A Dance With Tilly
By Daniel Kelley
Copyright © 2012 Daniel Kelley
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents and places are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without permission in writing from Daniel Kelley.
Cover design by www.digitaldonna.com
Daniel Kelley is an author and a music arranger. His novel, Jack and Tilly, the sequel to his short story A Dance with Tilly, was published in November 2015. Nearly 675,000 books of Daniel’s compositions and arrangements have sold worldwide, and over 30,000 of his e-books have captivated readers. With lyricist JoEllen Doering, he also composed the music to the classic holiday song, “It's Christmas Time Again”.
Daniel mosaics, bakes constantly, annoys practically everyone with puns, is a massive EDM fan, and loves playing games of almost any kind, though Hearts is his current fave. He and his wife Cynthia have three children and too many fish. Adair, Darcy and Adele are the names of the children.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
Chapter One
I first noticed the professor when I was six or so. It was Halloween, and I’d rung his doorbell expecting yet another cooing mother. Instead, a gracious man with gleaming eyes and a neat Vandyke had appeared, and after listening to my exuberant greeting, he bade me welcome before politely requesting a trick. I’d frozen. This wasn’t something for which Croft had prepared me, and as he stood grinning in the darkness just a few feet away, he was offering no suggestions.
Halloween is a big deal in Massachusetts. Aside from the whole East Coast thing they’ve got going in the fall, Marblehead, where I live, is practically spitting distance from Salem, America’s self-proclaimed witch capitol. Pumpkins, scarecrows, goblins, witches, hay bales, gourds, and petrified black cats fill every shop window, line every stoop. Children begin wearing their costumes a week beforehand. At least Marblehead has never had leaflet-bearing pirates and sorcerers roaming the streets, as Salem does!
After what had seemed an eternity, the professor bent down, smiled, and carefully placed first one, and then a second full-size candy bar into my nearly full black sack. “Don’t worry about it, Jack,” he had said kindly. “Think about it for next year, though. Okay?” Stupefied that he’d known my name, I’d simply nodded, and then he had risen back up and quietly shut the door. Croft had been no help at all, merely laughing and saying, “How ’bout that, boyo?” And then he had proclaimed the professor’s house to be a fitting cap to the evening, and we’d crossed the street to enter my own home.
I was fourteen now. Halloween had already come and gone this year, but I was once again on the professor’s doorstep, this time waiting for him to come home so I could ask him about what I’d seen from my father’s room late last night. It was cold. The autumn nip had turned into more of a winter bite, with teeth that could chew through a down jacket faster than one could mouth Antarctica.
I looked up at the hand-painted white placard that hung beside the professor’s front door. “Capt. Josiah Saunders, 1786,” it announced demurely. Our own home had no such distinction, perhaps because it was sixty years younger than the professor’s. Or maybe it’s because our front door isn’t on the street, so nobody has ever bothered to enquire as to its provenance.
The professor’s house is a symmetrical, three-story brick edifice: five windows over five windows over four and a door. It is large and respectable and solid, with black-painted shutters guarding white double-hung windows, flower boxes that still boasted a few hardy perennials, and a sizable fenced garden in the rear.
I looked across the road at my own house, a dark green, wood-sided structure that seemed strangely misplaced. Though the same size as the professor’s, it was built perpendicular to the street, so the front door is located on what appears to be the side. Facing the impressive multitude of gleaming glass and flower boxes above me were a paltry seven windows, one over three over three.
And it was from the uppermost of these that I saw the professor last night, waltzing about his third floor with the most beatific expression I had ever witnessed. I’d been mesmerized, as at first he had danced alone; then, all of a sudden he had a partner, and I wasn’t at all sure she hadn’t been there before!
Croft had gone to Boston, his weekly jaunt to do whatever it was Croft did when set free. I’d traipsed upstairs, meaning to abscond with my dad’s DVD player, the one in the family room having fritzed out. Leaning behind the console to disconnect the cords, my eyes had been drawn by motion.
What grace, what tranquility was in every step, every move the professor made! And his partner, when she became clearer to me: the look of peace on her face, of pure happiness as she gazed adoringly into his eyes. She was dressed a bit oddly, in an old-fashioned, shiny black gown with a fringed white collar and lacy flounces at the wrists. Her dark hair was pulled back into a complicated bun, and dainty, fetching ringlets bounced lightly about her ears.
