Magenta Monster

This month I am taking part in a writing challenge called GothNoWriMo – where you write a gothic or horror novel in a month. We are two thirds of the way through this month and I am struggling a bit, there has been alot of other stuff going on from working at the Cheltenham Literature Festival running workshops to cousins weddings. I do now have a relatively free week before the madness of book tour during Halloween week for The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry.

Anyway the short story that grew and has consumed my flash fiction writing abilities is now being planned out properly to be this years Nano project – Nanowrimo is the first of the writing challenged and is short for National Novel Writing Month.

It is unsurprisingly based in the The Punks universe but unlike all the rest it is not set in the distant past or the near or medium future – instead it is actually set in the present day. It also contains HP Lovecraft or rather the memory of him and his writings.

This has freed my mind up to write the flash fictions and short stories once more.

Halloween is nearing so here are some chocolate bones and skulls and vampire teeth to get the creative juices flowing.

The pumpkin sat mouldering on the door step, it had been a carving of extreme beauty, it had shown a celestial skyscape with each pin prick etched star a different depth so that it would glow with the correct intensity. Now it was slumped and slimy and in some places furry.

Fake spider webs were tattered in the wind and beaded with rain, they where matted and grey clumps hung from them like rather large swatted flies.

Time had just kind of slithered by since the autumnial feasts of fear and death and people just did not seem to have the energy that they once had had. Maybe it was the lack of summer, something that would pass in spring, something they just tended to forget about each year when the warmth and flowers arrived.

But in truth the sun had not dimmed though the sky was somehow greyer and the miserable mist had been falling on and off for what seemed like forever.

And no one had thought to check on the basement flat with the rotting pumpkin outside and if those above and next door had noticed a smell – well there was a rotting pumpkin.

Not that there was much they could have done if they had checked, other than hastened the ended by several weeks.

For inside the flat as neighbours where soon to discover was a scene of devastation and carnage, it had been a party once, with tacky witches hats and face paint, now not even the flies disturbed the dismembered bodies that lay about the place like discarded confetti.

It was not the alcohol, not even the absinth, nor was it the food colourings on the cheap and vivid sweets, or even the drugs two of the gate crashers had brought. No it was the unexpected, accidental guest that had reeked destruction, it was still being the life of the party, having consumed all the souls or at least the energy from the party goers.

It sat gelatinous and pulsing in the corner, a sort of washed out beige-pink with octopi tentacles undulated around it. The suckers glowed a pallid off white and looked like mushrooms starting to slime in the fridge. If anyone had seen it they would have been put in mind of bloated corpses and decay.

It was feasting still, slowly shredding every piece of now putrescent flesh from bones and then splitting and crunching the bones to suck out the marrow.

And it was growing.

They had summoned it, unwittingly the revelers had called forth a monster from the deep cold of time and space, the creature had been plucked ancient and wraithful from where it dwelt. And it was all the fault of a pumpkin and a book of horror stories.

The book still lay grasped in one tentacle, the claws had grazed the leather cover but it had not been a normal book and the binding was even less normal where the leather was concerned. But the kids who’d picked it u,p had just thought it was a laugh to read out loud on Halloween, and the name they all recognised was embossed in gold leaf on the front – H. P. Lovecraft. It was a huge tome and claimed to be his entire works, it wasn’t but that did not really matter.

It had been pennies, it’s ultimate price however was the universe.

Bound in the flesh of sacrifices, flayed alive and screaming, it alone, still would not have been enough to call forth the horror that now lurked in the flat in the middle of suburbia.

No for that there needed to be a map, something that showed the entity how to reach through time and space, to the exact location.

Like stars carved on a pumpkin.

The ancient fire blackened wood began to grow, it was six hundred years dead and yet now it creaked and groaned and sent forth new shoots. The shoots were not green but a rotting orange, thorns pushed their lacerating way into being. The hard packed forest floor shook as the tendrils of sick second life pushed their way through, cracking the ground and pushing loose leaf litter away.

