Looking At Clouds

By Laurie Pegrum

Theo enjoys the freedom of a rural childhood until trouble catches up with him. A most fortuitous encounter introduces him to a strange recluse. Who is this secretive woman and what strange magical powers might she possess?
A modern fairy tale both told through the eyes of a child and the adults he encounters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387634477

Book preview

Looking At Clouds

Looking at Clouds

Laurie Pegrum

Bibliography

of Laurie Pegrum

After-Life – A Science Fiction short story

2020 Vision – Crime drama in the technology business

Looking At Clouds   - The magic of childhood in Britain

Copyright

All the characters and events in this book

are entirely fictional.

© 2016 Laurie Pegrum. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-387-63447-7

Dedication

With love and thanks to my wife

for granting me the time to write.

In addition, I offer hearty thanks to my reviewers, each of whom have demonstrated a superior command of the English language to my own.

Looking At Clouds

A Wet Scramble

The boy’s breathing was ragged, although there was nothing sinister to stimulate adrenaline. He breathed unevenly as dribbles of rainwater intermittently sluiced down his hot sweaty spine, a gasp for each droplet of icy fluid finding an unsuspecting vertebra. It was rare for such cold water to infiltrate the lumbar region of the back, especially since the invention of the umbrella, but the wet weather this summer evening was exceptional. Despite the uniqueness of this event in his short life, he quite correctly predicted that the next item of clothing to become sodden was going to be his underwear.

The more common rain for this area of England was akin to a fog cloud rolling over the hill. This storm had however announced itself from the outset; it was going to be far wetter than the norm. The first few drops had completely given away the game plan by being excessive in size, splashing like small bombs the mass of which should never physically have been airborne in the first place.

However loud his breathing, nobody nearby would have heard anything less than a scream over the now roaring cascade; it was only the boy who was noting his own short sharp inhalations. With the enveloping waterfall and the developing darkness, the entire world had become a blur swimming past him. The rain was now stinging his eyes.

It was increasingly murky, all the darker for the thick black mass of cloud that slunk heavy in the sky, blotting out the final light of the day before the appointed time. If watching this hillside from any distance, it would have been impossible to distinguish the small figure of a child, unless wearing night-vision glasses or looking through a really good telescope that was fortuitously pointed in exactly the right direction. It wasn’t just his diminutive stature or dark clothing that provided invisibility, more the height of the gorse and bracken that made up the jungle being penetrated. The motion of the tops of the ferns due to the frenetic activity beneath might have been visible to satellite surveillance, however, any noticeable motion of the vegetation could easily be credited to the wind now whipping across the hill.

The boy was attempting a bee-line directly down the hill, a direction one might consider to be easier than moving uphill; the big advantage of going downhill being gravity. The disadvantage to the downhill direction was commonly putting your feet where you couldn’t actually see them; even should you regularly look down your nose. The rain and darkness may have made the angle of slope irrelevant in this circumstance, but a steep uphill would at least have brought every footstep closer to the eyes improving the chance to see where you were treading. Striding downhill on this slope involved guesswork, habitually making the naive assumption that while every previous step had proved successful, that the next step taken given a similar magnitude and style, would be equally valid.

This particular boy was very poor at digging in his heels, exhibiting a pointy-toe style of walking that would have done a ballet dancer proud. Given the soggy cloying mud and the  slippery wet greenery, one might have bet the bank on the boy having his legs slide out from beneath him at any moment. What the unsuspecting betting public didn’t yet know was that in addition to his once almost-white shirt, thick wool school blazer and long dark shorts, he was also wearing his studded football boots.

It wasn’t an official football practice he had attended as that involved some proficiency in the sport that few children possessed. The chosen few who made it to the school team were either especially gifted with their feet or alternatively outstandingly tall for their age, rarely the two attributes overlapping. The width of a player didn’t matter so much, the significant girth at this age only benefited a dirty style of defensive play whereby you could block and potentially knock the breath from a smaller player whenever you were given an opportunity to fall on them. The drawback to superior size was that you couldn’t run as fast, or change direction quickly, after you had started your spare mass off in a selected direction, given the incumbent momentum. The technique that this small boy attempted when playing football was to run around and attempt to escape large defensive players as swiftly as possible in the hope of avoiding being squished. For his nine years of age this bedraggled little boy would be considered tiny as a footballer, yet he had already learned a great deal about the technique of squishing, despite consistently being an unwilling participant.

