This is the "omnibus edition" of an ongoing experiment we've been trying over in Lesser Blogfordshire. Myself and the blogger known as akh have been attempting to write a story by one of us offering up a paragraph which the other will reply to. It's a strange idea, perhaps, but it seems to be going somewhere... For the sake of clarity, so far the first and other odd (Ugh!) paragraphs in blue are mine own and the even ones in black belong to my fellow author, the blogger known as akh who writes
http://akh-wonderfullife.blogspot.co.uk/
Here are the results of week one:-
http://akh-wonderfullife.blogspot.co.uk/
Here are the results of week one:-
Max stood on the balcony and smiled. The past six weeks had been possibly the toughest of his life so far, but at least he could look back on them now and know that they were behind him. Also behind him, through the glass doors, the party celebrating his achievements was in full swing, and he chuckled to himself when he heard the sounds of a familiar dispute over the choice of music breaking out. The same old raised voices with the same old arguments that he had heard time and again over the years whenever the old crowd went somewhere and music was being played. It was quite sad really, for not one of them could hold a tune if their lives depended on it. The soft tinkle of a breaking glass and the subsequent cheer and ripple of applause indicated to Max that perhaps it was time for him to get back inside and play the genial host once again, so he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. They immediately shot open again at the sound of more glass breaking. A lot more! Then the screaming and the shouting began. He spun around, ready to go and find out what on earth could be going on, just as the doors behind him swung open violently, and he stopped, frozen in disbelief. There, right in front of him, dishevelled and battered from fighting his way through the party guests, was a man who, apart from the long, filthy hair, the straggly beard and the battered dinner suit, could have been his exact double. The other party guests were doing their best to hold him back, but somehow this unlikely figure had forced his way through them to get this far and it seemed that he wasn't going to let anybody stop him. The man reached out a grubby hand towards Max and bellowed as if his very life depended upon it: “Max! Whatever you do, you’ve got to get off this ship!”
But of course Max didn’t. He didn’t need to. His blackened wings unfurled from beneath his stiff white shirt as he cried: “Ah, if only it were as simple as that!” Rising above the doomed ship below Max beckoned to the violin player - the show must go on, after all wasn’t this the show of all shows, the show that even the fallen Tamara had been waiting for all of these long, sweet years? Max spat - and as his spittle hit the spray-swept deck he heard a voice crackling from the speakers high up on the quarterdeck: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. Max turned his wings and flew.
As he soared upwards, higher and higher he felt the tiny shards of ice bursting against his face as he crashed through the clouds and he found it both beautiful and exhilarating after the confinement of that floating metal coffin. “Surely”, he thought, “Surely I’ve done enough now...?” Still climbing, he burst through into the blazing sunlight, convincing himself that this time he was going to make it back to the heavens, but then he caught that familiar sulphurous smell as first the tips of his wings began to smoulder and then his entire body burst into flame. Max had just started forming the thought “Oh...” when he immediately began to plummet to earth in much the same way as a carelessly dropped sledgehammer would fall from a skyscraper, with little care as to whom it might land upon, and, as he fell, the very same shards of ice he had enjoyed on the way up failed completely to soothe or comfort him as he plunged back down through the clouds. Far, far below him the ship chugged inexorably onwards towards damnation, the passengers and crew already oblivious to his absence, adjusting once more to the lack of him almost as quickly as they had to his arrival amongst them. Only one dishevelled figure noticed as the distant fireball plunged into the icy waters and threw up a momentary plume of white steam, and he was the only one who heard the faint echoing anguished howl of “Nooooooooooo!” that came from within it, and, as the rest of the passengers ran to the rail exclaiming their Oohs and Aahs at what they thought had been a falling star, he smiled to himself and thought “No, not that way, Max, Not that way. You don’t get away from me that easily...” before taking a sip from his champagne flute and disappearing.
