Message In a Bottle

Normally Danny Redwood wouldn’t be out this late, especially on a school night. But this was important. He had the money, and the address given to him from his friend Brian, who had needed help for last month’s spelling bee. And he had Brian’s word that this was legit. That first place trophy he kept showing off was proof enough. 

And so Danny found himself down the dark alley, a sliver between buildings in the wrong part of town, the wrong time of night. The last working street light was a block away, the last pedestrian he’d passed even further. He hugged his body and told himself it was because of the cold, and nothing to do with this tomb of a sidestreet his mother and father warned him against. The kind that looked like the ones you see on the news with crime tape and chalk outlines. The kind that held monsters. 

Every instinct told Danny to turn around and go back home, to forget about this whole stupid thing. Endure the fallout — the teasing, the punching. Cyrus and Mick would never let him live it down, but he’d endured them before. Too many times in his fifteen years. As awful as they were, surely they’d be better than... whatever this was.

It wasn’t much more than a door. No surrounding windows, no signage. Just a door set in an alcove, a heavy wooden frame etched with deep carvings that strode a line between ornate design and animalistic slashing. He ran a finger over one, felt its roughness. Swallowed into a dry throat.

You can still turn back.

Seriously, what are you doing here? Just go home. Let those morons find out. Just go.

Danny swallowed again. Then he turned the knob and went inside.

The first thing that greeted him were the shelves. Positioned too close to the door, too close to one another, they forced Danny to shimmy along their narrow lengths, wooden monoliths towering overhead with countless boxes and jars thick with dust. The dim lighting made him pause more than once, just to make sure he wasn’t going to bump into anything as he shuffled his way forth. Wooden floorboards creaked. He felt too warm in his coat; the shop was heated to the sort of stuffy temperature his grandma liked. And there was a smell he couldn’t place. Some kind of incense maybe. 

He kept moving. The gaps between shelves seemed to get wider, the light just a touch brighter.

“Help yer?”

A scratchy voice made Danny jump. He turned to his left, realised he was now at the store’s counter and looking at an old man peering at over the top of an old book, thick with yellowed pages. Brian had warned him about the man. Said he was always in a bad mood, and would probably try to make him leave. But stick with it, Brian had said. He’ll give you what you want.

“I, uhh, need…” Danny couldn’t bring himself to finish, and trailed off in a mumble.

The old man was bald, with skin of wrinkled burlap. The holes in his cardigan revealed a stained shirt underneath, both layers rolled up to the elbows. Grey eyes twinkled at Danny’s discomfort, and as he set the book aside, it revealed a mouth that curled in a wry grin. “Sorry, didn’t quite catch that.”

“I need a... need a potion.”

“Do yer now. And what makes yer think I’ve a way to help yer out with that? Come in here with that sorta talk. What would yer parents think?”

The man’s speech grated the spine. Clipped and angular. Danny forced himself to gather his own voice. “I need something that will make me good at dancing,” he said. “By tomorrow night.”

That gave the old man pause for genuine surprise. “Tomorrow? Mer boy, suppose I had what you think I do, yer think that’s how it works? The legit stuff takes four or five days. Why’s the rush?”

“Just because,” said Danny, and he wanted to say no more than that. 

Truth was, he’d had a week. Longer if you counted the posters that went up. Richfield High School Dance — A Journey Under the Stars. But it wasn’t until last Friday when Danny’s teacher, Mrs Langdon, had put the entire class into two hats — boys and girls — and drawn out each pair. This way is fairer, Mrs Langdon had said. This school dance is for everybody. No one is going to play favourites, or leave anybody out.

Danny Redwood wanted to be left out. He’d rather disappear into the floor than face the idea of going to a dance, in front of the entire school. Teachers as well. And parents. His name was drawn, and he was paired with Georgina Schuster.

There was an audible groan from the boys whose luck wasn’t theirs.

Georgina Schuster was a knockout. The prettiest girl in the class. Even in the same uniform as everybody else, she stood out with her blonde hair and magazine-perfect smile. And not just pretty, but smart, and known for her ambitious drive. Her after-school activities were many; hockey trials one day, violin practice the next.

Then dancing lessons.

Danny knew she’d had them, because it was impossible not to hear her gushing to her friends how much she was looking forward to the dance. This was before their names were drawn. After they were paired, after hiding was no longer an option, only one option remained: if the whole school was going to be watching the guy picked to dance with Georgina Schuster, he was going to make it work.

Danny didn’t want to say any of this, but it needn’t have mattered, for the old man stared at him in a way that seemed as though he was staring through him, right to his core. “So keen to impress a girl you barely know.”

“How did you—”

“See,” said the old man, as though he’d said nothing at all. “On the off chance I was into this sort of thing, the balance’d hafta be just right. Kid says he wanna dance, maybe it could happen. Maybe here, but maybe not here. Not with yer unregulated market. Yer get it?”

“I’ve got money,” said Danny. He patted the coat pocket that held the thick wad of notes, the bulk of his weekend bagging assistant wages. He didn’t know if it would be enough — Brian had said that the prices went from reasonable to ridiculous. But the hope was there. 

“Show me.”

Danny held up the notes in his hand. The man beckoned him closer, but Danny stood his ground. The wrong part of town was still the wrong part of town.

The old man seemed to find the resistance amusing. He settled back in his chair, stroked his chin. “What kind of dancing yer after?”

Danny paused. He hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know. All kinds?”

“Well, yer see...” The man brushed his hand across an invisible speck of dust on the counter. “Things yer talking about are quite particular in their effects. One’ll do foxtrot. Another, maybe samba. Specific dances, see.”

