19. What the Dickens?

THROUGH THE GATES OF TIME Part 19

“Thank goodness we’re home,” sighed Roger as he pulled the car up close to the garage doors.

They had made the return journey from the monastery in relative silence, though Apple had suggested that her teacher thought it best for people to be in their right homes, which made everything seem right.

“It smells of old tramp in here,” said Frodo after a while.

“Monk. He was a monk,” corrected Apple, “and if he smelled horrible it probably wasn’t his fault.

“You say it’s my fault when I smell,” muttered Frodo.

“That’s because you fart!” grinned Apple.

“That’s enough of that sort of talk!” protested Roger.

“I never do any such thing, then!” lied Frodo.

“Well then, it smells of old trampy monk,” agreed Apple, climbing out of the car.

“I‘ll get it fumigated,” decided Roger, “that’ll sort it out. But before any of that, kids, it’s still Christmas day and you’ve not had a real chance to look at your presents.”

“Upstairs, then” shouted Frodo as he raced into the house, “and you might have to help me, dad. PlayStations are quite complicated things, and I’m only a kid!”

“Give me time to recover,” sighed Roger, and he called “We’re home, darling,” to May, who was sitting in the front room in front of the television nursing a glass of red wine and smiling to herself.

“So you got rid of him?” she asked.

“We got to the monastery at Swanspottle and he seemed to know it as if it was a familiar old home,” Roger told her, “and the head monk there told us that there’s a really old legend of a monk that mysteriously went missing hundreds of years ago, and I’m betting that was when we were there. The door to our closet, the one we found ourselves going through, has been bricked up, you’ll be glad to hear.”

“So we couldn’t get him back that way even if we wanted to,” mused May. “It’s just as well, then, that you found somewhere to leave him.

“I reckon it was curiosity that convinced the Abbot or whoever’s in charge to keep him,” Roger told her, “they didn’t want to know to begin with.”

“And we’d do well to get our door bricked up before some other unwanted body comes through it. Locking it doesn’t seem to do much good because it being locked didn’t stop that primitive stone-age man from getting through.”

“I reckon I might have the answer to that,” grinned Roger, and he searched in his pocket for the key he’d slipped into it out of the Georgian door. “This must be it,” he said, “and I’m going to lock that closet door and throw away the key!” He held up an ornate brass key, larger than any he had for the house in the twenty-first century. But that was hardly surprising: the locks had probably been changed several times since the house was built over two centuries earlier.

“I wouldn’t do that, not lose it altogether,” advised May, “You never know when you might need it, you know, if something unforeseen happens.”

Roger got up and slipped the key into its keyhole. “I don’t know what you mean by unforeseen,” he told her, “just about everything in the Universe is unforeseen so far as this door and where it leads to are concerned. And there have been times when dinosaurs roamed the planet, you know, and the last thing we want is some of those to wander into this room with their muddy feet!”

“We could put some shelves in it,” suggested May, “we’ve always been a bit short on storage, especially when we take the Christmas decorations down and put them away. There seem to be more of those every year and we only ever put them up for a couple of weeks before we get fed up with Christmas.”

“I’m not opening this door ever again!” declared Roger, “I don’t care what happens, war and pandemics, earthquakes and hurricanes, this door is staying shut!”

He tried to turn the key in the lock but it must have been a long time since it was last used and he felt that he risked breaking the key in it if he turned any harder. The lock, it seemed, was stuck firm.

“I’ll oil it,” he grunted.

“Don’t hit me, mister, please don’t hit me,” whimpered a small voice from everywhere and nowhere, and in total alarm he took a step back and looked around him to see where the voice might have come from.

The closet door didn’t so much as open but wibble and wobble and almost fade away as the voice was followed by the emergence of the dirtiest child he had ever seen, walking, it seemed, through the closet door as if it wasn’t there in much the way ghost hunters say that spirits if the dead do. And that child, a boy of perhaps ten, looked at Roger with big eyes dimmed by fear. “I ain’t done nothing wrong, nothing at all,” the child added.

Then he fell down onto his knees for no apparent reason and clawed at the carpet.

“It’s soft,” he said, “so soft an’ I loves it, and I never meant no harm, God knows I didn’t, not as I should use the name of our Lord in vain ‘cause the preacher says I should be whipped if I does that...”

“What’s soft?” asked May, filling in the space left by her husband’s speechless mouth-open shocked surprise. But then, she wasn’t as near the kneeling child, had actually barely seen him.

The boy looked at her, and tried to smile. But smiling wasn’t easy for a lad whose ten years or so had been filled with pain, misery and endless toil.

“What’s your name?” asked Roger when he finally found some words, “and where on Earth have you come from like this?”

“I’se from the workhouse, misses, an they call me Oliver. I’se Oliver Twist, that’s who I is. Oliver Twist: the real Oliver Twist an’ not the kid in the book...”

© Peter Rogerson, 09.12.20