Search Results for 'sent'

It had been many years since Eleri left the service of Lord and Lady Teacake to make a life of her own in the woods, but she continued to visit Lady Jolly from time to time, arranging her visits to coincide with the Lord Mayor’s trips abroad. It was not that Lord Leroway wouldn’t have made her welcome ~ rather the reverse ~ in fact he found it hard to keep his hands off her. Eleri had no reciprocating feelings for the old scoundrel, but a great deal of affinity and affection for the Lady Jolly, a kindred soul despite their seemingly different stations in the life of a small rural township.

Lord Leroway Teacake had not been born a noble, nor had the Lady Jolly. Leroway had a dream one night that he had been made the Lord Mayor of Trustinghampton in the Wold, and in the dream he was asking his teenage neighbour, Jolly Farmcock, for advice on what to say to the villagers in his inauguration speech. It appeared that the pretty girl with the curious eyes was his partner in the dream, and the dream was so vivid and real that he set his sights upon her and courted her hand in marriage. Jolly was bowled over by his ardent attention, and charmed by his enthusiasm. Before long they were married and Leroway was ready to continue his dream mission.

Leroway was tall and broad shouldered, and prematurely bald in an arrestingly handsome sort of way. Despite his size, he had a way with intricate mechanisms; he had the manual dexterity of a watchmaker, and a fascination for making new devices with parts from old broken contraptions. Had it not been for the dream, he would have happily spent his life tinkering in the workshop of his parents home.

But the dream was a driving compulsion, and he and his new bride set off to find Trustinghampton in the Wold, as the feeling within him grew that the villagers were expecting him.

“Where is it?” Jolly asked.

“We will know when we find it!” replied Leroway. “Hold on to my coat tails!” he added a trifle theatrically. Jolly smiled up at him, loving his exuberance. And off they set, first deciding at the garden gate whether to turn right or left. And this is what they did at every intersection and fork in the road. They paused and waited for the pulling. Not once did they have a difference of opinion on which direction the drawing energy came from. It was clear.

They arrived at the newly populated abandoned village just as the sun was setting behind the castle ramparts. Wisps of blue smoke curled from a few chimneys, and the aroma of hot spiced food hastened their steps. A small black and white terrier trotted towards them, yapping.

“We have arrived!” Leroway announced to the little dog. “And we are quite hungry.”

The dog turned and trotted up the winding cobbled street, lined with crumbling vacant houses, looking over his shoulder as if to say “follow me”. Leroway and Jolly followed him to the door of a cottage with candle light glowing in the window.

The dog scratched on the cottage door and yapped. Creaking and scraping the tile floor, the door opened a crack, and a young woman pushed her ragged dreadlocks over her shoulder with a grimy hand, peering out.

“Ah!” she said, her face breaking into a smile. “Who are you? Well never mind, I have a feeling you are expected. Come in, come in.”

The door creaked alarmingly and juddered as it scraped the floor. Leroway scowled at the door hinges, suppressing an urge to take the door off the hinges right then and there to fix it.

“My name is Alexandria,” the woman introduced herself when the travelers had squeezed through the opening. She kissed them on both cheeks and gestured them to sit beside the fireplace. “We haven’t been here long, so please excuse the disarray.”

Noticing her guests eyes on the bubbling pot on the fire, she exclaimed, “Oh but first you must eat! It’s nothing fancy, but it is mushroom season and I must say I have never had such delicious mushrooms as the ones growing wild here. Let me take your coats ~ I say, what a gorgeous purple! ~ sit, do sit!” she said, pulling a couple of rickety chairs up to the table.

“You are too kind,” replied Jolly gratefully. “It smells divine, and we are quite hungry.”

“How many people live here?” asked Leroway.

“Twenty two now, more are arriving every day,” replied Alexandria. “Eleri and I and Lobbocks were the first to come and we sent word to the others. You see,” she sighed, “It’s really been quite a challenge down in the valleys. Many chose to stay, but some of us, well, we felt an urge to move, to find a place untouched by the lowland dramas.”

“I see,” said Leroway, although he didn’t really know what she meant by lowland dramas. He had spent his life in the hills.

He tucked into his bowl of mushroom stew. There was plenty of time to find out. He was here to stay.

