A Generalization: The Delewyn Doorsteps

  It was an odd sight that day, when, at precisely eleven o’clock, an unknown and unfortunate figure appeared on the Delewyn’s doorstep. The Delewyn residence, where there once lived a Mr. and a Mrs. Dorowin (later changed to the current house name), was now empty from cancer, proclaimed to be haunted as well. Many recognized a keep out sign when they saw one, but here he was, a stranger out of nowhere.

  Out of a nearby window, that belonging to 264 North Rockway Avenue, a small girl was home alone, analyzing with every drop of her semi-journalist blood, a kid, scarred, scattered, and visibly lonely. Reluctantly, she watched as the boy leaped from his post and ran off down Route OH-4. She was only there to see him being chased to his limit, before she exhaled a pang of guilt, and fell to the floor. As she hit the floor, a hand slid under her neck, lifted her onto a rough shoulder, and carried her to a black SUV. The man had just lowered down the lump in his arms on a hidden cushion, when he saw a small boy, disheveled and soiled to his bare skin. The man had no choice but to see the kid run up the highway, as he clambered into his car.

One: A desperate Search for Evidence

  The next day, police were on report in Springfield, Ohio, searching for a man accused of murder, theft, and one major mistake. They had minimal, but overly crucial evidence: a hat, and a kid, who was now traveling the highway.

  Agent Geltrés, a highly stubborn man who yearned to receive a rise in position, took the case without questioning the subject. As he arrived onto the scene of crime, he found himself quite terribly lost in all the fuss. After entering the house (prior to a great deal of shoving), he found one footprint in the shadows of a large curtained window. He tilted his attention toward the hinge where there was to be a string… and there wasn’t. Putting his hand between the blinds, he carefully let them open, only to find that they were glued shut. Near the foyer of the long house lay a vase, as dusty as if it were the carpet, but on it, lay two exact prints. Jackpot. The thought passed through the man’s mind.

  Charlie Corrners had never encountered such tiny prints to check. His job involved him in the news about all the thefts, and such. This is what he made a living out of, selling priceless information to the ones who needed it most; of course for a price. It is this, however, that he felt might just have lost him a millenniums worth of bills. It was quite obvious that no one had, or would, come looking for the two prints. It was this depression that brought him to where he was now, scanning fingerprints that may, in fact, be out of the subject. What he found at the end of five minutes time was nothing of his expectance. Only one note was jotted onto the following page printed out of a frankly large printer: Kidnapped daughter of Doctors May and Franklin Sun, Journalists for the New York Times. He too, felt a thought creep into his mind. It could only spell one word: Jackpot.

  One could never attain such dramatic of a search for intelligence as had this man. Yes, it was true he was suspected of major things, but it was not he who had done them. Desperately, he was trying to finish up many jobs, and he found himself doing this unsuccessfully. The robbery in France had gone askew as he had lost many of his best men, and the bailout in San Francisco was up to no date; he hadn’t heard from his men in California in a while. The one mission that kept him up was the kidnapping in a little town near OH-4. That was all he knew…

  She was ten years old. That meant nothing to her captor. She had been sitting in this hotel for as far as she could remember. She had gotten here after the driver missed the ramp to the city and swerved around back toward the city road, only to crash into a side barrier. The impact had been huge, even though she was sitting in the back seat. But the captor had been lucky and not altogether. He had been sent in a wave of blaring lights, and when the police came, they had no assumption that he was, plainly, a kidnapper. And that’s what she was thinking when there was a knock on the door.

  Agent Geltrés had never in his life been as proud of himself as he was now. Since the beginning of his career, everything had gone wrong. He was the least favorite FBI in the country for a while as well, when a bomb exploded somewhere in Oregon. It took him thirty days and nights, traveling around the world, to find the ones who set it off, only to be surprised that, in the meantime, they had been right where the bomb was, in Oregon. But finally he would be liked by all, thanks to two fingerprints on a dusty vase. He was hoping that the final prints would come soon, for he had sent them many weeks before. So where were they? He had no idea, whatsoever. And that’s how he ended up in from of an office door marked with the name of “Charlie Corrners”. He walked in.

Two: Mistakes Not Forgiven And Mistakes Made of Greed

  Charlie Corrners did not expect anyone, much less a police chief, just recruited.      

  “Yes…?” asked he, not quite paying attention to his visitor.

  “May you produce the prints that I gave you two weeks ago?”

  Charlie looked up at the round face in recognition. As a long pause ended, he insisted, “Might as well. Please pay me the price of ten-thousand dollars.”

  The officer could not believe what he had heard. “What!”, bewilderment flew from his tongue.

  Calmingly, the bailer repeated, “Ten-thousand dollars,”. He exclaimed every word as if, slowly, he was piercing the other’s intention. Stunned and outraged, Agent Geltrés left the room.

