‘That’s what we hope for, Brian. That is our fondest wish.’
Brian felt the blue glow starting to build, even as the fear left him. ‘So what I have to do is...untell him? Make him back into a story, a …what did you call it? A…device?’
‘If you can, yes.’
‘If he lets you.’
‘Please, Brian, try…’ This last was the ghost, and she was fading even as he looked at her. He was running out of time, he knew, so he took a deep breath, and got ready.
He stood up, and took control.
“Hey!” All the kids turned around to watch him, and the Storyteller managed to look outraged and flat out scared all at the same time – a mixture Brian hadn’t thought possible up until now.
“Shh, boy, we’re not finished the story.” The poisonous yellow glow was fading, barely showing around the Storyteller now.
“Oh yes we are. We don’t want to hear the rest of your story. It’s mean.”
Simple words, simply spoken, yet they broke the dam of fear that the Storyteller and his prisoners had fought so hard to instil, and the children were starting to break free. And as they did, so did the monsters. Brian looked at them all staring up at him, and he looked beyond them to the creatures that had materialised behind the Storyteller. They were standing eagerly behind him, the hunger shining bright and fierce in their eyes. He thought, though, that he was probably the only one here who could see them, because no one seemed scared, or worried, about them at all. Not even the Storyteller, though he soon would. Brian’s time was coming, it was nearly here.
Brian took a deep breath, and let all that clear blue light flood through him, and started to speak. “Want to hear a proper story?”
“Yeah!” The cry was unanimous, and the Storyteller quailed at the sound of it, diminished. Brian stood tall and proud, and puffed his chest out to throw the words right to the back of the library, the way he’d been taught in class. He wanted everyone to hear him, especially the Storyteller’s creatures.
“Once upon a time a mother told her son a story, except she wanted to make it sound all important, she wanted it to carry a lesson. So she started the story with ‘Once there was a storyteller…’ which of course made him real inside the story.”
All the children nodded in agreement, it seemed perfectly logical to them that what was in a story was real inside that story. Just like all the really good stories start with “’Once upon a time…’
“The boy told his friends the story, and his friends told their friends the story, and so it went on. And each time it was told, the storyteller got to be a stronger piece of the story. Do you see how that happened?”
As one, the children nodded their understanding. Everyone knows that once a story’s told a certain way, that version of it is out there, it’s set in stone, almost – the foundation for all future versions.
“No. No, stop it. Stop it at once…” The rest of the Storyteller’s words were muffled by the giant paw that clapped itself over his mouth, though no one other than Brian could see it, of course. The children were lost in his story of how a story got real, and hadn’t even heard the Storyteller’s latest outcry. Brian had a suspicion that that might have been because his voice was growing a little weaker every minute.
“The problem with that was…well, can you guess what the problem with that was?”
A hand went up, and Brian was happy to see that it was the little boy that the Storyteller had dragged all the way to the front.
“I think I can.”
Brian nodded his encouragement and smiled, and the little boy carried on, stronger now. “The storyteller forgot he was just a story, didn’t he?”
“That’s right,” Brian said, and the little boy blushed, delighted that he’d got it right, and that this story was nowhere near as scary as the one the bad man had been telling. All thought of the Storyteller being anything other than the Bad Man was gone, as was the power he’d held. “The Storyteller got very strong, but forgot he wasn’t real. He didn’t see that if he was real he’d eat regular food like real people; he just knew that fear made him stronger, stronger than the other stories – the ones our moms protect us from. I don’t need to say what they are, do I?”
The children were unanimous on this one. Nope, you don’t need to say another word, we get it.
Brian saw that the creatures had solidified even more, surely someone would see them soon? He looked the vampire square in the eyes and heard its voice in his head: ‘No one will see us, Brian, except you. You are the new Storyteller for these children; you are all the voice we need.’
“Good, ’cause I don’t like to hear them any more than you do, believe me.” Children and monsters alike laughed at that, and Brian thought that they sounded about the same. “The other stories, though, they didn’t forget. The Storyteller held them prisoner, ’cause he was stronger than they were, and he made them live his stories, scare the children badly so there’d be more fear to feed on. He was a Bad Man, all right. A really Bad Man.” His voice cracked, and he was surprised to find he was near tears, sorrow for the plight of the creatures that had been forced to hurt those that had dreamed them into existence (their Gods, in a way) making his eyes tear up and his throat all scratchy. “So…do you know what the older stories did?”
“Noo!!!” This was the Storyteller, aghast that he’d been so caught up in Brian’s story that he hadn’t realised he was hearing the tale of his own ending, and Brian’s beginning. He made as if to part the children like a wave, so he could bear down on Brian and stop him before things went too far, before he lost control. Too late. A thin, bony hand clamped itself on the Storyteller’s shoulder, the fingers digging in deep – a thin ribbon of blood (black like ink, Brian thought) drawing a dark line down his chest. On the other side, the werewolf was growling into his ear, or… was he chewing on it? Brian didn’t want to look too close – that wasn’t a story he wanted to be telling in years to come. Not to kids, anyway. Kids deserved so much better than that.
