Technically, this isn't new - I wrote it last fall. But it's a fun story that I haven't shared online before, so I hope you enjoy it. It's about a loyal son, a dying father, and a quest for a magical (?) artifact that goes spectacularly wrong. Let me know what you think!
“YOU MUST FIND IT!!”
A SHORT STORY BY
Lewis B. Smith
Roger’s father, Morris, was
dying. The cancer had come back, and no
treatment seemed to slow it down. Morris
had been in hospice care for a month now.
The morphine kept the worst of the pain at bay, but it also left him
delirious much of the time. Roger and
his siblings took turns sitting with him at night so their mother could get
some rest.
Each evening, there was about an hour after
the morphine wore off, but the pain was still suppressed. During these times Morris was clear and
lucid, and Roger enjoyed these fleeting chances to talk with his dad. This particular evening Roger was sitting trying to read a book as Morris dozed. Roger had eaten a sandwich, but Morris could
only sip protein shakes through a straw.
Even that left him nauseous some of the time.
“Son?” the old man’s voice
quavered. “Roger, is that you?”
“I’m here, Dad,” Roger said.
“Of course you are,” Morris said. “I’m sorry, my vision is going. Now I see you. Son, there’s something very important I have
to tell you. The pain is building again,
but I need to say this before I get more drugs.”
“Sure, Dad, what is it?” Roger said.
Morris tried to pull himself upright
and groaned as the tumors in his abdomen pressed against his stomach.
“Sumbitch, that hurts!” he
groaned. “Getting worse all the
time. It’s gonna eat me up soon. What was I saying?”
“You wanted to tell me something
important,” Roger said.
“That’s right. Gotta hold it together here,” Morris mumbled.
“OK, son. Listen. Crystal ball.
She lost it again. You have to
find it! Don’t tell your Mom, whatever
you do. But you must find crystal ball!”
“Crystal ball?” Roger repeated. He’d seen all of his parent’s knickknacks
over the years – they collected oddities from all over the world – but he’d
never seen a crystal ball in the collection.
“She needs to have it back, or she’ll
destroy everything!” Morris rasped. “Oh,
dear God, this hurts, son. Can I have
morphine yet?”
Roger looked at the clock. It was a half hour before the next dose was
due, but did it really matter at this point?
He took the syringe from the shelf where the nurse had put them and
injected it into the bag of saline solution, then hung the bag and attached the
tube to his dad’s IV.
“Here you go, Dad, this should give
you some relief,” he said.
“Thanks, son. Remember: find crystal ball! And . . .” Morris sighed as the first of the
morphine hit his veins. “Don’t . . .
tell your mother. Oh, that’s
better. I think I can sleep now.”
“You just rest, Dad,” Roger said,
kissing his father’s forehead.
He sat back down, his book forgotten
for the moment, pondering what his Dad had said. A crystal ball? A woman who would “destroy everything” if it
wasn’t returned? And why couldn’t he
tell his mother? He would have dismissed
it as a morphine-fueled fantasy, but Dad’s eyes had been clear when he said it,
and he’d seemed very earnest. But why
couldn’t he tell his mother about it?
Was there a real danger to his family?
Roger thought about it for the next
two hours. At nine, his sister Amy came
in to relieve him, and he pulled her aside for a moment. Amy was six years older than him, and might
remember things he didn’t.
“Did Mom and Dad ever have a crystal
ball?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “They had one of
those ‘Magic 8 Ball’ things when I was little, but Jerry broke it open to see
how it worked, and they threw it out. Why do you ask?”
“Dad got all worked up earlier about a
crystal ball. He said if I didn’t find
it that ‘she would destroy everything,’ whatever that means,” Roger explained.
“Who did he mean by ‘she’?” his sister
wondered. “He wasn’t talking about Mom,
surely!”
“No, in fact, he made me promise not
to tell Mom anything about it!” Roger explained.
“You might try Aunt Carol,” Amy
suggested.
“That’s a good idea!” Roger said. “She’s a night owl, so maybe I can catch
her.”
Carol was Morris’ older sister, and
lived a couple of hours away, in Cleveland.
A spry seventy-five-year-old, she loved to read till midnight and get up
around ten the next morning. Roger
walked across the street to his house and dialed her as soon as he got home.
She picked up on the second ring, and her
voice betrayed her anxiety as she answered.
“Roger, sweetie, is Morris. . . ?” she
began.
“He’s resting comfortably,” Roger
reassured her. “The doctors say he has a
few weeks left, give or take.”
