“How did we build the Crow Boy?” Mourne said.
Elgar considers this for a moment.
“That’s a very good question-”
“Rhetorical,” Mourne told her.
Elgar nodded like she understood. There’d been a lot of that.
“Adding a shade of drama to the affair, see?” Mourne continued. “A touch of the old theatric, you follow?”
Elgar—just an apprentice—not really following at all, but she kept it quiet. Eyes open, beak shut. Just here to learn. That’s the way.
“This is just rehearsal,” Mourne went on. “They like a bit of palaver, up at the Parliament.”
He nodded his dark head and cast a glance around the crowded, cluttered jumble of his—being polite—laboratory. Mourne tutted and sighed to himself for a heartbeat or two.
“How did we build the Crow Boy,” he said.
Tap of his talons on the grey stone floor, Mourne answered his own question: “We crafted with blood.”
Collected from a human child, Elgar knew, gathered up with a square of silk on a summer’s day. Raised voices, running feet, a harsh and desperate wailing; quite did her ears in, that did.
Another tap on hard stone. “We worked with breath,” Mourne said.
Stolen from a different, sleeping child, Elgar remembered, and captured cold in a bright crystal globe.
One last tap. “We built with bone.”
Mourne’s tone serious, solemn, and the words faded slow into dead air.
“Well,” Elgar said. “It weren’t quite so straight as that…”
Category Archives: writing
randoms iv
randoms iii
I stand behind shaded glass, and look down upon the city.
Not much to see from here, unless you have an interest in the jagged peaks of building tops and the thin black points of the support-spires erupting from a wide dark sea of webs; sharp angles tangled with brighter strands of fresh silk and brushed by fleeting fingers of speeding cloud.
Close to the distant horizon—beyond the city streets and suburban homes and all the farms and villages unseen—the sun stands still in a sky of washed out blue.
If I press my hand against the glass I touch the coldness of the air outside. The chill of winter biting at the world.
Here, so close to the Daughter, so far from the shroud that follows me, I feel alone.
I lower my hand and step back.
I turn at the soft whisper of an opening door, the click-click-click of boots on polished marble flooring. This room is opulent but sterile; every surface pristine, precise, harsh. No furniture, no comfortable waiting area, no casual ease. A tall curve of window, a series of doors of various sizes, and the broad checkerboard floor across which marches the stern stiff form of the tower-master, Crick.
He snaps to a halt and presents a vague outline of a salute, which I return with neat precision.
“Widow Enke,” he begins. “So good of you to attend-” as if I had a choice “-the Daughter will see you now.”
Nothing more than that, he spins about and click-click-clicks away and I follow—at a quick step with my palms damp and my heart racing—into the blackness beyond the doorway, into the presence of my god.
randoms ii
He must have known this day would come. Perhaps he wanted to be caught? Certain irregularities in his behaviour had been revealed; it began with task-sheets incomplete, unscheduled travels under the dark, it ended with one too many rebels escaping from our nets.
When I find Widow Brin, when he has at last stopped running, he is in a dank and dismal top floor room at an end-of-the-line hotel.
He waits at a table topped with brittle ancient plastic. A breeze from the open window flutters thin and dirty curtains. Brin’s personal issue weapon is on the table in front of him. He does not move as I step into the room. I aim my own pistol at his head as I approach.
I reach out mind-to-mind and he resists the pressure, fights the intrusion, but there behind the barriers I sense the fatal spark of infection. A sliver of fracture/light that twists inside Brin’s brain. A subtle seed of evil.
“Don’t save me,” he says.
He reaches for his gun.
randoms
Some folks legged it out of London when the hammer fell. Bright star falling from a blue sky, slamming down; down to earth out past the edge of Regent’s Park. A deep and horrible shudder of thudding impact. You could feel it in your bones and teeth. No flash or explosion as such, not from where I stood, but soon a pall of smoke as high as heaven twisting up above the spires and tower blocks. Screams and sirens floating out on the shivering air. A lot of people left right then. Not for stayin’ put, were they? Not hanging around to see what’s next.
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the things of the past
The first in a short series of references to things I’ve written in the past and which saw various levels of the-light-of-day.
“Spoken In Darkness” from an e-zine (sadly now defunct) called PANTECHNICON (edited by Trudi Topham et al).
Issue Five contains lots of great stuff…and also my story, which is about God, the Devil, and the private detective who finds himself stuck in the middle.
Still available online from here: Pantechnicon Five
Filed under writing