Thursday, August 31, 2023
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Monday, August 28, 2023
Sunday, August 27, 2023
Chapter 10: The Potter (new cover!)
What
does the god of fire demand of Brendan?
A commanding voice tells him every attempt he makes will fail … unless he does as it asks. Brendan ropes in his mate Johnny, if only to tell him he’s completely bonkers. They end up in a place they thought never to visit again, a place of nightmares from their childhood.
CHAPTER 10
MORNING. Gear puddles around us. Rucksacks with
food, water, and medical stuff. Rope. Torches. Spare batteries. Phones are charged.
Ha, looks to me as if we intend doing more than scouting around the entrance,
but I say not a word, allowing Johnny to gather what he regards as essentials.
He sent a message to his Janet, telling her he’s helping a mate out today, and
is now all business. Most unlike Johnny.
While he
mutters away, I go into my studio. Staring at my failures, I know this needs
doing. I need to get back to normal. I need to feel supple clay under my
questing fingers. I am a potter, not a penitent to some god with delusions. Right?
Too right.
Feeling
better, decision made, I rejoin Johnny. We’ll drive out to where the road
peters out, and hike the rest of the way, a matter of half an hour at most. No
long walk into twilight this time.
We’re on our
way within minutes, neither offering conversation. Soon enough, we abandon the
car, load up and start walking. The morning is fresh, still damp after the rain
two nights ago, and birdsong accompanies us. Weaving through the trees on a
track only animals now use, we come to the jumble of rocks, and there we stand,
mouths agape.
Whatever
barrier the local authority put up twenty years ago is no longer in place. The
chains that, by all accounts, fenced the area, lie forgotten in the mud,
rusting away, barely discernible. One sign remains on a listing and rotting
wooden post, but the words are indecipherable. In fact, other than for that
sign, the place looks exactly like it did on the day Harriet went in, never to
come out with eyes able to see.
“No one
remembers,” Johnny grunts.
Harriet’s
parents do, I want to say, but don’t. “We’ll make a stink about this when
we go back,” I promise instead.
Nodding,
Johnny moves forward. We then commence a dedicated search of the area. Other
than deer tracks, we find little. No one has been here in a long time.
Around ten,
sitting on a boulder with thermos coffee to hand, I look at my mate. “We’re
going in, aren’t we?”
He shrugs,
sips his brew.
Yes, we are.
We don’t wish to come here a second time. Do it now and be done with it. On the
flipside, that means, if successful, I’ll have time enough to fashion a host of
planters in the interim. Won’t make my deadline, but I’ll only be a week or so
late. The tester will go in the oven when ready and if unbroken after, the large
firing can commence. Shaking my head at my mercenary thoughts – gotta eat,
dude, relax – I again give attention to Johnny.
His eyes have
narrowed. “Look there. There, to the left. Do those rocks look pulverised to
you?”
They do. It
looks as if a giant trod there as he entered. Fanciful? Maybe, but my heart suddenly
thumps against my ribs.
* new cover not yet live online
Saturday, August 26, 2023
Friday, August 25, 2023
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
Monday, August 21, 2023
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Chapter 10: The Orphan
An orphaned boy searches for a lost girl.
A woman abandons her new-born at a motel in the back of
beyond. Adin grows up unloved, bullied, and no one remembers him. He doesn’t
exist.
Until he sees a poster for a missing girl on a lamppost.
There is an instant connection to little Sunflower, kidnapped for ransom, only
to disappear after the money is paid. He exists because he must find her.
Alone, he searches, a journey that takes him into the wild places, meeting
along the way some interesting characters.
In dreams he speaks to her, for she is the one who will
remember him.
Chapter 10
Your face is also your fingerprint.
SUNFLOWER
SHE SAW FRED’S face.
When it happened, she realised he
would never let her go. He would soon kill her. He needed her alive for the
photos he took of her with the day’s newspaper, but once her father paid, he
would kill her.
She had seen his face.
Fred surprised her. In fact, he
freaked her out completely. There was nothing normal about him, just as there
was nothing normal about her. His type of strange came from a different planet,
though. He did not act or react as a child expected. She doubted adults could
deal with him either.
Late one evening – she knew it
was evening when a bar of light appeared under the door, for he switched the
lights on for the night – he unlocked her prison and beckoned her out.
The action was familiar to her.
Either it meant he needed another photo, or he was allowing her to go to the
toilet. He allowed the latter only once a day, and sometimes it was morning and
sometimes it was night. Sometimes she had to hold for untold hours between, but
never did she surrender and wee on the stinking floor.
He looked odd this night. Not
quite the Fred who now no longer wore the balaclava over his face in her
presence. Unfortunately, she finished in the toilet one time before he was
ready, despite having stolen time to splash water on her face and wash her
hands, and exited the cubicle to see the balaclava rolled up, revealing his features.
She had thought him old, like her father, but he was more like her friend
Tara’s older brother, when she attended his twenty-first birthday party. Fred
was too young to have a daughter, and she had believed him that day in the park.
