What's in a Prompt - 1. Prompt 293

Nobody knew where he had come from. His story was like something from that film ‘The Village of the Damned’.

On June 11th 2000, at twenty three minutes past eleven in the morning, there had been an unexpected solar eclipse over the quiet little Welsh village of Skewen. Nowhere else in the entire United Kingdom recorded a solar eclipse that day, and the story of the ‘Skewen Mystery’, as it was dubbed, was covered in every major national newspaper and even a few of the regional magazines as well.

About a month later, a young woman by the name of Josie Maguire discovered that she was pregnant. In spite of what the village thought, Josie really was as pure as the driven snow. At the age of twenty three she had never even as much as kissed a boy, let alone had sex with one. Yet the fact she had a bun in the oven was more than enough for the villagers to doubt her protestations of being a virgin.

Josie kept the pregnancy concealed from her father. It wasn’t difficult, as he had emigrated from Swansea to New Zealand nearly three years prior, shortly after her mother’s funeral. Not only was the travel cost to visit him prohibitive to a single woman who just about earned enough money to live with a little left over to buy a few small luxuries, but Josie and her father hadn’t spoken since he emigrated. They kept in touch by e-mail, and there were the requisite birthday and Christmas cards exchanged, but they had not once bothered to telephone each other. However, father and daughter had never been particularly close, even when her mother had been alive.

The pregnancy itself was uncomplicated, and the only slightly bizarre thing about the whole time she was with child was the complete absence of morning sickness. In late February 2001, three weeks before her expected due date, Josie went into labour and after six hours of pushing, screaming, and swearing, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

She named him Loring Samuel. ‘Loring’, for some odd reason known only to her, after the actress Lisa Loring, who starred as Wednesday Addams in the original 1960s TV series, and ‘Samuel’ in honour of Saint Samlet, whose church she had worshipped in since she was a child. She had originally planned to name her first born son after her father, but now that he was in New Zealand, he was more distant than ever.

As he grew up, Loring proved to be a polite and intelligent, yet reserved, boy. Josie had never had any complaints from any of the teachers while he was at primary school, but it had not gone unnoticed that he had no friends. It may simply have been because the young boy was unusually precocious and so appeared much older than his years, but she doubted it was that straightforward.

Even at the tender age of nine, Loring was far more interested in reading the works of Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, and H G Wells, than he was in watching cartoons or reading comics. He was gravely polite around adults and children alike, so much so that he came across as being aloof.

Loring was perfectly aware that he was the only kid in school who had no friends, but he had told himself that he didn’t need friends. He was doing just fine on his own. He was the only kid in his class who had never been invited to a classmate’s birthday party or for a sleepover. It wasn’t that Loring had ever done anything to offend the other kids at school; it was just that the kid was . . . weird. He wouldn’t have looked out of place had he been born in the Victorian era or dropped into the middle of an Amish village.

By the time Loring started secondary school in September 2011, he had read more books than most people do in their lifetime. His teachers were impressed with his intellect, he seemed to understand new concepts immediately and was able to retain new information easily; some of his teachers suspected he had an eidetic memory. He had also started to warm to other children and was no longer as reserved as he once was, however the other kids were wary of him. Having grown up in a village with scarcely eight and a half thousand inhabitants, every child knew every other child.

All of Skewen knew the story of what had happened during that freak eclipse, if that was what it truly was. The jokes about the amazing virgin birth of Skewen were still told in the pubs over a pint and a bag of pork scratchings. The younger children were afraid of Loring, but the kids who had been in primary school with him knew that he was harmless; weird, but harmless. The older boys weren’t afraid of him, and they didn’t bully him, but just like the other kids in the school, they completely ignored him.

In September 2013, when Loring entered into Year Nine, he started feeling something he had never felt before; it was loneliness. He had always accepted the fact that he had no friends. The story of his birth wasn’t the only reason; Loring had never embraced the idea of company, and he had never ever tried to make friends with anyone.

He had never been a sociable boy, even at Sunday school. He took part in various activities both at church and at school, but he might as well have been on his own. He had played on his primary school’s football team, and he was a pretty good player, but he had never felt a part of the team.

Then there was his general appearance, which most people said was a major cry for therapy. His hair was raven black. It was a natural raven black, and the only thing unnatural about his hair was his ridiculously long fringe that was alternately dyed a pale shade of yellow one month and then any one of a dozen hues of blue the next. There was the earring stud, and the torn pants he always wore that were undoubtedly at one point fashionable, but were now fraying and only held together on a wing and a prayer.

There was also the question of his bizarre choice of hobby. He was an enthusiastic numismatist, a collector of coins. He had an impressive collection of coins from around the world, including a large number of pre-Euro and pre-decimal coins. He had nearly four hundred coins in total, most of which weren’t worth much more than the amount of metal in them, as they were modern coins that had been minted by the hundreds of thousands.

He had a number of French francs, Dutch guilders, Estonian kroons and the such, however he did have a few coins of note and reasonable value. Loring owned a 1911 Australian Penny (valued at £50), an 1893 Canadian twenty five cents (valued at £24), a 1929 German three Reichmarks (valued at £45), and a 1935 New Zealand Florin (valued at £30); though they would have been worth more than double what they were if they were of better quality than they were. The most valuable coin he owned, which had cost his mother £125 at an auction and that he had recently been given for his thirteenth birthday, was a near mint condition 1934 Southern Rhodesia half crown.

Monday September 16^th 2013 started out like any other day. Loring woke up, showered, had breakfast, and listened as his mother berated him once again over his general appearance; for some reason the fringe drive her nuts. He walked to school as he always did, and arrived in the classroom with fifteen minutes before first bell. He sat at his desk and pulled out a book to read.

As the rest of his class started filing in ten minutes later, he picked up on something. He looked up and saw a new kid. The new kid was everything that Loring wasn’t. The new kid had pale blond hair, he was smartly dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, and the pale blue irises of his eyes danced, almost as if they possessed a life all of their own.

The new kid was introduced to the class as Shawn Matthews. Morning registration was over as quickly as it had begun, and before the kids were dismissed for their morning lessons, their teacher reminded them about the class field trip at the end of the week to the nearby Cefn Coed Colliery museum, and that signed permission slips needed to be handed in by morning registration on Wednesday.

Shawn quickly fitted in to school life, and he was just as quickly filled in about Loring. He spent all day Monday and Tuesday staring over at the strange looking kid. He read all about the eclipse, both the credible stories and the fringe conspiracies. He listened to everything the other kids had to say about Loring. In spite of it all, he couldn’t understand why nobody wanted to be friends with the boy.

Over dinner on Tuesday evening Shawn reminded his mum to sign the permission slip for the school’s field trip, and, after a lot of soul searching, he also decided to make himself very unpopular at school. He handed the permission slip in at morning registration on Wednesday and then went about his school day.

Wednesday and Thursday consisted of more staring at the weird kid, more listening to the stories, and more reading up on the events that had occurred before he and his mum had moved from Shrewsbury to Skewen.

Friday morning the Year Nine class boarded one of the school’s buses and began their journey to the colliery museum. Loring sat at the back of the bus on his own as usual, and then a few minutes into the trip he felt the seat next to him sag slightly. He looked over and saw Shawn sitting next to him. Shawn opened the pack of Maryland’s he had brought with him and started eating them. At first Loring ignored the new boy, until he felt a tap on his shoulder.

Shawn offered the pack to Loring. “Do you want a cookie?”

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