When Max awoke he realised that it wasn’t over. That was the problem; it would never be over. Eternal life was a damnation. It wasn’t even as if he’d asked for it; he was just in the wrong place and the wrong time and had witnessed something that there could be no escaping from ever - and ever, as it had turned out, was a long time. He lay there bobbing up and down in the water, the sun beating down on his scorched skin. Not to worry, it’d heal within the hour, his wings would grow back in a day or two and then he’d continue. He would always continue. Far away in the distance the ship sailed on. If Max listened carefully he could hear the party music and the whoops of the passengers as the New Year was welcomed in. ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind’? Max listened; one acquaintance could never be forgotten, a single voice hummed deep in the melee of voices, a voice that Max recognised, one that would ever be brought to Max’s mind. It carried across the water like an assassin’s whisper, a promise of pain and death in every daggered word. Turning in the water, the salt stinging at the twin gashes where his wings would soon return, he struck out for the distant horizon. As he swam steadily away from the ship he thought about the girl he’d left behind, the one he’d found broken and shattered, roped to a feed pipe, deep in the engine room. As he’d swung her around, in the forlorn hope that she might be still breathing, he saw the mark hidden in the spider’s web of wafer thin gashes, some so deep that bone was visible through the blood. Damn him. He always left his mark. Double damn him. It was so easy for him to trick them. They just never seemed to realise that just because he had the face and wings of an angel that didn’t make him an angel. Her name had been Pamela, she came from Wisconsin, she was twenty-two and a smoker. Max swam on wondering what brand she used to smoke.
He shook his head, trying to erase the memory, but there were so many of them now and it never really worked. Pamela was replaced with Darren was replaced with Keith was replaced with Ariadne and so it went on, back through time. Pamela, of course, had been too easy. The old “flame from the end of the finger to light her cigarette” routine and she was damned forever. Too easy... Far too easy. Sometimes he wondered how far down these humans, of whom His “Merciful” Highness still seemed to have far too high an opinion if you asked Max, would allow themselves to descend before they just decided to pull the plug once and for all and decided to let the cockroaches have a turn at the top of the food chain. Max shook his head, and the pain from his burns momentarily erased Pamela’s face from his mind. “That works!”, he thought, but this brighter moment was swiftly extinguished by more pain from his vague attempt at a smile. He decided to dive deep, hoping that despite the salt, the water would be comparatively soothing, and plunged below the choppy surface. Visions of the future and the inevitable apocalypse filled his mind, and he tried to shake them away. There was no way he was going to let that happen. Despite all their many faults, he thought that this human form was pretty damned comfortable and he was damned if he was going to spend a couple of million years in the form of a cockroach. Mind you, he reminded himself, he was pretty much damned already. Then, just for a moment, he thought he heard Tamara’s voice calling out to him. “No”, he thought, “I must be imagining things...” But then he thought that he heard her again. “Damn!” It was his own fault, of course. Just thinking about the apocalypse was enough to get her juices flowing. Tamara and her faction had always been trying to bring about that little bundle of fun. He thought back to Cuba and to what he’d had to do to get that little situation to calm itself down. Then he remembered the price he’d made them pay for it. Still, after Marilyn had paid for the election, it had only seemed fair, to be perfectly honest. Things, he felt, were getting out of hand. Tamara would know what to do, he decided, she always did, unfortunately. He’d better try and track her down, just so long as he could persuade her not to just bring down the end of civilisation as he knew it just to spite him.
Tamara rolled the dice. They flew across the dirty concrete of the alley, hit the grimy wall and bounced and tumbled until they came to rest; a perfect double six. “Mine I think.” she said, allowing the smoke from her cigar to float up into the bright blue Cuban sky. She’d come a long way to get these two, stepping into the slip then out again at just the right moment. She’d known exactly where to find them; the same broken down hotel where they’d raped her repeatedly all those years ago. If only they’d known what she really was and had cared a little more for their pathetic souls and a little less for their even more pathetic dicks. It wasn’t the sex that had annoyed her, it was the way they’d rifled her purse when they’d finished, throwing a few coins onto the bed where she lay huddled and feigning terror. They’d left laughing, slapping each other on the back and tossing her purse back into the room. Well, they wouldn’t be laughing much longer. ‘Time to pay up,’ she said as she shifted; and the short fat Cuban who was Tamara, the one with the cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, began to smoke gently, small flames bursting into life across the surface of his grubby white suit. WHOOSH! And Tamara stepped out of the pillar of fire reaching for her rapists. “Mine I think.” She repeated as she walked towards them, her soft platinum hair moving in the still air as if it were alive. She puckered her lips and blew them a kiss, the skirt of her flowing white dress floating up as if caused by a subway grill beneath it. “Remember me boys? Yes, I thought so… and I remember you, I remember you both very well”. Walking towards them, her hands tuning to balls of flame, she reached out. “Time to pay your dues,” she snarled: “happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday Mr. President…” They turned to run, but she was on them before they’d taken a single step. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” She said, crossing herself for effect… and then they were. All that remained were two piles of soft white ash where the rapists had been standing only a spit-second earlier. Tamara turned towards the wall, reaching down she picked up the dice; she always liked to bring something back from her travels and these would make a nice addition to her collection. Oh well, on to the next job, there was still so much chaos to cause and she didn’t want to be late for her meeting with the others; horsemen could get so impatient. Stepping forward, she felt the slip as it enclosed and entered her and then she was simply gone.
