A simple farmer receives a horse from the gods, a man sells ice creams named after missing schoolkids, the demolition of a hotel brings an old horror to light, a wounded soldier finds the real enemy is in his own camp, a family inherits a peculiar r...
The ice cream van was still parked under the big oak the following Monday morning. At recess Jay and another boy from my class went over to check it out, but I refused to go with them. At lunch time Jay gave me a report. The serving window had still been propped open, but there was nobody to be seen. They'd gone around to the back of the van where a flimsy aluminium door was swinging in the wind and peeked inside. Empty. No ice cream, no waffle cones, no Ice Cream Man. The ice cream scoop lay on the bench beside the bucket of water.
I don't know what happened to the van – perhaps the council came and removed it – but it was gone the next day.
There was a search for Miss Radcliffe. Her name and face appeared in the local paper for a while, but after a few months you stopped hearing about her. We had a substitute teacher for the rest of the year, a nice young woman who didn't seem to know what detentions were.
I never told Jay or anyone else what happened that day. I told the police Miss Radcliffe had kept me back fifteen minutes after school, and the last time I saw her was at her desk marking work when I left. I surprised myself by how well I lied. It was like I'd already convinced myself that it was what had happened: in my mind I was simply telling the truth to the police. I never mentioned the Ice Cream Man. Did the police link the abandoned van to Miss Radcliffe's disappearance? I don't know. If they did I never heard about it.
There's one more thing to tell. I left it until last because I don't know how to describe it. I mean, I don't know what I saw that day. I'm not even sure I saw it at all. It was a hot day after all, with the heat shimmering off the tarmac, and I was scared, and I only looked back for a few seconds before I turned the corner onto the main road. Perhaps I imagined it.
Across the street from the school gate there was a drain. It had no grate over it. When I looked back at the ice cream van I saw something white moving across the street towards the drain. It was as pale and smooth as vanilla ice cream, its back unblemished except for a few blotches like stains on a dirty white apron. It kept low to the ground and moved in strange little jerks, perhaps because of the weird, flesh-coloured sac it dragged along behind itself. Dark shapes moved inside the sac, like faces behind a dirty window pane. I thought I heard faint cries on the wind. But before I could get a good look at the thing it had crept into the drain and pulled the sac in after itself.
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I wrote a very early, very horrible draft of this story way back in the year 2000 (which still sounds like the future to me). But I liked the basic premise, so recently decided to rewrite it from scratch. As with ice creams, it's best not to dwell on how stories are made: in that spirit I hope you enjoyed it half as much as, say, an ice cream made out of your least favourite teacher.