As Eleri prepared the mushrooms for breakfast her mind wandered back to the previous mushroom season, when Rhiannon had been visiting from the old country. The rain had been relentless, hammering down without respite, until the trees of the enchanted woods were bowed with saturation and the forest floor was as swampy as the Marshes of Doom. The river had risen to within a few short meters of her thatched dwelling, necessitating an emergency spell to lift the building onto temporary stilts above the sodden ground.

There had been an initial difficulty in achieving the correct height of the stilts. The first attempt had been much too high, and Eleri and Rhiannon had clung to each other laughing, as the cottage swayed alarmingly in the wind above the tree tops.

A swinging shutter slammed shut on Eleri’s pinky, occasioning a piercing howl of pain amid the shrieks of mirth, but it did serve to ground the women sufficiently to recall the ‘shortening emergency stilts’ spell. It was, however, administered without due care to details, and the building crashed to the ground rather too quickly.

Rubbing their bruised body parts but still seeing the funny side, they eventually managed to lift the abode a logical distance from the mud.

“Good morning!” Yorath called, bringing Eleri back to the present. “Mmm, mushrooms!”

The fire in the wood stove had gone out when Eleri awoke but she didn’t rekindle it. The dream of the girl with the dragon face filled her thoughts, and the mundane actions of the morning were not a primary interest yet. The face was perfect to replicate into stone, with an interesting texture that would lend itself perfectly to her paint effects, but no extreme protuberances to cause potential problems during the process. The inch long horns would not present too much of a problem, provided they didn’t grow too much. (and what was that in centimeters anyway, she wondered, and why was she dreaming in imperial measures? Perhaps it was a clue to the location of the owner of the dragon face.) But how was she to find that face? And if she found it, would she be able to take a mold of it? There must be a way, she pondered, to take a rubber mold of a dream character somehow.

Rousing herself, she decided to ask Yorath about it. He was always full of surprises, and knew so much more than one ever imagined about multitudes of diverse topics. Eleri started to become excited at the thought of what this could mean to the development of her project. With the addition of the anti gravity animating ingredient, she could bring dream characters to life in a way never seen before in the physical world.

And Yorath had returned as promised, and just at the right time. Despite doubting her abilities to use the elerium when he first introduced her to it, she had developed a simple enough technique to incorporate it into the statues.

It was good to see him again, although she was disappointed to see he was not wearing that red silk jacket this time. But he had the goods, and that was the important thing. And he might have an idea about the dream casting. She would treat him to a breakfast of fresh picked mushrooms and then ask him.

Eleri tried harder to focus on what Yorath was saying but she couldn’t keep her eyes off his red silk jacket. Eventually he realized the problem, and slipped the jacket off his shoulders, folded it neatly, and placed it in his travelling bag. Noticing Eleri’s widening eyes following the jackets movements, he zipped the bag closed and the tantalizing colour disappeared from sight.

“As I was saying,” Yorath continued. He now had Eleri’s full attention. “Don’t ask me where I procure it from, because I can’t divulge my sorcerers, er, sources. But I can promise a steady, if not unlimited, supply.”

“More tea, dear?” Eleri refilled his cup. “I’m very interested in the antigravity properties because you see, this stuff is so darned heavy. The heaviness has it’s benefits, in fact the weight of stone is one of the attractions. But during the creation process it could be extremely useful, not to mention the transportation aspect.”

Yorath smiled, nodding agreement. “Indeed, not to mention the expanded possibilities and abilities of the finished products.”

“The thing is,” asked Eleri, “Can it be programmed? There are times when heavy is entirely appropriate, and times when the anti gravity component would be welcome and beneficial.”

“The Overseer has been working on it, but he got in a bit of a muddle with it. You see, it’s a delicate combination of technology and magic. The combination has to be just right. Not too much technology without enough magic, but neither too much magic and not enough technology.”

“Oh dear,” sighed Eleri. “I’m afraid my technological know-how is nil. Well, almost nil,” she added. She knew how to mix colours, for example. Was that considered technical? She didn’t know, but felt despondent now about her ability to use the new ingredient.

“All that’s needed is a little more tinkering with the programming, and with a bit of luck,” Yorath snickered a bit at the word luck and continued, “I should be able to find just the right spell to go with it, to activate the technology.”

“I don’t know, Yorath, it all sounds beyond me, when you start talking about scientists and Heavy Ion Research it daunts me, you know?”

“Even though Elerium represents the hopes of a generation, the dream of a united world, and the struggle for human survival?” Yorath asked with a twinkle in his eye.

“Well, if you put it like that, how can I refuse? How soon can you acquire the right spell to go with it?”

