying that there were terrorists in the country and that soldiers should be sent in to fight them. Jem and her Dad exchanged a glance.

  After Mum got called into school, again, Jem started to spend more and more time in her bedroom. And more and more time at the library and on her laptop. Apart from the nutcase websites out there, Jem was surprised to discover that she could find most things on the web, if she looked hard enough.

  Things like the size and shape of the Moon has been obvious. It was more difficult to find out about wars and people starving but Jem was determined and she really wanted to know why so many grown-ups told lies. So, even as Dad had to spend longer and longer in hospital, she was spending hours on her computer. There were so many things to be discovered, so-called facts to be proved or disproved.

  Jem was nearly 11 and now Dad was thin and pale. He had a tube in his arm all the time and had been in his hospital bed for weeks. Spread out on his covers were copies of letters and print-outs from web pages. Jem was explaining how some big companies were damaging the world. She picked up a page with the picture of a bright eyed, determined woman standing by a mini-submarine.

  ‘She went as deep as she could possibly go, deeper than almost anyone,’ Jem was explaining, breathlessly. ‘She saw a flash of red and thought she’d find a new creature, deep in the sea, you know? Like those fish that don’t need eyes.’

  Dad smiled. Jem was a whirlwind every time she visited.

  ‘Do you know what it was Dad? Do you? Thousands of feet underwater, where no one had ever been before. Do you know?’

  He shook his head cautiously, he could see Jem’s eyes widen. She held his gaze, fire flickering within.

  ‘A Coke can.’

  It was only two days after that that Dad had closed his eyes forever. That was when the TV, the mirror and Gran’s old table had been broken and when Jem started getting into even more trouble.

  No longer allowed to go to school, Jem stayed up late reading, searching and watching the moon.

  And the more she read and the more she searched, the more she felt like her brain was growing. It felt like every new thing she proved made more space in her mind, like there was no limit to the lies she could uncover. And she realised time was running out.

  The plan had started weeks after Dad. Night after night, she had been firing off emails until two in the morning. Within a month she had sent, and received, over four thousand messages from companies, lawyers, politicians, professors and someone high up in the United Nations.

  Then she’d found Herman.

  Herman Hope was an old man living in California who had made a fortune selling certificates for plots of land on the moon. He had no family and no children and when, eventually, he and Jem spoke on Skype, she told him all about her Dad and her plan.

  He had laughed at first. Then he cried. And then he laughed again.


  ‘Tell you what, Jem,’ he finally suggested, ‘you send me a dollar and I’ll do it.’

  Another two years went by with Jem almost forgetting about Dad and her plan and then she would catch sight of the moon and her stomach flipped, like she had dozed off and suddenly woken up again.

  Twenty-four months of no school and Mum taking her to meet social workers, family therapists and an educational psychologist with bad breath. Mum couldn’t understand what Jem found to do in her room all day on the computer and why her room was full to the ceiling with books.

  Then, at last, a big, important-looking packet arrived from America. Mr Hope had died and Jem opened up a folder on her computer with nearly a thousand emails all ready to send and a YouTube video to upload.

  By mid-May, the head of every Government, hundreds of companies and almost every important international organisation in the world had received a carefully worded email from a thirteen year old girl in England.

  She told them about Herman Hope and his company selling plots on the moon for over sixty years. She explained that, way back in the 1940s, Herman had also written to several governments and the United Nations, giving them fair warning. They hadn’t bothered to reply.

  Now, she explained, the Moon belonged to the company she had just bought from Mr Hope and therefore they would need her permission before they did anything there. They wouldn’t be able to land on it or explore it or try to find minerals.

  A trickle of newspaper stories turned into a flood of hundreds of TV reporters with vans and satellite dishes outside the flat. Mum had seen the video replayed endlessly on the news and gone pale. Then she insisted on sitting next to Jem for every interview, holding her hand tightly.

  Most of all, the reporters wanted to know, what was all this about paying rent? What was it she really wanted?

  Jem explained exactly. The Earth, the tides, weather, wildlife – even the temperature and climate – depended on the Moon being exactly where it was, in orbit. If all the governments and multinational companies wanted to keep on using her moon, they would have to come up with some good plans. With each passing month, the rent would get higher.

  Oh, and it wasn’t enough for them to promise to do something about war, poverty or the fact that there was enough food in the world but still some people starved.

  They would have to prove it.

  Above her the silver moon was now a sharp, thin, crescent, like a bright eye closing. Like her Dad closing his eyes for the last time. Or winking at her.

  The House on the Marsh

  By Peppy Scott

  The tumbledown cottage lay on the edge of the marshes about half a mile from the only road into the village, hidden from view by the woods. In its out-of-the-way, secretive spot, it looked as though nobody had lived there for years. The house itself was almost falling down and there were no curtains at the windows or other signs of recent human habitation, except for a cluster of paper scraps taped to the windowpanes. Somebody had scrawled mysterious notes all over them, but the words would have made no sense to anybody except the person who had written them. Some of the markings weren’t words at all but looked like complicated maths, some like pieces of musical notation.

  From one year to the next, nobody used the over-grown dirt track which led to the cottage, except for its strange occupant. He lived there like a hermit, without electricity, running water or visitors. Nobody claimed to know Richard Jarvis or how he came to be there, but everyone in the village recognised him. His unusual appearance startled people seeing him for the first time. The grey straggled hair, the ragged clothes and the bulging eyes kept everyone away from him as he ambled around the streets and lanes humming, singing and muttering to himself. There was a rumour that he been a fantastically talented musician driven mad by his own genius. Everyone just called him ‘The Mad Maestro’ and the children were secretly terrified of him.

