Enchantment

David, at age ten, had one passion in his young life: he loved rock-pooling, where he would spend hours on the beach searching for rock-pools that the receding tide had left behind. One day, though, an amazing sight met his eyes as a small face grinned back at him from the rock pool. Indicating that he should join them, he found himself sitting on soft sand surrounded by little people laughing and squealing in high-pitched voices. After being entertained, he was restored to the side of the rock pool where his bucket and net remained unattended. Wondering if this could be sunstroke, he blinked twice, but the little people had gone from his sight. On the way home, he pondered what had happened, resolving to tell nobody. As the years progressed, he finally left school and attended university to pursue a career as a marine biologist, giving him every opportunity to search the oceans of the world to find his newfound friends, but he had no sight or sound of them. Marriage to Stephanie and two children later, he was none the wiser; he even searched the Mariana Trench, but nothing showed up. On his son’s eighteenth birthday he took the family to NASA Space Station in Florida, and there, one day on the beach, he disappeared from view. Police and tracker dogs searched the beaches but could not find any explanation for David’s disappearance. A distraught Stephanie returned home to resume her life without David. Suddenly a telephone call alerted her from Florida that a body had been found thirteen years later and identified by a diver’s wristwatch as being David; he hadn’t aged! Interrogated by police and thought to be used in an international smuggling organisation, Interpol kept them under hotel arrest whilst they investigated his bizarre story of being taken by the little people, where he was made to work under the surface of the sea to encourage sailors to their doom. Finally, David began to age until he was near seventy years, thereafter being allowed home for he and Stephanie to resume their lives together.