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PAUL EDMUND NORMAN: DAYLIGHTS
Danny stood at the bus stop, sheltering beneath an
overhanging tree for a while after the bus crashed. He had no way of keeping
track of the time, for he was not wearing his watch. Trouble was, his mother
would never believe him if he went home now. She would never believe that the
school bus had simply not turned up. She would accuse him of not trying to
catch the bus at all, of staying too long in the sweet shop.
Of deliberately missing the bus.
He could hardly tell her he had made the bus crash,
made the driver die, could he? She had called to him, she had called to him to
stay in the village, but that had not been her talking to him, it had been her
mind talking to his mind, something they both knew they could do but never
acknowledged openly. This time there had been an urgency he simply could not
ignore. In order to stay in the village, where he might be needed, he had to
stop the bus. He had made the driver, the fat man, see something that had
frightened him so much, his puny heart had given up, and he had died. It had
not been difficult. Just like drawing a picture, only you imagined it in your
head and it took shape in the fat man's brain. In his mind. Hadn't really been
there at all, had it?
The second man, that had been different. Danny had
looked at the man as he walked towards him, and he had known, somehow, that he
was on his way to see his mother, and he did not want him to get there. Not at
all. Danny decided, on the spur of the moment, that the man was not good for
his mum, and he had to die too. Same technique, just a different reason for
killing him. He had frightened the living daylights out of him. Or rather, the
thing that was inside him did. It seemed to Danny that there was in the air
this power, this substance into which he could tap. He could feel it around him,
inside him, and he knew it was bad. He knew it was a power for bad. There were
shapes moving in the mist which he could sense, shapes that fed off each
other's badness. No, worse than badness, they were evil, and it seemed that as
they coalesced they multiplied, like cells in the body, they came together and
fed off each other and became bigger and more powerful than the sum of their
individual parts.
Being of an impressionable age, Danny assumed that the
bad things that happened to the bus driver and the driver of the red BMW had
been caused by him. It did not occur to him that the power in the mist, of
which he was certainly aware, could be doing these things on its own. Maybe it
used Danny's thoughts to augment itself, to provide that little extra nourishment
it needed to do the job properly. Maybe it did not need Danny, but allowed him
to think he was helping, saving him for something in the future. Those things
would certainly not occur to Danny, for his mind was already on other things.
He had seen achieved what he set out to achieve, and that was it. Time to
concentrate on self.
Being only nine years old, Danny's mind leapfrogged
quickly on to the next thing that occurred to him. He forgot about the accident
with the school bus, he forgot about the man with the red BMW, and concentrated
on his own predicament. He had done what his mother's subconscious mind had
told him to do, he had stayed in the village in case he was needed. Well, if
she needed him, she could call him again. As far as he was aware, she was no
longer in any immediate danger, if indeed she ever had been. He had seen to
that, hadn't he? He wished he knew what the time was.
Now if he had remembered to put on his
digital watch, well, it would have done precious little to substantiate his
story that the bus had not run but at least he would know what the time was.
With a digital watch you did not need to
tell the time, the watch did it for you. It was those other watches and the
clocks on the church tower and in the window of the ladies' hairdresser, it was
those kinds of watches and clocks he had difficulty telling the time by.
Usually he picked up his watch as he got out of bed. But as luck would have it
he forgot his watch, clean forgot it until he was half way down the street.
He had spent a long time in the sweet
shop looking for the new sticker album for military aircraft for which he had
been saving his pocket money. He knew that the man in the newsagent's usually
had the books as soon as they were advertised.
At first he could not see them, then
he moved some other books out of the way and there they were. On the shelf next
to the counter, where the batteries and the postcards and the chewing gum and
the extra strong mints were, there was a small box with packets of stickers.
'How much are the stickers, please?' he asked.
'Twenty pence,' the man replied, beaming widely. Danny
took three packets of stickers from the box, placed them on top of the album
and put his hand into his trouser pocket. Then he could not find all of his
money and had been about to return the book when he remembered he had
transferred his money to his jacket pocket last night because Mum had wanted to
wash his trousers. The jacket he had worn beneath the raincoat when he took Rex
out, and which now hung in the hall at home. So he paid for the book and the
stickers with his dinner money — he would rather go hungry and read — and the shopkeeper urged him to get a
move on as the bus would be there in no time at all.
Danny was reasonably bright, not the
brightest in his class but not the dumbest either.
Danny could read, he could write, and
he could draw, he could draw so well, in fact, the other kids were always
asking him to draw things for them. Sometimes he wore glasses and when he did,
his reading and his writing improved dramatically. He had his eyes tested
regularly and the man with the bad breath and the short blue nylon overall
assured his mother and father that Danny did not need glasses. One day, when
Dad was at work and Mum was hanging out the washing Danny had been going
through the drawers inside his Dad's wardrobe and found an old pair of glasses.
He stared at himself in the mirror, tried the glasses on and nearly fell over
in surprise. They made everything bigger.
He looked out of the bedroom window at
Mum. She looked bigger. Everything about her looked bigger. He made a mental
note to mention this to his father.
Eventually he put the glasses away
with his model cars, his Action Man and his computer pencil case. Occasionally
he took the glasses to school and sneaked them on when Miss Page was not
looking. The other kids just cracked up, he looked so funny. And Miss Page
would look down the end of her nose to see who was sniggering in her class, by
which time the glasses were off and back in Danny's pocket.
He wondered briefly if the glasses had
some magical quality that made reading and writing and just about everything
bigger and easier. He wondered if wearing them would enable him to tell the
time better. But he guessed not.
Danny's house was big. Old and big.
Seven bedrooms, two living rooms, two bathrooms, two inside toilets and
washrooms and an outside toilet. The garden was enormous, with an orchard of
apple and pear trees. Danny's bedroom overlooked the orchard. One of the apple
trees grew very near to his bedroom window and on more than one occasion he had
climbed out and into the tree. He had to be careful, that was all. John Willis
from up the road had fallen out of a smaller tree in his garden. He had split
his head open and broken one arm in two places. Danny just had to be careful,
that was all. Very careful. And make sure he wore shoes with big thick soles,
rubber, that gripped really well.
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Gateway is published by Paul Edmund Norman on the first day of each month. Hosting is by Flying Porcupine at www.flyingporcupine.com - and web design by Gateway. Submitting to Gateway: Basically, all you need do is e-mail it along and I'll consider it - it can be any length, if it's very long I'll serialise it, if it's medium-length I'll put it in as a novella, if it's a short story or a feature article it will go in as it comes. Payment is zero, I'm afraid, as I don't make any money from Gateway, I do it all for fun! For Advertising rates in Gateway please contact me at paulenorman@yahoo.co.uk Should you be kind enough to want to send me books to review, please contact me by e-mail and I will gladly forward you my home address. Meanwhile, here's how to contact me: paulenorman@yahoo.co.uk