“That’s cold comfort when your baby
brother is dying,” she said. “I know
they mean well, it’s just so – so cold of them to put it that way! Well, what do you need, sweetie? You didn’t
call to listen to an old woman ramble about the shortcomings of for-profit
medicine!”
Roger chuckled. His aunt was an unrepentant 1960’s flower
child liberal; his Dad a MAGA Trump supporter.
Roger himself hated all politicians equally, not least for making his
family’s holiday gatherings so combative.
“No, I didn’t, Carol,” he said. “I called because of something Dad told me
tonight. Do you remember Dad ever owning
a crystal ball?”
“A crystal ball?” she asked. “Let’s
see. As a boy, he collected toy cars,
fossils from the creek, arrowheads from the fields across the way, and baseball
cards. His room was like a cut-rate junk
emporium! But I don’t remember him ever
having a crystal ball or anything that resembled one.”
“Well, he must have at some point,”
Roger said. “Because he asked me to find
it, and made it sound pretty urgent. He
said ‘she’ll destroy everything if she doesn’t get it back!’ – and that’s a direct
quote.”
“Who she? Your mom she?” Carol asked.
“Not Mom,” Roger said. “In fact, Dad specifically said not to tell
her about this.”
“Hmmm,” Carol mused. “Morris was
stationed in Okinawa back in his Navy days, and I know he continued to collect
all sorts of oddments while he was over there.
He had this one Navy buddy that he shared an apartment with off base
back then. That fellow might know. What was his name – Thackery or Tackery or
something like that. . .”
“Tadbury!” Roger exclaimed. “I think Dad got a Christmas card from him
last month.”
“Yes, Dennis Tadbury, that was it!”
Carol said. “He might know about this
mysterious crystal ball!”
“I’ll find his address in the
morning,” Roger said. “Mom never throws
cards away!”
The next day Roger went over to his mom
and dad’s house and waited till his mother was busy trying to get Morris to
eat. He then went to the drawer where
she kept the family Christmas cards, all bundled by year. The most recent set hadn’t been bundled yet,
and flipping through them, he quickly located one from Dennis Tadbury. He snapped a picture of the return address on
his phone, then went back over to his house after making sure his mom didn’t
need any help. Once there, he looked up
Dennis Tadbury on the internet and found that the Navy veteran lived in
Buffalo, NY, but didn’t have a listed phone number. Roger thought about it for a bit, and then
remembered the urgency in his Dad’s voice.
He called the local airport and booked a commuter flight to Buffalo,
which would leave later that afternoon. He called Amy and Jerry to ask them to
cover his shift with Morris that night, and drove to the airport.
Roger wasn’t wealthy, but he had won a
half million dollars in the lottery a couple years before and used it to clear
all of his debts. He’d banked the remaining money and let it earn interest,
while continuing to work his job as a travel agent. Since he was divorced, with
no children, he had more disposable income than any of his siblings. That, he
thought as he drove to the airport, was probably why his Dad had asked him to
find the crystal ball.
He had a rental car waiting for him in
Buffalo and drove to the address on the card after grabbing a quick meal at the
IHOP near the airfield. The house was neatly kept and the yard mowed, and the
name “Tadbury D, USN” was printed neatly on the mailbox. He rang the bell, and after a short delay,
Tadbury answered.
He was a spry,
white-haired man of seventy years or so.
He wore a grey cardigan and a bright green bow tie. Morris thought he resembled an extra from a
Hallmark Christmas movie.
“Can I help you, young man?” he asked.
“I’m Roger Hendrick, son of Morris
Hendrick,” Roger began.
“Of course! You look just like Morris did when I knew
him!” Tadbury exclaimed. “You Mom told
me Morris has cancer. He hasn’t passed
on, has he?”
“No,” Roger said, “but the doctors
have told us it’s just a matter of time.
He’s eaten up with it.”
“Damn!” Tadbury said. “That’s terrible news. But what brings you out here, young sir? I appreciate the update, but there has to be
more to it than that!”
“Well, sir, you know how my Dad always
collected all sorts of eclectic junk,” Roger said.
“Oh yes,” replied Tadbury. “Our little apartment on the Ginza was overflowing
with all the stuff he bought or found in Okinawa! Shells, Japanese carvings and porcelain, bits
of uniforms and weapons from the war, you name it!”
“Did Dad ever have a crystal ball?”
Roger asked.
The old man thought for a long time.
“Not that I know of,” he finally
said. “He had a lot of weird things, but
I don’t recall ever seeing anything like a crystal ball, or even hearing him
talk about it!”
Roger slumped with disappointment. The
old man patted him on the shoulder.
“Come on in and have a cup of coffee,”
he said, “and we’ll try to figure it out.”
