Samuel's Ordeal

On a smooth rock dais under The Tree of Benevolence, young Samuel’s thought-herd sat in deep thought about thought matters.
“What is daunting Samuel’s notions so much? Is amnesia on the prowl in this shrine of a brain? Is Samuel being impudent with the teacher again?” the thought-herd pondered. Far in the distance he saw the Giant of Strategy dwindling into the distance to where he was summoned by the logic of the brain, strangely with a haughty gait like that of someone important running a reverend errand. The world looked dull and arid in Samuel’s mind. He was clever, but far from jovial.

Samuel felt like he was living in solitude: no friends and many foes, with only a remote glimmer of happiness keeping him resolute enough to continue living. He impetuously decided to recruit friends to his circle, but how recruit when you seem to be shunned?
“Hey look, there goes mister lonely who passes time with himself only!” one of the passers by jeered at Samuel while he was walking home. He felt like calling John McDonald a witless truant who spends school time incinerating his career, but peering down at his feeble legs and arms deterred him.

He turned down a dirt road christened West Dust Avenue and prepared himself for torment. There was no use being prudent about travelling down this road, it was the only way home. Predictably the Mischievous Four gang leapt from behind an enormous lonely boulder protruding from the plain. Samuel thought that the only way to explain how it could have wound up there of all places was that it must have been a giant’s forgotten toy from times of old.

“Good day my Sammy with hammy or perhaps jammy,” Dorian Jones, the leader of the gang, greeted Samuel mockingly.
“I don’t have any food for you, Jones, and you know it!” Samuel said courageously.
“No? Well, no matter,” Dorian said imperviously. “I’m not looking for your sandwich today my friend. I’m looking for your flesh and bone. We want to become the Mischievous Five. We need some brains to become more notorious. We need a propagandist.”
“M, m, me?” Samuel stuttered. “You want me to join you?”
“No, the guy behind you,” Dorian jested. “Now follow me to the junkyard, Sammy. You’ll remain a sissy boy till after the Mischievous Fou… sorry, Five, initiation.”

So the boys trod on until they reached the gate of the perilous yard littered with scorched cat corpses and rat remains. They threaded their way through miscellaneous heaps of metal and refuse towering dreadfully high above them. A dome of cloudy sky smirked down upon the Mischievous Four going on Five. All the way the boys talked. Samuel was still tentative, but was soon used to the constant cursing from Dorian. He seemed to have one word serving as adjective, adverb and any other part of speech you can probably think of.

Accompanied by the vibrations of Dorian’s voice, a sinister figure trespassed through Samuel’s mental gate that made his thought-herd quail and scud towards safety. The wicked figure called Gondoroth soon adopted all authority in his mind. It ravaged his vocabulary with a searing flame and transfigured all words captured by his memory into curses. He was becoming sly even before the initiation.

As is common in gangs such as this a ‘plan’ is mostly a synonym for certain imprisonment, and the sudden boom of an unseen policeman made it even more applicable to the Mischievous Almost Five. Without speech or warning each and everyone of the Mischievous members, except Samuel, disappeared with trained efficiency from the scene. Samuel was manacled by an extremely stout-limbed policeman who grabbed him from behind. He was pinned to the ground, writhing with fear.

“Now we have you, you little pes. You window breaker! You thief! You slimy little fish! Now we’ve got you! No escaping now!” he exclaimed victoriously.
He was loaded into the back of the police wagon smelling of fresh doughnuts. An infant pedestrian boy on his mother’s back pointed at a small, huddled figure in the rear of the passing police vehicle.

“Innocent!” he shrieked in baby language. Samuel was convicted of wantonly stealing an apple, a product that would have done the officer better.
After a long unpleasant drive in the nimble space of the sweet-scented police wagon, he was shoved into a surly cell and with an echoing clank the metallic gate of the stone cage was savagely hurled shut. A cloud of despair descended upon him.

The small and hazardously ominous figure in Samuel’s mind began to destroy him in the noisome space of the hostile cell. It mustered an incontrollable rage inside his mind about which he felt compelled to release in a swift and ferocious blow on one of the guards wielding an irritating tapping baton.

“Do not fear,” a voice spoke clearly and suddenly, driving all evil from Samuel’s mind and replacing it with an ineffable reverence for an old, yet sacred-looking bundle of rags in the adjacent cell. “You learn from your mistakes my son: When you mix with the rubbish, you are fed to the pigs. Do not fear, I will help you!”

Before his very eyes the man disappeared, raiment and all, into thin air without even the faintest sound of a crack or a pop. A queer form of blindness assailed Samuel and a strange feeling travelled through his body. He felt like being on the verge of swooning.

Slowly but surely his sight and conscience returned. He squinted into the bright light of his bedroom, which at first startled him, and instinctively studied his wrists. They were encircled with a conspicuous red mark each that he strangely didn’t comprehend or heed to. He endeavoured to remember what had happened, but his memory failed him. A faint giddiness still lay over his mind, but farther he was unscathed.

“Seems that miracles do still happen,” Samuel muttered to himself absentmindedly, making his way to the fridge to acquire some decent food to compliment an unfathomable feeling of liberation.