She reappeared in a different, much darker and dingier alley, if that were actually possible. This time it was raining and the rain was forming into puddles on the uneven paving slabs beneath her feet, their surfaces dancing and distorting from the raindrops that glistened and glinted in the one beam of weak light that obliterated her view of anything beyond it, plunging it into a great, unknowable blackness. “Odd”, she thought. She hadn’t expected that, and, if there was one thing Tamara really didn’t like, apart from the scumbags she dealt with every day, it was unexpected things happening. She closed her eyes and tried to move again, but when she opened them she was still in the same, stinking alley. “Very odd”, she thought again, “Still, never mind. Different alley, same old sh...” She looked down again at her feet, encased inside the kind of footwear she really wouldn’t ever choose to be seen dead in, assuming, of course, that she could have actually died, and then at her ridiculously soft hands as she stretched them out in front of her. “Never mind” she thought, “Soon change that” and she blinked a slow, deliberate blink, but nothing happened. She looked at her hands. They were the same as they’d been just a second ago. “That’s not right” she found herself saying out loud, but the voice seemed husky and weak to her, not the kind of voice she usually preferred to have at all. “Who’s that? Who’s there?” a voice shot out of the darkness, responding to her cry. She quickly tried to duck back into the shadows and, as she did so, caught sight of her latest reflection in one of the muddy pools of water, and found an all-too familiar face staring back at her. “Oh no, no, no, no NO!” she bellowed angrily, “Don’t you dare try that one on me!” just as the first blow hit her clean across the back of the head, and a voice whispered in the darkness “You didn’t really think you were going to get away, did you?” before shouting out to draw the attention of the baying mob that she could hear approaching. Various blurred images of faces and fists swam across her vision as she fought to remain conscious, knowing that the crowd that had found her were never likely to show any mercy to the person that they thought they had caught. Just as the merciful oblivion started to swallow her up she thought she heard a familiar sounding voice saying, in a slightly mocking way, “Well, if we are going to have our little chat, Miss Mourning, I’d prefer to have you completely under my control when we do...”
Tamara Mourning stared down at the white, open-toed, high-heeled shoes that encased her dainty, painted toes. She loved the dress, adored the hair, and there was no doubt that this was a great body; if a little overly feminine. The shoes though… Her feet were killing her, and she longed for a pair of boots, a good pair of kicking boots with a long steel-bladed knife nestling deep inside them somewhere. In normal circumstance this would not have been a problem. She’d simply have stepped into the Slip for a moment and made the shift. In normal circumstances she could have any type of footwear she chose; body too. She thought back to the ship and Max; remembering his face when she’d burst through the door, slightly dishevelled and a little unkempt but apart from that his exact double. It was a game they’d been playing for years, centuries even. The aim was to catch the other unawares, get them to react in some way: “Max! Whatever you do, you’ve got to get off this ship!” she’d said. He hadn’t though, he didn’t need to. Instead he’d spat at her like he always did and then flew off in a huff. What was it? Surely he didn’t think that she had any part in that silly, chain-smoking girl’s death? He should know her better than that by now. Armageddon… yes; but a pointless killing here, a little murder there – well, like these damned shoes, it wasn’t really her style. No, that had all been down to Frankie, it was just his style. For a crooner, he never really had much imagination; and as for that violin player boyfriend of his… well. How they had ever been tolerated in the Band was beyond her, they were strictly second rate. Tin Pan Alley hound-dog players, not even good for the borderlands. Now Max – well, Max was altogether a different proposition. He could play the blood from your veins, the sweat from your pores and the sex from the more intimate parts of your body. When Max played everyone listened. Max played and everything was possible. God, she needed to lose these shoes, and this body wasn’t right for whatever beating she knew was coming. Conversation? She didn’t think so. Frankie didn’t do conversation. Frankie really only spoke with his fists and prick – and then in grunts - the rest was just empty words. They were all around her now; Frankie and his band of filthy, sycophantic tulpa-forms. They’d made a circle and were closing in. She who would be the One shivered; just how had he taken the Slip from her? Tamara strained her pearl-buttoned ears. Damn these shoes, damn Frankie, but most of all damn that damn, damned Max. Far in the distance the drumming of hooves… and they were getting louder by the moment.
