Skiddlethorpe and other stories



  SKIDDLETHORPE

  AND OTHER STORIES

  by

  PETER D. WILSON

  Monthly entries in the 2012 Daily Telegraph competition

  for pieces of up to 2000 words

  Copyright Peter D. Wilson

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  Disclaimer

  The content of these stories is fiction, and apart from some autobiographical material adapted as background to “Svetlana”, any resemblance to persons, events or situations in past or present reality is coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  Tiger

  Alpine Assignment

  The Road Taken

  Skiddlethorpe

  Uneasy Assassin

  Command Performance

  Svetlana

  Family Reunion

  Set a Thief ...

  Fantasy

  A Harmless Deception

  Fowler’s Cave

  About the author

  Cover photograph: Linn of Tummel, late summer 2012

  TIGER

  Tom raced down the garden, across the sunken lane and up into the meadow beyond, towards a pond where he had often fished unsuccessfully for newts and tadpoles. After a long spell of miserable weather it was a gorgeous spring day with brilliant sunshine, a few white clouds, and a breeze just strong enough to blow the cobwebs away without being uncomfortable - at least, not to a healthy, active young lad. However, a clump of gorse and hawthorn a couple of hundred yards away seemed to be blowing about more than the wind seemed to warrant, even in the stronger gusts, and he wondered why. Could there be something moving within it? He had occasionally seen a fox thereabouts, but if an animal was indeed responsible it must have been of a much bigger kind. As he went closer to look, the disturbance seemed to shift, and a moment later the puzzle resolved itself when out sprang a tiger.

  “What a splendid animal,” he thought, not registering the oddity of the situation. It slowly surveyed the surroundings, spotted Tom and paced majestically towards him. For some reason he didn’t run. Then out came another tiger; the first looked towards it, and a silent conversation seemed to pass between them. The second turned its head, uttered a low sound, and a cub emerged cautiously from the thicket. It too looked around, then ran to its mother who tapped it gently with a paw and started to lick stray tufts of fur into place.

  The cub soon had enough of this, wriggled free from the restraining paw and ran up to Tom, rubbed against his ankle and rolled over, looking up expectantly. The requirement was obvious, and Tom duly crouched to rub its chest while the parents looked on benignly. When he thought duty satisfied, he would have stood up, but the cub clasped his hand in its paws and clearly wanted more. At last the incongruity struck him: tigers don’t do this. Come to think of it, they had no business to be there at all. The wind had risen with a chilly edge, and looking up, he realised that without his noticing, the clouds had spread into a complete canopy while the older tigers were growing hazy and grey. The cub under his hand was curiously still.

  A snore startled him and he jerked awake. The cat on his knee stirred lazily and yawned, stretching out a paw and turning to look directly at him with the appearance of a question; Flora had always seemed almost human. With a shock, Tom noticed for the first time how prominent among the wrinkles were the veins of the hand resting on her fur. The years that had passed over him so lightly were now taking effect, and however reluctantly, he had to recognise that he was definitely getting on. For his age he was still remarkably fit, and he gratefully recognised his good fortune there, but the signs of deterioration - increasingly frequent lapses of memory, silly mistakes in familiar activities - had already caused him some anxiety. His thoughts often ran now to possible futures, none of them very encouraging, as well as to events in the past; he sometimes wondered what might be the connections between them. What premonition or lurking memory, for instance, could have prompted that curious dream about tigers?