“I just—”

“I sold outta moonwalking when Michael Jackson died. Busy coupla months there.” It was a memory that brought a grin to the man’s face, and all pretence was erased. As though reliving the amount of money he made from those sales had won out against the idea of keeping this kid at arm’s reach. 

It wasn’t a grin that Danny shared. “Don’t you have, like, a kind of general dance one?” He sensed the tension in his own voice, but he didn’t care. He just wanted this over with. 

There was a moment, a meeting of eyes. Then, with great effort, the old man hoisted himself off his stool. The motion revealed him as a distinctly hunched figure, and he shuffled with a low stoop as he headed to a back shelf, rifled through its contents. A minute or two passed. Danny said nothing. Part of him wondered if the man was back there calling the police, before realising if he was calling anyone, it would be someone worse. He wanted to run. A few minutes head start was better than nothing. 

Eventually the man returned to the counter, slapped down a small glass vial between them. “This’n do the trick.”

Danny leaned in. The vessel was no bigger than a matchbox on its end, tapered at the top and filled with a luminous liquid. He moved his head, inspected it from all sides. The colour inside kept shifting with the light. It looked altogether foreign, an effect he couldn’t place. 

“It’s not gonna bite. Go ahead, yer can pick it up.”

Danny did. The bottle felt heavy in his hand, the weight betraying its small size. Like the liquid inside was made from the densest material imaginable. 

“The way this’n works, it feeds offa yer partner. Yer as good as they are, no more or less. Just hold their pretty little hand and the juice takes care of the rest.”

Danny kept staring at it. Could it really work, just like that? There was no label; who knew how the old man knew which vial did what. Could be he had dozens of the things back there, all filled with the same stuff, all given to the same desperate customers. All doing nothing.  

“Yer don’t believe any of this, do yer?”

Danny thought back to his friend Brian. He’d won that spelling bee, said it was thanks to the potion sold to him by the old man in the shop, but who really knew. Could have been having him on. “You say this will work…” 

“Sure as I’m sitting here. Works better than the best. Why, yer think I’m here to swindle yer?” But before Danny could answer, the old man moved his posture. “Tell yer what. Yer not happy it works just like I said, yer can keep this.” He reached to his neck, lifted out over his head some sort of charm hanging on a frayed length of string. He rested it on the counter next to the small bottle. “Mightn’t look like much, but get that valued anywhere and they’ll tell yer what it’s worth.”

It didn’t look like it was worth anything. A polished green stone, flecked with yellow and white. Who knew what it actually was. Who knew if this was just another thing the man had in dozens, stashed under the counter and totalling a value of barely two dollars.

Danny was hesitant. “You’re just going to give this to me?”

“I expect you’ll bring it back. Deal’s a deal. Yer returnin it after my stuff works. Else I know just how to find yer and take it myself, Danny Redwood.”

Despite the warmth in the room, the shiver that scraped up Danny’s back was cold and unforgiving. It was all he remembered feeling as he threw his money on the counter, took his items and hoped against hope that this stuff worked.

*    *    *

White streamers. Mirrorballs. Soft music. The dance brought Richfield High School together in the gymnasium, dappled lighting playing across the swaying crowd of coupled teens. 

Danny felt their eyes on him. He tried to tell himself they were looking at Georgina Schuster, gorgeous in her pink dress that flared out where the hem touched the floor. Roses in her hair, their smell mingling with her perfume. She was beautiful. And they probably were looking at her. 

How could they not. Their dancing was terrible. 

Together they kept stumbling, moving out of time with the music. His shoes kicked her shins. Her own dress tripped her up more than once. He had to catch her from falling, and he wouldn’t have minded a chance to have her in his arms, were it not for the fact that this spectacle was exactly what he was hoping to avoid.

In the crowd, to Danny’s right, stood Cyrus and Mick, the two brutes who had his number. They laughed between them, no doubt looking forward to delivering those punches next week, punches earned for wasting a date with Georgina Schuster. 

The potion didn’t work. His dancing was bad as ever. Probably the trinket he had was worthless, too, and Danny wondered why he’d bothered to wear it around his neck.

Georgina tripped, blushed. “Sorry about this,” she said. “This isn’t really my thing. Bad night or something.”

No. It was him, bringing them both down. Georgina Schuster was not bad at dancing; she’d been preparing for this for weeks. That stupid old man.

“Hey, where’d you get this?” She lifted out the pendant from Danny’s shirt, and he felt her fingertips graze his skin.

“Long story,” he said.

“This is my grandfather’s. It’s priceless. How’d you get it?”

Its value came secondary to the shockwave that boomed through his mind: 

Her grandfather?

There was so much that Danny wanted to say, to ask, but she asked again, insistent. And so he told her. Every detail. “He said the potion would make me as good a dancer as my partner,” he said at the end. “Guess I fell for it.”

Somehow, a smile crossed Georgina’s face. And she chuckled, a fate-of-the-universe laugh.

“When I got paired with you… I knew you couldn’t dance. But I didn’t want to show you up. So I figured it’d be best if we were both on the same page.” She revealed an empty potion bottle in her hand, the rim marked with her lipstick. “Dancing lessons begone.”

She could have just faked it, he thought, before realising that she couldn’t have faked it that well. Georgina was too good to be deliberately terrible. 

She kissed Danny on the cheek. “Let’s go outside,”she said. “I think the stars are out tonight.”

This piece was nominated as a finalist in Field of Words' Short Story Competition 2017.