“The older stories waited until they found a special kid. One who dreamed brighter than most, and remembered his dreams. One who would believe.”
“Then what?” This from the little moppet who’d been so scared earlier, honey curls bobbing with excitement as she waited to hear the ending. This story was going to end right, she could tell. This story was going to be awesome.
Brian smiled, and the light seemed to stream from him, making the library a brighter, warmer place than it had been all morning while they listened to the Storyteller. “Then they told him a story, of how it had all happened and how it had all gone wrong. And the boy believed them, and told the tale again – only this time he started it without the Storyteller, turned the story back to what it should have been in the first place. Which is… what?” Brian yelled this last, scared that the Storyteller was going to break free, scared that the monsters were wrong and his tale wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t work, and the Storyteller would have his soul, before moving onto fresh meat, and starting all over again. He waited, scarcely daring to breathe, he was so scared. Right here, right now, he wanted his mom. And more than that, he wanted his dad to be standing right behind her, backing her up as she defended her Brian. Tears pricked at his eyes, and he blinked hard, fighting them back.
There was a puff of yellowy-green smoke that reeked of rot, and a fading roar of monsters that had been sent back to the night, and to spaces between spaces, and that had taken their prey, still bleeding black ink, right back with them. There was one cry, loud enough to bring the parents running, eager to see why their kids were so excited.
“JUST A STORY!”
Brian did cry then, tears of relief streamed down his face as he saw his mother elbowing her way through the crowd of adults looking for their kids. She looked scared, like she always did when she couldn’t control things, and she couldn’t keep Brian safe in her orbit, had to let him go out into the world of bullies, and crime, and dads that couldn’t stay because the
y loved booze more, and had let it win. He saw all of that and none of it in her face, because she would never have told her son what she was so scared of – that her son’s innocence would be spoiled too young, and blight what remained of his childhood. He saw his mom, worried because she couldn’t see him, and that was enough, even though on some level he surely sensed the rest.
He saw his mom, his world, arms extended and a smile spreading across her face as she saw him. And he ran to her.
Plus Ça Change…
Ava walked along the length of Dr. Greg Templeton’s office, carefully rearranging the books so that the spines sat at a uniform depth on the shelves – none sticking out of line by so much as a millimetre. “Nothing different,” she routinely said on her visits. “Nothing can be different. Nothing can change.”
The good doctor said nothing, merely watched as she traced the room’s contours over and over in her relentless search for absolute symmetry. Finally, after a good fifteen minutes (this time; sadly, it was a vast improvement on the initial frantic forty minute routines), Ava relented and stood in the middle of his office, turning slowly one last time before nodding, once, and sitting down in the freshly polished (by Ava) black leather chair facing him across the desk.
Greg leaned forward. “Is it better now?” Not for the first time, he wondered if the fact his office was so sparsely decorated was what kept her coming back.
Ava nodded, just once, bird-bright eyes darting across his before her gaze dropped to her lap, where fingers kneaded themselves into endless, intricate, but resolutely repeated patterns. “It’s the same.”
“The same?”
Again the nod, just once. “Same as before. Has to be the same as before.”
He waited, but Ava ventured nothing more; she just sat, eyes endlessly tracing the room and everything in it, in her mission to keep anything from changing. Going through his notes, Greg thought back to when she’d first slouched into his office. It hadn’t been voluntary. The police had taken her into custody after being called to the local supermarket – the manager had got fed up with her re-arranging the shelves, hour after hour, until every tin faced forward a set number of millimetres from the front of the shelf, every bottle did the same. In short, the whole store was laid out with regimental neatness. She had become quite violent when customers ruined her perfection by having the audacity to take things off the shelves and actually attempt to buy them. It had taken three policemen to escort her off the premises and into the waiting police van.
The court had committed her to hospital for evaluation (a mandatory seventy-two hour hold, long since past), and she had done the same there: relentlessly tidying both her own bay and other patients’. The nurses had watched, bemused, but only restrained her when she started trying to ‘fix’ their filing system.
And so here she sat – legs crossed demurely at the ankle, right over left as always; hands restrained in her lap, kneading themselves into a frenzy; charcoal eyes staring at him, full of hope that he held the answer. The key.
He didn’t.
Ava twisted, suddenly, staring round at the shelves to the rear of his office.
Greg followed her gaze, but saw nothing that might have attracted her attention. The shelves stared blankly back, with no sign of anything having been disturbed. “Are you all right, Ava?” he asked.
She glanced very quickly back at him before directing her vision to the shelves again. Her answer, when it came, was thrown over her shoulder. “Did you hear something?”
“Hear what?” he said. “It seems pretty quiet.”
She turned to him properly then, slowly fastening her gaze on him as she answered: “It does, doesn’t it.” She was clearly fighting the urge to turn back and examine the shelves once more. “I wonder why that is?”
