5B1: Delusion

With trembling hands, Michael Darnby scooped the untidy heap of £5 notes into a wad and began to count. His venture into the realms of the para-normal had yielded the magnificent total of eighty-nine notes. He counted them four times, planning a major spending spree.
   Breakfast forgotten, he thrust his trawled treasure into the inside pocket of his jacket and left the house. There were one or two cars about, but very few people. Then he noticed that all the shops were shut.
   With cheerful sarcasm, he reminded himself that he was out rather early on a Saturday morning.
   He spotted a newsagent's across the road. At least he could buy a paper. Feeling rich, he stopped at the paperback rack and selected the first brand-new addition to his library for a long, long time. He took two fivers from his inside pocket and placed them on top of his usual newspaper and the book. Then he turned back to the rack to select another paperback.
   He had noticed that one of the notes had been folded into four recently. It was the one that he had placed across the Comparator Gate of his psionic amplifier. The young assistant moved the book off the newspaper and gave the paper to another customer. One of the trawled £5 notes disappeared as she folded it.
   "Just a minute," Darnby protested, "my money's in that."
   The man with his newspaper unfolded it. "Nothing there, mate," he said with a shrug, even though the trawled £5 note was lying in plain view.
   "What's this, then?" Darnby demanded, picking it up.
   The man and the shop assistant exchanged puzzled glances, then looked back at his hand. With an expression of impatient pity, the man shrugged and headed for the door. The assistant gave Darnby a dirty look and turned to another customer.
   "Is this what you're looking for?" The newsagent showed Darnby the folded fiver. He checked the price of the book, slipped it into a paper bag and handed it over along with a penny coin as his change. Darnby accepted the bag awkwardly with the hand that held the rejected fiver.
   He left the shop feeling embarrassed and a little shaken, having forgotten about buying a newspaper, which he could no longer afford anyway. As he was transferring the bag containing the budget-wrecking paperback book to his pocket, the £5 note made a bid for freedom. Darnby watched it drift to the pavement. No one walking past the fiver even glanced at it.
   There was a low wall enclosing a raised bed of grass and a ring of flowers near the newsagent's. A youngster with a paint-splashed toolkit was sitting on it, waiting for a lift to work. Darnby joined him, keeping an eye on the £5 note on the pavement. It could have been invisible.
   The scattering of people out before the main shops opened, or on their way to a Saturday job, walked past it or even stepped on it.
   Darnby lit a cigarette and tried to collect his thoughts. He slipped another note out of his inside pocket and examined it while seeming to read the blurb on the back of his book. It looked all right. He allowed a gust of wind to waft the rectangle of tired paper out of reach.
   The people passing by continued on their courses undeflected. There were two £5 notes on the pavement for anyone cheeky enough to walk off with them. Nobody did.
   It's faith, Darnby thought in disgust. An unsupported belief in the unreasonable. I've got myself believing in a mirage, in four hundred and forty-five quid's worth of wishful thinking.
   He took the rest of the trawled treasure out of his pocket. It still looked and felt real enough to him. Pieces of blue paper took to the air, driven by the breeze along the main street. Darnby watched for a while as the town's early risers ignored a small fortune blowing around their ankles. Then he went home to tear up his psionic amplifier.

END of this route through the story.

In Conclusion

I wrote this short story in September of 1980, before the computer technology needed to create a hypertext story was available to the home user.

Fifteen years later, in September of 1995, there were much fancier hypertext programs on the market than the one which I wrote [using QBasic 4.5, for anyone interested in that sort of thing] to display the hypertext version of the story, but what really counts is the content of the story, not how it looks, and the author chosing to make the effort to go all the way with his vision.

The story is featured in the second volume of my collected short stories [first edition 1997] and this HTML version was created in January, 2000.

This is the end.

Use the navigation panel on the left to explore another route or return to the front page by closing or this window. The BACK button will not return you to the front page as this is a separate window.

Created for Romiley Literary Circle by Henry T. Smith Productions, 10 SK6 4EG, G.B.
sole © Philip Turner, 1980.