Election Night

The sound of the rain on election night was a constant demanding drumming on the roof of the car, like a radio station tuned to white noise whose signal cut out as I passed beneath every one of the seven bridges between work and the polling station.  It was, I knew, my democratic right and duty to cast my vote and much depended upon it.   The car park, I noted with dismay as I drove into it, was a long way from the entrance.   A long wet way under the wet white noise.    But still I had my mark to make, and make my mark I must.  I locked the car behind me with a brace of beeps.   A bundle of fly tipped garbage propped against the wall of the desanctified church that was now a community centre moved unexpectedly and spoke.

“buy your name, mister?”

Boundaries

Picture by Aesop Clerk

Peel away the layers of myth, Sarah thought, and it came down to this:   Beyond the iron posts was Outside and dangerous.   The waterfall was falling light, dazzling and glorious, churning the pool, outflanking the iron posts.    The cliffside hinted at faces in that flickering light, smiling, laughing, beguiling.   Outside was dangerous, but that had not stopped Sarah’s sister wading out a year ago, deaf to Sarah’s cries of warning, pleas not to leave her alone.

The elders of the Last Human Settlement had strict rules.  Only children could draw water.  It was safer.    But Sarah’s sister had drawn water too often, and now she was gone.

Sarah filled the containers and mourned her sister.   For a moment only she glimpsed a smiling youth fetching water on the far side of the pool, Outside.   Handsome…

No.  She imagined it.  

Perhaps she would imagine it again tomorrow, she hoped.

Prompt from Light and Shade Challenge using the image above, and Studio30Plus using the phrase "Peel away the layers"

Beautiful Stranger

CLUB

3a : an association of persons for some common object usually jointly supported and meeting periodically; also : a group identified by some common characteristic 

(A writing prompt from Trifecta)

MYSTERY

(A writing prompt from Studio30Plus)

When I first became immortal I assumed it would be like being part of an exclusive club of wise and mysterious beings, roaming the earth like gods and angels.  It really isn’t.   There aren’t many of us but we keep bumping into each other.   The world becomes a dull party.  You know their jokes, stories, habits and hang ups.   One minute you’re sitting on a beach watching the sun set and the next some bastard’s bitching about some merchant from Thebes who stiffed him over an amphora of bad wine.    Most of us become solitary.  All of us become bad company.

Not you

Hah.  Maybe.    I’ve been alone too long and sometimes I need to make contact.   Not with another immortal though.    Tedious bunch, like I said.  And the ones that aren’t tedious are too damned dangerous.   I warned you about those didn’t I?

Scared me silly.   I’ve been looking out for Them ever since.

They’re too good at hiding.  I’m putting you at risk by talking to you, I should go.

Please don’t.  I want to learn more about you.  Not just the immortality thing, but you.  You as a person.

Too dangerous.   They are always watching, and they hate the idea of one of us opening up too much to a mortal, exposing our secrets.   But I have to.   The solitude crushes me sometimes.   I just want to watch the sun rise with someone by my side who understands.  Just once.    Idiotic really.  Sentimental.   And dangerous for you.  I can’t believe I’ve been so reckless, I’m sorry.  I’ll go now.

Please!  I want you to stay.  I want to watch the sun rise with you.   Want to know you better.  You don’t have to be lonely.

Alright.  If you want.  There’s a high hill above the bay, glorious view to the east.  Know it?

I do!

Meet me there in two hours.    Be careful They don’t follow you.

I’ll be careful.  I love you.

I love you.   Delete your chat logs.

A Cloak of Falcon Feathers

DELIBERATE

3: slow, unhurried, and steady as though allowing time for decision on each individual action involved <a deliberate pace>

(a writing prompt from Trifecta)

The two men watched, seeing unseen, as the young woman on the monitor moved her arms and hands and fingers.

“Tai-Chi?” said the younger man.   The name badge on his white coat read  Frankl.   He could not take his eyes from the screen and the constant intricate gestures.

“No,” The older man was short and white haired.  Nobody pestered Doctor Kessler about name badges or rules and regulations.   “Not Tai-Chi.   They look more like yoga mudra, but not from any tradition I know.”

“You do yoga?” 

“I read books,” said Kessler testily.  

The woman had been found wandering in Munich, stark naked, stumbling and her inability to respond to the presence of others had led to her being given over into the care of the Planck Institute.   She’d been catatonic for just over a month.

“When did the gestures start?”

“A week ago,” Kessler said.   “About the same time that the tattoo on the nape of her neck started to fade.”   He smiled like a chess player.

Frankl kept his eyes on the woman and her deliberate complex dance of hands and fingers.   He could not see the back of her neck, her blonde hair was in a long braid.

“Tattoos  don’t fade,” he said, “Unless it was henna or some temporary-“

Kessler showed him a photograph.   The design was black and angular and looked like a pair of spiders with interlocking legs.   “A tattoo.   And it’s gone.  And now this.”

“But…”

“I know.   The same gestures over and over.  Twenty four distinct patterns then they repeat.  Minor variations.”  Kessler nodded to himself.  “Getting more precise I think.”