They danced undulating cords into the icy air and began to intertwine, to weave and braid and form a spongy lattice work, a skeleton of something that had been once before. The birds stopped singing and the forest lay still shuddering in anticipation. It remembered the blood, thick and rich and how it fed the roots of the oldest trees, but the people had stopped coming, long ago the people had left the woods and hid from the grotesque power behind city walls.

All but one.

Akona of the Vísend, and now she was old, she had always been ancient but she had also been young, now she was old and brittle and bitter. She had waited and slept in the permafrost. Once she had been a queen, once she had been the forest but now she was a shade that flitted in the shadows and awaited the sacrifice. The house of rotting timber sprouted into life, it had a soft look to it as if made of sweet biscuit.

She hummed a song on the air and inverted the rainbow in the sky, locking the earth into a cold harshness. The woods had sensed a change coming, the lands had awoken her, they all needed blood to sustain, she had failed over half an age ago to provide but the world had already been changing then. This time no child would fool her and she would take what was needed straight away.

People once more trod the woods, the echos reverberated down to the roots of each and every tree. The meat was coming, and once more they could grow. Akona drifted into the dwelling and glowed, an inviting miasma spilled from the twisted cottage and beckoned to the cold and weary. A sweet spicy aroma drifted on the air. It could be mistaken for cooking to the desperate, breath too deep and the stench of decay was evident.

The hikers entered her domain, she breathed in their fresh scent and made the sky snow, hash sleeting snow, not the elegant dance of snow flakes that people seemed to like so much. This was viscous weather designed to maim. One of them slipped and skidded and shattered a leg on a jutting jagged stump. The cry peirced the woods and it rustled in delight, drinking the pain but there was no blood, the injuries were all still locked within the flesh.

There was a taste of desperation but it was not as raw or as potent as the old rites, these people did not believe they were lost. They made their way to perceived safety. The woods teeth howled and hurried the tugging and cajoling of the uninjured as they stumbled up the slope under the burden of a friend.

Wolves were not what they should have feared and they seemed to know it, the forest with the echo of a thought whisper, ‘ginger bread cottage?’ the woods felt the wariness of the group but this blood could not be allowed to escape. They needed it or they would wither to nothing but wood and humus.

Akona sniffed as they passed into her realm, she could not detect fire but something like it clung to them. She set the wooden thread to tether the door shut as soon as they were within. They were clad in strange garments, spun from the inner of the leaf, no animal touched their skin, such strange magics she did not know but it mattered not what sorcery they had found in their cities, she was old.

The creaking of the spongy wood alarmed the travellers but she conjured a stove in their minds, a pot of soup bubbles but they did not reach for it. Puzzled she increased the tantalising smell of meat. They turned their backs on the pot, and called for those who lived there. She condensed from the fug above the imaginary fire, a harmless old lady, a grandmother with leathered skin and moonlight hair.

They recoiled from her.

She was too long without blood to take their rit by the knife, a remnant from before her time, hidden in the ground where her roots had lain after the devious fire. An object of power the blood gods of the before had left her. She smiled at them and gestured to the stove.

They smiled back and shook their heads they spoke but she could not understand their soft palleted speech, she got images of them, of animals in torment. She tried not to ground her teeth in frustration, she could not use soporification.

They mimed use of some sort of speaking spells, holding flat things from ear and mouth at the side of the head, she shrugged and turned away spinning blankets corse and smelly for them. They took them with grimaces of pretend thanks. She picked up a flute of split bone and began the tune of forgetting. They lay down upon her blankets and eyes closed fitfully, like many before them they did not even know they should struggle, the blankets wrapped around them, smothering to a deeper sleep.

Akona cackled with glee but her strength was gone, she could not hold the knife to pour their blood. She evaporated, the soft wood creaked and groaned and tendrils wrapped around the shrouded bodies. They tightened until skin ruptured and the blessed blood oozed through the corse cloth and into the wood and the witch and the forest.

It was not enough but that did not matter, as the rescue party where not long in the coming.

