GONE DOWN: By Tim Jeffreys
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010The detective looked the room over as the relatives huddled in the doorway. It was as though they were afraid to enter. He wondered why. There’s nothing untoward here. It looked to him as any child’s bedroom would, strewn with books and toys. The bed was as it would be had the boy just got up. The window above it was shut and locked.
“This is how everything was the night he left?” the detective asked.
It was the boy’s mother who answered him. “No one’s been up here since he vanished.”
“What kind of night was it when he disappeared?”
“Cold and wet. Like this.”
The detective glanced out at the gathering darkness. Turning, he noticed some drawings pinned to one wall. He stood and examined them. Some showed a boy and a swan, others a boy and an owl. The detective had been shown a photograph. In his notebook he’d written: Sweet-looking kid. Now he wrote: I envy him. A few drawings showed something he could not define. He took one picture down and handed it to the boy’s mother.
“What is that?”
“I don’t know. A monster?”
“Does it remind you of anything?”
“Does it you?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Is it relevant?”
He shrugged and opened his notebook again.
The kid knew, he wrote.
He looked back at the pictures of the boy and the swan, the boy and the owl. Winged creatures. Is this how they come? he wondered. Is this their disguise? Maybe these pictures were meant to be a sign from the boy. A clue to where he’s gone.
Walking to the window, the detective looked out across the city. It was all starting to make sense. He could remember the crash. He wasn’t meant to, but he could. They had come down in a blaze of fire. He could even remember seeing the boy on the plane. The kid had been sat with his parents. His real parents, not these people crowding in the doorway. He turned to look at them.
“What city is this?” he asked.
The man and woman looked back at him, confused. “What?”
He was growing impatient. “What is the name of this city?”
“What has this got to do with our son?”
Everything! he wanted to scream. Because I don’t know! I don’t know this place! I don’t know who I am! I was in a plane crash! I died! I’m not meant to be here!
He bit his lip. He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t let them know what he was thinking. He had to wait. He had to bide his time. He looked back to the child’s picture of the monster. That’s what he saw, he thought. That’s what he saw when he looked at these people who are supposed to be his parents.
There’s been a mistake.
We’re not meant to be here.
He moved back to the wall of pictures, tracing with his finger the white wings of the drawn swan. Then he opened his notebook again, paused a moment, thinking, then wrote:
They’ll come for us all. In time.
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©2010 Tim Jeffreys
Visit my website: http://www.timjeffreyswriter.webs.com/