“Some obsessive compulsive syndrome?”

“Clearly.  But nothing I’ve seen before.  Damnation…”    Kessler’s nose had started bleeding, he raised his hand to wipe the blood away.   The woman stood gracefully from her cross-legged position.   Frankl reeled, suddenly dizzy and the monitor screen flickered briefly.

“My damned nose,” Kessler muttered pressing a handkerchief to his nostrils to staunch the blood.

“She’s gone,” Frankl said, “She’s just… gone.”

Wooden Heart

This story originally appeared at Studio30Plus 

The grove of trees was secluded, and it was dark.  It was ancient and largely unknown.  And it was waiting.    The eldest of the trees held court there, squatting like a bloated tyrant with a tanglewood crown and grasping miser’s fingers raking the earth around its corpulent trunk.   Healthy things did not grow there, wholesome plants did not flourish.   Birds did not roost in the trees of that grove, not the wise old birds anyway.  Ravens shunned it.   Foolish fledgeling songbirds who fluttered into the tyrant’s little realm did not flutter out again.   Insects and crawling things flourished and dug and bred greedily in the stinking moisture of the hollows of that grove.

An approaching light, flimsy and weak.   Two men picked their way through the night, a lantern held aloft by the older of the two.

“It is much further?” said the younger, a strong young man in his twenties, broad shouldered beneath his roughspun jacket.   His voice carried the barely masked complaint of someone who had been out much later than he expected to have been out, and who had travelled much further than he had wanted to.

“No,” said the older man.   He picked his way between two wiry sentinel trees and carefully stepped down and down and down the grove’s steep sides.   “We’re here Antonio.   Watch your footing.”

Antonio, the younger man peered down into the place that his neighbour had brought him to and he grimaced.  The air was foul.

“This is not a healthy place,” he said quietly.

“What is a healthy place?” said the older man hanging the lantern from a jutting branch.   “Where in all of Tuscany is healthy?  Is safe?”

Antonio recognised the familiar bitterness in his neighbour’s voice.   “My friend, the cholera has passed us by.   You cannot keep blaming...”

“God mocks us,” said the older man, pacing slowly to the edge of the clearing, feeling the earth suck hungrily at his boots.   “He despises us.   I despise him in my turn.”

Antonio crossed himself.

“He took my wife from me ten winters past,” said the older man, “and left only my boy to remember her by.   All the love I had for her I poured into him.   My hopes.   Everything.   And I gave thanks to the Almighty for him.   And then the Almighty showed his undying love again.”   He spat copiously on the earth.    “The cholera hung over our town like an unseen angel seeking who he might devour.   My boy...”

“Please,”

“My boy!” the old man said angrily, turning and pointing a finger at the younger man.   “God showed his contempt for our lives, our hopes, our efforts!   Should I bear it in smiling silence, as a woman bears the fists of the drunkard who beats her?”   He looked up at the distant sky and bit his thumbnail.     

Antonio did not answer at once.   He would let his neighbour’s anger rage and burn itself out, and what good would argument do for him now, here in this place?   This place cared nothing for words.

“My grandmother’s mother came here,” said the old man more quietly now.   “She was born in Palermo, but she fled north with nothing but the clothes on her back and a bundle of sticks.    The priests called her strega, a witch.   And the Inquisition was still a power in those days.  Strega!”    He wiped his chin, clearing it of the spittle that had flown there when he had raged.

“A slander,” said Antonio

“The truth,” said the old man with no shame in the words, but rather pride.   “She found this place, this very place, and she added her bundle of sticks to the old wood that grew here.   Sticks from the woodlands she’d danced in as a girl.”

A gust blew the lantern a little and the shadows moved and encircled the two men.    Antonio shivered and looked around, the older man closed his eyes as though embraced.

“There are trees as old as Eden,” the old man said, his voice soft, “who drank up the water from the ground when Adam and Lilith coupled in the midnight heat.   Who supped on the tears of Eve who wept when the Almighty’s curse fell upon her,”

“We should go home,”

“Trees who sank beneath the deluge and refused to die,” the old man said, his voice stronger now, “who knew their enemy for what He was and held on fiercely to life and waited for their moment.”

Antonio came slowly toward his friend and took hold of him by the shoulders.

“You’re distressed,” he said in a voice that shook with fear for his friend’s wits, “but you must stop this talk.   It is sacrilege.  Blasphemy.”

The old man’s eyes looked into Antonio’s and did not know him.

“Trees that gave their wood gladly for the crosses on the sullen brow of stone beyond Jerusalem.   Who rejoiced to drink the blood that-”

“Enough!” Antonio shook the older man roughly, hoping to break him out of this feverish rage that twisted truth and the world around an old man’s grief.

“He is with us,” said the old man in a triumphant voice, and above them old limbs, ancient limbs moved and creaked in the wind and something cracked and roared and fell.   Antonio looked up too late and raised his hands too late and felt a thunderbolt of dry and eager weight strike him on the head.