Roger sat down in a comfortable
recliner and explained his father’s cryptic request as he sipped the rich dark
brew that Tadbury poured him.
“You know, your Dad did have an
interest in occult items for a while, after he got out of the service,” Tadbury
said. “He wrote me about it all the time
while he was in college. He had a fellow
he roomed with at MIT that shared his passion.
What was that guy’s name?
Ledbetter – no, that’s not it, but close. Just a second.”
Tadbury got up and went over to his
desk. After a bit of digging, he produced an ancient manila envelope filled
with old letters. He dumped them out on
the table and began flipping through them and skimming, humming a Rolling
Stones song as he did.
“Here it is!” he said. “Leddenfelter!
Such a weird name, I remembered it forty years later! Well, sort of remembered, anyway. Arthur Leddenfelter. He and your Dad got in some trouble over a
collection of shrunken heads they were caught with, back around 1980 or so.”
“I think Mom mentioned that once,”
Roger said. “She made him get rid of a
bunch of that stuff.”
“Well, if your Dad ever had a crystal
ball, my guess is that Arthur Leddenfelter would know about it,” Tadbury said.
“Do you have any idea where
Leddenfelter lives these days?” Roger asked.
“No, but that can’t be too common of a
name,” the old Navy man replied. “You should be able to track him down on that
Facey-gram thing that everyone raves about.”
“Not a fan of the digital age, I take
it?” Roger asked.
“Not in the least!” the old man
replied. “All it seems to have done is
given all the stupid people in the world a place to band together and reinforce
their idiocy. And everyone knows there
is nothing more dangerous than stupid people in large numbers!”
“Thank you, Mister Tadbury,” Roger
said. “You were a huge help.”
“Glad to do so, for your Dad’s sake,” Tadbury
replied. “Give him my best wishes, and I
do hope you’re able to give him some peace about this.”
“I will,” Roger said. “He still has his lucid moments.”
“And when the time comes, please let
me know,” Tadbury said. “I’d like to
come and pay my respects.”
“I will,” Roger promised, and headed
out to his car.
When he got back to the hotel, he
plugged up his laptop and did a search for the name Leddenfelter. Tadbury was right – it wasn’t a common
name. There were only fifty
Leddenfelters in the entire United States. Only two of them were named
Arthur. One of those was a
sixteen-year-old TikTok star, so that ruled him out. The other one lived in Spokane, Washington,
and was seventy-two – only three years younger than Morris. Roger saw with some relief that his number
was actually listed, and after calculating the time difference, he dialed it.
“This is Arthur Leddenfelter,” a
quavering voice said on the other end of the line. “May I help you?”
“I certainly hope so,” Roger said. “Were
you a college roommate of Morris Hendrick?”
“I certainly was!” Leddenfelter said,
with considerably more energy. “He and I
were quite the young terrors back in our day!
We haven’t spoken in several years – I’m afraid his politics came
between us. How is he?”
“Not well, I’m afraid,” Roger
said. “He has terminal cancer. But I am his son, and he’s asked me to track
down something of his. I don’t think his
mind will be at rest till I find it.”
“Well, he left a lot of his occult
stuff with me when that gal of his made him get rid of it,” Leddenfelter
said. “So there’s a chance I can help
you.”
“Do you remember a crystal ball?”
Roger asked.
There was a long silence on the other
end. For a moment, Roger thought that
perhaps his phone had dropped the call, but then Leddenfelter gave a sigh.
“I’m sorry, young man,” he said, “but
I was in a car wreck ten years ago that damaged some of my long-term memory and
left me with mobility issues. I don’t
recall a crystal ball, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Problem is, those boxes of your dad’s are up
in my attic, and I can’t do stairs anymore.
You are welcome to come out and search for it.”
Roger swallowed. Spokane was on the other side of the country,
and he had already missed one night with his Dad. Who knew how many nights the old man had
left? Still, as he recalled the anxiety
in his Dad’s voice, he decided that he had to do it. He called Jerry and Amy and told them what
was going on, asked them not to tell his Mom, and then booked his flight.
The next morning he flew across the
country, arriving in Spokane late in the afternoon. He took his rental – a grey Toyota – to the address
Leddenfelter had provided. The house was
a large but decrepit bungalow-style dwelling with a circle drive up front. Roger parked his car, mounted the steps, and
knocked on the door.
“Come in, Mister Hendrick,” the voice
he had heard earlier sounded through an intercom. “The door is open.”
He entered the front hall and found a
wizened old man in a wheelchair waiting to greet him. Leddenfelter smiled and offered his hand.
