Ooh. Just managed to get in under the wordcount at 1998. This is a short story for @mctiller's Twenty-Four Hour Short Story Contest.
It won't make much sense if the Faraway Tree books by Enid Blyton weren't reading fare in your childhood :)
The theme for this story was:
A man reads a newspaper ad: If you have the credits, we have the time travel.
And here is my submission.
Jo, Bessie, Fanny and Dick were lounging around in Bessie's lounge room. It had been a long year and now, at midsummer, they'd managed the impossible - to make it here, without husbands, wives, children and grandchildren, for a return down memory lane. To what, they didn't quite know. But they all knew where.
Fanny had had the most dramatic time getting here. She had literally stormed out on her husband, in the end. "But why can't we come?" Frederick had queried. "I'd have thought Beth'd like a family reunion. We could've taken Emmy and Oliver too, seeing it is Ollie's birthday. I mean, geez, Frannie, what kind of a grannie ditches her grandkid's birthday?"
"My name," Fanny had hissed, her guilt rising, "is Fanny. My sister's name is Bessie. How many times do I have to tell you?"
A stormcloud had appeared over Frederick's countenance. "This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Changing your names again. How old are you all again? I bet Rick put you up to this stupidity."
"And his name is Dick!" Fanny had stormed, as she threw enough clothing into the suitcase to last for a four-day weekend.
The four of them had changed their names at a memorable LSD party in 1966. Bessie, disliking the cow reference, had begun calling herself Beth. Fanny and Dick had quite understandably become Frannie and Rick. And Jo - as out-there as he ever would be, and who had remained resolutely grounded while they all tripped - had renamed himself ... well, Joe. It had made sense at the time. Leaving their childhoods behind.
All of them quite put the Enchanted Wood and the Faraway Tree behind them. Now they were adults, they'd taken off the whole experience like an old jacket and stuffed it away at the back of the cupboard. Indeed, for the next 12 years it almost became taboo to discuss it. Only once, in 1973 at a drunken party to celebrate Joe being made partner at the law firm (Joe drank soda water), Frannie had brought it up, wondering wistfully how Silky was. The others had all looked at her uncomprehendingly, then slowly dawning, like it was all coming back to them from a dream. They all went silent for a bit, staring deep into their drinks while Let Me Be There by Olivia Newton-John played on the stereo and people danced in the loungeroom. Then snap, the spell was broken again - or unbroken, as the case may be - they all took sips of their drinks and went on to talk of other things.
Until 1979 when they received letters. They had no idea how Moon-Face and Silky had found their addresses. But nevertheless, here they were. Individually handwritten letters, in Silky's unforgettable silvery-light handwriting - except they had forgotten.
DEAR BESSIE, FANNY, JO AND DICK,
We know you may have grown out of adventures, being grown-ups. But we miss you, and we thought you might like to know that there have been whispers by those in the know (namely, Dame Slap), that the Land of Do-As-You-Please is returning to the top of the Faraway Tree. We don't know when, exactly. We just would love to see you again and, as it was one of the most enjoyable times we all had together, we thought that would be a perfect time. We know grown-ups need plenty of forewarning to prepare so we hope this gives you enough time. We so hope to see you. Please bring your credits when you come.
Love from SILKY AND MOON-FACE
Enfolded in each letter were 16 square red cards with white type on them, which said "One Credit" followed by their names. And then lastly was a small tin full of - oh, joy - pop biscuits.
Jo had noticed an extra spring in his step since that day in 1979. A feeling of ... anticipation. It came back to him, how it had used to feel as a kid. Climbing that tree, seeing its folk, climbing into the clouds up the ladder. Jo's business partner appraised him one day, after a strategic meeting with a client Joe handled like a pro, relaxed but focused. "I don't know what's happened with you. But I like it."
Jo understood how much he'd changed. Before that letter had arrived, he'd felt like he was sinking into as stale a version of his life as his father lived before him. Go to work, come home, have nothing to say to his wife, his two kids holed up in their bedrooms.
Truth be told, Joe had been toying with the idea of shutting himself up in his garage, in his car. He had the tubing hidden in the boot that would connect to his exhaust at one end and he at the other and send him away from this grand disappointment. He'd been thinking about it the night he arrived home to Moon-Face's letter, opened on the hall table, and his wife's questioning.
He'd laughed it off as some silly joke his sisters were playing on him, about a childhood story they'd concocted. His wife's eyes had opened in shock and then pleasure at the taste of her first pop biscuit.
The new decade dawned and 1980 rolled by, 1981, 1982. They all began to wonder if they'd imagined things when there was no more contact. The plans they'd made to go themselves to visit the Enchanted Wood never materialised. They soon started forgetting they'd ever received the letters at all. Then one Thursday in June, on the third day of his annual holidays, Jo looked up from his reading in the conservatory to a squirrel tapping at the window. In its paw was a newspaper, which it placed in the crook of the tree before scampering down the trunk, up the garden and over the fence.