The football played that night had been between all-comers on an irregular yet partially flat part of the large village green. This was an informal meeting place for a number of local families to be outdoors and exercise after dinner, taking advantage of the long mild summer evenings. The players came exclusively from the immediate locality, varying from young children upwards; the adults attending being fathers hounded from their favourite television programmes to monitor their offspring’s physical safety. Sometimes girls played football as well but they were more likely to be thumping-great-big sisters, well versed in the arts of the squish; those were to be avoided by small boys.

This boy loved to play his football, but the obstacle was getting to the field. The quick and only sensible route without personal helicopter was over the hill between the villages, saving months on the purported road trek around; one that he had never actually attempted. Should you take the road there were no street lights along the lanes, although you could always wait for the headlights from intermittent cars to show you the way. Cars were a nasty business, zipping along dangerously close to pedestrians who would cling to the hedgerows in the false hope of safety. The boy had been warned against car drivers by his mother on many occasions, typically around evening news time on the television. He had been repeatedly told never to get into a car with a stranger. She needn’t have worried about explaining this to him as in his estimation all adults in cars were naturally scary enough to avoid, even the ones that might have stopped with good intentions. Given the pelting of hail, that was now stinging his exposed skin, it would appear that the option to trek home over the hill this evening had not been a wise choice.

One of the numerous public footpaths between the villages would be his normal route, although they had the tedious habit of meandering back and forth to reduce the incline to a more even pedestrian gait. With the onset of evening, the boy had adopted a more impatient policy of being direct. Taking on the more difficult and challenging task of forging his own trail, he clutched at and grabbed occasionally at passing plants even when they offered him effectively no physical support.

With a yelp he brought his descent to a sudden halt. Gingerly reaching down with two fingers of his right hand he plucked a large briar that had attached itself to his left leg. At first he thought he had run into a fence of barbed wire but small white flowers were just visible in the dying light, something one would not typically expect to see on fencing. The thorns had pierced the skin on his thigh between shorts and long socks having first stabbed into him and then partially torn across the flesh sideways as he moved forwards.

He considered the scratch to be quite serious and decided it definitely merited a cry but before he could get a good sob going he realized there were no witnesses. With the rain water splashing off his face he would be unable to make himself any soggier with tears than he was already, so he gave up on wailing and instead made a closer inspection of the damage. He wasn’t sure but he thought he could see red running down his legs making him speculate whether he should just sit down and die quietly. Had his observation been more astute he would have noticed that the scratch was only on one leg but the red stain was on both; red dye was being sourced from his rain-soaked supposedly-black school shorts.

One of the dads who had played football that evening had a tattoo of barbed wire around his upper arm which had caught the young lad’s attention. A boy of his age had no idea about tattoos, assuming you needed to be a pirate before you were allowed to have one. Remembering the pattern now was reassuring, should the bramble scratches on his leg leave a jagged scar then he could always get a tattoo of barbed wire around his thigh to make him look cool like a pirate.

As the storm arrived with surplus reinforcements the droplets became a barrage such that you could no longer tell individual impacts apart. The water dropped in streams so thick you might as well have had a bucket of water poured over your head; repeated unnecessarily. The rain now included a mix of hail, hitting the tall ferns with a rambunctious slapping as if preferring to do damage rather than provide sustenance.

The pounding on his head brought him back from considering his injury like a school bully smacking him on the bonce to get his attention. The scratch was quickly judged to be less serious than first thought; it was already starting to feel more itchy than painful. The boy looked up and saw nothing but the canopy of foliage above him. Another doubt as to whether this was a good evening or not went through his mind for he knew that where there was one bramble, there were likely many more. He logically picked a direction downhill to continue, taking greater caution now by waving his hands ahead of his legs.

Using a stomping motion he thumped his feet down and occasionally sideways aiming to seriously injure any plants before they could injure him. He didn’t differentiate between stinging nettles or thistles; he had experience of both touches hurting and wanted to avoid them all. Trying to be brave and get himself home faster he opted for a marching tune, whistling as he forged ahead on his self-made path. The tune was actually from a children’s television programme and not technically a march at all, not that the boy knew this or cared, it was simply what had first come to mind. His whistling was off-key but satisfyingly shrill due to his slightly buck teeth.

First a brief couple of flickers, then a savagely white flash of lightning, provided ghostly illumination and fern shadows all around. It had been similar to going to bed in a strange house and somebody turning off the light switch like his grandmother did with a shaky hand. The flaming white dazzle became a negative after-image accompanied by an immediate clap of thunder. It was loud and very close, as if an explosion had just gone off above his eyebrows. The rain didn’t really bother him now that he was soaked, in ignorance the lightning was kind of interesting, however the thunder scared the heck out of him. Raising his hands he held them over his head as if a ton of bricks were about to fall, after all, that was exactly what it had sounded like. He paused pensively, brought his hands down again, snatching a quick breath wondering when it was going to reoccur and then restarted off down the hill at a quicker pace. Forgotten were the brambles and stingers now; he was frightened.

