31 October 2011

novel excerpt

He sensed a presence, the Presence, a great spirit, an almost tangible presence cover him like a cloak. It warmed his spirit. His heart burned within him. He felt lighter than air, then, as sometimes happens in dreams, Maurice saw himself gliding in the air. He knew. He felt. The knowing was larger than his mind could handle and yet he felt at ease. Largeness. Power. He caught a momentary glimpse of a mountain lake surrounded by spires of black granite. Wreaths of smoke, or fog, seemed to dance around the stones and a strange light flashed back and forth over the water. Was it lightning? The vision passed and he jerked awake. The vision haunted him. It left him thirsty for more. He felt a deep melancholy, a longing, a certain nostalgia for something more...a unknown thing that lived in a higher reality calling to him. A tear. He felt his cheeks moisten. The Presence still lingered as an exotic perfume, then dissipated. He felt it before during his younger days-always between sleeping and waking. He fell into a trance. In the darkness before dawn, a dread and dark heaviness covered him and he heard a voice say...

17 October 2011

Page 32

Lt. Jones waited for precisely thirty more minutes after Maurice unknowingly left the office. The thought that the Mr. Blue fellow bore a faint resemblance to the man in the videos, at least from behind, grew on him. The secretary’s eyes were bloodshot as well, he noticed. When he arrived, they were large, and glossy, and green, and eyed him with a great deal of sincerity or boredom.

Twenty-eight days to find Mr. Perez and bring him before the Velkladdeur,’ he thought. ‘And still no Maurice Perez insight.’

This disturbed him and felt illogical. To compensate he played an old mind puzzle. He put one and one together and got two. He put one and one together again and got eleven. ‘Ah, now we’re getting somewhere,’ he told himself. Another rearrangement of one and one gave him a stick and he was holding the short end of it. He scratched the RFID chip in his arm and felt his biological clock produce extraordinarily loud tick-tocking sounds with his internal sub-woofer.

“Miss Skipper?”

“Yes, Mr. Jones.”

“The Blue fellow that was just here?”

“Mr. Blue, yes?”

“That wasn’t Mr. Perez was it?

Candy tried very hard not to blink as she replied, “No sir, that was Mr. Blue.”

“Is Mr. Perez coming to work today? I really haven’t much time to spare.” As he said this he slipped a hidden microphone disguised as a paperclip onto Candy’s cluttered desk. It would be safe there as Candy apparently never used paperclips.

In her effort not to blink, she began blinking at twice her normal blink rate. Lt. Jones took this as a good sign…as a complement…and was under the impression she was flirting with him. He unconsciously stuck his chest out.

“You’ll be the first to know,” she said, now blinking at approximately 1 blink/second.

Lt. Jones, in turn, increased his own blink rate from 1 blink/minute to 1.1 blinks/minute. He was stressed and made a mental note to add to his daily list.

06 October 2011

Page 31.5

The initials LTJ kept her from sleep and her intuition warned her Maurice’s life was in danger and under no circumstances should this L.T.J. character (whoever that was) ever meet him.

Polly called Maurice and got his voicemail. A metallic voice said, “The number you have just dialed is out of satellite range. Please try again at another time. Good-bye.”

The very thought of Maurice falling into the wrong hands made her blood run chill. He hadn’t mentioned taking a spontaneous trip, so she figured he must be in some vast underground vault or tunnel...or possibly hiking in the vast deserted scarred lands between Goshen, Canaan, and that hideously ugly pyramid thing. She whistled. She decided as soon as it was daylight to talk with Jakob Walder.

The very next morning at the crack of dawn, or shortly after the crack of dawn, or rather what Polly thought should be the crack of dawn, and was closer to 8:30 A.M., Malachi roared to life and sped down the road carrying a pensive Miss Polly B. Frottin. The destination was the Dew Drop Inn. The purpose was to seek advice from Mr. Jakob Warder. The secondary purpose was to order the special of the day, ‘Lean Eggs and Spam.’ The spam, she decided, was not going to be eaten, but fed to Scrap Iron. The lean eggs, well, that would need tested and written about for the Sunday article.

Polly and Malachi ground to a halt at 9:00 A.M. sharp in the parking lot of the inn. Unfortunately, a culinary drone from Z-tech also happened to grind to a float over the treetops at the same time. Nobody really ever understood the purpose of the culinary drones. Most assumed their purpose was to spy on unsuspecting picnickers to gather data for the types of food being eaten. Some blamed it on a vast conspiracy, so said a major conspiracy-theory group based in the newest Canadian province of Connecticut that, among other things, believed Martha Stewart was still living albeit under the assumed name of Marsha Stuart. In fact, bumper stickers proclaiming ‘Martha Lives!’ were popular among some of the more devout members.

The culinary drones often zapped small furry animals for no apparent reason, and as the opposite of luck would have it, Scrap Iron got struck with a bolt of high energy photons at the same instant Polly stepped from her car. It has been said cats have nine lives, and maybe they do. Dogs do not. And so, Scrap Iron…guardian of the front porch at the Dew Drop Inn…affectionate companion of Russell and Buck…watcher of the eternal chess game…and sleeper on the dirty rug by the old wood stove, let out a last, long, doggy groan that sounded very much like the Icelandic word for rust.

It was a time of sadness, as Polly patted Scrap Iron’s head one final time. Russell, Buck, and Ell, (Jakob was mysteriously late), buried him in the backyard of the Inn. Between the two odd fellow’s Rhino and an ancient, boxy, atm-like object inscribed with the words Ms Pac-Man. The sides were painted with an obese anthropomorphic bacterium and she wore a yellow ribbon. The burial was short. The final eulogy consisted of a few sighs, some coughs, and half a dropper of tears.

Jakob arrived fifteen minutes later.

Page 30.5...(yes, I know its been awhile)

Sometime later, Maurice didn’t know how much later since his watch stopped running somewhere between the 143rd and 1,357th pothole, they arrived at a pyramidal-shaped rock formation that resembled those the Aztecs constructed. The pyramid, constructed 30 years previous by the Goshen Waste Management Division, was composed of 3.16 billion tons of compacted trash covered with a thick layer of soil. It was 870 meters tall, visible from space, and either the 16th or the 18th Wonder of the New World depending on which poll you followed. Curiously enough, the pyramid had no name and was simply referred to as Mount @ by Googlepedia. The Nekton considered it holy and regularly made pilgrimages to its flanks. Another interesting fact was the Nekton, once in the shadow of Mt. @, ceased speaking their spoken language and used their unspoken language, one that consisted solely of whistling. In the whistling language, Mt @ was represented by a long drawn-out expiration of air that lasted 3 to 4 seconds then generally petered off into silence, and sometimes, a faint grunt-like sound. Incidentally, this also happened to be the same exact thing tourists uttered during bad car accidents in Goshen. This often led to a great deal of confusion during Goshenite-Nektonian interactions particularly during rush hour traffic.

On the eastern side of Mt. @ stood a long low concrete building painted ash-grey to resemble a long low ash-grey rock. Four feet above the ground, Jakob grabbed an oblong rock that was attached to the wall and twisted. A bit of dust settled to the ground and an outline to a door appeared, then opened.