“Leave it with me,” he replied.

“I recalled a dream last night. One thing led to another, maybe I’ll tell you about that later, but it is connected, so remind me later. Then I was reminded of a story. Then I had a message from someone about a dream about a writer with a maid called Agnes, and she had recalled another story about Brooklyn. And of course, that got me thinking about stories. And story characters! And us!”

At this point in Liz’s monologue she paused and looked meaningfully at Godfrey, Finnley and Roberto. She repressed an urge to slap Roberto, who was gazing out of the window (thinking about mountain tajines no doubt), to get his attention for the meaningful look that she wanted to give him, and cleared her throat loudly instead.

Not a moment later she had to control the urge to slap Finnley, who was just about to make another remark about the length of her sentences.

“I didn’t say a word!” Finnley exclaimed with righteous indignation. “I only thought about it!”

“And I didn’t slap you, did I. I only thought about it too!” retorted Liz.

“Ah, but you’re the one who wrote it down. You’ve gone and done it once you write it down.”

“Don’t be daft,” replied Liz. But she wondered, what if?

CLOVE:

I offered to help Stevie go through her mum’s things expecting her to refuse on the grounds of it being private, but she said, Yes, you do it and I’ll watch, it will be easier that way. Stevie wanted to do it all methodically and start with the drawers, and I said no, that’s silly starting in the least likely place.

So we did it my way, and haphazardly followed random impulses. I’m not sure whether it was successful or not, because Stevie didn’t find what she was looking for (not forgetting that she didn’t know exactly what she was looking for anyway) but we did find something interesting. If I wasn’t going home soon, I’d have sent a message to Corrie right away, but I decided to keep it to myself for a bit, I don’t know why.

The elephant in Sue and John’s bedroom caught my eye, one of those big ceramic Indian ones with a flat saddle to put a spider plant on. It weighed a ton, but we managed to turn it over without making too much of a mess of the spider plant, which we forgot to remove first, and sure enough it had a cavity inside and there were some papers wedged up there.

Stevie got excited and started making squeaky noises and telling me to be careful. I gave her a look, and pulled them out and handed them to her. They weren’t like documents or anything, they were torn up maps with some little bits cut out where the letters of the names of the places were.

“Just a load of old rubbish! It must have been in there when she bought it, I can’t see Mum shoving rubbish up there. How exasperating, I thought we were on to something!”

“Let me have a look at them, Stevie,” I said, slowly reaching out for them. I was starting to have a funny moment, trying to remember.

It took me a minute or two, but I did remember. Although I can’t imagine how it could be connected. But still, it was a bit odd. It reminded me of what we’d found at the Brundy place that day, me and Corrie.

Corrie:

I’m getting a bit worried about Aunt Idle, she’s been in Iceland ages and we haven’t heard from her, and nothing on her blog for ages, either. When I found this, I did a bit of research into the Bronklehampton case. That’s another story.

“Aunt Idle was going to visit her old friend Margit Brynjúlfursdóttir. It was all very hush hush: Margit had intimated that there was to be a family reunion, but it was to be a surprise party, and she mustn’t breathe a word of it to anyone. Margit had sent her the tickets to Keflavik, instructing her to inform her family and friends that she had won the trip in a story writing competition.

It was Idle’s first trip to Iceland. She had met Margit in a beach bar near Cairns some years ago, just after the scandalous expose on the goings on of a mad doctor on a remote south Pacific island. The Icelandic woman had been drowning her sorrows, and Idle had been a shoulder to cry on. The age old story of a wayward son, a brilliant mind, so full of potential, victim of a conniving nurse , and now sadly incarcerated on the wrong side of the law.

Aunt Idle didn’t immediately make a connection between the name Brynjúlfursdóttir and Bronklehampton, indeed it would have been impossible to do so using conventional means, Icelandic naming laws and traditions being what they were. But the intuitive Idle had made a connection notwithstanding. The maudlin woman in the beach bar was clearly the mad doctors mother.

Idle had invited Margit to come and stay at the Flying Fish Inn for a few weeks before returning to Iceland, a visit which turned out to last almost a year. Over the months, Margit confided in her new friend Idle. Nobody back home in Iceland knew that the doctor in the lurid headlines was her son, and Margit wanted to keep it that way, but it was a relief to be able to talk about it to someone. Idle wasn’t all that sure that Margit was fully in the picture regarding the depths to which the fruit of her loins had sunk, but she witnessed the womans outpourings with tact and compassion and they became good friends.

