Author: Alexander Fawn

It was kind of magical that it happened on that very day.

It all began innocently enough. Just a smile across the counter. Nothing more. Just a smile… but what a smile! She must have looked really dumb, just standing there ogling him. It was when he asked her if everything was alright, that the pounding in her chest started. Anyway, that’s when she surprised herself by licking her lips and apologising, saying how much she was looking forward to her break when she could go up to the café and get a coffee. He smiled again, saying what a good idea. She had watched him go, weaving his way through the shoppers. It was a busy day in the department store. She had quickly pulled herself together and moved along to serve her next customer.

When her mid-morning break came, she was relieved by another lady assistant and she made her way to the café. The moment she entered; she saw him. He gave a polite wave along with the smile, of course. Her heart had begun thumping again as she approached. He immediately began apologising for taking the liberty of waiting for her to appear. She had just smiled back, shaking her head. Next thing; she had just sat, while he ordered their coffees…

The rest of it was a whirlwind.

They talked for the best part of an hour, making her late back to her department. Her fellow worker was very understanding when told why she was late. Then came the meeting after work, in the Italian restaurant they had decided on. Finally, he had driven her home. With a brief kiss, she had gone in. Behind net curtains she had watched him drive away.

Now, she was lying in bed thinking about it all, for an age.

It had been all she could do, not to invite him in. That might have put him off; giving him the wrong impression or something.

…and to top it all; all this, on her forty-fifth birthday!

Visiting the old second-hand bookshop in town was something he did whenever he had the time.

Today, he had at least twenty minutes before the next bus, so he wandered in and began strolling through the aisles. He was browsing through the titles of books along a shelf of tatty-looking paperbacks, when he came across it. He pulled it out and stood staring at the front cover, with old memories flooding back. It was one of the books his class had needed to study, some twenty-odd years ago. It looked grubby, with part of the front cover torn off. Inside was no better; lots of dirty marks and some faint scribbling. Out of nothing more than curiosity, he moved to a spot where the light was better, trying to read what had been written.

The first thing that caught his eye was the date. It was during his own school years. Then, with difficulty, he read the owner’s name. He recognised the boy immediately. This very nasty kid had been in his class. He had never liked him. Apart from being a show-off, he was a bully. He continually picked on school kids younger than himself. More than once, the rotten kid had stolen things from his school desk. He had done this with anything he liked the look of. He was forever getting into trouble.

Thinking back, he remembered how he found himself having to try as hard as he could to keep out of his way. He also remembered, not so long ago, reading an item in the newspaper about him being given time in prison for attempted murder. It seems he shot the owner of a convenience store he was trying to rob, who had nearly died. At the time of reading this, he hadn’t been at all surprised to find out what had become of him.

Turning back to the ruined cover, he read the title again, ‘The Moral Path to Take’. He remembers studying it. A book, in which the author makes a powerful case for morality in all walks of life. He bought the book.

When he got home, he went straight to his computer to see what more he could find out about the case. One article indicated which prison the man was serving his time in.

After including a short inscription above the original pencilled notes, he wrapped the book up in brown paper. Adding the man’s name and the prison’s address, he took a casual stroll into the village post office, where he sent it off. He was sure they would open it at the prison for security reasons, looking for drugs, weapons and the like, but after a short delay, he would get it. In fact, he was convinced that they’d be happy to pass it on.

His only regret being that he wouldn’t be there when the prisoner opened the parcel. Particularly, when he read the message, written in large, clear block capital letters. It read, ‘NO BENEFIT GAINED FROM THIS BOOK, I NOTE, DUMMY!’

Visiting hours were almost over

And he needed to catch his bus.

The old man in the bed nearby,

Was waving and making a fuss.

–

The visitor was willing to pause for a bit,

He quickly pulled up a chair.

The old man thanked his distant son,

So grateful that he could be there.

–

The approaching nurse questioned the scene,

As the old man slipped away.

She asked if he really was his son.

He shook his head, sighed and said,

“The truth was too hard to convey.”

–

It was sad, she said, that the son wasn’t there.

“All is well”, he said, smiling, “because…”

Letting go of the hand, he began to stand.

“For one brief, precious moment, he was.”

