Jimmy Cooper - Victor Max Valentine aka David Alan Mors

A broad smile spread across Rory’s elfin face. The weather had subsided leaving only the somber sky behind. His mum had finally given him permission to go out and explore. She regularly reminded him he had been a very small baby and always susceptible to sickness. While drying the lunch dishes she recounted, for the hundredth time, the story of poor little James Ccooper who had run about in the snow for too long one day the year before last and wound up dying of pneumonia.

Mrs. Cooper claimed there was another boy playing with him. She could not tell who it was from the living room window.

“Don’t stay out too long, icy winds are coming back.” His mother warned.

Rory’s willowy limbs took him flying across the backyard. The cold damp air glazed his face. The squish, splot of his elastic boots hit the ground liberating the scent of wet earth. Remnants of the late autumn storm soaked the bare branches and tiny drops clung to the tips like crystal beads carefully placed by a pixy jeweler. He stopped just at the edge of the forest behind the house. A gathering of blackbirds bounced and traded places in the trees above him.

“Hallo, you” he said, wondering at the game they might be playing.

He could hear the stirring of a creature, perhaps a squirrel, scampering from bole to bole in the wood. He looked down at his wet galoshes to see a worm labouring through the fallen pine and

broken leaves. Its head tested the air for the best way to go next. Then a sinister noise came from farther in. He squinted his eyes and moved closer.

“Hallo.” he called again, cautiously.

The response was whispers from an unknown thing.

The ash trees surrounded him now.

Behind him, a presence moved up to his shoulder. His rusty lashes fluttered as he looked toward his left yet he did not turn.

The shock of hair at the back of his head fluttered in the wind.

Something rounded his right side and dead things shifted and crackled. Though the day was still drab, a deeper shadow fell across his face. He turned and looked up.

“You again,” he said tonelessly. “ I thought you might come ‘round today. That is why I begged mother to let me out to play.”

There was a harsh hissing and the wind whipped around him upsetting things that then clung to his clothing and hair.

“Your shadow is taller every time I see you.”

Something shuddered, a sound that might have been the groaning of ancient limbs in the wind.

There was a low boom that traveled through the wood. It reached the house where his mother continued her cleaning. She looked up and listened for a moment.

“I know,” the boy said in response to something silent and still. “We can go for our walk again if you like. Shall I soon become part of the wood as you promised? I shan't tell mother, she would not let me go. But I would so like to be a thing of the copse like you.”

“Yes, mother worries about me all the time.”

“The winter is coming and I should never get sick again, mother would like that part.”

You woke me up that day in the snow. I was very grateful but sad for you, Jimmy. Now we can disappear into the shadows together.”

“Oh, she won’t be surprised. She knows strange things happen here.”