  ***

  It was another grey, rainy day in mid-August. The school holiday had been one damp day after another so far, with visits to the beach cancelled, plans for day trips altered and indoor games played to death. Stephen and Tom, half way through their annual fortnight’s stay, were bored with being stuck inside their rented seaside cottage. Today they wouldn’t let the rain stop them enjoying the outdoor adventure they loved in this place. Here, their parents allowed them a freedom they didn’t have at home. They could roam around the village, its beach, lanes, woodlands and marshes all day and as long as they came home in time for meals their mother didn’t fuss. They were supposed to take a phone with them in case of emergencies, but they usually forgot.

  ‘Let’s bike up to the woods,’ suggested Stephen.

  ‘Yeah, let’s go,’ said Tom. ‘Anything’s better than Dad making us play another game of Cluedo.’

  Collecting bicycles from the shed they promised their mother they would be back by one o’clock for lunch and pedalled along the lane, heads down against the driving rain. As regular summer visitors, the boys were now familiar with the sight of Richard Jarvis lolloping along in his raincoat, but his appearance still alarmed them.

  ‘It’s The Mad Maestro!’ hissed Tom.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ replied Stephen, the elder of the two boys, ‘just keep going.’ He was as nervous of the man’s oddness as his brother, but he felt he should act as though he wasn’t bothered. In any case, The Mad Maestro was heading in the opposite direction so it wasn’t as though he was following them.

  ***

  Clear of the village and wet through, Tom followed Stephen as he veered off the road onto a narrow track and propped his bicycle against a sheltering tree.

  ‘I’m sick of this rain,’ complained Stephen. ‘Let’s stay here for a bit.’

  They left their bicycles and followed the narrow track away from the road, stalking imaginary enemies to hunt down and kill. It was their favourite game, something they never got to do in the town where they lived. There, they had sometimes visited a playground when they were smaller but were always watched by their mother who seemed to see danger everywhere. They preferred to stay indoors with their games now, but here they ran free. They hadn’t been in this part of the woods before so there was lots of exploring to do.

  ‘We need weapons,’ said Stephen.

  ‘We can make spears,’ said Tom, totally involved in the game and running ahead to find sharp sticks.

  He stopped suddenly and forgot all about being a lethal hunter at the unexpected sight of a house in the woods. It was Stephen who realised who must live there.

  ***

  ‘It’s The Mad Maestro’s house!’ he said and both boys stood stiff as a whisper of fear ran through them. Neither was going to admit to being afraid, though, and soon the fear changed into a tingling excitement. Here was a real-life adventure for them.

  ‘He was going down to the river,’ said Stephen, ‘so he shouldn’t be back for a while. I bet you daren’t go in!’

  Tom froze between terror at the thought of going into the house and dread of being teased by his big brother if he didn’t.

  ‘I bet you daren’t!’ he replied, playing for time.

  ‘I said it first,’ said Stephen, and Tom knew he had to accept the challenge.

  ‘This stuff is freaky,’ he said, frowning at the scrawled notes on the window. He felt sure they were some kind of dark warning and he was already wishing they had stuck to their original hunting games.

  ‘Never mind those,’ said Stephen, ‘try the door.’

  Tom hoped his ordeal would soon be over: the door would be locked, he wouldn’t have to go in, but at least he would have tried so Stephen would think he was brave.

  The door handle turned easily, the wooden door creaked open and Tom’s heart sank. He had no choice but to enter the dim and dusty front room. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom before he saw the clutter of makeshift furniture – shelves made from piled crates and wooden planks, old doors used as tabletops – and, most surprising of all, on the
mantelpiece surrounded by candles like a holy shrine, a framed black-and-white photograph of a beautiful and glamorous young woman.

  ***

  ‘Tom!’ He heard Stephen’s warning call and turned, startled, to run out of the house, but in the doorway he bumped into the equally startled figure of Richard Jarvis.

  ‘Oh!’ cried the man, a look of panic crossing his face before he realised the intruder was only a child. His face relaxed and softened into a smile.

  ‘Oh, visitors!’ he said, ‘How nice. Will you stay a while?’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Tom, heart pounding. ‘Sorry, I’m just leaving.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ said Richard Jarvis, ‘I so seldom have visitors these days. Do you like music?’

  ‘Er, some music,’ mumbled Tom, thinking it was a strange question and feeling certain their musical tastes would be very different.

  ‘So do I,’ said Richard Jarvis, placing a trembling hand on Tom’s shoulder and gazing at the portrait on the mantelpiece. ‘She was the most beautiful woman and she had the most exquisite voice...’ he said to himself as his hand squeezed Tom’s shoulder, almost drawing him into a hug. His eyes weren’t bulging as they usually did but looked dreamy. He seemed to be in a different world, not noticing Tom at all. Tom looked again at the photo and couldn’t imagine that these two people could ever have known one another. He decided that The Mad Maestro was every bit as crazy as everyone said.

  ‘But I mustn’t keep you,’ said the man, suddenly coming out of his dream. He smiled kindly again, took his hand from Tom’s tense shoulder and nodded a goodbye to him.

  The boys ran as fast as they could, leapt onto their bicycles and didn’t stop pedalling till they were back at the holiday cottage with the gate closed securely behind them.

  ***

  They were late for lunch, which meant trouble; having to explain their lateness, they decided for a change to tell their mother the truth.

  ‘You were alone with that weirdo?’ screeched their mother. ‘It’s about time they did something about him! Did he touch you?’