As a writing tool and as part of the hunt for artists for book covers, I love Pinterest and so I have set up a board of spooky, dark or halloween themed pictures.

These are images that I personally find inspiring 🙂

Enjoy – they are here.

It’s been a long time coming and I’ve been meaning to do this for ages – so here is a news letter, mailing list, news announcement thingy that people can join to find out about all the random things I do and warning I do lots of stuff.

No really lots of stuff – the news letter covers my performance, craft, art, science communication stuff as well as my poetry, story writing and other projects.

So if you are still interested then go to this link here and sign up 🙂

This is an amazing visual of Tudor London and absolutely epic story fodder or if you all ready have a story you are working on that is set in this time period, then this is essential viewing!

The effort that has gone into creating this is amazing and it has apparently won awards.

For me there is a kind of apocolyptic feel due to the lack of people and the sense of very real plague fears.

Use this picture as inspiration for writing a story.

Throughout history it had been known as the Red planet, or as some harbringer of war. Mars sat in the field of view and Elsa felt the same awe she had as a child as she flicked through the space agencies’ rovers images. She’d always thought of it as a Red Globe, the same as Earth was a Blue Globe – it had something to do with the orrery lampshade she’d had as a kid and her granddad’s drinks cabinet which was a giant earth that opened up.

It had been a globe – the earth had been a globe, Mars and the planets were globes; they saw them via the light they reflected back from the sun. They glowed like her lampshade and that seemed important for a globe. For most of her life, Mars had been an orange blob on a screen or via the telescope optics; it was real, and yet not.

Now she was sitting here looking out at the actual surface. There was a week to go before they would attempt to land. There was not much to do and the confined space had become ever more repressive as the journey drew near it’s end.

Worse, no one had really wanted to speak of the actual mission once they found their sister ship floating in the night. They had all known they might find it; mercifully, they had orders not to bother stopping for it. It was supposed to have already landed six months ago but the absence of any contact and the large unexpected solar flare had lead everyone to fear the worst.

It could have been them; no doubt, others would be lost too, and they themselves had not yet set down on the red planet. So many variables, so many risks, so many chances.

Sometimes she could hardly breathe when she thought about it all. The Phoenix’s hulk floating dead in space had shaken her, she was not going to deny that. No solution had been found to the radiation problems and sundry other issues with space flight, but when she thought of the rockets that first took humans into space she felt an overwhelming sense of pride – if they had managed it and, for the most, part came back, then so could she.

She called up her files again and started reading the geological reports amassed over the last half a century by various remote sensing and rover missions. They were gambling that the water supplies, the ice and the rock cavities were useable; if not, they had little leeway for supplies to be shipped in, although it was possible. Also her and Ben had worked out that they could mount a mission to the Phoenix, reducing the risk to their own survival – not that any of them really wanted to look at what was in that ship.

She shuddered and tried to blank her imagination, calcified half-dressed astronauts still kept creeping in, though, or tumbling in puddles of preserved puke, irradiated so no bacteria could have broken it down.

Being the backup mission meant they had exactly the same supplies on board; a multiple redundancy that had been added into the mission, as it clear it was going to cost lives. She was lucky she hadn’t been with some of the other companies; Prometheus Industries was incredibly concerned over safety, but even then, expected grave losses for this mission.

Every launch window there was they would be sending another mission. The two-year gap in between was problematic… Her mind wondered back to the Phoenix and wondered if they had died instantaneously or if it had taken days, or weeks. She hoped to hell that it hadn’t been months.

A data packet from Earth appeared and pinged itself into existence, stealing her attention. She smiled at the messages from her family and skimmed off the latest journals for her to review and read, looked through requests for video responses to various schools’ questions and the like – they had taken huge efforts to try and take continued contact with Earth with them.

To her surprise there was a message from Jonathan, the CEO of Prometheus Industries, a bitcoin millionaire who had really damn good plastic surgeons. His rugged features and unruly black hair, that glinted with the odd silver thread within, appeared. His blue eyes seemed to pierce her across the distance of interplanetary space.