He was one of many rescuers that worked their way through the building, following the explosion.

It had been a gas leak somewhere in the basement, he’d been told. It had brought down the entire multi-level apartment block. People were still being found alive. Much of it was unstable, with an occasional subsidence throwing up clouds of dust. He had climbed up a slope of building rubble to investigate a sound coming from a dark cave-like crevice. It had been formed by two giant horizontal slabs of concrete coming down, almost on top of each other. He peered in, but the dark, dusty environment hid any real detail. Despite the safety-hardhat, face mask and heavy protective clothing making moving around difficult, he switched his helmet torch on and crawled a short distance into the gap.

Moving the beam around, he could just make out the face of the man he had so often seen in the pub with his dog. He was barely conscious, groaning and looked to be completely trapped. He only knew him by sight. Nevertheless, he knew him to be a brute of a man, a heavy drinker and not a particularly nice person to know. He had seen the ruffian kick his dog on a number of occasions. He had to remind himself that part of his training was to keep personal emotions out of it; the rescue mission was what it was all about.

Then he heard a different noise; a soft whine. It was the dog, crouched beside its master. The animal didn’t look pinned down in any way that he could see. It was surely free to move, he thought. It could only be the animal’s loyalty to its master that made it stay by his side.

He called softly to it, and despite it having a slight limp, it managed to crawl out into the daylight. The man picked the animal up, and cradling it in his arms began to carefully make his way back down. He paused when he heard the rumbling behind him. Looking back, he saw that the two great slabs had come together, with plumes of dust billowing out.

Moving more quickly, with a firm grip on the dog, he made his way down to the street where the emergency response vehicles were gathered.

It was his mask that concealed his satisfied grin.

The one thing he knew for certain was that the precious stone was hidden in the building.

The building in question was a derelict, twenty-room mansion. Unlike most buildings of this type, this one was surrounded by relatively small grounds. The entire property had been fenced off for years. For the first two nights he kept watch on the place. He slept in his car, tucked away in the trees, some distance away. He needed to be sure that it was empty and that nobody else knew of its significance. The precious jewel would be a life-changer. He knew that once the stone was in his hand, with the proper fencing, he was about to become a multi-millionaire. He knew that through a new private owner, it would never be seen again.

Once inside, the hunt began. Working his way slowly from room to room, he carried out meticulous searches.

It was on the third day that he found the drawer. He was in the smaller of the two studies when he came across it. The wall behind the desk, like the main study, had wainscotting on the lower half. Here, the panels were much smaller. After tapping each panel in turn for several minutes, one of them popped out part way. Finding a groove beneath, he managed to pull it out with his fingernails.

For him, who had been convinced that the building would be the treasure’s resting place, the well-deserved excitement was growing by the second. In the hidden drawer was a small jewellery case. Lifting it out carefully, he opened it.

It was empty!

Looking back in, he saw that something had been placed underneath the case. It was a piece of paper folded in half. On it, written in pencil and using block capitals, he found the following message. ‘First, congratulations, you must have searched the building thoroughly to find this secret drawer. Unfortunately, I got here first. Secondly, ask yourself whether I found it empty. If so, I wish you luck as you continue to search…’

He looked around and sighed…

She regarded herself as an oddball.

It was during her final year at university studying human sciences that she felt that the need to conform with the sorts of things that young women of her age were supposed to, was not what she wanted. The whole business of fighting for the attention of boys and the trouble it caused with other girls was so pointless. There was also the endless struggle of going through clothes shops trying to find things that would make her look trendy at all times. Added to this was the ongoing issue of always having to be so very cool. It really was quite silly. None of this was the way she wanted to live.

It was shortly after getting her degree that she discovered a different way. Not far from where she lived there was a nunnery. Curiosity drove her to research the place along with the general subject of taking orders. She saw that, although young, she was just old enough to be accepted. She learnt that this would involve spending time in daily mental prayer, giving time to daily spiritual reading, completing designated chores and observing the rule of silence.

Her enthusiasm made her want to share what she had found. However, she soon realised that discussing this with any of her friends was well-nigh impossible.

These same friends would often wonder what became of her.

There is wonder in the void,

The vastness of it, daunting.

There is mystery in the void,

The conjured image, haunting.

