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Alex The Inventor - Chapter 4

The Ghosts in the Glass Tunnels

By G.F. BrynnPublished 7 years ago 3 min read
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Book 2 - The Ghosts in the Glass Tunnels

Chapters 1 to 3 can be read at: Deep Sky Stories

Chapter 4 (Part 1) - Probably Wasn't A Good Idea

Alex Faraway's grade seven teacher, Mister Chater, worried. He worried about many things that could happen or might happen, almost every day. It was, perhaps, a symptom of being an over-ambitious person who, despite all his efforts to get ahead through the years, had only managed to land work as an elementary school teacher, and had become stuck in the same place far too long.

Worse still, the school was small and dingy and out in the middle of a dirt-farming community that no one seemed to care about, one way or the other.

"Delta?... where on Earth might that be?" would be the chuckled question from a colleague now and then, if poor Wallace ever attended a teacher's convention.

The problem was that there just wasn't enough to do for an ambitious yet underachieving man in such a small, backwater town as that which he now found himself.

As a result, Wallace Chater wasted much of his agitated energy worrying, and what he had found most recently to worry about was young Alexander Faraway, the boy who lived on the outskirts of Delta-Town, by an old, abandoned junkyard and was clearly exceptionally gifted.

Wallace could tell by now, from what he had seen Alex do during class, every day of the school year, that he was very bright. He had, only the previous Thursday, impressed Mr. Chater with his remarkable ability to draw the other children into his fascinating world of creative inventions.

That day, when Alex spent an entire hour covering all the blackboards with his wondrous technical drawings, had been nothing short of astounding! There were still some students who wanted a repeat of that day too.

But then, the strange behavior had occurred the following day when Alex took a rather difficult exam and finished nearly all of it in a blur — in less than ten minutes. On top of it all was the bizarre manner in which he had zipped through it, scribbling wildly — and then, of course he also drew that picture; an unnaturally accurate topographical map of Valles Marineris, the great rift valley on Mars.

And then...and then had come the night Wallace Chater would never forget. He shivered even now, despite the warmth coming from the fireplace in his small study. It was well past midnight and Friday morning would be dawning soon enough.

"I really must get to bed", Wallace chided himself and tried, with little success, to push aside the memories of the past week. He was reviewing class assignments for the following week...and hoping to receive a call back from an old acquaintance.

Wallace tapped his pencil nervously against the edge of his desk amid the stuffy silence in the little room. The faded oak desk he worked at was covered with several stacks of upcoming projects as well as previous homework which still needed marking.

But all those carefully stacked and indexed papers and workbooks now seemed to have diminished in importance when laid beside the disturbing mystery that young Alex Faraway had handed him. The quiet boy with the hyper-keen mind and unusual activities clearly needed to be investigated much more closely. There were odd — even dangerous events occurring at that dirty old junkyard nearby Mrs. Faraway's house — he was sure.

There was no telling how many of those hideous insect creatures were still hidden amongst the mounds of garbage in that old corn field. He realized now that it couldn't have been entirely the boy's fault though, because...well, Mr. Chater knew something else; and, he knew someone else too.

Abruptly, his cell-phone chimed quietly in the stillness, causing Wallace to stiffen slightly with expectation. Small, triangular LC3-D screens slid up out of the three-sided phone until they formed a translucent, triangular box with their points meeting at the top.

A soft glow from a tiny LED laser within the phone projected data onto the three screens from their inner, central focal point and a small, holographically projected head formed before Wallace's eyes, floating in the air above the phone. Within a millisecond, the tiny camera in his own phone would have also performed the same graphical magic for the other man to see as well.

science fiction
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About the Creator

G.F. Brynn

G. F. Brynn is a self-taught writer & illustrator whose sci-fi stories weave a rich blend of youthful adventurism with ancient myth-fantasy. The characters move in a world in which the divide between dream and reality is thinly shaded.

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