A Sliver of my Scribblings So Far…

The arias of archangels arc through the air as I am “assisted” into the amphitheatre. Their anticipation appals me, my arrival announced with apish amusement, ablaze in affected affluence. Alongside the angelic anthems, their applause is an absolute aural agony.

Abominations, all.

Behold – the buzzing breaks, albeit briefly, into a breathless babble as a bolt of brightness bursts into being, far above. It bears downwards, becoming bigger and bolder in the blazing sky and I blanch, barely believing that the bastard would bridge the barrens of Babel to be beholden to my embarrassment… but lo – in a beat – he is before me, and he burns with bitterness and bile.

My betrayal is brought to light, and with a bellow that blasts me backwards, he broadcasts that I am to be beaten, until both body and brain are broken. This is, unbelievably, better than the barbarity I would brook from the brutes on the balconies above, so I bow. I will bear the first blow. But before it begins, he bends down beside me.

“Baptism by blood,” he breathes.

–   CRACK  –

I crumple. On cue, a cacophonous crowing cascades into the courtyard and the collisions continue, coming without cease as carefully, quietly, my consciousness creeps away, consumed by cavernous… crawling…

…Dark.

One Night in Derby – Part 1

A few entries back, I mentioned that there was a tale-in-waiting which deserved to have an entry dedicated to it. As it turns out, it needs more like two, so here’s part one of that story, dragged out of the dungeons of my memory, 100% true. To set the scene: I was travelling back to Leicester from York by train in horrendous weather, and arrived at the station of a small, grimy town called Derby, where I was to change trains to continue my journey…

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It was a dark and stormy night; I think you know the kind

I watched my connecting train depart… while I’d been left behind

And the story of what happened next I wrote out for you all

But the tale came out so long it would’ve filled the entire wall

So here instead are the events, rewritten in poetry form,

Of what can happen stranded in Derby, in the middle of a storm

Oh, and just one crucial point – to add to my bad luck –

My phone battery had up ‘n died (Yeah I know; I suck 😉 )

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———-

Time: 9:00 pm

At nine o clock I missed my train, the connection had been late

The next one? Half-past five AM; so now, I’m thinking ‘Great...”

Then I saw a pub nearby, and headed towards the lights

To be told: “Closing early, love. Sorry, it’s one of those nights!

You’d best head into town by foot – it’s only half an hour.”

Which was fine, ‘til five minutes in, the sky began to shower

So watch me leg it down Main Street, while folk in taxis gloat

(I’ll leave it up to you to guess, whether I had brought a coat.)

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10:00 pm

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Thankfully I soon found a bar, sporting a sign which said:

“SUNDAY NIGHT IS BAND NIGHT, SO COME IN AND ROCK YOUR HEAD!”

“Band night eh, that doesn’t sound bad,” I thought, with optimism

Then discovered that ignorance is bliss, faced with Nu Metal rhythm.

However there was entertainment to find, in braving these aural assaults

By talking snobbily with some guy, about each band’s musical faults.

He’d been a friend of Robert Plant; so I ensured that we shook hands

While he reminisced about Zeppelin – “So much better than these shitty bands…”

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12:00 am

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That place closed around midnight, so time for some more bar-hopping

But now I had to hurry it up, with the temperature rapidly dropping

And it seemed that a club called ‘Fusion’ was the only available place

So I lingered in its doorway, spine shaking along with the bass.

I was just minding my own business there, when one of the bouncers asked

If I was coming in or not, and I had to convince him fast;

I didn’t have much money left by now, and less desire to spend it here

So I explained myself and pointed out that the weather was quite severe

The doorman laughed at this and then, after talking to his mate,

Suggested I help out on the door – “Beats freezing, at any rate!”

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2:00 am

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So I became a Fusion bouncer – well, at least for a while

Until the nightclub had to close, and I continued on my trial.

Through rain and wind and metal and bass, so far I had survived

I could only hope to hold my ground, until the train arrived.

But there were strange things waiting to happen in the intermittant time

And they my friends, will be the subject, of the next entry’s rhyme…

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A Tale of Two Uni’s

Typing this entry out one-handed, so it might be a bit shaky. Why? Read on…

Here in Leicester there are two universities; The University of Leicester (which I went to) and DeMontfort University. The latter used to be a polytechnic and was upgraded to uni status, so there’s a healthy mock/hate rivalry between the two.

The house I live in is deep, deep inside enemy territory; with the DM campus itself only five minutes down the road, the surrounding area consists almost entirely of DeMontfort students, so whenever the inter-uni events start and the ‘Leicester Uni is scum’ posters start going up in the windows of surrounding houses, it always feels prudent to keep one’s head down. I’ll leave the ‘your dad works for my dad’ chants to the people attending the rugby matches.

