Storytellers

Minutes after turning the lights off in Sarah’s room, Grandpa Dave was called back by the child.
“Grandpa, I’m not sleepy,” she said, her voice full of petulance.
“It’s ok, sweetie,” he cooed her. “Sometimes you can lie down and think you’re never going to fall asleep and the next thing you know I’m waking you up in the morning. Just close your eyes and you’ll be sleeping in no time.”
“But I’m really not sleepy!” she repeated as her voice increased by a few octaves by the end of the sentence.
Grandpa Dave sighed, unsure of what he was supposed to do. He wanted to avoid a tantrum, but didn’t know how to please the child; luckily, it was Sarah herself who offered a way out.
“Can you tell me a story?” she asked. “Or two,” she quickly added.
“I’ll tell you one story. And then you’ll go to bed and sleep.”
“Two stories.”
“One.”
“Six!” she shouted, showing a fundamental inability to grasp the subtleties of haggling.
“One, sweetie.”
“Fine,” she surrendered. She sat up on the bed, undoing the neatly folded covers and scrunching up the pillow. Grandpa Dave began reading:

Once upon a time there was a king, a mighty king with a grand court and many knights and damsels at his service. He ate hearty meals every day, went to joust or see paladins battle for his favour and ruled with a fair hand. He had a jester who told him jokes and a magician who advised him on kingly matters. He lived well and had no worries in the world.
One day, however, he began to hear whispers behind his back. At first he ignored the people who stopped talking when he entered a room, or who looked at him from afar and chuckled quietly, but eventually grew tired of it and asked his queen if she knew what was going on.
“I’m afraid,” she said, “that many think that you’re getting too old. People remember when you were a valorous prince and think you’ve become fat and slow.”
The king resolved at once to regain his youthful strength and asked the magician to make him a young man again; but the magician knew no such spell. However, the jester overheard him talking, and told him that his cousin was a witch who lived deep in the woods and may have been able to help him. Soon, the king left for the forest, disguised as a common traveller to avoid suspicion.
When he reached the witch’s hut in the darkest corner of the woods, he found out she was quite mad. Even before he could ask her anything, she came to him, dressed in rags and with twigs in her hair, and started talking to him. This is what her ramblings said:

One day, a large vessel of gleaming silver and gold will glide on the skies of a red world, where all is sand and it looks like it is always sunset; it will be twice as large as the greatest castle, and thrice as magnificent. It will cast a great shadow upon the rocks of the red world, looming above a surface that no living eye has ever seen; and it will touch the earth with lightness you would not expect from such a massive object. The vessel will let its inhabitants descend and walk upon the red sand, but it will be hot, that day, so hot that the vessel-dwellers will soon return to the shade shorty after their wandering; and they will learn that no cloud has passed between the burning ground and the hard sky in more than a thousand years.
They will not let such a thing dissuade them: they have a giant bird that can carry them through the sky, and they can tame the rays of the unblinking sun. Soon, the vessel will drop an egg on the ground. The egg will be as big as a house, hollow, and lacking a bottom, so that the inhabitants may live in it and touch the red sand without the relentless gaze of the sun bearing down on them. The dwellers, unable to go outside the egg, will start going down, digging in the sand, and, soon, in the rock. Every barrowful they cart out will add to a giant pile, creating a mountain of dirt and debris which is screened and checked by the dwellers themselves. By looking at what they dig up, they will direct their descent.
Eventually, days after beginning in their enterprise, they will reach a cave. The cave, however, is no mere grotto, no hole in the rock: its walls are smooth and regular, its ceiling even and unbroken, save for the hole made by the dwellers, and its floor stable and straight. The dwellers will enter it themselves, and it will be empty, though the inhabitants of the vessel will be just as happy of having reached it. They will carefully drill a hole in one of the walls, revealing another cave much like the first one lying just beyond; that cave, too, is empty, but after another hole they reach a much smaller one that has something in it.
In the cave, there is a wizened and dried dead man. He sits on a chair, unmoved since the day he passed beyond, still in his clothes and clutching his head in his hands. There are some more things around him: a small desk made entirely of metal, a portrait made by such a great artist it is almost life-like, and some small objects scattered around. The dwellers, intrigued by their discovery, will look at the objects, until one of them will spring to life at the touch. Lights will come out of it, sounds will arise and it will say words, though none could be understood by the vessel-dwellers. This is what it will say:

A young man walked along a busy road. Being the day before Christmas Eve and all, he was out and about looking for presents, a task he’d ignored for far too long. He’d hoped that by avoiding it long enough he could pretend the whole thing had slipped him by and that he’d genuinely forgot to buy gifts; a pang of guilt had taken him, however, and, as with every year, he’d forced himself to slap together something for his judgmental relatives. Since this year he’d left it so late, he’d have to do it while walking in frenzied crowds in the cold, and he shivered as the trudged through the sleet. He had little money to get presents with, he pondered gravely, and even less will to find something they could appreciate. There was a time when he’d made a sincere effort to please them, but every time he felt he could not do well no matter how much of an effort he put in, and so he’d just stopped trying. Eventually, he even stopped staying for the dinners, finding the whole passive-aggressive comments too tedious and infuriating to deal with. Of course, this only exacerbated things, and he’d heard from a cousin that his aunt had been really displeased with his last year’s excuse for not remaining. “Just wait till she hears this year’s,” he thought to himself cruelly as he entered some store, worn by the frost and the mob.
He grabbed some kind of ashtray for an uncle he wasn’t quite sure smoked, a spice-holder rack that was on offer and the cheapest bottle of wine he could find. He then had second thoughts and returned the bottle to its place, taking one that was second cheapest. He battled for one of those tacky dancing Santas, which he hoped, without much conviction, would be considered ironic and funny. Before he reached the checkout, he saw a book section in the megastore, and lazily made his way there, partly because he still needed a few more presents to fill the gaps, but mostly because they were by far the emptiest aisles. As he was trying to remember which relatives were atheists and which were Christians, and, with each, to which degree, he caught in the corner of his eye a small book.
It was a weird book, he immediately thought. It was definitely much older than all the others around on the shelf, and seemed to lack a price. There was no tag on it, and it was the only one of its kind. The young man stopped in the aisle and picked up, scrutinising it carefully: the back had no words on it, while the cover was slightly worn, and read: “The Kingfisher”. He opened the book, which gave a musty and filling smell of old tome, and began reading the first chapter:

It was a grim day, Louis Sonneck thought. The sky was grey, he had to pay rent, and the office’s secret stash of whiskey had been discovered by the cleaners in the night, who had promptly told the bosses. He gingerly tapped on his typewriter, feigning nonchalance and hoping he would not be associated with the confiscated booze. He’d had half an idea of going to ask for a day off, but then he thought that that would look suspicious, and relented, glancing at the watch every couple of minutes. He really wanted to leave before disciplinary action would be dispensed, so he ran with great speed when Mr. Kuberlick, the External Business Director, called him.
“Yes, Mr. Kuberlick, what can I do for you?” he asked, hoping it was some errand or the other that would take him out of the office for a while.
“You have to go to Gutford & Sons, Sonneck,” he said, handing him a piece of paper. “Take this, have Sendhall in Accountancy sign it for you.”
At first, Louis was perplexed by this request: usually Kuberlick had him and his colleagues sweet-talk vendors, explain technical data and the like. Getting a paper signed was something a simple telegram boy could’ve accomplished, and a trained accountant such as Louis would’ve been too much for such a trivial task. It wasn’t until he actually read the paper that he understood what he was supposed to do: he nodded with a somber face and left the office.
You see, Louis Sonneck was not a common accountant. Though his cover had him work as a meager number-cruncher, he was a low-ranking member of the New York mob. He’d tried hard to escape the streets he’d been born and raised in, but gambling debts and poor life choices had always managed to find him. He’d gone back to school after narrowly avoiding jail for a murder a friend had committed and he’d been implicated in, and for a while he’d tried to become a respectable citizen: but when your uncle was the Kingfisher, an up-and-coming mobster, bonds of family made it hard to stay out of trouble.
Louis threw away the paper as soon as he was out of the building and walked a short while before entering a bar. An impassive man sitting at the counter looked at him enter and followed him with his gaze as Louis sat next to him.
“Sendhall, Gutford & Sons,” he said to the man.
The man chewed on a toothpick and spoke slowly. “Is that all?”
“Yes,” Louis replied, sweat appearing in beads on his forehead. Much to his relief, the man seemed happy with the information and he got up to go in the back of the bar. Louis sighed.
“Bad business,” he heard, suddenly, “dealing with Joe Mallon.”
He turned to where the voice came from, and he saw an old man sitting a meter away from him nursing a whiskey despite it being barely beyond two o’clock.
“Oh yeah?” Louis asked. He knew perfectly it was terrible business, but didn’t feel like arguing. He hoped the noncommittal response would dissuade the other patron; but as with everything else he hoped, it didn’t come true.
“Come here,” the man said, motioning to him to get closer with his hand. Louis, looked around, sighed, shrugged and pulled his barstool next to his.
“Now, I’ve got a story to tell you about dealing with Joe Mallon and his kind.”
“Do you?” Louis asked, disinterested.
“Oh, yeah,” was the reply, as the old man started:

