Day 14 - Breadcrumb Trail Part One

Hey guys! Grace Nask here with Day 14 of the April Challenge. Today we have some of Breadcrumb Trail, a short story for teens and above. It's about a lady named Lily with strange neighbors who reads about a murder. So let's get to it!

Breadcrumb Trail

What type of name was Hansel? Certainly not the name of anyone decent in the twenty-first century, thank you very much! But Matilda Walsh was the type of woman who bought an entire apartment complex on the corner of Meadow Street just because she could; I couldn’t sway the name choice. What did I know, anyway? I’m just her neighbor, Nosy Lily. Lilian Green to you.

But I guess Hansel turned out all right. He’s arrived at the age of thirteen quite nicely under the gaze of Matilda. From what I can see, that is. Hansel doesn’t get out much of late, and I’m not inclined to ask. Never asked about the father or the hefty sum of money Matilda received when pregnant (that’s how she bought the apartment complex) either, so I’m not about to start asking questions now. We respectable people keep our snooping where it belongs. Still, you can’t help but wonder….

But no; I refused to get involved. That’s how I found myself reading the paper on that cloudy Saturday afternoon. And if I happened to sit in the parlor with large windows in order to see Matilda’s apartment complex, you don’t have any proof so back off.

I flipped open the newspaper’s folded edges, watching Matilda’s house from the corner of my vision. The headlines caught my eye: WOMAN FOUND DEAD ON HOLDIN LANE. Strange. Wasn’t Holdin Lane the street next to mine? I read on.

On the seventeenth of November, a woman was

found dead on the corner of Meadow Street and

Holden Lane at 7:00 pm. An array of burns and

blood loss, some places without any blood at

all, marked the victim unrecognizably. A DNA

test resulted in the remains of Matilda Walsh

The newspaper dropped out of my hands before I could finish the sentence. Matilda? Dead? No! No; she couldn’t be. Hands working rapid wrinkles into my pencil skirt, I glanced out my window at the gray apartment complex.

As if sensing my denial, none other than Hansel Walsh came running out of the complex towards my house.

I could do nothing but stare at his form through the window until the young man reached my front door and rapped on it nine times in quick succession, like the beating of a frantic heart. At the noise, I managed to rise to my feet, stepping over the fallen newspaper as if it contained a corpse, and opened the front door to my parlor.

“Pardon me, Ms. Green,” Hansel greeted in a rush, panting his lungs out, “but it got loose, and Mother’s dead, and the monster’s roaming the streets and its going to kill more people tonight and lots of them will die and I know what to do but I don’t know how I’m going to do it and I need your help!” He stopped for quick breath, tears needling his eyes.

I stared at Hansel open-mouthed. He looked a stone’s throw away from crying on my front porch, and from the state of his ragged hair and bloodshot eyes he hadn’t slept much as of late.

His words echoed through my mind; they all seemed decent, proper words from the English language, but my brain for the life of me could not wrap around their meaning. “Monster”? “Loose”? “Kill more people tonight”? My thoughts drifted back to dead Matilda in the newspapers, and the burns left on her body. What was going on?

At length, I found my voice. “Sweetie,” I commanded, still a bit dazed, “Take a big, deep breath for me. I’m sure it’s been a long day, and I heard about Matilda; I’m sorry for your loss. Now, talking a bit slower, repeat that one more time?”

Hansel nodded, his head bobbing back and forth uncontrollably. He took the deep breath I asked and summoned his tears back inside. When he seemed more composed, he met my gaze. In a quiet voice, Hansel tried again.

“Ms. Green, may I please come in?”

I placed my Earl Grey on the table and rubbed at my temples. “You’re saying what?”

Hansel placed his own cup down on the small folding table I considered my dining space in the house. From the opposite end, he seemed more thirty-one than his thirteen years. With a stare like that, I almost wanted to take the little idiot’s story seriously. Almost.

“There’s been a monster in our basement ever since I was born. Mother told me Father died trapping it in there. He was Prince to Duskland, a small country in another dimension. They use the monster’s flames as energy to power the entire kingdom. We--Mother and I--protect it from this world and feed it. The King, in his goodness, provides compensation for the task.” Well then, that explains the money part of it. Now that it mattered to me, of course.

“But yesterday, as Mother was feeding it, it got out. It is weak from years of confinement, but it gains power from the darkness. It will rampage the streets every night if we don’t find it and destroy it first.” Oh ok; that sounded reasonable enough I suppose. But to Hansel it most certainly did. He took a breath and clutched his cup, his hands shaking.

When he regained some composure, he continued. “There is, however, hope. Mother created a magical sword designed to destroy this monster if the need ever arose. But it needs Mother’s fingerprints in order to activate it. That is where you come in, Ms. Green. May I ask if you have kept Mother’s fingerprints from the time you brought her to court?”

Don’t look at me like that. So I may have brought Matilda to court over the trampling of my flowers, but she deserved it. Those poor...burned...acid-drenched plants from thirteen years ago...oh get ahold of yourself, Lily! No good memory distorting the littlest things!

I snorted at Hansel. In my haste to change the subject I sniped, “If it’s really some giant fire monster, why hasn’t it burned its way through your basement? If this kingdom in another dimension uses it as their energy source, I don’t think they’ll be too happy if you kill it. And wouldn’t I, the neighbor of this wackadoo institution, have noticed something by now?”

“There are protection runes and a portal--” the little idiot started in earnest, but I cut this lunacy off before Matilda’s offspring could corrupt my brain further.

“Look, sweetie, I appreciate you coming to me, but I can’t help you. I know someone who can, though.”

Hansel’s face, which had fallen, now brightened again. “Really?”

I nodded and grabbed a notebook and a pen from the counter. Flipping open to a clean page, I scribbled at the top: 515-555-0418 and passed it along the table. Hansel, taking another sip of his tea, glanced at it. His elation turned to confusion. “Whose number is this?”

I got up and stretched. “A mental health hotline.”

Hansel stood up faster than if a metal spike had been added to his chair. “May I please be excused?” he growled between his teeth. I smirked and nodded. Glaring, Hansel stormed out of the room. I followed him out and held open the front door.

As he stood on my porch, eyes ablaze, Hansel gave his final word, “You do not have any idea what you are messing with, Ms. Green.”

I slammed the door in his face.