All stories

Bill Tubbs was standing next to the tightly closed door of his rustic log cabin. He had been standing there for several minutes, breathing slowly to calm himself. Bill Tubbs was completely nude. He blushed slightly at the thought of this, and his body tingled, just a little.

He was nude! He had done it! He was naked in his own private wood cabin, moments away from grasping the door handle to stride forth into the great outdoors as his creator had always intended.

It had taken him three days to reach this point. Day one had been glorious – off with his shirt and his vest, at wander topless in his private cabin before the horror glimpse of his pale fish belly tummy in the bathroom mirror had sent him diving for a thick towelling bathrobe.

But day four. He was going to do it. He was going to open the door to his cabin and step outside.

Naked.

It’s at times like these that most other people would take a step back and wonder – just for a moment – whether accepting a job as the head of finance for the National Nudism Society was the best career move for a card carrying shy. Sure, he ticked ninety-nine out of the hundred boxes, and sure, it was a massive step up for him, career wise. But nude, in public? Bill went weak at the knees at the thought of this. He stumbled. He put out a hand to save himself. His fingers caught on the door handle. The door swung, blazing the light of the midday sun that dazzled his eyes and forced him to put up his other hand to shield his eyes from the glare as he sought vainly for the door handle.

Bill stumbled, naked and pale, till slowly he stilled with the wonder of it. He was outside. He was naked. No busload of Japanese tourists stared open mouthed at the sight. Bill was shy, but he was also a cautious man. It had been a work of genius to rent a cabin out here in the wilderness, dozens of miles from another living soul.

Bill was totally alone, and he began to strut. His therapist had advised Yoga, so Bill threw himself into Downward Dog.

A few days later and Bill was almost at one with nature. His natural fish grey pallor had been swapped for something approaching all over lobster. He had added a few pirouettes into his early morning yoga routine, almost giddy at the thought of his first day on the new job. In fact, Bill had almost relaxed enough to leave the safe in his room unlocked, before thinking better of it – what if an itinerant tramp should happen by whilst he was outside a-frolic in the early morning sun? Bill Tubbs had finally conquered most of his demons, but there was nothing wrong with being careful.

He galloped back through the cabin and hauled open the front door. He gambolled, gazelle like out through the door and so a-tuned was he to this solitary life that he quite failed to notice the police officer until he had gone through Downward Dog and into Autumnal Avenue.

The call came in from the duty sergeant at around 2am, an anonymous tip off, he said.

“Was it a man or a woman?” I asked down the crackling receiver, more to delay getting out of bed than any real need to know.

“Man, ma’am. Sounded drunk. Deep voice, bit of a lisp. Probably a tramp - that alley’s pretty popular with rough sleepers, especially in this weather, it’s nice and secluded.”

“Alright, I’ll go straight there” I told him, wearily. “The others?”

“Already on their way, ma’am.”

Outside was miserable; the tail end of autumn when the once crisp, fresh picture-book leaves are turning to brown, stinking mulch on the pavements and the air is permanently damp and freezing. My car smelled of mould and old cigarettes and didn’t begin to get warm until I arrived at the crime scene.

At this time of night the city was a dystopic wilderness. Pulsing bass lines and shrieking laughter floated over from the main strip, but over here, they mingled with the crashes and night howls of the underworld.

Broken windows stared blindly as I made my way towards the alley, a river of reeking matter trailing me, oozing its way along the gutter. Here the paving slabs are treacherous and uneven, and rats like dogs watch you from the shadows.

The cars and police tape had drawn a crowd and the darkness was filled with people craning to get a glimpse of the grisly scene. Men with newspaper tied around their feet, with sores at their mouths and filthy sleeping bags around their shoulders; women in dressing gowns with cigarettes and yellow skin and hollow eyes jostled for position.

I ducked under the tape.

“Where is it?”

“Over here, ma’am.” It was Jess, my DI. She was managing everything with her usual calm competence. She walked me over “it’s -”

But I saw for myself what it was and understood why she hesitated. Behind one of the police cars was a large, old-fashioned safe, the kind with wheels you have to turn to open. How it had come to be in this godforsaken alley was a mystery in itself.

The door was unlocked and inside was the body; a broken, misshapen mess that had been forced into the cramped space and now spilled out onto the damp, dirty floor. Its face was spattered with blood, eyes open, a mouth full of broken teeth gaping at me.

