The exercise:
Let us bring things to an end with: the seeker.
Feel free to ignore the usual Friday restriction of four lines of prose if you're finishing off a tale you've been writing the last couple of days.
I know that if I find time to join in (and I'm hoping to) that I certainly will.
4 comments:
@Marc: I hope you do find time to join in with this set of three prompts. All the silence is... peaceful :-P
Sorry for the double post; I thought I'd kept it short enough.
The seeker
I arrived at Easter Island with days to spare before the conjunction. I'm pretty sure that that was now about twenty days ago, but there are still four days to go till the conjunction. And while I definitely wouldn't put it past the Schedim to try and tamper with the conjunction, or past the Seraphim to somehow have it never have been going to have happened, neither of them are actually powerful enough for that. At least, not in the four days we've got. So something else has happened, and I don't know what, I just know that I'm getting terribly, terribly bored.
I think, but it's hard to tell, that time has somehow stopped. Everything here on the island is oddly muted -- there are no smells at all, everything just smells slightly cold, like a room open to the air that hasn't been lived in for decades. Colours are all greyer than they should be -- the sky looks permanently like it's going to rain and the grass looks... infected. There are no echoes, the seashells I hold to my ear don't let me hear the sea and the waves don't crash against the coast to make any noise.
Literally, actually; that's what makes me think that time has somehow stopped. The waves are frozen at the edge of the island but I can see them moving further out. Birds above fly freely, but as soon as they get low enough they freeze and just hang there in the air. They're not locked in place; I've picked some up and moved them, and that 's fine, but they don't reanimate. They are slippery to the touch, like graphite, like they're not properly part of this world anymore. The only thing that seems normal when I touch it is myself.
I'm not saying I touch myself, just to be clear here.
So it's like I'm sat in a frozen moment in time, waiting for time to pass, which seems rather self-defeating. But in twenty days (at a guess) I've not been able to figure out how to make time happen again.
And then Joachim appears, stepping out of the air like there's an invisible helicopter there, brushing a hand through his white-gold hair and glaring around him like he's expecting a Pyrothir to be inviting children to a barbecue. He looks marginally less annoyed when he sees me, but it's only marginal.
"Who did this?" he asks, and I'm struck by how ridiculous a question it is.
"How should I know? I landed here, by boat, either a few minutes or twenty days ago. After the boat left, this happened. Has time stopped?"
"Sort of," says Joachim. "You've been turned through ninety degrees in a dimension you don't perceive. You're experiencing a different time to the world you think you're stood in, so no time is passing there, at least locally, but it's passing in a different direction for you at the moment. It's a bubble-effect, you can probably see things passing in normal time some distance off."
"You can fix this?"
"Yes."
"What happens to this time I don't understand you do?"
"You get twenty days wider," says Joachim. "And if that doesn't make any sense to you, that's good it shouldn't. You might need to go on a time-diet at some point, but we can worry about that after the conjunction."
I smile as there's really nothing I can say to this. So far I've killed an Angel in Rio, had an Angel's death curse try and kill me, and now I've forcefed time like a goose for foie gras. When I come to write my memoirs they're going to be catalogued next to the Bible and other great works of fiction.
Joachim does one of those things that involves moving in dimensions I can't perceive and bits of his hands disappear and reappear and make me feel slightly nauseous. There's a noise like a tightly-wound spring uncoiling very fast and a smell of mint, and colour and sound and smell return to the world.
There's a pop and two nearby birds burst into flames. If I listen hard I can hear more pops.
Joachim looks at me. "Did you move anything?" he asks, and I nod. "You added energy when you moved them," he said. "It all gets applied instantaneously. You should have tol-- how much did you move?"
I get the feeling I'll be eating a lot of roast fowl over the next four days.
Greg - I love this ending so much. That 'how much did you move?' has threatened me with a giggle fit I can't afford to give in to (sore rib muscles are hell).
Anyway. So, so good.
And now my ending...
Mine:
Daddy's getting worried now -
It's dark and he hasn't found a soul.
Too late, he's seen his mistake -
Surely his boys have fell down a hole.
He's shouting out their names now,
But only hears silence in reply.
The game's over, you'v all won!
Let's go home and split mom's apple pie!
His bare skin is crawling now,
His thoughts are a murky, muddled mess.
He's lost them forever... but
Wait. Who's this girl in the blood red dress?
Overall this is a pretty creepy hide-and-seek tale, and told in poetry to boot! I'm very impressed, and I found the whole thing getting eerier as it went on, which is good sustenance of the theme. I don't know if you can edit comments or not -- you've got a missing 'e' in the third line of the second verse, so I hope so :)
And... you mentioned you had bruised ribs again (it feels weird typing 'again' with something like that); can I assume that's because this is based on a true story and you had to fight the girl in the red dress off? ;-)
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