The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie by Keith Brooke

Author:Keith Brooke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: coming of age, fantasy, seaside, surreal, teenage, walter mitty
Publisher: NewCon Press

9. A Case Of Replacement (part one)

That night, Frankie had his nightmare about the Jolly Old Sea Captain again. It was a long time since he'd had this particular dream.

He dreamed that he was lying awake in his bed, his room flooded with silvery moonlight. The pub sign was creaking, even though there was no breeze to move it. He climbed from his bed, momentarily terrified even to put his bare feet on the floor.

From his window, he peered down. The pub sign was moving, as if rocked by an unseen hand, and it was blank. The old sea captain had gone roaming.

Fears can be so intense when you're dreaming. Frankie sat on his windowsill, surveying the street, alert to even the slightest sound coming from within the house. Nothing stirred the night fog, and the gas streetlamps cast no unexpected shadows.

The stairs creaked.

He knew this was only the sound of a house at night, its timbers expanding or contracting as they cooled.

A shadow! Out in the fog, a dark shape where the gas-lamp's beam was interrupted. A man, shambling along, like one of the Owner's automatons, his arms held out before him like Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster. The figure wore a brass-buttoned navy blue blazer, and a white seaman's cap was perched on his head. Grey whiskers extended down the sides of his face and there would almost certainly be a pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth and a ruddy glow to his cheeks.

The Jolly Old Sea Captain...

The figure stopped, and looked directly at Frankie.

The Jolly Old Sea Captain looked just like Mr Cray!

Frankie drew back into the shadows. Seconds later, the old sea captain had gone.

And then he heard another creak of timbers coming from within the house – the stairs, or the first floor landing.

And another.

Another.

He lay there, wide awake, and realised that he was no longer asleep, no longer dreaming, and the house was in silence.

He got up and padded across to the small leaded window. The scene was almost exactly as he had dreamed: the fog, the feeble gas light combined with silvery moonlight. But there was no Jolly Old Sea Captain in the street and when Frankie craned to see, the pub sign was not blank.

He went back to bed, and concentrated on pleasant thoughts.

*

Frankie and Grace built sandcastles and waited for the tide to come in.

Frankie had filled buckets and inverted them, then chipped away at the moist sand to reveal walls and crenellations. He dug a deep moat around his best castle, and then built a sand causeway across it to the west gate, which he had protected with a portcullis made from lolly sticks. Then he dug a channel down the beach in order to divert seawater into the moat as the tide advanced. As a finishing touch, he made tiny clay figures and set them around the castle's defences.

Grace had stared at the flat sand for an eternity, as if she was trying to see something, or sense it.

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