Three months later she awoke, trapped inside a glass cube. She opened her eyes and the blazing lights surrounding the box caused her to slam them tightly shut again, then she spent ten minutes gradually opening and closing them, trying to adjust. Finally, just as she was able to open them fully, the lights went out. Oh yes, she reminded herself, fallen Avenging Angels might be utterly diabolical, but they’d still managed to learn a thing or two from these humans when it came to torturing their own kind for fun. Damn the wretched CIA! Damn them all! And of course, she had, time and again in another life. Cheap tricks like this weren’t ever going to get her to... She stopped. Instinctively she knew that three months had passed in the blink of one of these rather impressive eye things that her form now mimicked, but she suddenly realised that she couldn’t remember a thing about any of it. Not one second. She shuddered as she started to feel an unfamiliar feeling. She was scared! This was the first period of time in millennia which she couldn’t account for every single microsecond of. She tried to trawl back through her memories but there was nothing for her to remember at all. The alley, the beating, the circle of vengeful thugs, that face... her face... and those all-too familiar hooves, beating, pounding and then... the lights, this box and... and... As if tuned to her very thoughts, the lights blazed on again, and an infinite number of reflections of that hated face on top of that wretched body stared back at her. Just for a second before she had to clamp her eyes shut again, she noticed the chain that stretched up from the top of the box into the inky darkness far above her. Aha! The old man was slipping! He was obviously getting far too afraid to trust to his own powers of concentration to keep her dangling here. Or was that what he wanted her to think? She of all creatures knew very well the awful power that giving just the faintest glimmer of hope could bring over a victim. She paused, trying to think of a way out. In the stillness, beyond the buzz of the arc lights, on the tip of her senses, she thought that she heard the slightest hint of a jazz band playing somewhere just beyond the edges of her perception. “Great!” she thought, “As if I haven’t been punished enough...” But then an idea came to her and she only hoped that the lungs of this long-suffering body were up to what she needed them to do. She tried to remember. Would three months off the fags be enough to clear them? She sang out a perfect top “C” for as loud and as long as she could. Around her the glass box shattered into atoms and she plummeted at the speed of light a million miles back down to Earth, hitting the Nevada desert like an A-Bomb test just five seconds later.
