No Strings Attached: Sleeping In

Mr. Blavitt died, some vandals crept over the fence with a can of petrol and a box of matches. For whatever reason, these strange people set fire to several of the pieces of house and ran away. It would have saved everyone a lot of time and bother if someone had set fire to the house in the first place, but nobody knew it was going to happen, so we have to excuse them.

In the morning, after the fire-engines had gone, and the small crowd of interested people had drifted away, all that was left was one section of Mr. Mack MacMackie's fine house. It was a bedroom section, with the wall-paper peeling from the walls, brown and stained, and the carpet wrinkled, mouldy and dirty, and the weatherboards rotting, black and fragile.

And in the bedroom, standing alone on its blocks of wood, was a bed, with its cover crooked, and its quilt sprinkled with moss and leaves, and under the bedclothes was a shape, not unlike the form of a body. It was as if someone was still asleep in the bed, though such a thing would have to be impossible, because no-one could be so lazy as to sleep for so many years simply because nobody took the trouble to wake them, could they?

But the path of life, as you well understand, seldom runs in a straight line, so it shouldn't surprise you to know that, despite everyone's best efforts, the whereabouts of Mick MacMackie has yet to be revealed, though it is well known to you because you are intelligent enough to solve the mystery just from the few clues you have been given.

Eventually some person who did not give his name bought the last piece of the house, and loaded it on to a large trailer and drove away, and the lawyers were disappointed because he did not need them to write letters or sign any of their bits of paper.

And sadly we have to say that whoever bought the last bit of the house has not left their address, and it is unlikely that we will ever know what they did with the boy in the bed, or even if they bothered to look in the bed.

Perhaps he's still asleep, somewhere, in an empty paddock, under the shade of some big, old trees, snoring peacefully in his mouldy bed sheets, while the grass grows higher and the ivy creeps over the floor?