Anyhow, the nearest cash point to the house is outside their student union, so every now and again an expedition into the belly of the beast has to be made. Today was one such day.

Or evening, to be precise. The DeMontfort campus is not a pretty sight once the sun sets, and the ‘Demon’ part of its name begins to come into effect. Rabbles of students emerge from the murkier corners, perhaps even dragging themselves out of the cracks in the pavement itself, to roam the streets outside their student union.

In the midst of this horde is the cash machine.

As I paced towards it however, something caught my eye. Sitting on the concrete steps that lead up to the union was a blonde girl, hunched over, with a puddle of nasty looking vomit upon the ground in front of her.

Lovely, I thought, having skirted past, and keyed in my pin-number. Ten pounds.

As I waited for the growling machine to produce my grocery money, I cast another look at the girl. She was mumbling to herself, and did look in a bit of a bad way. I folded the note, shoved it and my card into my pocket, and went over.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

No response. Her head hung low so I couldn’t make eye-contact, instead having to make do with staring at the poorly-dyed roots of her hair. I reached down to pat her on the shoulder and ask if she had any friends nearby.

The girl snarled angrily, swatting my hand away, and I felt a sharp scratch across the palm of my hand. Shocked, I took a step back and noticed, to my disgust, that her long, fake nails were caked with reddish vomit.

Well; that was enough of that. Maybe she could tell that I was not one of ‘her kind’, so to speak. In any case, I wasn’t about to risk getting clawed at again so, unsettled, I left her to it and came back home. Next time I’m definitely going to the cash machine in town.

And those damn scratches are really starting to itch.

Death By Chocolate

Somewhere between the senses – not in another dimension as such, but hidden deep in the rarely-trodden tunnels between taste and touch – Death By Chocolate cleared his nasal passages. The process sounded like thick, melted chocolate draining through metal pipes, and as he swallowed the congealed mass with a gulp, one of his subordinates oozed towards him. It was sporting a look of wary excitement on its, for want of a better word, face.

“What do you-ouu think?” it bubbled.

DBC looked at the telephone on the table. Was it really that time already? He double-checked the figures, rolled the calculations once more through the sinewy wringers of his mind, and found himself satisfied. It was.

There were a lot of phones in his little part of the Sugarverse, but this was the really important one. It was the one he only got to use once every few thousand years, and he took a few nanoseconds to savour the opportunity. Naturally, he was not a fan of anything savoury at the best of times, so before his distaste could spoil the moment he snatched up the receiver.

He would not miss Obesifer. And although there hadn’t exactly been a cheer when the pale horse had made its move, the mood in the observation room had become noticeably sweeter.

“That one will do,” he said, his voice a decisive, brandy-snap crunch.

As I slept,

I dreamed of a den dug deep in darkness, where the dust-covered dead, deprived of day, delight in a deluge of dance and drums. The din, disregarded by the dozy denizens of the dwellings above, dabbles with my disposition as I descend.

Definitely dead, you demand? Yes… yes, I dare deliberate that they were the departed. Dead on.

I determined doubly that this demented dancing was not to be disdained, as I divine some deeper devilry is afoot down in the depths, dithering ‘twixt dark and daylight.

Deeply disturbing…

Nocturn Update

Today, I felt like I wanted to throw all subtlety to the wind and just pile a load of wild, fantastical ideas into Nocturn. That’s what comes from jumping ahead to less linear settings I suppose, as I did last week, writing a whole load from a story that leads on from the events in the Nocturn books. See, while the city and forest are – in my humble opinion of course – very rich environments in themselves, they are, by necessity in plot and theme, inwardly focussed and constricting. The story is about what happens to them – any ‘outside world’ is not explored. Which means that I’m always getting interesting, cool ideas that I can’t use because they don’t fit the setting yet.

While I feel like using them right away, I force myself to write them down in a seperate document, and put them aside. Their years will come!

The Nocturn editing’s still coming along, although it’s taking a lot longer than I thought – underestimated the amount of stuff that needed changing and polishing. The ending is still an incomprehensible mess, and I’m having difficulty decided exactly where to stop the novel; how much snuggling to do after the climax, if you will…

My aim was to have it ready to send to people to read by the beginning of August, and it’s looking less and less likely that it will happen. Not to worry though, it’s all necessary polish!

Also, I knocked up an abstract-y picture of Srin and the city that’s got a few meaningful strokes to it. What kinds of meanings? Well… that would be telling!

Times like this I wish I had a Wacom tablet for digital drawing, all I’ve got is me trusty mouse, which makes for pretty shaky pics. One day, when Nocturn has made me a wealthy man… 😉