A Tad In Time

Beyond the willows was a high line of hills, and beyond that, a long stretch of country that rolled away into the horizon.

Tad and Debbie's parents had moved to the country eight years ago. They had left the smoggy city life, and chosen a place where the air was clean, and the sound of roosters crowing replaced the usual morning grumble of busses and trucks. This made the children more-or-less "country kids", in their opinion at least.

It had been a great experience, coming to live in the country. Tad had been only three when he first stepped shakily from the car on to the driveway of his new home. The world had seemed so big when he was that small. He had been used to a poky little backyard, with a high fence around it. Now he could run all round what his Dad called the "back paddock", and after that there was a hill, with tall, stately pines along its crest, and after that more land, hilly and green, going on seemingly for ever.

Over the years. Tad and his younger sister had explored the world around them. They had made friends with most of the neighbors, sloshed about the edges of the streams, gone for hikes up the river-beds, explored the bush which followed the creases and valleys in the hills, and had a look at the abandoned houses - old abandoned homes once cherished by earlier settlers.

One of these abandoned houses, they had discovered, was in fact occupied, though it had not looked that way. It had used to be an old hotel, which sat in from the side of a shingle road near the river. It was a mess but unbelievably there was still a little space within its rotting, crumbling walls that kept the weather out.

The roof was brown with rust, the windows cracked or gaping, the stone-work crumbling. Wild, twisted trees had coated the building with a yearly mass of dead leaves, and different kinds of creeper had boiled up the walls, wrapping themselves about the sides like a blanket. The front door, which hung crookedly under a heavy cloud of honey-suckle, always stood slightly open.

It had happened one day that Tad and Debbie were on their way back from the river when they had seen an elderly man, chopping and collecting wood, in the bush-entangled area behind the hotel. They had waved. He had waved back. That was the beginning of a slowly growing friendship. That was how the children had come to know Professor Judkins.

It was he whom the children thought of when the same video tape produced three different endings.

"I think we should go and tell the Professor about this?" said Debbie.