Short Story Excerpt: CCTV

Another Short Scene from another angle of Aaron Gray and the Dragon War... I thought we'd pay another visit to Mrs Seeger.

“You can’t find him?” Mrs Seeger’s hands were shaking so much she could feel the phone vibrating against her ear. “But he always goes into town, that’s how we knew he was…”

She couldn’t bring herself to say the word “safe”. Aaron wasn’t safe. He was missing. Properly missing.

“I know,” the staff member from the care home said, using the same false calm voice that Mrs Seeger used when trying to reassure panicking parents. “But we’ll find him. He was seen catching the bus straight after he left here, and we’ve asked the bus company for their CCTV so we can see where he got off.”

“Right, so who’s at the bus company?”

“I was just going down now, I’m meeting the police there in half an hour.”

“Okay, good. So what have the police said so far?”

“Not much. They seem to think it’s normal behaviour for Aaron, but they’re keeping a lookout.

Mrs Seeger could hear her voice raising. “It’s not normal behaviour for Aaron. I mean sure he’s ran away before but he’s never disappeared. We’ve always been able to find him.”

“I know. I’ll let you know more when I’ve seen the CCTV.”

“No you won’t. I’m coming too. I’ll meet you outside the bus office.”

Mrs Seeger put down the phone before the staff member could object. She drove to the main office of the bus company as quickly as she could and arrived at the same time as the police officer. The care home staff member arrived twenty minutes later, carrying a take-away coffee cup. They went inside, and after brief introductions were shown to a room with a colour TV screen. They watched in silence, the only sounds being a nearby computer and the slurp of take-away coffee.

Mrs Seeger watched the screen as Aaron calmly boarded the bus, chatting to a young girl about the same age as him, with shoulder length brown hair and large blue eyes. Later some slightly older children boarded the bus, and Mrs Seeger could see Aaron tense. She wondered if they had anything to do with his disappearance. A few moments later Aaron was laughing and opening the bus window. The screen appeared to skip slightly and Aaron and the girl vanished.

“Wait. What happened there? Can we rewind?” Mrs Seeger found a rewind button on the console in front of her and watched again as the two children vanished. “Are we missing some video?”

“No. Look at the timestamp,” said the police officer. It’s all there, and none of the other passengers have moved.

“So what, they just vanished then?” snapped Mrs Seeger.

“No… Well I don’t know, but we’ll find out.” The policeman paused the video. “At any rate we know their whereabouts up until this point, and we know that they were last seen at…” He pointed at the view out of the bus window. “...the theatre fountain. I’ll go over there and see if anyone’s seen anything.”