  As he sat in a window seat at the Öpînhaggsen Café, one commonly known only as the boy, wondered how he could escape the transformation of his to-become form. It was a complex process, involving much pain and weathering. It is this that he tried to get away from, but though it was not his captive, it was quite the opposite, as one can run from thy captives, but cannot shield from his prisoners. More or less, this was his prisoner: a transformation. No one knew, or wanted to know, of his condition, the name not heard once. He was struck with a case of commuter’s form, a thing simply explaining his differences of being hurt or not. Running on the highway was his only chance, and escaping one girl was his only freedom.

  And the thought of freedom was soon extracted from a man in jail, sent there by one anonymous, and brought there because of a scandal that he would gradually forget through his aging. Once more, a man of upmost secrecy had done, nevertheless, what someone with the initials AG was trying to complete, and finally, those initials became those of this figure upon secrecy, stolen, and well prepared. Agent Alfred Geltrés was soon going to be the world’s most feared man, and only one could stop it, and he wouldn’t.

Three: One Understood, Two Misidentified

  The last time he saw himself, he was in the paper, accused of many things that he did not recall, and the detectives merely used that against him. It was not long before he had appeared on the grounds of jail. As he appeared in the place, he saw it all, and with one conclusion that he didn’t tolerate, and that was the fact of this all being wrong, for that’s how it was. First of all, he was and agent, which too, the others used against him. It was bigger a mess that the time of the Oregon bank bombing. He cleaned the floors, washing them by hand; he pleaded, day after day after day; and most of all, he hoped, and wondered, then hoped once more, then came back to pondering. He had been a disgrace to the majority of those he knew, and that was the worst thing of all. With a clang, the door swept open and a boy—or was he a boy?—strode in. He noticed the bewildering expression on the man’s face, and set out to explain.

  “Have you ever heard about the Delewyn Doorsteps?” started the boy. The man, in return, carefully nodded. “Why not you tell me about it.” The boy sat down, nodded his head, as the man began speaking, and the guards walked out into the hall, noting the sense of private conversation.

  “The Delewyns’ doorsteps have long been under police investigation,” he started. “A couple years ago, a ‘robot’ was said to have inhabited the house. And every so often, a boy runs out the house, and whoever sees him always ends up murdered, or otherwise dead.” In his last twenty years of working for the FBI, he had never let out so much as that. He kept to himself, and for a reason he would not explain. The boy, satisfied, walked out, and shut the door. The boy knew more than that. His mechanical brain allowed him the sense of more than one could imagine. He knew who had poisoned the beings in the house, and he knew who the Dorowin’s were too – CIA spies. They had come here on a private mission that not one knew of, other than him.

Four: The Private Knowledge — an excerpt from the Dorowin File

Mr. Conner and Mrs. Alice Dorowin joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1932 after flying in from the Soviet Union. They were sent on a mission to find and kill alleged leader of WAKS (World Association of Kidnapping Specialists), Travis Willstote. They set off on their journey 1962 with thirty years of experience, but were murdered by an unknown group on November 27th the same year. All other personal information has been cleared due to private circumstances. Their two children, Conner II and Rachel-Beth (born two years apart in 1957-1959) had been taken to care at the Southwest Orphanage Center of Ohio (also known as Sorcoh) before being kidnapped out of their beds one Monday night. It is believed that they were later taken to a foster home after being found on a deserted street in downtown Springfield. Later they had been adopted by Drs. May and Franklin Sun, who, after working in various hospitals around the globe, settled to work in the New York Times. Two days after his tenth birthday, Conner II died of cancer in his left leg.

Five: The Manhunt

  The manhunt started one-hundred forty-six hours after the jailing of Alfred Geltrés. Chief of Police Grant Ford was sipping his morning coffee while reading the advertisement section of The Plain Dealer. As he turned the page, spotting nothing of interest, he stumbled upon an article about a man named Travis Willstote; alleged leader of WAKS, the world’s most terrified-of kidnapping agency. He knew one thing for sure—Travis Willstote would end up behind bars, sooner or later.

  He immediately called up his crew, and within 24 hours, the leader of WAKS was captured, and questioned. The next day’s report came out something like this:

January 16, 2007

  Travis Willstote, 47, alleged leader of WAKS (World Association of Kidnapping Specialists), was jailed at 17:46 EST yesterday after hiding from police for over three hours. Chief of Police Grant Ford quickly set to work after reading an article about Travis and finally tracking his location down at Case Western Reserve University parking lot. After being questioned, he confessed of murder, false creation and trial, and stolen identity. He was finally sentenced to 120 years in prison, thirty years for each crime. Travis was born in Wyoming as Clifford Willstote to B. J. Willstote and Hope Nelson Willstote on January 2, 1960, and later changed his name in collage. All other information is unknown.

All the victims of the kidnapping were quickly released from their hiding place, and the Dorowin mission had finally been finished.

  And after a long wait, the settlers of Rockway Avenue finally got their wish—peace and quiet, at long last.