“You look a great deal like your
father,” he said. “I know you probably
don’t want to be away from him for long, so there’s no need to stand here and
make small talk. Upstairs you’ll see a pull cord that brings down the ladder to
the attic. There’s a light switch to your left.
Your Dad’s boxes, as I recall, are all at the far end, on the right
side. Take as much time as you need. I hate to think that my dying friend is troubled
because of something that I’ve held onto for thirty years!”
“I can’t say how much I appreciate
this,” Roger told him.
“Think nothing of it! Now go start digging,” Leddenfelter said with
a cackle.
Roger needed no further
encouragement. He mounted the steps and
found the pull cord, then climbed the ladder into the attic and switched on the
lights. At the far end, he found a pile
of eight boxes with his dad’s name neatly printed on their lids. One by one, he dug them out and went through
them. Some of what he found was amusing,
some disturbing, and some just plain bizarre.
But even after emptying all eight boxes and going through everything in
them, there was no sign of a crystal ball or anything resembling one. After diligently digging for two solid hours,
he gave a sigh and packed everything back up.
He stacked the boxes the way they had been and came back downstairs.
He found Leddenfelter seated at the
kitchen table, eating a bowl of soup and sipping a cup of coffee which appeared
to have been fortified from the open bottle of Jim Beam next to it.
“No luck?” the old man asked him.
“Not a crystal ball, a baseball, or a
football!” Roger said. “I really thought
this would be where I would find it, too.
Is there any other place where some of my father’s stuff might be
stored?”
Leddenfelter thought for a long
moment, and then brightened.
“There’s an old junk store down the
road,” he said. “I remember now, right before the accident, I was clearing out
some things. There were a couple of
boxes your dad had sent me later on, stuff he said wasn’t as important to him
but he thought I might like. I had so
much clutter already, I called him a few months later and asked if I could take
those boxes to the junk store, since I was getting rid of some of my stuff,
too. He said it would be no problem, he
was better off being rid of those things.
So I took six boxes down there, but I’d printed his name on those two,
just like on the ones upstairs. So
that’s where they wound up.”
“Blast!” Roger said. “Who knows where they are now!”
“Probably still there,” Leddenfelter
said. “Old Oscar that runs the place is
as crippled up as I am, and he had a ton of inventory he’d never unpacked. I’d bet those boxes are still there. Thing is, he only opens three days a week
nowadays. You might could catch him in
the morning. Oscar Forrester is his
name, and the store is called ‘Forrester’s Junk Emporium.’ If this mysterious ball isn’t there, I don’t
know where it is!”
Roger sighed and thanked the old man,
and then drove back to the Best Western where he’d booked a room for the night.
The bed was hard and lumpy, and the room
smelled of stale Cheetos and beer. But Roger dropped off to sleep almost right
away when he turned the light off. In his dreams, he chased a glowing crystal
ball down the steep slope of a mountain, but it always rolled just out of his
reach, no matter how hard he ran after it.
The next morning he called Forrester’s
Emporium, and the recording informed him the place would open at ten o’clock. Roger
packed his bag, checked out of his room, and put his suitcase in the car. Then he ate a small, wrinkled apple and a
fresh -cooked waffle that constituted the hotel’s “Continental Breakfast,” and
read his book until ten.
The location was about ten miles down
the road, and Roger got there just in time to see an old man on a walker unlocking
the front door. He got out of his car
and followed Mr. Forrester – he assumed this was the proprietor – into the
store. Once there, he explained his
errand and asked for permission to search for his dad’s boxes. Forrester was reluctant at first, but a
twenty dollar bill improved his disposition, and he unlocked a back room where
he said all of his “recent inventory” was stored.
“I keep thinking I’ll unpack all those
boxes when I sell of some of this junk,” he explained, “but business is slow,
and people keep bringing me more things, so I never got to those boxes old
Leddenfelter brought me. They’re still
where I put them ten years ago.”
Roger groaned when he entered the storage room
– it was piled to the ceiling with boxes of junk! It took him an hour of searching and moving
stacks to find the two boxes with “M. Kendrick” written on the outside in black
marker. He pulled them out and emptied
them, going through the contents and finding nothing. But as he sighed in defeat, he noticed a
small pile of junk behind where the shelf where the two boxes had been. One of
the box lids had been open – could it be that those things had fallen out? He used a broom to pull the pile towards him
and saw to his delight a dark sphere in the miscellaneous junk. He reached under the shelf and grabbed it. It was covered with dust and grime, but there
was no doubt about what it was. He
carried it in triumph out to the shop and asked for a rag to clean it with.
