Rescue By A Halloween Witch

I wrote this to lilfluff's third prompt.  It follows on from On The Night Of Disguises and is followed by Trick or Treat?

“My son was attacked and bitten by a rat when he was small,” Tybalt Grimolochin explained to the two teachers dressed as witches.  “He still fears them.”

“My Dad killed it,” squeaked up Joe, nervously holding his father’s hand, “but the others got away.”

“Rats are nasty, aren’t they?” cackled his kindergarten teacher, Elvira Madden, as she kept in character.  “Perhaps we can find a treat in our cauldron to help make you feel better?”

Her friend and fellow pretend-witch, Dorothy James, started their lorum ipsum inspired chant while Elvira stirred in the cauldron with her ladle, making sure she got one of the ‘prizes’ nestled in the bottom into the ladle’s bowl.  Joe politely accepted his chocolate frog and added it to his bag along with the jelly snakes and other treats he’d collected so far then went to the next room of the ‘house’ clutching his father’s hand.

It was dark by the time the teachers were able to leave and Elvira was glad to be out of her makeup.  She said goodbye to Dorothy as they climbed into their cars and then turned right onto the road while Dorothy turned left.  Instead of going home though she almost immediately turned into the club car park commonly used by parents visiting the school.  Sitting in the middle of the car park, completely alone except for a child in a lion costume and a tall man, was a small sedan.

She pulled up beside them and said, “Is there a problem?  Can I help?”

Tybalt Grimolochin smiled at her but he looked worried.  “We got back to the car and found that someone’s slashed our tires and sealed all the movable panels with what looks like silicone sealant.  I’ve called the NRMA and a taxi but neither has turned up.”

Elvira frowned.  “That’s not a prank, is it?  Look,” she unlocked her car, “you two get in and I’ll drive you home.  It’s a good thing I saw you or who knows how long you might have been here.”

“Thank you.”  Tybalt ushered his son into the back seat and climbed in beside him, doing up both their seat belts.  Elvira locked the doors again and moved off.  Tybalt went on, “We’re up in Ferndale.  If you take us up Dog Trap Road to the three way corner, I’ll give you directions from there.”

“Okay,” and Elvira turned out of the car park in her original direction.

Behind them, in the beautification plantings surrounding the car park, red eyes glowed in the dark.

The Mail Is In The Cheque

I wrote this to aldersprig's fourth prompt.

Our mail room has had to adjust to the changing times.  Accounts less so, which makes it a good thing all the mail goes through our mail room.  Everything gets scanned in and then they run an algorithm over it, or so they tell me.  Apparently that algorithm picks up anomalies, things that look like spots of ink and aren’t, that sort of thing.

The mail room scans the morning’s cheques received in a batch separate to our other mail.  We do security clearance background checks for which there is a fee.  Not a big fee but a nice, round number that brings us in a constant, miniscule but government-mandated stream of revenue.  There’s more PR value in it than cash in a ‘your tax dollars at work’ sort of way and the price is cheap because we want people to get those clearances.  How hard is it for a business that needs those clearances to send us a twenty dollar payment?  Credit card or direct debit preferred but we still get cheques and even cash in the morning mail delivery.

This particular cheque tripped the algorithm’s parameters and set off the flashing lights on the machine so they fished the original out of the batch and had the specialists look at it.  In retrospect it was easy to tell that it was supposed to attract attention, being for two cents short of the twenty dollars.  All the dots were microdots.  Every ‘i’, every decimal point and every full stop had been overlaid.  It was old tech But Agent Murchison-Chu had managed to get a full situational and status report about the Callisc affair onto a cheque.

Of course if it had gotten as far as Accounts Receivable, who’ve bitched about the scanning system for years and how it delays the cheques getting to them, we would have lost the lot.  They send short paid cheques straight back.