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    The Knowledge and other stories
    The Knowledge and other stories
    The Knowledge and other stories
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    The Knowledge and other stories

    By Danny Rhodes

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    About this ebook

    Three children discover a suicide victim and the secret he tried to keep; a grieving railworker finds a glimmer of hope in an abandoned car; a group of friends visit a casino that craves more than money...

    Heartfelt, dark, unsettling, with fragments of the fantastical owing a debt to The Twilight Zone, this collection brings together six previously published short stories by Danny Rhodes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDanny Rhodes
    Release dateSep 24, 2011
    ISBN9780957036505
    The Knowledge and other stories
    Author

    Danny Rhodes

    Danny Rhodes grew up in Grantham, Lincolnshire before moving to Kent in 1994 to attend University in Canterbury. He has lived in the Cathedral city ever since. After a number of his short stories appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic his debut novel, Asboville was published by Maia Press in October 2006. Well received by critics it was selected as a Waterstones Booksellers Paperback of the Year and long-listed for the Waverton Good Read Award. It has been adapted for BBC Films by the dramatist Nick Leather. Rhodes' second novel 'Soldier Boy' was published in February 2009. He is currently working on his third novel, set in the Midlands during the 1980s. He continues to write short stories in a variety of genres. His latest published stories appear in Volume One of the quarterly publication The Fiction Desk, edited by Rob Redman (April 2011) and in the 10th Anniversary Issue of Openwide Magazine edited by James Quinton, a publication which gave him one of his first breaks in writing back in 2003.

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      Book preview

      The Knowledge and other stories - Danny Rhodes

      The Knowledge

      and other stories

      Danny Rhodes

      Copyright©2010 Danny Rhodes

      Smashwords Edition

      Carrion Publishing

      Also by Danny Rhodes

      Asboville

      Soldier Boy

      First published in the UK by Carrion Publishing

      This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by the way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

      ISBN 978-0-9570365-0-5

      www.dannyrhodes.net

      Cover Design: John Oakey

      Photograph: John McBride

      This one goes out to all the readers, writers, editors and publishers who have supported my work. Special thanks to James Quinton, Steve Hansen, Rob Redman and Scott Pack, to name but a few…

      Danny Rhodes, August 2011

      Foreword

      This collection represents a selection of short stories first published in Small Press Magazines in the UK and USA.

      My aim has always been to write stories which echo those that appeared on TV shows like The Twilight Zone, stories where reality and fantasy meet and yet we accept these meetings, stories where the fantastical is buried so deep in reality it’s hard to disengage one from the other.

      I am no Richard Matheson but you have to start somewhere.

      Danny Rhodes, September 2011

      Contents

      The Knowledge

      A Covering of Leaves

      The System

      The Insane World of Henry Zellinger

      Nightwalkers

      Devil’s Work

      The Knowledge

      It’s been with me as long as I can remember, this desire to seek out hidden places. When we were kids it was about exploration, about breaking the rules and trying to discover what it was the adults didn’t want us to know. We located hidden places and made them our own. We didn’t think about the danger. It didn’t enter our heads that some places were better off hidden. It didn’t seem to matter then. Perhaps if we hadn’t acquired the knowledge it wouldn’t matter still. Perhaps one day we’d be encouraging our own children to go and seek adventures in hidden places.

      The knowledge changed all that. The knowledge made us old. The knowledge has a way of passing itself on from one generation to the next.

      That’s why I fear for the children, because the knowledge is waiting for them. It lurks in its hidden places and calls out. Somewhere close by there’s a child with a thirst for adventure. Somewhere close by is the next poor soul in line to acquire the knowledge.

      It’s this way! Through here!

      Bruce was on the other side of the fence behind the ‘Keep Out’ sign, his cheeks puffed and flushed like ripened blackberries. It was one vicious afternoon. The railway tracks were sharp edged and angry with sunlight. Adam and I were blinking and rubbing salty sweat from our eyes, but Bruce’s eyes were wide and ready for anything.

      If you want to see you have to risk it.

      So risk it we did, crawled on our hands and knees through the gap in the fence to join him. It was summer. We were free. A door to a magical world had opened, one without school, without structure, where the only limits were our imaginations. There were butterflies amongst the flowers and fields of golden corn for us to get lost in. The sky was a great stroke of cobalt blue. In truth, it was difficult for us to contain ourselves.

      It’s funny how memories rise up from within and then subside. You’d think it would have shaped our lives, such was its impact at the time, but it didn’t really happen like that, not at first anyway. Somehow it managed to sink way down into the inky blackness that is my childhood, where it stayed for the most part, rose only in nightmares, forced me to sit up for hours with my bedside lamp on, chewing my fingernails to the quick. I’m thinking of it now because it’s Bruce’s wedding day and because I worked out over a beer yesterday evening, that it’s exactly twenty years since that sweltering Saturday when he led us down the slope that was the railway cutting, and along the edge of the tracks to the hut he’d discovered the weekend before. When I say ‘us’, I’m talking about Bruce, his younger brother, Adam, and myself. And perhaps I was premature in suggesting it didn’t shape our lives the way it might have because it may just have shaped Adam’s in some dark and unfathomable way. He’s the youngest. Perhaps we were just that little bit older. Perhaps we had the edge over a six-year-old boy with holes in his jeans who was forever to exist in the hollow domain of the middle child. We were eleven. Bruce and I had completed Primary school just two days before. We were about to start a new chapter in our lives and our world was changing. Adam’s world was still just beginning. He had no right to witness such things. And of course he was the one who witnessed it all, not us. We were only bystanders when the final blow fell. We forever had that detachment to cling to in the midnight hour. For Adam, there was no detachment. If the memories came to him they got right in to the places they liked best, coiled themselves around and clung tight, and there was nothing anybody could do about it, not doctors, not psychologists, not even priests.

      Twenty years. Earlier this afternoon I stood at the altar as best man to Bruce Littleton and Amy Stanhope. Three hours ago they walked down the aisle away from me; rings on fingers, hands locked together, for better or for worse, in love everlasting. In the front row Bruce’s mother was crying, his sister, too. Adam stood rigidly beside them, watching in silence, wearing the half-vacant expression that cloaks him whenever a crowd of people are gathered and there is a danger of their attention falling on him. Nobody else saw it, but I did. He was thinking of his brother and the life they’ve shared and perhaps calculating that it was twenty years to the day, almost to the minute since Bruce pushed open the door to that rickety old hut by the tracks, the door creaking in its desperate struggle to stay on its hinges, to show us the secret he’d been whispering about at school all week long, and discover another secret no small boy should ever be exposed to.

      It’s a vixen. She’s got two cubs, is what he’d told us as we clambered over the fence by the swimming pool on our short cut to the tracks.

      She’s been feeding them rabbits mostly. I watched her carry a dead one in. Its neck was broken, twisted right around.

      But there was no fox in the hut. There were no cubs either. There was the hole the vixen had dug and there was the evidence

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