I was searching for a suitable flashback today, and one with Dylan crossed my search path. Apart from links to stories that featured him and his buddies, there was an extract from the BookElves Anthology featuring him. I didn’t want to feature that again, but I realised I’d posted it to mark his passing, which was 26th February 2016.
So today, to commemorate him again, 9 years on, I’m doing a couple of extracts from another story which appears along with the two rewritten from the BookElves books, plus one more, in Messenger Misadventures. It adds up to just under 1000 words.
Dylan takes a fall
Dylan trotted over the hills from Sarlen without a care in the world. He’d given out all his messages, and if he didn’t get back too early, he would not get sent out with more. Being fast sometimes gave him more work than the others. That couldn’t be fair.
He loved the view from the top of the hill. To the west, the hillside sloped down to the sea loch, with Ulva in the south and the isle they called the Dutchman’s Cap in the distance, along with its companions. Away on the horizon was the low line of Tiree, and the more bumpy Coll. It was a good few hours before the sun would set behind them.
Ahead he saw the last ridge before he started downhill towards home. He contoured around the highest point, started down the other side, and avoided the bog at the bottom of the hill by steering left towards the track.
A figure waddled along ahead of him. It looked like Mrs Howie. Where had she been? He’d better go past her fast enough to show he was working. Too busy to stop, anyway.
“Hello, Mrs Howie,” he called as he was a few seconds from overtaking her. Better not to give her a shock or she’d complain to his uncles.
She half-turned just as he reached her.
“Och, it’s Dylan. Off again, I suppose?”
“Fraid so, can’t stop. Bye!”
He was away before she could say anything else, although he could hear her muttering to herself as he leapt down the track. He took a straight line across the bog, jumping from tussock to tussock, while the track went round in a big loop. In a few seconds he reached the junction for Haunn.
Approaching the stepping stones over the Ensay Burn, he decided not to risk the full leap over them, and landed on the middle section.
It wobbled.
He wobbled.
He pushed off with his landing foot and there was nothing to push against.
The stones collapsed under him, and he lurched forward, where he narrowly missed catching hold of a solid tussock and instead grasped a few thin strands of grass. They uprooted. He slipped backwards, hitting his head on the rocky side of the little gorge, and fell into the water.
Barely conscious, Dylan curled himself into a ball, still grasping grass in one hand. The Ensay Burn sent him tumbling down the gorge, floating half in and half out of the water.
~~~
[Dylan is washed up on a ledge below the sea cliffs]
~~~
Dylan’s first thought on waking was that he was dreaming still. As he stretched, the aches and pains returned, and he tested every limb to make sure they all still worked. His side felt very sore, and he could only take a small breath. Maybe he’d hurt his ribs.
Looking out, he knew it was past the first hour or even two, but it was one of those unnaturally still days when the sea looks like glass. A ripple alerted him to the presence of something, and he shuffled back a bit as it headed towards him on his ledge, several feet above the water now.
A flurry of water and some splashing, and a seal hoicked itself up onto the rock in front of him.
“Phewff!”
If that was a greeting, Dylan didn’t understand it. He recoiled from the fishy breath, but gathered his wits again. The seal wasn’t attacking him, after all.
“Good morning Mr Seal. Or Mrs Seal. I’m Dylan.”
The seal looked at him. Dylan looked back. Then the seal looked towards the north, and twisted around and slipped off into the sea with a ‘plop!’ as it entered the water.
“And goodbye to you, too,” Dylan muttered, and lay down on the rock again. What should he do? He wasn’t much good at swimming, and anyway he didn’t like the feel of his ribs. Maybe he should wait until someone else came along.
He didn’t have long to wait.
He could see a long pale greenish shape flowing towards him under the water, only betrayed by a V shaped ripple on the surface.
He backed up right against the cliff as a woman’s face, hair matted and adorned with shrimp and baby starfish, erupted from the surface. She pulled herself up so she was level with him. Oh no! She was naked! She looked at him, studied his body, peering round his front to look behind him, screeched something and slid back into the water.
Dylan relaxed, but at the same time his heart beat in excitement. He’d seen a mermaid! He’d always wanted to see one, but never before…
The mermaid (if it was the same one), put her head out of the water again, about ten yards away, and screeched some more.
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t speak Merlanguage,” Dylan said, wondering what they called their form of speech.
Another answering screech and the mermaid disappeared.
The ledge was only about ten yards long, so he explored it all. It was cut into the cliff, so that he could not get around the sheer rock to another ledge without swimming. Unless he waited for low tide to see if there was an alternative route lower down, he thought. This was not good. He was stranded. If the weather changed things could get very difficult. His side hurt too much to risk swimming, or climbing the cliff. He couldn’t yell for help, since the sound wouldn’t travel up to the land, only out to sea.
What on earth was he going to do?
Having taken all of this adventure in his stride so far, Dylan suddenly realised: he was stuck, he was helpless, and the high tide would probably sweep him out to sea again. Panic rose inside him.
But there was nothing he could do.
(c) J M Pett 2021
Don’t worry too much, the mermaid sends Deirdre to rescue him!
In the usual manner of these things, as the last I wrote, I think it’s the best of the four stories in Messenger Misadventures, although it comes second in the book. The fourth, also an original, is probably the next best 🙂
You can buy the ebook: Amazon, Apple Books, B&N for Nook, Kobobooks, and Smashwords. And the paperback is linked to those pages or you can get it at Blurb. Enjoy!
Lovely excerpt and great line drawings!
I remember this story—it’s a good one, for sure.