“Cause of death?”

“We’re not sure yet, ma’am. We didn’t want to move the body until you’d seen it.”

I nodded once, wrapped my coat around me and squatted to look more closely. The body had been forced inside the safe - Maybe to conceal it? Unlikely - you couldn’t keep a secret like this long around here. Or was it to make a statement? My blood chilled at the thought and I stood up without taking my eyes from the corpse.

“A strange one” I said.

“Yes, - a real mystery. I look forward to working on it with you, detective chief inspector…”

But the voice wasn’t Jess’s. It was a soft, deep man’s voice, with the faintest trace of a lisp.The anonymous tipper? I whirled around to face him, but he was gone, melted into the darkness and the press of dead-eyed onlookers that surrounded us.

Omega 8: Arrival

Reba and I arrived on the island, code named Omega 8, with ten marines, our research gear, an armored jeep and a safe. We’d boarded a V-22 Osprey from the aircraft carrier USS Truman, located in an undisclosed area in the Southern Atlantic Ocean. The Osprey dropped us down on the beach, the jungle too thick and wild for a landing, blasting sand in all directions.

“This certainly isn’t the Autumnal avenue I was hoping for,” Reba said as the Osprey lifted off again, flying low over the sea and fading into the distance.

“What the hell is an Autumnal avenue?” I asked, watching as the marines set up our basecamp closer toward the jungle.

“No idea,” Reba said before barking orders at the marines to be careful with our supplies. Her long hair was fire in the sun, and her blue eyes sparkled with the adventure awaiting us. The marines unloaded the safe out of the jeep at her instruction and placed it securely under a blue rain tarp.

“We need to watch that safe carefully. It’s got our lives locked up in there,” Reba said with a hint of worry and frustration.

“You think those drugs will work?” I asked, rubbing sand out of my eyes. I looked around. Vast, deep, forbidden jungle surrounded us. The final, unexplored country.

The satellite images the military had briefed us on were stunning. A wild place, never touched by man, and with creatures as tall as trees and as strange looking as anything out of a science fiction book.

“They work on elephants. But I can’t be positive. Let’s just hope they don’t like the taste of people,” Reba smiled up at me, her white t-shirt already soaked through with sweat from the late morning sun.

God damn I love this woman. Our wedding would have to wait until we got back but it would be worth it. I grinned back at her, hugged her tightly. After two years of research, we’d finally made it to Omega 8.

“Sorry about the wedding,” I said. Neither of us had spoken about it since it was called off just twenty-four hours earlier. Duty had called.

“We’ll reschedule. How did Tana take the news?” Reba asked, frowning. She’d hated keeping secrets from her best friend. They’d known each other since the fifth grade. They were now twenty-eight years old and still inseparable.

“She took it well. I think she was more concerned with Uncle Doug seeing her naked in the dressing room.”

“Oh please, she probably loved it. She always was a tramp.” Reba left the conversation to check on the safe. She didn’t trust anyone, including these marines, to guard it.

“Oh shit!” Reba’s voice echoed through the trees a moment later.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as I ran up to the base camp. Reba was next to the open safe. My heart skipped.

“It was unlocked. The sedatives are gone.” Reba gave me a grave look, her face scrunched up in worry and fear.

Sabotaged.

And it wasn’t even lunch time.

Not a tramp in the country but a sedate walk through a sculpted avenue of trees. Trees planted in neat rows that visibly demonstrated humanity’s mastery over nature, a comfort to her mother.

Sarah read Dad’s nameplate to make sure they’d got the right one.

“He loved this place” said the nameplate.

“Did he?” Sarah thought. It seemed tame compared to the wild powerful rush of windborne oxygen one got on a mountaintop. “This Place” reminded her of the Tree museum in the Joni Mitchell song where they charged the people “a dollar a time just to see ‘em”. It wasn’t the wilderness he yearned for but rarely saw in his later years.

And after this morning’s revelations how much that she presumed about Mum and Dad was actually true?

At some point her parents had decided to cast their relationship into a lifelong iron bond resistant to boredom and disillusion and the dissolve of dreams? Millions had made these traps for themselves in late twentieth century only to see successive generations rise below them and try to cast them off.