The fasten your seatbelts sign flashed and pinged. The landing at Keflavik was going to be on time.”

““I wish you’d told me about the 60’s fancy dress party, Margit, I’d have brought an outfit with me,” said Idle.

Margit looked at her friend quizzically. “What makes you think there’s a fancy dress party?”

“Why, all the beehive hair do’s! It’s the only explanation I could think of. If it’s not a 60’s party, then why…..?”

Idle noticed Margit eyeing her long grey dreadlocks distastefully. Self consciously she flung them over her shoulder, inopportunely landing the end of one of them in a plate of some foul substance the passing waiter was carrying.

Margit jumped at the chance. “Darling, how horrid! All that rams bottom sauce all over your hair! Do try the coconut shampoo I put in your bathroom.””

And that was the last I’d heard from Aunt Idle.

Corrie’s findings from elsewhere:

“You can’t leave without a permit, you know,” Prune said, startling Quentin who was sneaking out of his room.

“I’m just going for a walk,” he replied, irritated. “And what are you doing skulking around at this hour, anyway? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“What are you doing with an orange suitcase in the corridor at three o’clock in the morning?” the young brat retorted. “Where are you going?”

“Owl watching, that’s what I’m doing. And I don’t have a picnic basket, so I’m taking my suitcase.” Quentin had an idea. “Would you like to come?” The girls local knowledge might come in handy, up to a point, and then he could dispose of her somehow, and continue on his way.

Prune narrowed her eyes with suspicion. She didn’t believe the owl story, but curiosity compelled her to accept the invitation. She couldn’t sleep anyway, not with all the yowling mating cats on the roof. Aunt Idle had forbidden her to leave the premises on her own after dark, but she wasn’t on her own if she was with a story refugee, was she?”

“Seeing Dido eating her curry cookies would turn Mater’s stomach, so she went up to her room.

Good riddance she thought, one less guest to worry about.
Not that she usually thought that way, but every time the guests leaved, there was a huge weight lifted from her back, and a strong desire of “never again”.
The cleaning wasn’t that much worry, it helped clear her thoughts (while Haki was doing it), but the endless worrying, that was the killer.

After a painful ascension of the broken steps, she put her walking stick on the wall, and started some breathing exercises. The vinegary smell of all the pickling that the twins had fun experimenting with was searing at her lungs. The breathing exercise helped, even if all the mumbo jumbo about transcendant presence was all rubbish.

It was time for her morning oracle. Many years ago, when she was still a young and innocent flower, she would cut bits and pieces of sentences at random from old discarded magazines. Books would have been sacrilegious at the time, but now she wouldn’t care for such things and Prune would often scream when she’d find some of her books missing key plot points. Many times, Mater would tell her the plots were full of holes anyway, so why bother; Prune’d better exercise her own imagination instead of complaining. Little bossy brat. She reminded her so much of her younger self.

So she opened her wooden box full of strips of paper. Since many years, Mater had acquired a taste for more expensive and tasty morsels of philosophy and not rubbish literature, so the box smelt a bit of old parchment. Nonetheless, she wasn’t adverse to a modicum of risqué bits from tattered magazines either. Like a blend of fine teas, she somehow had found a very nice mix, and oftentimes the oracle would reveal such fine things, that she’d taken to meditate on it at least once a day. Even if she wouldn’t call it meditate, that was for those good-for-nothing willy-nilly hippies.

There it was. She turned each bit one by one, to reveal the haiku-like message of the day.

“Bugger!” the words flew without thinking through her parched lips.

looked forgotten rat due idea half
getting floverley comment somehow
prune hardly wondered eyes great
inn run days dark quentin simulation

That silly Prune, she’d completely forgotten to check on her. She was glad the handwritten names she’d added in the box would pop up so appropriately.

She would pray to Saint Floverley of the Dunes, a local icon who was synchretized from old pagan rituals and still invoked for those incapable of dancing.
With her forking arthritis, she would need her grace much.”

Corrie’s findings from elsewhere:

“It was no coincidence that “Elikozoe”, his nom de plume (he was born Albert (Al) Yokoso, from a father of Japanese descent and a mother of Cajun descent) had been sent to the Pickled Pea Inn (formerly known as the Flying Fish Inn).”

I thought about leaving that one out, as it seemed so nonsensical, this place has never been called the pickled pea, but I’m leaving it in for now. Might make some kind of sense somewhere down the line.