Jo went outside. The Grantville Gazette. The newspaper of his childhood home, where Bessie lived with her partner Emily and their Airedale Tolstoy. As he took the newspaper inside, the phone rang. It was Bessie.
"Did you receive a newspaper by any chance?" she asked, breathlessly, her voice all high and girly, not at all like a pharmacist. She told him to turn to page seven. There was a simple ad in a box:
J, B, F and D
If you have the credits, we have the time travel.
See you tomorrow after dark? Love, Moon-Face and Silky
And so they'd concocted some silly story about a name-change party, which was perfectly fine for Bessie and Fanny to do, being a couple of silly old hippies, but it took Jo some time to convince his wife he wasn't having a midlife crisis as he shot off to his childhood home on a whim.
So now here they were, lounging around, looking out at the darkening garden when Dick sprang up.
"Time to go!" he declared, his eyes shining like it was 1946, flinging open the door and galloping across the garden to the fence in the wall that led to the woods. They all felt twinges of apprehension as they followed him through and came upon the darkness of the wood. They walked for 20 minutes, quiet, their torches bouncing off trees, the backs of their necks tingling at shadows.
Then they heard it. A jingling sound. So slight at first it seemed imagined, but as they approached becoming more discernible as drums and banjos and singing. Then they came upon the folk of the Wood, going about their business. A market, dancing. A few of them looked curiously at the adults.
It was all coming back to them now - the little winding bit before you rounded a corner onto ... the Faraway Tree!
"I say," said Bessie, reverting to her childhood speech patterns, "how on earth are we going to climb this?"
Indeed, they hadn't quite thought of that. So many things appear smaller when you come upon them in adulthood; the tree did not. In fact, it seemed bigger. They were all looking dubiously at the first bough of the tree when a squirrel appeared with a pile of cushions just as a rope bounded down from the canopy above. The cushions from the slide! The squirrel tied the cushions to the rope and chittered to the children adults, pointing to the rope.
"Jump aboard!" came a voice from high above them. It was unmistakenly Moon-Face and the children adults felt an upswell of love and joy at the sound. How could they have ever forgotten Moon-Face?
Jo pushed himself forward and climbed onto the cushions. "Up she goes!" he cried, and the rope began pulling him upward. Jo let out a whoop. Bessie and Fanny looked at each other in astonishment. Jo - whooping?
But anything was possible here. They all felt it, the magic that wafted on the air like mulled wine. Jo's legs disappeared from sight. It seemed like forever until they heard a faint sound of laughter, excited chatter and ... yes, sobbing coming from the tree above.
Indeed, both Moon-Face and Jo had set to sobbing after Moon-Face had gazed at him a long moment, a little curiously, a tinge of sadness even, and said, "It is you, isn't it. I can see you in there, Jo! Jo!"
And Jo had fallen weeping onto Moon-Face's neck, great big tears, and he didn't even feel embarrassed or anything. Then Silky grabbed him and hugged him, and the Saucepan Man, who stuck a spout of one of his kettles into Jo's side. And then Jo helped them pull up the rope three more times until they were all finally up the tree, with Dick grumbling because Dame Washalot's water had drenched his ride.
Inside Moon-Face's dear little house they drank tea and ginger beer and watched the years fall away as if they'd never been. The children adults felt self-conscious at first of their advanced years as none of the folk in the Tree had aged a day it seemed.
"How long have we been gone from here?"Bessie asked, eating her third pop biscuit.
"Oh, goodness, I don't rightly know. Two hundred years maybe?" Moon-Face looked at Silky for confirmation. She nodded and then looked towards the door as a familiar sound began, one the children adults had not heard for what felt like a million years - the rushing sound of a new land coming to the top of the tree.
They clambered to the door. The tree had already become a hive of traffic, with pixies, goblins and elves descending out of the cloud and down the ladder, while all manner of creatures climbed up.
"Shall we go?" Silky's eyes glittered like jewels.
"Do you all have your credits?" Moon-Face asked. Jo took them from his back pockets where they'd been safekept, 64 red cards that he handed to Moon-Face. Who threw them into the air, where they all turned into countless tiny fairies who flew excitedly around the room and then buzzed around the heads of each of the children adults. Except they were not quite so much children adults as they'd been before they came back here. They all looked somehow ... younger, or dewier. Or something.
"These credits determine whether you have the required childlikeness left to climb the ladder," Silky explained as the fairies settled on the heads and shoulders of the four adults children. "We know how it is for humans who grow up. We were most concerned about you," she said to Jo. "The squirrels did give us some worrying feedback over the years." Jo looked at her open-mouthed, a little amazed at squirrel reportings, of how the cords and ropes of his adult life were unloosening.
"Well then," said Moon-Face beaming at him, and then at the others. "Shall we go?"
They all turned out of Moon-Face's house and, with shrieks and laughs, climbed the ladder into the clouds.
Divider clipart from the awesome OpenClipart
Pic: CC0