When pain woke him it drove away dreams of whispering voices and replaced those dreams with searing hot agony from temple to jaw.   He was lying on the ground in the mud beneath that ancient tyrant tree and he was tangled there in down-drooping branches and thorny vines that clustered around its roots.   Beneath his wounded head there was mud and bloodied water and his heart was a pounding drum that shook his whole body.

The old man was crouching nearby, hunched over the fallen branch that had struck Antonio.  It was bulbous and fibrous, as thick around as a man’s thigh, and the old man was sawing off the smaller shoots and tendrils that writhed and bled grey sap as they fell to the ground.

“Help me,” Antonio said, his voice a phlegmy gurgle.

“See what he has given me,” the old man said, not looking up from his work.   “He is generous.   He that my grandmother’s mother knew by name, see what he has given me.”   He put away the knife into his belt and grunted as he hefted up the hewn log of ancient gloating wood.   “He will restore to me what was stolen.”

“Help me up, help me get free of these...”  He was going to say ‘hands’ but that would have been madness, surely.  “Of this tree.   My head is split, help me to stand.”

The old man shook his head and tucked the log beneath one arm, reaching up to take the lantern from the branch.

“You remain,” he told Antonio, “You remain.   A gift demands a gift, that is the old way.”  He turned away and the night closed around the trapped young man like water rising over the ground.    Crickets and beetles emboldened by the dwindling light crept, then ran, then danced over the captive.

“Don’t leave me here!” he called.  He struggled, thrashing his limbs, but the limbs of this grove’s old master were stronger still and held him fast.   The lantern light was almost gone now, the old man out of sight.  “Don’t leave me!  Geppetto!”    The darkness engulfed Antonio completely and the wind through the branches above him lamented him in mocking tones, and the crawling things in his nostrils and mouth and ears whispered as they feasted and told him of the mighty deeds that the carpenter’s son would bring to pass.

Abandoned Beauty

(a writing prompt from Write on Edge)

“He’s on his way, I’ve seen him through the eyes of owls.  Young and full of vigour,” Her voice was self-satisfied, with just a hint of lewd appreciation.

“So romantic,” came the reply in gentle delicate tones of wistful contentment

“Romance be damned,” the third voice was a menacing rumble, “it’s the story that draws him.  Always the story.”

The three of them waited in an upper room, looking out of the window into the wooded valley below.   The house was glorious once, but that was before it had been abandoned to the elements and to time, before moss and vines grew over its surface and the burrowing creatures dug into its rocky foundations, before the rain and wind of countless years wore away the paint and etched age into the face of the building.    

The three of them wore the shapes, more or less, of women.

“We should try to stop him of course,” said the first of them, “Should I…?”

“No,” sighed the second, “let me.  Poor boy.”   She relaxed out of her vanishing body and the valley forest pulsed in response.

“She’ll botch it,” growled the third.       They watched as the canopy of trees quivered far below and a few moments later the one who had vanished returned.   She was ragged and glaring now, her green clothing tattered and torn.

“Clever boy,” she said, and she’d lost the wistfulness,  “My vines and stinging plants engulfed him.  He sprayed me with chemicals and withered me.”  She spat on the floor.  It steamed.

“My wolves will end him,” said the first of them.  Her eyes gleamed orange and she was gone.   Below there was howling and shouting and chasing and…

She was back suddenly, clutching herself and leaking blood.

“Revolvers,” she growled, “and he’s a bloody good shot.”

“Useless,” boomed the third of them and the sky darkened as she vanished.   “Leave.  Him.  To.  Me.”    The last four words were thunder crashes, and lightning stabbed the valley shattering trees and stone where they struck.

The other two looked at each other and waited.

“He’s good,” said the one in tattered green.

“He’s the one,” said the wolf-eyed woman.

Suddenly the third of them was back, pale and furious.

“He’s a pain in the backside,” she said, “And he’s tough.  Made it to the steps.”

They all peered out of the window and looked down.  Far below a young hero staggered up the long flight of stairs leading to the house.   He was injured and soaked and a little scorched, but undaunted.

They sighed and moved further in, resting on a balcony overlooking the grand hall below.  In the centre of the hall was a bed and on the bed a maiden lay, pale and golden haired and untouched by time.

The young man thrust open the mossy doors and staggered into the room.   He paused as he took in the beauty of the maiden sleeping in the mansion lost to time, but he only paused for a second.   And then, his strength renewed he strode forward and bent over her to kiss her flawless skin.

“They always get the story wrong,” the first grumbled as the maiden’s eyes flickered open.

“Such a shame,” agreed the second.   The maiden wrapped her arms around his shoulders and opened her mouth wide, revealing twin rows of pearl white fangs.  The young man screamed as she bit down.

“The sacrifice of the heroic king,” said the third, nodding, “has to be the strongest, the cleverest, the finest.   And they’re the only ones that make it through, who make it past the flora, and the fauna and my merry weather.”     

In the chamber below the maiden sat up and stretched, her gown soaked scarlet, her lips dripping gore.     She waved at the three faerie who had guarded her, and they waved back grinning.

Job done.