“This morning was quiet, but his mind was not.
There were always the nagging thoughts that something ought to be done, the restless fear of forgetting something of importance.
But this morning was quiet.
A bit too quiet in fact.
No raucous cackling to stir the soft velvety dust from the wooden floorboard.

Quentin was wondering whether the story makers had lost all interest in moving his story forward. Yet, he was more than willing to move it notwithstanding, his efforts seemed of little consequence however. Some piece was missing, some ever-present grace of illumination shrouded in scripting procrastination.

His discussion with Aunt Idle had been brief. She’d told him with great intensity that she had a weird dream. That she looked into a mirror and saw herself. Or something like that,… she was not a very coherent woman, the ging wasn’t helping.

Maybe his task was done. Time to leave the Pickled Pea Inn.
His friend Eicnarf seemed eager to see him. Or maybe that had been a typo and she really meant to sew him, or saw him,… she could be gory like that…

No matter, a trip out of the brine cloud of this sand coated place would do him good.”

And good riddance, you cheeky bugger, I can’t help thinking.

““Did anybody see our last guest?” Mater couldn’t help but regularly count her herds (so to speak), and although she wasn’t as authoritative with her guests as she was with her family members, she couldn’t help but notice that her last count was one person short —enough to start worrying her.

“Hmm lwwft thws hhmmmng” said Idle, her mouth full with cookies.

Mater shrugged. It was still better than when she used to talk with sauerkraut.”

I had better ask Clove to remind me how to do italics I suppose. This could get confusing.

It’s the Wall of Watches, where the last remaining heart beats of the condemned live on, refusing to be forgotten. The wall itself is high, with chains crisscrossing it’s face to keep a patchwork of boards in place. Threaded into the chains, however, were the watches of those who died at the wall.

The watches hung from each other. There would be one watch attached to the chains and then more watches would be strung on it’s bands. It was a practical solution to diminishing real estate on the wall, but it was metaphorical as well, representing the interconnection of hearts and souls.

Most watches were mechanical, but wound by the movement of handling. On the day of their death, or if they expected it, they’d run to the wall and fit their watch to the chains. Well-wishers would visit the memorial and handle the watches to both keep them going and to remember their loved-one once more. As long as the ticking continued, it was said that their heart remained beating in this world.

The guards would walk the condemned men past the wall to remind them of the people who came before. Dissenters.

As a line of men shuffled past the wall, an inmate leapt out of line and furiously fumbled with his watch, trying all he could to attach it. There was always one. One guy would become so overwhelmed by the empathy of the symbolism, would connect so strongly with the wall, that he’d leap out of line and attach his watch…an act which would be paid for by immediate death.

A guard watched with a certain pity. The orders were to shoot on sight, but he would let them have their last act. Right as the band slipped through the buckle, a shot was fired and the inmate fell in a lump.

All of this seemed so familiar to Aaron…or was it? Is this where he was supposed to be? He had a sudden moment of clarity while standing in that line, watching his fellow inmate fall. What was he doing here?! It was one of those moments that hits you. What in the world is all this bullshit?!

He loosened the belt on his watch as he drew closer to the wall, not wanting to seem suspicious. He would attach his watch, willingly and premeditated. Their expectations of him would not hold him ransom…rather, he’d use their own expectations against them. They would not kill him. He was in control. This was his time. This was his life. He was taking it back.

And, right as he slid the belt through, he got one last look at the black face of the watch…

Aunt Idle was going to visit her old friend Margit Brynjúlfursdóttir. It was all very hush hush: Margit had intimated that there was to be a family reunion, but it was to be a surprise party, and she mustn’t breathe a word of it to anyone. Margit had sent her the tickets to Keflavik, instructing her to inform her family and friends that she had won the trip in a story writing competition.

It was Idle’s first trip to Iceland. She had met Margit in a beach bar near Cairns some years ago, just after the scandalous expose on the goings on of a mad doctor on a remote south Pacific island. The Icelandic woman had been drowning her sorrows, and Idle had been a shoulder to cry on. The age old story of a wayward son, a brilliant mind, so full of potential, victim of a conniving nurse , and now sadly incarcerated on the wrong side of the law.

Aunt Idle didn’t immediately make a connection between the name Brynjúlfursdóttir and Bronklehampton, indeed it would have been impossible to do so using conventional means, Icelandic naming laws and traditions being what they were. But the intuitive Idle had made a connection notwithstanding. The maudlin woman in the beach bar was clearly the mad doctors mother.