His hand encountered something sturdy in front of him which then gave quickly under his advance. He managed to stop and discern that it was a piece of fence wood with a half moon cross-section. He had been lucky that the two long nails sticking through the end of the wood hadn’t caught him. A fence must be a good thing as he was probably near a stile or maybe about to get back onto a real footpath rather than his current more hazardous trail. Letting go of the broken railing, one end slipping limply to the floor, he gingerly made his way forwards encountering yet more brambles to snag on his clothes. With some athleticism he restarted his military march stomping on the upstart brambles ahead of him, quickly slowing with the realization that he was tackling more of a bush this time, rather than a solitary stem.

The small soggy rucksack on his back contained: a very heavy hardback school text book; the dirty plastic wrappers from three days of lunches; some cheap ballpoint pens of different colours; plus his only pair of black leather school shoes stuffed with socks. Annoyingly the rucksack had become hooked onto a high bramble; at least the thorns were not stuck in his skin! He pulled to release the bag, caring less about ripping the material than he had his leg, but the bramble hung on tenaciously. Normally you could back up to release something that had snagged onto you, like taking out a fish hook by pushing it inwards, however backing up on this wet hillside was not so easy. To retreat you had to climb uphill into yet more brambles that had sprung back into place despite some serious stomping, plus the plant that was snagging his bag was too high up for him to reach. He was almost hanging from the straps as if wearing a parachute.

He was scratched, he was dangling and he was considerably beyond wet. Could he even be a little hungry too? He was becoming late for supper and the murky lighting suggested it was close to night time. All this nature stuff was getting to be really annoying to the point where he unconsciously considered crying again, actually managing a small cough-like choke to explore the concept further.

All he wanted to do was get his bag free of the bush and go home. Unhooking his arms from the rucksack he now held both of the straps in one hand as it clung there. He briefly considered leaving his bag suspended right there in the shrubbery, but suspected he would need to have his school shoes for the next day. He also didn’t want to let go of the bag now that he was pulling really hard as he feared correctly that should he release it, both he and the bag would be catapulted off in different directions. Without his weight hanging onto the bag he might never be able to reach it again; maybe it would fly off and be lost.

He pulled, and then he pulled again, and again. This was irritating; a simple piece of plant growth was defeating him. He was a boy and he was strong, he was bigger than a bramble. He was a bramble crusher and would show all the brambles in the world who was boss. Gripping both rucksack straps together with two hands, he threw his arms and every ounce of his limited body mass into a twist and pull down the hill to release the bag.

It worked. It worked very well. It worked too well. The force of the release sent him staggering an extra three steps down the hill only to find that his feet were suspended freely in space. At first he hung there like a cartoon character who fails to fall until he notices that there is nothing underneath him. He instinctively reached for something nearby to grab onto but couldn’t mentally let go of the rucksack that he had just recovered in order to establish a grip.

He caught on to something that almost worked for him, raking his hand down the saw blade of thorns on a bramble stem. Unlike the restraint that had caught his rucksack this bramble snapped with the sudden pull. As a small previously unnoticeable dark hole in the ground swallowed the rest of him up, he yelped; not just from pain or shock but from the frustration of things not going his way. With his undamaged hand he dragged his school rucksack into the hole behind him; he was simply not going to lose the bag he had so recently rescued. There was a squelchy thump from within the hole as the bag apparently found an inconvenient landing site.

Somebody Missing

A strange popping noise from the new, but low-cost,  fridge-freezer preceded Cathy Benshaw shouting out something brief about excrement at the top of her lungs. All the electrical power to the house was instantaneously cut off. She was right at the end of watching a soap opera episode, a recent addiction of the last few weeks. Power cuts were all too frequent in this part of England; she had never had this kind of recurring problem in The States. A loud roll of thunder shook the building as if the intervention of nature might possibly excuse the utility company.

Her new flat-screen television didn’t glow in the aftermath of a power cut like her old bulky television used to, resulting in the room instantly turning pitch black. A rare but conveniently timed car went down the road outside giving her just enough light through the curtain-less window to get off the sofa and open a nearby cupboard. In the ensuing darkness as the light from the car passed by she fumbled about and found what she called a ‘flashlight’; it had taken some time for the local  shopkeeper to realise that she wanted a torch and not a laser pointer. It was kept at the front lip of the shelf; something she had taught herself to keep handy from prior experience.