‘Commander Elsa, I hope my message finds you well. This message is for you only. I fear the situation on Earth is deteriorating politically, with the final collapse of the bread bowl in India. There has been a drastic increase in violence and threats of war. I will do everything within my power to make sure the next missions are launched but I can not guarantee – things have gotten bad fast here. I am sorry, there is nothing else for me to say, it is up to you how you handle this with your crew. Do not mention this issue in any return correspondence.’

And then he was gone. She sat and stared at the rest of her messages, just stared, she didn’t read anything, she wasn’t even really thinking. Things were not brilliant when she left but not disastrous; sure, the US had fallen to pieces but that had happened when she was a kid. All that aside she knew that for now her family were still safe, that there was a chance of the next mission going to launch.

Sighing, she knew she wasn’t going to tell anybody else – not yet. But that did not mean she was not going to plan for the worst case. She pushed her self off of her seat and drifted to the compartment above her pilot seat; the blister packs of pills and serum sachets were still there, she prayed to a god she did not believe in that she would not feel the need to use them. The fact she was even checking they were still there was upsetting.

She looked back out the window at the Red Orb in front of her. ‘Well, Mars; looks like our lives are in your hands.’

She took a tranqualiser to sleep.

The monster awoke to the dark cold of the lab, air con to stop the computers over heating, the monster shivered and tried to sit up. She was bounded a trolly, the thin padding doing not a lot to ease her discomfort. She mewed in despair, her language centres were not yet functioning, somewhere in the vast gloom around her the clacking of a keyboard told her that someone was trying to fix that. She was aware of all of them, every single one – clacking away at key boards and one… one was part of the system.

Something clicked in the inner darkness of self and she screamed one word, ‘HEEEEELP!’

A man came a tried to comfort her, assuring her she was fine and that they were Drs but she knew something was wrong, she wasn’t a person like these other people… she was a monster. Yes it was there the thought pulsing and bright, she would have green skin and bolts coming out of her neck. She would kill.

It was vivid and so assured. The monster began to sob, she didn’t want to kill anything, she was scared of going back to the not formed, why would she send someone else there?

She twitched and jerked and twisted in the restraints, a sensation she did not know but that she wanted badly to go away shot through her leg. There was a moment where she marvelled that she had such a thing to feel with then the jerking continued worse than before. She screamed and what light there was blinked out.

The monster slept in the cold. When she awoke she was in a room, the walls painted yellow and photosynthetic life forms sat massacre in a ceramic vessel, and they did not yet know they were dead. The monster felt a gritty feeling in her eyes as if they were filling up with something, to her horror it turned out they were and warm saline water poured from her face. It was disgusting.

But she was no longer strapped down and she sat up relieved.

She tried to leave the bed and stand but her legs where so very heavy, the Dr had said she was ill? No that wasn’t right – they’d made her? No she was ill and in hospital.

The light was far too bright.

Someone was watching her, she could feel the presence from the edge of her mind, it was pleased and displeased and the monster lay back quaking with fear. She wanted to go home but that was an empty shell of a meaning, there was a shape for home in her head but it was artificial and brittle.

She slept and dreamed of wires and eyes in jars, of vats of slime and light, a white coat awoke her and jabbed her with a spike, it was a needle, she remembered that now. She was growing memories, no just remembering, she’d been ill so very ill. They’d rebuilt her hadn’t they?

‘Was it a car crash?’ she asked.

He smiled at her, ‘it will all be explained later for now rest you’ve been through a lot.’ She nodded and drifted off once more to recall the wires and light and tanks and the smell of souperating fish. Her stomach churned and she was awake and puking but there was nothing there to throw up with and so she dry heaved until the yellow bile burnt her throat and splattered weakly on the floor. A nurse came and the monster watched wondering about the taste in her mouth, it was metallic.

There was a glass, with liquid in it, she knew this thing and tried to pick it up but there was no co-ordination and it skittered to the floor spilling it’s contence but not breaking. Her tongue felt weird but there was nothing she could do so she lay back and slept.