Idle had invited Margit to come and stay at the Flying Fish Inn for a few weeks before returning to Iceland, a visit which turned out to last almost a year. Over the months, Margit confided in her new friend Idle. Nobody back home in Iceland knew that the doctor in the lurid headlines was her son, and Margit wanted to keep it that way, but it was a relief to be able to talk about it to someone. Idle wasn’t all that sure that Margit was fully in the picture regarding the depths to which the fruit of her loins had sunk, but she witnessed the womans outpourings with tact and compassion and they became good friends.

The fasten your seatbelts sign flashed and pinged. The landing at Keflavik was going to be on time.

“Thanks,” said Bossy taking her cup of tea.

“So, tell me more about this evil fruit-loop doctor,” said Ricardo with an encouraging smile.

Bossy looked intently at him. “It’s no joke,” she admonished him sharply.

“Oh, no. No, of course not. I mean, yeah, I really want to know. It all sounds very … intriguing. And sort of creepy, to be honest. But definitely not a joke.”

Bossy relented and gestured imperatively for Ricardo to be seated.

“The doctor could best be described as a mad genius. He believed he had found the answer to looking eternally youthful but didn’t want to go through the time and expense of clinical trials through the normal channels. So he set up a testing laboratory on a small and relatively unknown Pacific Island. Tifikijoo, I believe it was called.”

“Uh huh. Actually I do vaguely remember something about that story.”

“We got the story first,” Bossie said proudly, “but there was a media ban on publishing some of the information, unfortunately. The Doctor managed to get funding for his tests through an undercover organisation whose hidden agenda was to hide an ancient crystal skull while at the same time providing them with a facility where they could continue their own secret testing into spider genomes. I can’t tell you too much about that — it was all hush hush. So, you wouldn’t have read about that in the news, I bet,” she added with a smug smile.

“Uh, no,” answered Ricardo, privately wondering if Bossy was the mad one. It was all starting to feel a bit surreal to him.

“Did the doctor know about the skull stuff?”

“No, the doctor was genuinely only interested in preserving beauty. Unfortunately, to this end, he killed one of his first guinea pigs. And tried to disguise his crime by mummifying the body. That’s when it all began to implode on him.”

“What happened to him?”

“He had some good lawyers and was found not competent to stand trial on the grounds of insanity. And the fact that all his clients had signed liability waivers helped a bit. He was sent to a high security psychiatric institution but managed to escape by reverting to his female identity—he was transsexual—and hiding in a laundry trolley.

“The doctor hated the way he was portrayed in the media and most of his venom was focused on our people. We had a guy working with us then, John Smith, and he covered the story with Connie. They got the brunt of the hate emails. John nearly had a nervous breakdown with the stress of it and moved to the country. Pity, he was a good writer.”

“So what makes you think Santa Claus and the doctor are one and the same?”

“Call it a very strong hunch. The Doctor was born in Iceland and had strong family ties there. And now I fear he has lured Connie and Sophie there in order to exact his evil revenge!”

The hotel manager closed the red ledger in a loud flap, releasing a cloud of dark dust. Connie wondered if it was becasue of that volcano with the unspeakable name which had been fuming again since their arrival.

“There is no vacancy”, he said.

“But, we had a reservation”, said Sweet Sophie with her sweetest voice.

“Maybe you had, but had is in the past. Now there is no vacancy.”

Sweet Sophie took a deep breath in and tried to imagine the poppy ground of her hometown in Cornwall. It didn’t work. She didn’t feel relaxed nor did she feel bliss. She had no imagination for that kind of positive thinking, her mind only worked for conspiracies and time paradoxes.

Connie had been looking at her watch repeatedly, and breathing heavily. They had been trying to get past this man for fifteen minutes. His face was as pleasant as a Gib’s monkey ass. Not as Maybe not as comfortable to sit on though. Sweet Sophie couldn’t think with all the noise Connie was doing. She knew there was a solution, and she didn’t want to go to another hotel, their instructions were specific, get a room at Diamond Suites hotel.

“It’s no use”, said Connie. “Let’s find another hotel. I’ve been told there is one called Blue Lagoon part of a wonderful Spa.”

“Shush”, said Sophie. “I’m thinking.”

“That would be a first”, said Connie with a conniving smile.