So, I was a soldier in the army at the time; I mean, at the time, when we were proper men, and I know each generation says the same thing, but we were men. At the time, everything was a lot simpler, and it was easier being a man, there wasn’t as much stuff to think about as now, you just cared about having an honest job, bringing bread to the table every day and getting a good wife. Now that’s not enough, you gotta think about a million different things, and some jackass with glasses and a better understanding of the stock market than you can make you lose your job even though you’ve been with the company for twenty years, but I digress.
So, I was in the army, and we were stationed somewhere east; isn’t it funny, how soldiers are always stationed “somewhere east”? I never heard of someone going north or south, or even west, so I figured that we’ve conquered all those places and we’ve only got east left to deal with. After, all the west was won, or so I hear; but, anyway, I was stationed in the east.
I was out with my buddy Jimmy, everyone’s got a buddy named Jimmy, mine was an army buddy, and we were out checking some ravine or river or rocks or the other; I forget, my age makes it hard to remember all. So we were there, and an enemy starts shooting at us.
So I say: “Bobby, go call headquarters!” and Bobby bolted like a hare! Bobby was with us, but I didn’t like him as much as my buddy Jimmy; a right jackass, he was. So, I was with Jimmy, getting shot at while Bobby runs back to get reinforcements, and we crouch in a bush. I say to Jimmy: “I go this way, you go that one and we catch the bastard in the middle.”
So we do it, it works pretty well too, as we get the bastard, right in the middle where I said he’d be, but unfortunately Jimmy was shot. He was lying there, all bloody and sad, and he tells me: “I’m gonna die, ain’t I?”
“No, Jimmy, no, Bobby’s gonna come back, there’s gonna be a medic and he’s gonna fix you up.”
But he wasn’t buying it, and he was losing consciousness, so I tell him a story to pass time and keep him awake. I started:

There’s a grandpa that, every day, brings his little granddaughter to get ice cream. Well, not every day, not since he heard that it can bad for children to eat too many sweets; but they always go for a stroll in the park. They sit on the bench after school on the way home, feed the ducks, go on the swings, and look at the dogs.
One day, after the grandpa and the child had had dinner, he let her watch the TV for a while, and then he brought her pyjama. She protested, but eventually put it on; she then brushed her teeth, laid out the clothes for tomorrow and said her prayers, all under the watchful eye of grandpa. Finally, he put her to bed.
Minutes after turning the lights off in Sarah’s room, Grandpa Dave was called back by the child.
“Grandpa, I’m not sleepy,” she said.

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