He had no answer to that. The room looked as it always did, he hadn’t heard a noise – yet clearly Ava was scared. Greg found himself listening, head cocked to one side, ready for some sign that his patient had heard something, after all. There was nothing. He caught sight of the clock, then; 4.54p.m. “I’m sorry, Ava, our time’s up.”
She said nothing, just stared around the office, eyes wide – as if that way she’d see more, might catch sight of anything that had changed.
He cleared his throat; tried again. “I’ll see you next time?”
She nodded, then; just once. And scuttled out of the office before he could say anything else.
He watched as she went through her usual routine: first she placed an ear against the door and listened, then she grabbed the handle but didn’t open the door yet – she just listened a bit longer, then finally she’d open the door – checking what lay beyond in both directions before setting foot outside the sanctity of his office. Then she was gone, the door shutting quietly but firmly behind her.
The next Tuesday saw Ava return. As usual, there came a tap at the door, and then it opened a crack. Greg saw an eye, peeking at him through the gap – just one eye, slate grey, regarding him with great seriousness.
He smiled. “Come in, Ava, please.”
The door opened, and she sidled through before closing it behind her and leaning against the closed door as she listened, made sure there was no one creeping up behind her. She eyed the room with distrust, and the doctor sat back, knowing this could take a while. Her hair looked slightly dishevelled, as if she’d been running her fingers through it – a new habit? He saw a spot of something dark on her jacket sleeve and frowned. She was normally immaculate – perhaps whatever accident had caused this stain was what had made her so anxious? She gave no sign of having noticed the mark, just set about the business of checking his office for signs of change.
It took twenty minutes this time. She pored over all the books on the shelves, looking for any that might have been returned to the wrong slot or moved from the correct position, making sure they stayed in their regimented rows and weren’t out of order. She wiped down the chair facing him and nodded – a tad apologetically, this time, he thought – before pulling it out the required number of inches so that she could sit down without having to go through the routine of cleaning it again (allowing it to venture too close to the desk before she sat meant it could be contaminated, although he didn’t get quite how – he just knew she needed the chair to be far enough away from the desk that she could sit in it without further contact, after which she could pull it closer); then she went to the sculptures and paintings – examining them closely, her expression grim. Finally, she sat down.
“Everything okay, Ava?” he asked.
She shook her head, but said nothing, her eyes still darting around the room.
“No? What’s wrong?”
She turned her attention back to him – slowly, clearly uncomfortable, before answering. “I’m not sure. But something’s not right.” Then she was off again, searching for the source of her disquiet.
He sought to reassure her. “I promise, Ava, that I haven’t moved anything.”
She shook her head. “No, that’s not it. Nothing’s moved.” Her hand strayed to her hair, shaking slightly, but she forced it back into her lap – clasped it with the other hand, tight, ensuring no further escape.
“Then I don’t understand,” he said. “If everything’s the same, then…”
“I didn’t say everything’s the same,” she snapped. “I said nothing’s moved. That’s not the same thing at all!” Her breathing was fast, shallow – her eyes refused to rest on anything, glinting like the pavement when the sun comes out after a storm. She looked like a cornered animal.
He struggled to understand. “I’m sorry, Ava, but if nothing’s moved, then what’s different?”
She smiled, then, and for the first time he was scared. Because her expression seemed so alien, somehow full of threat – her normally placid features almost manic. “Hard to tell, isn’t it?” Then she tipped the chair back and ran out of the room, laughing, leaving him staring after her, totally confused as to what had just happened.
> She missed the appointment after that, and the next; but finally returned three weeks after her sudden exit. She tapped on the door, then entered and slammed it behind her before going through her usual routine of checking for sounds of anyone following, and commencing her regular rounds of the office.
Greg watched her carefully. Her grooming was immaculate once more, there was no trace of any blemish on her clothes – and she moved quietly but seriously round his office, calmly adjusting the odd book or knick-knack on a shelf. Finally she pulled out the black leather chair facing him, positioned it carefully, wiped it down and sat in it, leaning slightly against its back, hands folded sedately in her lap.
“Well,” he said. “You seem calmer than you were on your last visit.”
She permitted herself a small smile. “I do, don’t I.”
Greg nodded. “I’d say so. Are you feeling better?”
Again, that half-smile, her eyes clear and bright, dove-grey as they reflected the sunlight breaking through the window behind him. “I am,” she said. “I feel much more… myself.”
Greg watched her for a moment, unsure of how to respond. It was unusual for a patient to return to relative normality so – apparently – easily without some kind of treatment or counselling. Yet Ava seemed to have managed it all on her own. He saw a slight tic below her left eye, and wondered whether to comment, but thought better of it. Even if the calm was a façade, it wouldn’t help to shatter that illusion this early in the session. He sat back, laying his pen on the desk atop her notes. Her eyes flicked down, then back, but not quite quickly enough to escape his notice. “So tell me,” he said. “What have you been up to the last few weeks?”
In Times Of Want Page 6