But it was her ethereal appearance that stunned me. She seemed to shimmer, to float in the professor’s arms. It was almost as if she were entirely weightless, although it was most likely because of another attribute of hers that I’d assumed this.
For she was transparent.
A bitter wind hurled itself down the street, and I stood, shivering. It was after five, and I could sit here no longer. Paulie’s Flicks closed in half an hour, and I needed something to watch tonight. The professor would have to wait.
I hopped on the bike I’d parked on his cobblestone forecourt, and huddled the handlebars as I rode the few feet to the corner of Hooper and Washington. Jogging left on Washington, I pedaled up the hill – past a gaggle of women’s shops, the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, a street crew trimming gnarled trees away from power lines. At the top of the hill was Abbot Hall, an uptight brick structure bounded by its own grassy park and topped with a massive, clock-festooned spire. Past this, I flew downhill toward Five Corners, an eclectic welter of businesses that lurked just out of the range of most tourists. Gray, blue, white, yellow, green and brown houses blurred by; yellow fire hydrants with white crowns; burnt-orange maples and capricious beeches and poplars; stubborn oaks that would resist changing color until the last minute, then turn a dull brown.
Paulie’s was crowded; what else could one do on a cold November night other than curl up by the television, a large bowl of buttered popcorn and a steaming mug of cocoa sitting close at hand? I dropped last night’s Wes Craven at the desk, picked out an old Brian De Palma, and headed outside again.
I walked my bike down the street, skirting the army of cracks jutting from the rugged sidewalk. Ladycakes was closed; no sticky bun for a pre-dinner treat tonight! I didn’t feel like pedaling all the way up to Walgreen’s, so I turned in at OneStop, a dingy convenience store I normally avoided because I found individually stickered candy bars to be strangely disturbing.
The bell above the door jangled as I entered. OneStop was always one dead fluorescent bulb short of dim, and atoned for its many deficiencies only by
providing an amazing assortment of candy. Abba-Zaba was my current favorite, and I brought one up to the counter, carefully peeling the sticker off before handing it to a smirking girl perched on a wooden stool. She put down the book she’d been reading, but didn’t move to take the sticker.
“What?” I asked, rather too brusquely.
She looked down at my proffered hand, then back at my face with a barely restrained smile. “You don’t want me touching the candy? Or is it something else?” Her voice was low, even, like a creek running smoothly in a rock-bound channel.
“I just… I thought it would be easier for you this way.” This time it was I who looked down, surprised at suddenly feeling abashed. Why should I care what this clerk thought? This shopgirl in a dubious establishment? I looked back up, and found a pair of humorous brown eyes studying me. Her smile widened and the babble of confusion within me grew, confoundedly turning my cheeks into what felt like kindled underbrush.
One hand finally slid off her lap to accept my offering. Our fingers met, I felt the silken pad of her thumb brush my forefinger. She keyed a few buttons on the cash register, and the till rang out. “A dollar, thirty-five,” she stated brightly. I fumbled in a pocket and came up with exact change. “Thank you!” she said, depositing the coins and then slamming the drawer shut.
I stood still for a minute, studying her face, wondering what it was that was making me feel this way. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she wasn’t exactly awful to look at, either. She was somewhere around my age, though maybe a year or so older, and had long, straight dark hair with wavy bangs adorning her forehead. Her mouth was warm, her face kind; a pert nose sat placidly above full red lips, and around her neck an ivory elephant with a missing foot hung on a thin silver chain.
“What?” she asked suddenly, mimicking my earlier question to her.
“I… nothing!” I turned and practically ran outside, feeling her laughing eyes on my back as I unintentionally bashed the shop bell with the door, as I fumbled with the kickstand of my bike, as I hastily shoved the Abba-Zaba into a jacket pocket, breaking it in two as I hopped atop the bike to speed away.
All the way up Washington I felt her watching, and as I tore past Abbot Hall and coasted down to Hooper Street. As I parked my bike, as I entered my home, as I raced up the narrow-stepped stairs to the safety of my own room. I was ashamed; I was flushed with panic! I was immersed in unaccustomed confusion.