Sweet Sophie didn’t pay attention, she was used to rudeness. Instead she looked at the manager’s ugly face and suddenly had an idea that might have come from the past but could be applied in the present to get them a key.

“Of course it was in the past”, she began, “We just forgot to take the key of our rooms.”

“Very well”, said the manager, “What are your room numbers ?”

Sweet Sophie smiled. There was some progress. What did the letter say again ?

Connie noticed the old woman was frowning a lot this morning, and thought to herself, Not so sweet after all, the old trout. In a funny sort of way, it endeared her to Connie in a way that the endless cheery sweetness had not.

“There’s no Elf School in the directory, but there is a Tw’Elf Centre, do you suppose this is the one?”

“May as well check it out,” replied Sophie.

“Representatives of the twelve continents of the earth?” Connie read, adding, “Sounds like some kind of mumbo jumbo fringe nutjob stuff if you ask me.”

“What, less nutjob than an Elf School?” replied Sophie with a snigger. Connie laughed, beginning to warm towards the old dear. “I’d be interested to hear more about the anticipated merger with the Bermuda Triangle.”

Back at her desk after a crash course at zumba with the Chinese team, Connie was sorting her e-mails (meaning sending them to trash). Nothing fancy, nothing catchy, nothing to grab her attention span for more than a minute.

The noise of the open space was making her feel drowsy. Maybe a coffee would help her wake up, or maybe if something could happen to stir the pot. Connie deleted a few more e-mails to show the others that she was a busy reporter before leaving her desk.
Passing by the desks of her colleagues, Connie looked surreptitiously at their computer screens and saw that everyone was playing the busy game. It was sad to recognize that good news (meaning bad news) were hard to come by nowadays.

In times like these, she had to resist the tentation to create her own news, it was not that kind of press. But still toying with the idea and making up some outrageous stories with her team was a way to make time fly away more quickly. Once, Hilda had even reused one of the titles for a real stories that sadly happened shortly after she had made it up.
Rumour had it that Hilda’s great grand mother was a gypsy and could do palm reading. The gran even used palm tree leaves to do her reading when there was nobody, you just had to cut the leave in the shape of the person you wanted to read the future and she would tell you all about them. She was good.
“It runs in the family,” Hilda had said. “It’s helpful to be at the right place at the right time.” And for sure she was the most prolific reporter of the agency.
Connie sure would have used some of Hilda’s medium inner sight to know when something would happen.

She made herself a cappuccino and with the milk drew the face of Al Pacino. Many years at a press agency and you learn a few tricks to impress your friends.
She heard the slow and uneven pace of sweet old Sophie behind her. She sighed, she didn’t want to have to answer another of her dumb questions about the future. If Hilda could read bits of the future, Sophie was always thirsty about it. Maybe that’s why Hilda was more often in the field and not so often at her desk.

Connie turned and almost dropped her cappuccino as the old lady handed her a Fedex envelop.
“Sorry,” said sweet old Sophie, “That just arrived for you. I wonder what it is.”
“I’m sure you do,” muttered Connie.
“It’s from Santa Claus,” said the old lady with a conniving smile.
Connie looked at the old lady, with a forced smile. Was insanity a cause to get rid of one of your employee ? She took the package with one hand. Heavier than she had expected. When she saw the address, she couldn’t believe it was real. The sender’s and city’s names were certainly fake. Jesus Carpenter, Santa Claus, AZ
Sophie was still there, looking at Connie with a big smile.
“What are you waiting for ?” the reporter asked.
“Aren’t you opening it?”

Connie considered opening the package, but the avidity on the old face was making her uncomfortable. “Nope,” she said. With her cappuccino and the package she went back to her desk. Sweet Sophie was still looking at her with that greedy smile on her face. Connie shivered and shook her head. It was obvious, the old tramp was mad.
She touched the package, trying to guess what was inside. As no convincing guess presented itself in her mind, she stripped it open. There was an iPhone 5 SE with 64Gb memory in it, two plane tickets for Keflavik in Iceland, and a note.
‘If you want a good story prepare your suitcase. Bring Sweet Sophie with you. We’ll contact you once you are there.’

Connie thought of a joke. She checked the package and no matter how many times she looked it was still her name. She looked toward the cafeteria and she shuddered. Sweet Sophie was still looking at Connie with that strange smile, as if she knew. Or as if she had sent the package herself, the reporter thought.
“Someone knows where Hilda is ? I need to talk to Hilda.”