My latest (I have to keep writing while I'm editing the novels). Should be available next Friday/Saturday (already a third completed, but as ever I have a cover)
Somewhere Never Travelled or Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind a Novella by PJ Lyon.
Quote:
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Time and distance seperated them, but when Tom Gill's dying grandfather goes missing on Christmas Eve, no time or distance can keep him from returning. Now a search for a sick old man will reveal the secrets of a town and a Grandfather Tom thought he knew, but is only now discovering.
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Prologue
The old man huddled against the dying light of his cigarette and pulled a face that had delighted generations of his children and grandchildren alike.
“So, what’ll it be on this night?” he said.
“Another story, Billy,” his first grandson said, for even though Billy had the grand title, everyone knew him as Billy.
“Which story?” Billy said.
“The one about India and the hot curry-no!-the one about New York and how you-”
Billy held a boxer’s mit of a hand into the air and from that raw and powerful fist he extended a finger, until, under the flickering light of the almost-but-not-quite dead cigarette, he conjured a gun.
A gun that he fired off into the imagined past and there to the docks of New York where a boat slept in the muddy waters of the Hudson and the salt-lashed and far-from-home men were very much awake.
From the gun, a bullet—
"Bang!" Billy said.
The rapt grandchild, eyes wide waited for the next and the favourite lines of all.
But the gun dry clicked as Billy opened his mouth to speak, then stopped.
"What happened next, Billy?" the grandchild said.
Billy, a faraway look in his eyes, shook his head.
"A different story tonight, I think," he said as he holstered his firing hand. "Yes, a story I haven't told before."
The grandchild, pulled in by the voice, scooted forward.
"A new one? Is it true?"
"Aren't they all?" Billy said, a wink in his smile. "But this one even more so. This one is the greateststory ever to be told."
"Better than the boxing one?"
"Aye, a million times better."
"And the one about the singing man?"
"Chalk and cheese."
Jumping mad from excitement, the grandchild said; "Tell me! Tell me!"
Billy leaned forward, the promise of some faraway and exotic adventure in his eyes, the rest of the night waiting to begin on his breath.
"Are you sure you want to hear this one?" he said, toying.
"Yes! Yes!"
"Absolutely sure?"
"Yes! Yes!
"Okay then, our story begins on a night not unlike this one. A Christmas Eve in a town like this, not so far from a city, and a long long way away from any kind of good weather." Billy painted the imagined world with his fingers, casting shadows under the nictoine-dying light from his cigarette. And now his fingers danced snowflake patterns. "And in this town, not so far from a city and way to far away from the good weather, it began to snow. Big snow, mind you. Thick, each flake as big as a man's head."
The grandchild saw the snow and the town and for a moment he was all wrapped arms to keep hismelf from the chill.
"And under that big as a man's head snow, there was a man. Let's call him..." Billy thought the question out with a shift of his eyes, waiting for the response that always came.
"Call him Tom, please, Billy, please call him—"
Billy stabbed the suggestion mid-air and held it up on his finger. "Yes, Tom's as good a name as any, I suppose. Okay then, Tom it is. And Tom, a grown man of course, not a little boy or nothing, he arrives in town looking for someone, for some thing..."
"What, who was he looking for?" Tom said, imagining himself a man under the snow in a town not unlike theirs, not so far from a city and very far away from the sun.
Before Billy could answer the question, the front door opened and in came an avalanche of family, shaking themselves of snow and cold and into laughs and warm seats on the couch.
Billy leaned with conspiracy in mind and beckoned Tom close with a cupped hand.
Close to Tom's ear he spoke warm words, enough to take away the chill of any snow from any story.
"One day I'll tell you the rest of that story, I promise," he said.
One day...
...twenty years of days passed before Tom knew the story and the man who stood there under that snow, not so far from a city and a long way from good weather.
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Coming soon to FEEDBOOKS.