Cassandra's cold, blue eyes stared across the room at her friends talking at the bar. They were shrouded in a cloud of blue tobacco smoke from the pipes they were all enjoying immensely. At a time when such vices were frowned upon, to say the least, smoking reviled substances of any sort was almost a capital offence socially. Cassandra loved it.
She languidly lifted herself from the booth where she had been chatting to one of her oldest colleagues and joined her clique. She found a plain, ceramic pipe proffered by Ivan Kalinsky. The dark haired and brooding Kalinsky had been a failing writer in the 1950's when Cassie had turned him. Two and a half centuries later, nothing had changed for the man.
No matter how far down he went, he could not find it. Sitting among the remains of incense sticks poking up like rotted reeds on the bank of a stagnant river, Ulthar Greigg tried to focus his mind on nothingness and the impermanence of the world around him. The solidity of his inability to delve deeper was a glaring argument against the doctrine. A friend had once suggested psychedelics, but Greigg was a purist. He might be a lot of things, but taking short cuts for immediate gains was not his style.
Loaded Weapon had dragged on for days. Days fueled on Dual Caffeine Boost cola and energy drinks, the likes of which are banned in at least a hundred countries. At seventy-five levels, Doug Turner had never gotten so close. Out of six on his team, only two of them were left. Him and some dude from San Diego. Canon-fodder.
What would you do if you woke up in hospital able to see two different universes at the same time? If you're honest and anything like me, you'd fill your pants in a heart beat. See how that endears you to the monos around you.
A singular motorbike crash after a singularly bad day at work just crowned a wonderful Monday. Commuting home, I was confronted by an SUV stopped in the middle of the lane. The drive just gawped at me as the magnitude of his error started firing his synapses. It was a pity that they didn't fire any faster. I hit the skids, the front shocks compressed and the whole thing locked up. It was only a fraction of a second before the bone crunching impact and my brief flight across the SUV's bonnet. Somehow, the windscreen collapsed just before I arrived and my right foot got caught in the frame. Exit stage right, right foot and my boot. They never found the foot or the boot.
Obsession is a funny thing. Not in the ha ha sense of the word, but in ways that are ironically humorous when you really get down to it. Mine landed me in the Miskatonic Asylum for the Ontologically Bereft. After months of treatment, I have finally been allowed a pen and paper on which to write the scattered thoughts of a fractured mind. That is what they will think. People only see what they are ready to see. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear will understand more. A warning. An augury of what is to come.
Aden stared into the maw of his own demise. His mind could not quite grasp what was happening to him, until Greg pointed out that the maw was a half-drunk bottle of cheap bourbon. Aden stared at his best mate blankly. He was sure he felt some dribble wander down his chin.
“You sure you're ok to walk home?”, Gregg asked, looking at Aden on the street.
From his place leaning against a shop window, a Gucci boutique whose doorway he had just used to relieve himself, Aden nodded vague assurances that he was perfectly capable of getting himself home. Greg was half cut himself, or he would not have accepted Aden's promises. He did. Aden feebly waved as Greg walked over to the taxi rank to get a ride to his own pad, a few miles away.
The resonating harmonies of All is Violent flowed from the stereo system that was worth three times as much as Greville's rusted, puke yellow 1974 Datsun 710. “Cartographers of Human Purpose” alternated between deep sonic wells and soaring highs of pulsating sound born on the fingers of master musicians. Greville drove the damp, glistening road, his headlights scintillating on the rough, black stone. His mind was divided between driving and watching his soul rise on the currents of meditative harmonies.
For millennia, the slumber had continued since the first seed had been planted there among the other giants. Giants whose boughs reached to the clouds that scudded on the winds of ancient breath, standing watch over a vast land denuded of civilisation or those who would come to establish it on these shores.
The slumber was deep and comatose until those first bipeds arrived and began to make noises around him. The whispers were no more than a brushing graze against the very limits of his consciousness, a ripple on the surface of the calm unconsciousness that had been his for aeons past. As more came, more whispered and the whispers became sounds. Sounds added to sounds and became voices. More voices added to voices and they became words and then strings of words. Words imploring and need. Words of reverence and awe.
Loaded Weapon had dragged on for days. Days fueled on Dual Caffeine Boost cola and energy drinks, the likes of which are banned in at least a hundred countries. At seventy-five levels, Doug Turner had never gotten so close. Out of six on his team, only two of them were left. Him and some dude from San Diego. Canon-fodder.
What would you do if you woke up in hospital able to see two different universes at the same time? If you're honest and anything like me, you'd fill your pants in a heart beat. See how that endears you to the monos around you.