–

Its existence in the universe

Or deep within the brain,

Seen as something missing,

Shows neither loss nor gain.

–

It is neither dark nor empty,

No colour, weight or heat.

A glimpse of comprehension

Shows a nothingness complete.

–

A space full of absence,

Its parameters hard to frame.

It is both within and without,

They are but one and the same.

–

Seen as two quite separate states,

For ease we divide it.

The only way to see it all

Is to huddle up beside it.

When he arrived at the rank, there were no taxis.

After around ten minutes or so, this little, old lady shows up. She starts yakking on about her daughter and how she’s in hospital with something really nasty and nobody knows what it is and doctors are doing tests. In a way, he felt sorry for her, and to a degree, for her daughter, but he had problems of his own and would have preferred a quiet time at the rank with his own thoughts about the court case, the lawyer’s fees, the new evidence that’s about to be submitted by the prosecution, probably more of his customers coming down with food poisoning. He knew he’d been cutting corners when it came to food safety standards. Now this. He’d been trying to save money by not doing the right thing in his shop. Now, with so many of his customers falling ill, he could very well lose his business.

He was turning the potential consequences of all this over in his mind, when a taxi pulled in. They were both going into town, so he agreed they could share the ride. After all, the old girl was worried about her daughter and, knowing which hospital she was in, it was the least he could do. He knew there was only a couple of blocks between the hospital and the district court building. She would be dropped off first.

They both got in. She was still going on about how worried she was about her daughter. By this time, he had switched off. Her complaining was beginning to irritate. It wasn’t until the phrase ‘must have been something she ait’ came up, that their individual concerns about their circumstances came together in his mind.

As they pulled up at the hospital, she thanked him for letting her share the ride. He said he hoped that her daughter gets well soon.

He felt it was the least he could do!

He was a nighttime shelf-filler at the local supermarket.

He wasn’t very good at it. He kept putting things on the wrong shelves. After several warnings, they let him go. This event led to his girlfriend packing her bags and leaving. However, this downward spiral of his personal circumstances took a sudden turn. In fact, his life began to change radically when his severance pay came through. He couldn’t help suspecting that it was much too generous, but he didn’t feel like complaining. This was soon followed by a nice letter from a venture capital investment company in the city, thanking him for his work and saying how sorry they were that he’d decided to leave, and letting him know that they would be happy to re-employ him at any time in the future. The envelope had his correct address, but he noticed that although his first name was right, his family name was spelt wrong; nothing major, the letter ‘i’ had been used in place of an ‘e’. With all things going digital, he wasn’t surprised.

Things escalated after this.

His latest bank statement came up on his screen. Again, everything was correct, except for his last name. It had an astonishingly large balance! That was when he began to dig deep into the person that he was incorrectly being taken to be. He soon found out that the other was a person of around the same age, single, wealthy, and the owner of a holiday home in Madrid, Spain.

He thought long and hard about how he would handle the situation…

Would he call a halt to the position that this tiny digital error had put him in, or would he go with plan ‘B’?

Although an ex-shelf filler, he had always had natural cunning that was simply bursting to come to the fore. The alternative plan was rather dicey, but doable. He would pay his landlord the remainder of the week’s rent in advance, pack and take the earliest flight to Spain. When there, make arrangements to quickly sell the holiday unit. Fly to the Canary Islands, buy an apartment and lie doggo.

What could possibly go wrong?

He told himself this was Kama, and it was just the way things were meant to be.

He went with plan ‘B’.

For her, the funeral was a sad affair.

It wasn’t so much about the day being overcast with occasional rain, or the sombre sight of the pallbearers making their way up the steps, or the queue of people paying their respects by each pausing, one at a time, at the open coffin, or the flowers that had been placed nicely, nearby, or the pungent smell of the incense, or the sermon that extolled her late husband’s virtues, or the fact that she was surrounded by so many solemn faces, or all those sympathy cards waiting for her at home. No, it was none of these. In fact, the whole thing had left her with a feeling that she’d been wronged. This was definitely an injustice that she’d have to live with.

The truth is that she could have gained her freedom from this miserable swine much earlier if she’d only known that an undetectable poison had become available on the dark web almost ten years ago!