Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #11 February 2015 | Page 73

to get home and reach Louise before she saw the book.

by the voice he was expecting to hear.

It would take him up to just one point off a ban but
that was the least of his worries.

A middle aged woman came met him at the door. “Are
you looking for Mum?” she said.

He fumbled the key in the lock once before opening
the door and calling out Louise’s name. She should be
at work for another hour. There was no post on the
doormat. Tom walked through the short hallway to the
kitchen diner. There was a package and several letters
on the counter. Louise had been home. Was she still
here? He called her name again. No reply. The package
was open and contained an Amazon delivered copy of
his book. There was a note stuck to the front cover. A
chill went through his whole body as he read.

“I was looking for Felicia Brett,” Tom said.

About the author’s partner.
Louise trained to be an actress but gave up her stage
career to work full time at a job she doesn’t much like in
order to subsidise Tom Ashton while he wrote a novel.
She believed in his writing and she believed in their love.
She hoped they might have children together and the
bottle being kept for a special occasion was meant for
celebrating her being pregnant, if that ever happened.
Louise has read the book. She will be selling the house
and moving back to London.
Tom sat on one of the tall chairs by the counter and
put his head in his hands. He started asking himself ‘why’ over and over. After a while the question
changed to ‘how’. Eventually he sat up and accessed the
internet on his phone. It took fifteen minutes to pinpoint the information he was looking for.
***
The cottage was pretty much what he was expecting. It
was small but quirky, built at forty-five degrees to the
road, or maybe the road came after the cottage. There
was ivy covering one side and rambling rose bushes
under the main ground floor window. Tom parked
his car on the wide grass verge that separated the lane
from the short boundary fence. As he got out he saw
that the door to the cottage was open. He called out
“hello” from about half way up the path to the door,
not wanting to alarm an elderly person unnecessarily.
To his surprise he was answered straight away but not

“Same person,” the woman said. “I’m her daughter. I’m
afraid you’ve just missed her.”
“Oh, thanks. Do you know when she’ll be back.”
The woman stepped out into the daylight, looked at
him and sighed. She had very tired looking eyes which
he had not been able to see before. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I should have made myself clearer. She died this afternoon. She’d gone into Bristol for some daft radio thing
and taken it upon herself that she could walk the two
miles to the nearest bus stop and back. She collapsed
just after getting home. She managed to phone me and
I called for an ambulance. Neither of us got here in
time. The ambulance left half an hour ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t then,” the woman said. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean
to be short with you. It’s been a difficult afternoon, as
you can imagine.” She sighed again. “Are you one of the
people she helped out?”
“I don’t know. If she did, she made a bit of a mess of it.”
“I’d be surprised. I’m a sceptic about all that Wiccan
stuff myself but she always seemed to have lots of
people stopping by and thanking her for this, that and
the other. Whatever she said to you, she probably had a
purpose.”
Destroying my life?
Felicia Brett’s daughter grasped the inside handle of the
door. “I’m sorry, but I need to finish up in here. You’ll
understand that I don’t really want to talk to anyone
right now. I’m sure you can sort out whatever it is.”
“Yes, sorry, of course,” Tom said. “I don’t wish to disturb you any more.”

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