The first time the power had gone off she had been totally unprepared. It happened during her second night in the building over dinner with her son after school. They had sat still together for a minute in the hope that the black out was short-lived, then thought to use the ‘Torch Light’ application on her mobile phone to find her way around the room. All the application did was to turn the phone’s screen full white and run the battery down quickly but it was absolutely fabulous compared with the utter dark.

They had lit the gas cooker with matches to get warm even though it wasn’t really cold that night, finished their meal in the kitchen then given up on any further activities and gone to bed early. Getting into bed without brushing her teeth as she regularly used a plug-in electric toothbrush, she swore to herself that this would not happen again. Next time she would be prepared. The ‘dark ages’ must be very aptly named; life would be dreadful without electricity. How could you even brush your teeth properly if there was no electricity?

Tonight she was much better prepared as she shone the yellow plastic lantern-style torch around the room to orient herself. Completing her mental survey she correctly concluded that she had the only functioning light source in the room. She nudged a nearby chair neatly under the kitchen table so as not to trip over it and then opened a pine dresser drawer. With the light in one hand she pulled out a resealable plastic food bag with the other. The well-stuffed bag held a stash of small round tea light candles and the butane barbecue lighter from the local shop. Spilling a pile of flat metal-clad candles on the table and placing the torch down to point at them she picked one up and tried to light it with the lighter.

Holding the candle above the flame proved awkward, made more worrying by the flickering of the flame and her unsteady hand risking a fear of fire touching her fingers. She then put the candle down onto the table and turned the lighter upside-down. Somehow this seemed wrong as the lighter was made of plastic, so surely the flame would melt or burn the end off the lighter? Whatever, this way around appeared to work better from a personal safety perspective. Despite the quiet without the television, while concentrating on the problem of the candles, Cathy had yet to notice the patter of rain splashing outside.

After successfully lighting four of the small candles on the kitchen table, the electrical power came back on. No flicker of pre-announcement, just suddenly enough electric light for her eyes to squirm in her head. With a sigh almost of reluctance now that she had achieved candle-power technology, with separate puffs she blew out the candles fully expecting the pantomime power to go back out again; however it stayed on.

In the now overly bright kitchen she sensibly plugged her mobile phone, taken from a handbag, into the charger on the kitchen counter, while mumbling something about technology under her breath. She resolved to buy: a spare ‘flashlight’ to have one for each hand, longer candles that she could light at the top, maybe even a generator for the whole house if this third world country could not get its act together.

It was very dark outside and pouring with rain judging by the noise against the kitchen window, she hadn’t noticed that from the lounge. Where was her boy? Despite the two glasses of Chardonnay she probably ought to go and pick him up from his friend Derek’s house rather than leave him to walk home in the dark and wet. Maybe Derek’s mum could drop him off this time as they didn’t live very far away. It had been a good thing the boys hadn’t been here when she had shouted out her expletive, she would have been embarrassed to swear in front of Theodore, but even worse if Derek had heard; especially if he had subsequently told his mother.

With her mobile phone under charge she picked up the rarely-used land line phone from the cradle and dialled a number while referring to a piece of paper on the hall table. After only three rings a male voice answered, This is Mike and Dotty, brusquely adding, Leave us a message after the beep, which cleared away any doubts that this was an answering machine. Cathy wondered at what point Mike would add Derek to the family roll call. Eventually, following the message, after what seemed to be an overly long pause, she heard the aforementioned tone. Hi, this is Cathy, Theo’s mum, is he still there? We try to get him to bed around now, when we can. Give us a call when you get this. Thanks! It wasn’t really incorrect to have said ‘we’ rather than ‘I’; a woman alone wasn’t going to make it obvious that she was currently man-less. Anyway, grammar was hardly a concern at the moment with her son missing.

Jiggling the phone back into the ill-fitting cradle Cathy stared out the kitchen window into the dark. There was another bright flash from lightning but the thunder betrayed the lightning’s proximity, leaving her to wonder how the storm could possibly have managed to race away so quickly. The raindrops beat against the kitchen window, somehow making her feel cold inside. Was it the passing atmospheric pressure wave of the storm front or did she detect a creepy feeling that something was very wrong with the world? She tried to shut the rain out by closing the window that had been left slightly ajar since some overdone toast had set off the smoke alarm. In almost a continuation of the same action, without waiting for a call back, she picked up the phone a second time and pressed redial.

Hello? was the fresh response.

Hi Dorothy, it’s Cathy.

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