It was a hideous thing, about six
inches tall including its pedestal. The
crystal was a muddy amber color, and embedded in its center was a disturbingly
realistic glass eye. It looked like a
cheap horror movie prop, but Roger was glad to have it.
“That’ll be fifty bucks!” the old man
said when he saw what Roger had.
“Fifty buck for this piece of junk? I already paid you twenty just to look for
it!” Roger said.
“And it’s exactly what you came for,
so fifty more bucks is a small price to pay for your dad’s peace of mind, now
innit?” the old man cackled.
“Forty and not a penny more!” Roger
said.
“Fine!” the old man snapped. “Now get out of here! You’re so filthy you’re going to scare away
my customers!”
Roger stared around the empty store
and chuckled – you had to admire the old man’s optimism! But he looked at the tawdry globe he held in
his hand and breathed a sigh of relief.
Now his dad could pass away knowing the crystal ball had been located! Of course, he still had to find out who ‘she’
was, but hopefully his Dad could tell him in a lucid moment. He slapped two twenties down on the counter,
and then after a moment’s reflection, he dropped another ten down.
“You really were helpful,” he
said. “So I guess I’ll be OK with
fifty.”
He changed clothes in the airport
bathroom, ate a huge lunch in one of the terminal restaurants, and by sunset he
had boarded his flight back east. It was
about nine the next morning when he claimed his baggage and picked up his own
vehicle from the lot where he’d left it three days before. A snowstorm had come in, and after he got
home, he took a long hot shower, and then bundled up in a thick coat before
walking over to his folks’ house. The
crystal ball was a dense, heavy weight in his pocket.
His mother was standing by Morris’ bed
when he got there, and his dad was sleeping quietly.
“Roger!” she said. “It’s so good to see you back! What was this mysterious business that called
you away?”
“Something Dad asked me to find,” he
said. “But he didn’t want me to tell you
about it.”
Katie Kendrick rolled her eyes.
“Son, he’s only had one or two waking
moments since you left,” she said. “Honestly, he’s slipping away fast. You had better tell me; I don’t know if he
will wake up again before the end.”
“OK, Mom, I guess I will,” Roger said
after thinking for a minute. He pulled the globe from his pocket. “Dad sent me to find this, and I’m supposed
to return it to someone. Thing is, I
don’t know who. He just said I had to get it back to her, or she would ‘destroy
everything,’ in his words.”
Roger’s mother stared at him for a
long moment, her mouth frozen in a perfect ‘O’.
“Tell me exactly what your father
said,” she demanded. “Word for word, please.”
Roger closed his eyes a moment, trying
to remember his dad’s demand verbatim.
“He told me ‘Crystal ball – you must
find it! She’s lost it again, and she’ll
destroy everything if she doesn’t get it back. Don’t tell your Mom!’ That’s as near as I can remember it,” he
explained.
Katie’s reaction stunned her son. She threw back her head and laughed, a hard,
long belly laugh such as she hadn’t had since before Morris got ill.
“Please tell me you didn’t have to
travel too far to find that monstrosity,” she said.
“It was in Spokane, Washington,” Roger
said, feeling suddenly stupid.
His mother laughed even harder at
this, so hard she had to reach for a chair and sit down, holding her sides as
she shook with mirth.
“What the hell is so funny?!” Roger
finally demanded in frustration.
Katie took a few deep breaths and
dashed some tears of mirth from her eyes.
“Crystal’s ball,” she finally
said. “That’s what he told you. Not ‘a crystal ball!’ Crystal was our cat,
back when we were newlyweds. She had a
hollow metal ball with jingle bells on the inside that was her favorite toy. She would bat it around and chase it all over
our little apartment. But every now and
then, she would hit it to some place where she couldn’t reach – down the grate
or under the fridge. And she would go
absolutely nuts! She would shred
curtains, pee on our bed, knock every dish off the shelf, and generally trash
the place until we got her toy back. Oh, Roger, son, oh my!”
With that she collapsed into another
fit of laughter.
“Then what is this thing?” he asked in
frustration.
“I have no idea,” his mother
said. “I’ve never seen it before in my
life!”
“Roger?” came a weak voice from the bed. Morris Kendrick was awake again, his eyes
clear. “Did you find Crystal’s ball? That cat will destroy everything if we don’t
get her ball back to her, and your mother will kill me!”
Roger turned to face his dad, still
holding the crystal globe in his hand.
The old man’s eyes widened slightly
when he saw it, and then his brow furrowed.
“Son,” he said, “What on earth is that
hideous thing?’
But Roger could not answer over the
sound of his mother’s laughter.
