Five Tall Tales

By Gerry Chadwick

Another collection of short stories featuring a combination of Horror and Sci Fi.

With a bit of mystery and thriller thrown in, hope you enjoy reading them as much as i loved writing them!!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Sep 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9783755420972

Book preview

Kings Pawn

Kings Pawn

Dinah didn’t know what made her stop at the pawn shop that day. She had never stopped there before but the moment she saw the chess set she knew it was fate.

Dinah was a chess fanatic, collector, player, queen of her local chess society. Which was rare, even in the modern era the chess world was still very male dominated. So why stop at this store, she didn’t know. But she didn’t care when she saw the set in the window!

It was a classic black and white marble board and there was a classic style to the pieces, however, one side was a dark, charcoal grey, not black and the other side was a creamy white and it was the way they caught the light that attracted her the most. Small crystal flecks glittered when the light caught them. Instantly, she knew exactly where it would fit in her home office. There was a table with a Tiffany lamp she had bought a while ago. The flecks would catch the light from that lamp beautifully.

She bought the set from the tall, creepy guy in the store. Pretending to browse while he packed it carefully into a box. Nothing else appealed to her but she didn’t want to chat to him, she never really had much in the way of social skills. Didn’t take part in girl talk at work because she had no interest in fashion, men and god forbid, babies!

Dinah’s world was numbers and chess. As a high earning accountant she saved her rich clients millions and that paid well. That gave her time to feed her passion, her love, chess. Her first set had also been bought second hand, when she was just thirteen. Two of the white pieces were missing and she had roughly carved out replacements from a candle and had literally made her own board from a piece of white card she had stolen from an office supply store, along with the black marker she had used to painstakingly mark the squares before colouring in the black ones.

She had learned to play from online sites, she had a cheap phone that her parents didn’t know about. Not that they would’ve cared, actually that was a lie, her mother would’ve used it to go crazy at her. Her dad didn’t care one bit, he drove a truck and that was the only thing he cared about and the only thing he ever talked about, to Dinah or anyone who was close enough to listen. The only thing she ever learned from him was how to repair a truck, clean a truck and siphon fuel. He was hardly ever at home anyway, leaving Dinah stuck with her mother, who’s hobbies were drinking and taking out her frustrations on Dinah.

As a teenager she retreated into her own world, did extra work at school, especially in her beloved maths and joined the chess club where she got beaten mercilessly for months until she started to get the hang of it all. Everyone else in the club was male, of course, it was nerd central. But then, everyone thought she was a nerd anyway so, no big deal. Finally, when the other club members had all stopped hitting on her, by then she was fifteen, she started to win games. The next term she won the school tournament and started to earn some grudging respect. After that there was local college. Her father died, heart attack, she hardly registered it. Her mother drank more heavily and got more abusive, but by then Dinah had a lock on her bedroom door and just avoided her.

Now, she was in her late thirties, had a nice, two-bedroom apartment with two cats and her mother was in a home, sober for the first time in years but mostly out of it because of a combination of a stroke and dementia. Dinah played the good daughter, paid the bills and never visited.

She parked