The monster opened her eyes and found that her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth, she ripped them apart and it was painful but satisfying. The man was there again and helped her sip, her throat hurt like it couldn’t imagine what this swallowing business was all about. But she managed it and the water was silk and ice and sweet and tainted with oiliness.

She wanted to sleep more but now they would not let her, they made her stand, stand on legs she could not move, they made her think about moving her legs, they moved her legs and somehow she wasn’t sure how, she began to walk. Each step took a lifetime, took stupendous effort and at the the end they carried her back to the bed.

That night she dreamed of fire, and places that could not be, of a syllabant language that hissed and clicked from the palette. The monster awoke knowing she had once had a different face, one with large eyes and wide forehead. Her teeth had been pointy. She felt the mind in the system, there at the edge the one that knew her as a Monster. It was quiet now, scared and afraid, just a whisper, it had winked out. A new presence pressed in upon her and the Monster shock within herself for it was a reflection of self, but a self that knew all, knew itself whole and from the beginning. It dominated her mind and she whimpered.

It seemed pleased and displeased, the monster had know this creatures wants before, had felt them in the dreams.

Day passed into weeks and the darker stronger mind that was some how hers was there more and more of the time, she wanted it to go. It was not her, it was dark and hurt and twisted and she wanted nothing of it’s desire to unform things. It had laughed at her and whispers had told her she would change her mind when she saw the unforming that had already happened of The People being wiped out.

The monster now knew she was abomination but she was a necessity, and she could walk and talk and she looked like… the people around her.

She knew there must have been a great head truma as her memories did not fit together properly. But now she was growing hair, she didn’t remember having hair before, she brushed it lots, it was one of her favourite things to do.

The Dr came and asked her questions, she didn’t tell him about the presence in the back of her head. He seemed to know it was there though, she sometimes saw flickers of a visual monster in the mirror in the bathroom. Such dark wide eyes.

Then the Dr came with others and a pile of clothing that were not hospital gowns, ‘My Lady it is time for you to venture out.’

She stared at him, ‘but I still don’t remember’ she said softly.

‘You will and you are needed, come we will dress you.’

The cloths were not like the drs and nurses around her, nor like the ones she had seen on the limited TV she had been allowed to watch. They were like those she remembered those, those adorning the monstrous creature that was her but did not look like her. There was a thick panelled skirt and a bodice that was short and revealed her navel, a butterfly had been embroidered onto it, its scales she noted where little tiny mini fish that you could barely see. She only noticed because she was expecting them.

A collar stood out from her shoulders, it would be a pain if she let her hair grow long. She had not had hair… before. There was a cloak that shifted and swirled and she loved it but the foot ware was wrong. There should not have been any or if so there should have been sandals but instead she had soft knee high boots. She stared at them, they were yellow like sands on the shore.

A yearning for the sea tugged at her, she looked up at the smiling Dr then he bowed his head and held out his arm, ‘you are our Lady Chaos, a boat awaits you. You are still weak but your people need you, armageddon calls!’

She took his arm, fear making her icy on the inside. She was not the monster, she decided, she never had been. The voice in her head told her she would be, she stared back at the bathroom one last time wondering if she would see that wide eyed self again.

I will greet you when your task is done came the echo in her head.

Who are you? She thought back in desperation.

A musically lovely laugh echoed in her cranium, I am The Lady Chaos, I made you all and I will destroy you all and you my lovely are me, on a cyborg skeleton, wrapped in their meat, with you we can correct what should never have been.

Lady Chaos the Monster clutched painfully at the arm of the Dr who helped her through the building, she could not escape not yet, she was still so so weak.

you can not escape at all, you are linked to me! screeched the voice in her head.

Monster knew she could not face the non from again, she knew she would send others there to remain safe from deaths embrace. Shivering as tears streamed down her face she was loaded into boat.

It begins came the echo, she did not need to ask what for the word was bright in her mind, the word was revenge, the word was repentance, the word was savage.