3. Dimworlde Cottage

Jack is slowly recovering when a replica of himself arrives on the scene

Jack was careless as to where he dashed. Half tripping over near-submerged tree roots as he went, he ran as quickly and as far from what he perceived as his own dead body as he could go, his heart pounding.

There was some magic in the air, and he couldn’t get his head round understanding even one percent of it. The pale body he had run away from was dressed almost exactly like himself, shortish black shorts, a plain white tee-shirt and elderly pale blue trainers on his feet. The prostrate form looked like he looked, and therefore, ergo, somehow it was him. A fore-telling of something dire that was going to happen to him, maybe.

An entry into the ghostly world of the supernatural and a ghastly, grisly ending to his own life stretched forlornly on a grassy hillock, a melting away of every tomorrow that might be, a plunging them into the dark world of eternal non-existence.

His mind was so preoccupied that he failed to notice the tumbledown cottage with its front door at a grotesque angle until he collided into a privet hedge that surrounded it almost completely. But then, alarmed by an obstacle that shouldn’t have been there, not in the woodland where nobody lived, and still haunted by the image of a dead boy etched starkly into his memory, he completely failed to notice the old man glaring at him over the top of a pair of pebble-lensed spectacles.

“Hey you, varmint!” croaked the old man, “sod ye off or I’ll have the cops onto yer!”

The mention of cops did something positive. It brought back to his mind the instructions from his dad on what he should do if he chanced upon a collection of old bones, and the body of a dead boy was certainly a collection of bones, albeit that they were covered in flesh rather than being truly old.

“Police!” he half moaned and half screeched so that his voice came out as something sounding as if it might have originated on another world, “Me, I’m dead back there!” and he pointed back the way he had blindly charged, not caring that his words sounded meaningless.

“Dead, you say? You, you say? Dead?”

Jack nodded as frantically as he could. “Lying on the grass, still, with blood on his head… on my head.”

“Better get a copper, then. Here. You ait here and I’ve got a fancy phone I might learn how to use one day… You wait here, you varmint, don’ you dared run off, and I’ll fetch the blasted thing…”

The old man backed into his tumble-down cottage, keeping his eyes firmly on Jack, or if not his eyes the excessively thick lenses he was attempting to peer through.

Jack could think of running, but lacked the mental strength to move as much as a muscle, but stood there in a state of mindlessness.

After barely a minute he old man reappeared, holding a mobile phone and tapping its glass face as if that would summon forth an army of blue-clad policemen.

“That’s not…” stammered Jack. He was an eleven year old boy and consequently know just about everything there is to know about the technology available in the age in which he lived. Mobile phones, rather than being a mystery, were an avenue to such delights as You-tube and other outlets that would no doubt have confused the phone’s owner.

“Here,” gestured the old man, “you do it. You phone the cops, you varmint… I ain’t seeing so well,” and he stomped up to Jack until the boy could smell the weird assortment of unpleasantnesses that wafted from him, and pushed his very modern mobile phone into the boy’s hand.

Jack knew enough about the telephone system to ring the emergency number of 999, and when asked he replied, in a voice shaking with terror, that he wanted the police and that there was a dead body not so far from the old man’s cottage which, he read from a faded and cracked name-plate, was called Dimworlde, and concluded that he was terrified.

The male voice that had answered the emergency call changed to that of a woman who informed him that she was a police inspector and asked whether he playing tricks because the school holidays were boring?

“I would never…” he spluttered, “not in a thousand years…”

“You must understand that it is peak times for joking calls,” the woman’s voice said, “to start with, what’s your name? And don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble. Not yet, anyway.”

“Me? I’m Jack. Jack Newby…” replied Jack in a quivering voice.

“Jack? You say that you’re Jack? Hold the line, Jack Newby. Someone’s on the way to help you… In fact it’s going to be me and I’ll be with you as quickly as I can. Please stay where you are, with Mr Juniper.”

Then the phone went dead and Jack handed it back to the old man. “Are you Mr Juniper?” he asked.

The other nodded. “Baz Juniper if you want my full appellation,” he grinned, “they know me well enough at the cop shop. I used to clean the place. I don’ want you to think I were a copper though, varmint: I were better than that. I were a cleaner as knew which way to hold a sweeping brush, and that’s summat the average cop is rubbish at!”

“She says, the lady police woman says, as she’s coming herself,”

“She is, is she? I know who she is, then, and we’re in good hands, you young tyke! When I were sweeping the place out she were a humble constable, and everyone fancied her, even me, not that I should be talking such grown-up stuff to a whipper-snapper like you! Florence, she’s called, with legs and so on as a man could die for… sorry.”

It seemed that virtually no time passed before an unmarked police car nosed along a dirt track that lead towards Dimworlde cottage which, to all appearances, was lost in the depths of a timeless forest, but obviously wasn’t.

“Why, it’s Florence Winthorpe or I’ve turned into a blind beggar!” rasped the old man, “and you’ve come to save this varmint from my raggedy claws!”

“That’s enough, Baz, though it’s good to see you,” replied the smartly dressed woman as she stepped out of the car, “and this must be Jack Newby, the young man who found a dead body…”

“It was me,” stammered Jack, “I mean, the boy… lying dead as a dodo and dressed exactly like this,” he indicated his own body with a sweep of both arms.

Before anything else could be said a thrashing sound from the undergrowth leading the was Jack had stumbled interrupted them.

“Help!” called a fresh voice from that direction

And to his huge and frightening surprise a familiar figure staggered into sight from between a thicket of half grown saplings

And to Jack it was as if he was looking into a mirror at himself. Unable to control himself he found his consciousness was ebbing awaty as he fainted and slid to the earthy ground whilst his mind fought to reject what his eyes had seen.

“Another varmint!” breathed old Baz

The new arrival gasped when he saw jack slithering to the ground. “Is that me?” he asked, faintly “am I dead after all? Help me, please, help me... I want to go home!”

© Peter Rogerson, 28.06.24