Max dreamt. He was suspended high above the ground in a glass box. He had no idea how long he’d been hanging there but it had been a while, his throat was sore, his back was aching. Two, maybe three months? Anyway, what did it matter this was somebody else’s reality, only a dream to him, but he knew that with the coming of the autumn storms the Band would be on the move again. Time for once was short. By late October sharp and perfectly fashioned tunes of experience would blow into the cities, towns and villages everywhere even the tiny settlements in the borderlands. Nowhere can escape the music and nowhere ever has. Not that he’d been to Nowhere for a while, although he thought he was about due another visit. Things happen in Nowhere; a cat gets run over by a truck, a young woman loses her engagement ring, cancer is diagnosed, a father slaps a child in anger, prayers go unanswered, the leaves fall and rot in gardens and graveyards and both big and small tunes play for suspecting and unsuspecting alike. Yes, the Band would be on the move again, forever and ever, Amen and the Band moves to so many tunes - Wagner, Berry, Godric, Chopin, Zappa, even Miller, tunes composed from strength and direction, places past, souls taken, nefarious needs, those lost things, a lot of hunger… and of course who and what are caught in the music as they play on - and on - and on. Damn this dream! It was making his mind all fuzzy, images popped into his head out of nowhere, words and thoughts losing their sense and meaning and with the Band there’s no choice at all. Both the innocent and the old must listen, young and male, good and black, white and guilty, the bad and female. It’s all musical chance when the Band comes to town and sometimes the bad things catch into the Slip and listen, resting for a while. They have a drink or two, find love, feed, take whatever they need; a cat gets run over by a truck, a young woman loses her engagement ring, cancer is diagnosed, a father slaps a child in anger, prayers go unanswered… and then the Slip catches them up and they are on and away again, (wake up) blowing away, the notes still echoing, (wake up) to the next place. If only it were all a dream and listen - the wind is howling, and beneath the wind that song… Riders on the Storm? (WAKE UP!). Max awoke, the taste of sand in his mouth and the scorch of sun on his skin. That bloody Mourning woman again. Max picked up his sunglasses and donned his snap brim fedora, well if it was good enough for Indiana Jones it was good enough for him. Better be quick and step into the Slip, the music was growing louder. It was time to shift.
Jeremy picked himself up from the cabin floor and looked around him for his little sister Jemima. In his eight years of life he’d experienced a lot of things out here in the desert plains, but the shock that had pummelled their tiny home was certainly a new one for him, and was much bigger than any quake - if that was what it was - that he’d ever felt before. That morning, their mother had told him to keep an eye on Jemima before she’d gone off to town for a lunchtime meeting with one or other of his many uncles, but he wasn’t sure whether she’d quite anticipated this happening. In fact, now he came to think about it, he wasn’t even sure whether mother would be coming back at all. In the past she’d been known to leave them to fend for themselves for perhaps a day or two at most, and usually she came home with stacks of candy bars and the sorts of toys you usually only saw for sale at gas stations, but if the “Big One” had finally hit, who was to say whether or not she would ever return? Jemima had scrambled for cover, just like they had told her to at the schoolhouse, and was now sitting curled up in a ball in the fireplace and covered from head to toe in soot. “Jem...?” he called across to her in an urgent stage whisper, as if the merest sound might bring the entire house collapsing down on top of them. On hearing his voice, she opened her eyes, blinking away the soot and tears, and looked right across at him. He smiled and scrambled over to her, and they held onto each other tightly, looking at the debris of their home and listening to the creaking of the old stone chimney stack above their heads. He whispered a few words of encouragement to her with a confidence that he didn’t really feel. Her entire body was still shaking with fear, but he thought for a moment and decided that what he really needed to do was persuade her to move, but when he tried to tell her this, she just shook her head and refused to budge, so he hugged her as tightly as he could and wondered quite what to do next. Up above their heads there was a sudden loud “Crack!” and, before he knew what was happening, Jemima had bolted across the room and thrown herself under the old kitchen table, which was still steadfastly standing upright on its solid oak legs despite the plaster and wood that had fallen onto it and scattered the breakfast things all over the floor. “Okay,” thought Jeremy, “One more dash and we ought to make it to the door...” He looked across at where the remains of the kitchen door still remarkably remained on its hinges and realised that he’d made a far better job of fixing it than even his mother thought him capable of. Wondering whether their luck would hold out, he briefly explained to Jemima about what they should do, but she stubbornly shook her head once more. Then she froze, a look of abject terror crossing her face, and pointed a tiny finger over his shoulder and back towards the door. Jeremy turned, and framed in the shattered glass fragments that were all that remained of the window was the most terrifying face that he had ever seen. Luckily, it didn’t seem to have spotted them yet as it was far too busy spitting the sand from its mouth. At precisely that moment, however, the creature seemed to notice them and locked its eyes on his, before growling angrily “Aaargh! Just when I thought I’d got myself ahead of the game...” Jeremy clung onto Jemima for all that he was worth and was rather amazed when the creature spoke again. “I don’t suppose you could spare me a glass of water, could you?”
The experiment continues...
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