How naïve she really was, of the real world.
Tonight, his brown eyes seemed
like living orbs. As if two worlds moved there in his face. Usually he showed
no emotion; he just beckoned her to duty with dead eyes. His kind of strange
was all about no expression. His hair was a funny reddish-brown, worn slicked
back, which she thought might be because he always wore the balaclava rolled up
as a cap, ever ready to pull it down when his face needed hiding. Tonight, his
hair stood on end. In fact, as he waved a hand at her to come, the other messed
his hair even more. Obviously, he’d been running hands through his hair.
It was strange behaviour.
Fred was excited about something.
Had her father paid the ransom?
Her heart became a lump of ice in
her tightening chest. Fred was about to kill her. That was the reason for his
excitement.
He preceded her down the short
dark passage, knowing she would follow. Sunflower once went the other way,
seeking escape, and discovered only a blank wall. Besides her cell-room, there
was nowhere to go. Her heart started beating again, loud thumps she was certain
would soon jerk her up and down in the violence of its movement.
Where this was, she had no idea.
Her room had no window, the passage was lightless, and this space, where he
forced her to pose with a newspaper, was boarded up. There were two windows,
but dirty slats had been nailed over them, tight, allowing no light or sight
through. A naked bulb overhead highlighted the nastiness. The narrow toilet cubicle
to the left did possess a small window and that one allowed light in – when she
visited it in the day – but was constructed of glass that allowed no view. It
was rusted in place; she had attempted to pry it open, if not for escape, then
at least for knowledge of her whereabouts. Well, escape had been first on her
mind, but the sight of a tree or a building might help, too.
No sounds other than Fred’s grunts, footsteps and occasional words now formed part of her life. She had not yet heard the whisper of a bird in song, or a tyre crunching over gravel or swishing in rubbery silence on tar. Whether she was in the country or hidden somewhere in the city, she could not know. Not knowing meant she was as lost inside as she was to the outside.
The only other sounds she
experienced emphasised the state of her existence. The slap of a tin plate on
the floor – deposited once in the morning and once in the evening, and she knew
it as morning and evening by the food on it – and the scrape of it being collected
again. The click of the camera on Fred’s phone. The rustle of the newspaper.
Her ablution noises, and the flush of the toilet.
And her sobs, but those were
silent. He was not to know of her pain, although it was true that her
hopelessness sounded loud in her own mind.
In her dreams, when she managed
to sleep, blue eyes watched over her. Once she watched a documentary with her
father about New Zealand, and said how lovely the blue rivers were, and her
father said the melting snow caused that kind of blue.
Snow-melt eyes.
Because he saw her, she lived.
And while he looked, she could endure. It was a boy, she just knew it, but also
wondered if even her sleeping mind played tricks on her. Maybe she needed a
protector so much, she made him up.
Fred motioned her to the plastic
chair she usually sat in, and then dragged another closer. This, too, was
unusual behaviour. She had seen the other chair between the two boarded windows,
but he had never bothered to use it before today.
He sat in it, facing her. Staring
at her. With dancing, gleeful eyes.
Sunflower swallowed. “My father
paid,” she whispered.
A massive grin split his face. He
laughed then, and slapped his thighs. “He paid!”
“What now?”
He lifted a finger into the dank
air. “Now it is time for decisions.”
“Yours?’ she dared.
“Yours!” He chortled and slapped
his thighs again.
She did not dare ask what that
meant, but he told her without her having to prompt him. His excitement could
not long contain his ability to create suspense for her. He wanted to share,
because she was the only one he could
share it with.
“I now have enough money to
disappear, little flower, and you will need to deep disappear also. The
permanent kind, because you had to look, didn’t you? But you have a choice. You
have made me rich, so I’m giving you a choice.”
She did not trust that, but
anything was better than a knife across her throat. He wouldn’t use a bullet,
no; too loud. And she had a suspicion he’d prefer the thrill of her blood over
his hands, rather than a clinical kill.
“Choice?” she whispered.
“See that door there?”
Fred pointed at a door to the
right, one she thought led either to a kitchen or maybe a hallway that led to
outside. It was locked. She’d seen him lock and unlock it with a bunch of keys
he kept in his pocket.
She nodded, staring at him, her
heart alternately beating hot and cold, sending heat and then ice to shiver
over her skin.
“There’s a hole beyond it, real
deep. Either I throw you into it and walk away, for none will find your body
for months, maybe years, or …” He stopped there, leering at her.
“Or?” she shuddered.
“You come with me, and we
disappear together.”
Would he beat her if she went
with him? Or have sex with her? Would he throw her into another cell somewhere?
Maybe he’d kill her in another place. Maybe he liked the idea of her scared,
putting off her murder until she could barely talk for fear.
But maybe she’d escape from
somewhere new. Even if he beat her. Even if he raped her.
“You have ten seconds to make
your mind up, little flower.”
“I’ll go with you,” she stated.