She listened to the tittle-tattle about her mother’s various new friends at the church and realised that they had rarely ever spoken about Dad even when he was alive, except to use him as a way of stopping a phone call abruptly. “Must get your father’s brisket on, you know what he’s like.”

The young, self-satisfied Sarah of a few hours before had missed the clues because in her mind her parents hadn’t quite been real, just predictable “relatives” whose conversational paucity forced her to flee back to the city after scarcely an hour in their company.

It had changed this morning when she had opened the forbidden safe in Dad’s study to retrieve his ashes. Reaching in, she had found with them, a pile of letters written by a Scottish lover years ago, before she’d been born.

The strangest thing though was that after the initial stab of pain on her mother’s behalf, it didn’t seem strange at all. If anything it felt like the obvious answer to all the nagging questions she’d never asked.

Mum had popped her head in, seen Sarah looking at the letters, made a disapproving huffing sound like the one she’d made when Sarah had been caught smoking out of her bedroom room window and left.

Did he love this place? No! He loved Mountains, and boys-own adventures and a young Scottish man called Andy who attached sprigs of heather to his letters. But he’d put his true love aside for suburbia and respectability. And if he hadn’t done that she wouldn’t have existed.

From respect to her mother whose own story might carry even more pain, most of the ashes were scattered here in the place he hadn’t really loved. The old lady looked after them dry-eyed as they fluttered. “You always took after your father” she said bitterly.

But Sarah retained a tablespoon full of ashes in a small plastic bag.

And the next spring when she and her partner Jacqui headed north on their annual trip to Scotland to conquer various Munros she took the final pinch with her to scatter on the free, fresh, highland wind.

The avenue stretched onwards, endless and empty. Tall trees paraded down the centre, gold flecked leaves clinging tentatively with red fingertips. In the distance a figure’s stooped back is framed in the evening sun for a moment before sliding into the shadows.

A young man walks with light steps through the thigh high grass and knotted weeds. The man in the shadows waits for him, sat beneath a tumbled down shopfront. Tattered clothes, unwashed, unkempt hair covers a patchwork of scars criss-crossing his head and arms. Tired grafitti branches out around him blending into the wild cracks of the decaying walls.

“To walk the streets in the daylight is either brave or stupid”. He says quietly but with a voice that rolls down the broken streets.

“Maybe both? Besides you we’re hard to find in this city, and time is pressing.” The calmness in the young mans voice is thin and cracked.

There is a glint of regret in the old mans eyes. “No longer a city, my friend. The wilderness has reclaimed its foundations. It is only home to chaos now. Chaos and fear.”

“I’m not here for a lecture.” The young man says, determination and turmoil in delicate balance.

“I know why you have come. But let me ask you this? Why? Why bother? What good will it do. Look around you. There is nothing here for you. The city is dying. The earth is rotten. The skies weep bitter poison. Hate is king here. Division cuts anew each day and another part withers and dies. Better the sick be dead and the poor be buried, there is nothing here for them now.

What will change? Nothing. Tomorrow is today, is yesterday and so it will go always. You are but one here. What can you do?”

The old man is standing now, his eyes are narrow, his chest heaves in and out like an exhausted balloon hoping to pop. Suddenly he slumps down, dips his head into despair and asks, “What gives you the right to think you matter?”

The young man, walks closer. There is a wetness to his eyes that hints of the forgotten oceans. “I do not claim to matter. At least not alone. I come because I have to. Because there is just one day when I can stand up for something, despite all the horror, the pain, the abandonment. I have to believe. Some part of me has to dare to hope that maybe this time it’ll be different. And that maybe more will follow.”

The young man has reached the old man. He sees what the old man is sitting on. It is a safe. The door hangs loose, trying to escape, trapped by a single encrusted screw. The young man kneels in the dirt. The old man sighs and reaches into the safe. He raises his hand aloft. A thin black pencil cuts through the pale light.

“You have decided and it is not my place to say yes or no. So take it, go through the doorway, you will find the box.” His outstretched arm beckons to the doorway, the tip of the pencil, an arrow to the darkness.

The young man stands slowly. Silently he takes the pencil.

“Wait.” The old man says and reaching into his pocket brings out a slip of paper. As the young man takes the paper. The old man grips his arm tightly. “Remember you have only one chance. Make it count. X marks the spot.”