Red eyes

I started this one, and was thinking of making it into a serial. It's brief, but see what you think.

Red eyes shined from behind the glass, frightened eyes. The pupils were fully dilated; she noted this on her clipboard. The creature snarled through the one-way glass, it was unnerving but not altogether threatening when the glowing red eyes followed her as she moved onto the next captive. This one lay prostrate on the floor. The eyes were not visible, and it seemed altogether more placid than was to be expected. She took a step towards the glass and tapped on the barrier with her pen. There was no reaction from the cell’s inhabitant, not one flicker of response. The overhead light left no shadow in the small room and there was nothing but white walls, a large one-way window and plain grey linoleum floors. She spoke into a microphone of her lapel,

“Is it dead?” Before there was a response across the coms system, there was a response from within the cell. The creature didn’t move but in a surprisingly low voice ground out the words,

“I am yet living. It should, in theory, take a lot more than boredom to kill me madam.”

This was unprecedented. Nothing had engaged in communication without significant ‘encouragement’ before. She blinked, startled, and then stepped backward as the prone body began to rise. It didn’t move awkwardly, but with an impossibly supernatural sense of grace. In one smooth action it rose on the balls of its feet, unaided by the use of its arms. He, for it was male, swiveled to face her. He was lithe, with rakishly long wavy black hair and skin the colour of caramel. He gave off the air of nonchalance that was unusual to say the least. Most became feral, predatory, the oppressiveness of captivity becoming increasingly unbearable. Evidently, however, this specimen didn’t fit the trend. He began to whistle and inspect his fingernails, obviously amused by the silence from her side of the glass. He was an anomaly, and she didn’t like anomalies. She pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose and contemplated what course of action to take.

The night before

Tomorrow I have to get up really stupidly early to catch a train. Needless to say I have not packed yet and I am a tad pushed for time. Nevertheless I am honour-bound to present something and so,  let me say this: period dramas are awesome, those set in the nineteen twenties/Edwardian era often doubly so. Look for anything made by Merchant Ivory and look in particular at a little-known adaptation of Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April from 1991. It has wonderful actors such as Joan Plowright, Alfred Molina, Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent and Josie Lawrence playing really quite intriguing characters and some very pretty landscapes too. Cracker of a film, perfect Sunday night/any other time viewing - hop to it.

Pentradle Way

Things I saw today:
1. What had to be the world's largest bumble bee. Seriously it was about the size of two two-pence coins.
2. A shiny, chrome-effect smart car. It was flashy and the perfect picture of fashionable, small mechanics. I assumed it's owner was Italian, as it seemed the next logical step up from a scooter.
3. A man talking to his friend as they were walking, who had what I could only call an unnecessarily loud voice. I felt my middle-class affrontage rise is ugly head and I wanted to blurt out 'Shhh sir, please be quiet, I'm trying to eat my lunch in relative peace.' but don't worry,I did not.

And now for another short one: 

Tall wildflowers and weeds blocked the path to the last house on Pentradle Way, but there was something arresting about the place that meant one couldn’t help but stop and contemplate its mysteries for a little while.

Polly stood at the rusted garden gate and pondered, as she often did on quiet walks such as these, why such a beautiful home would remain unclaimed and empty for so long. Pentradle Way was a large stretch of country road that extended miles, twisting outwards both South and North from her current position. This was one of the few remaining crumbling country piles that was relatively isolated, situated in its own neighbourless plot. The oddly formal Georgian frontage was coloured and softened with age, its once groomed gardens now wild and rampant, but there was still something rather gentile, delicate, and almost wistful about it. As if it would sigh if you stepped through the front door.

Polly called to her dog, Barley, and turned as if to go. Something came over her however, and rather than returning back to the sleepy village about a mile further down the hill, she hopped over the small garden wall and waded through the acre of greenery to the porch. Despite the shade from the ivy, the sunlight had bleached the door a silvery grey and the damp had swollen the wood making it incredibly stiff to open.  Attempting a karate-like kick would only damage herself she felt, so Polly reversed into it and launched a successful attack with a combined hip and shoulder action which was surely going to leave her bruised, but otherwise uninjured.

The door creaked on its hinges somewhat ominously, shedding the hazy summer sunbeams into a long-forgotten hallway. Flurries of curled up leaves scattered every which way across a surprisingly expansive terracotta and white tiled floor. It stretched towards a pale wooden dresser to the right, accompanied by a faded, moth eaten green loveseat. The leather was twisted and curling at the corners, worn by the grooves of a familiar occupant. Some smell lingered in the air, a combination of dust and roses, sweet and perhaps a little melancholy. Polly looked up the white, painted stairs which curved away out of sight. A pair of old lacy curtains billowed in the breeze from a broken window.

Polly took a step forward then motioned for Barley to follow her, but the dog whimpered and started dancing from side to side, discomforted and eager to be away. With a sigh she turned back, letting the door swing to behind her, and followed Barley back to the lane. She jumped back over the fence and squished her wellingtons into the wet mud rather satisfactorily. A giggle burst forth from her lips and found a faint echo, carried softly on the breeze from somewhere behind her. She looked back towards the house, but no one was there. Just a twitch of curtains by the window caught her eye, a pale smudge behind the glass and what might have been a hand raised in greeting. She squinted but it didn’t become any clearer. Lifting her arm a little, Polly waved in that general direction, well it would be rude not to, then she called to Barley once again and continued towards home, still wondering what secrets such a lovely house could have known.

Dreaming

One night I had one of those weird dreams. The ones that pop back into your head at the most random moments. I went to bed as normal, tucked up and toasty. Next thing I know, it's freezing and completely dark apart from the small lines of light around the edge of my door. I dived off the end of my bed and retrieved the duvet from its place of rejection on the carpet. I rolled up, squishing my toes into the duvet, trying to rescue them from the onset of frostbite. I shut my eyes tight, but there’s that niggling noise that tells me I didn’t lock my door last night. When it’s unlocked it vibrates in the frame and squeaks. Normally I don’t hear it, but the middle of the night is awful quiet, and any sound is magnified a thousand-fold. I made the heroic dash from the bed to the door and back, and then resumed my foetal position within the duvet cocoon. The next three times I wake up during the night, there’s no obvious reason. I’m perfectly warm, it’s totally silent. But I kept having that feeling as if I’d forgotten something, something scarily important. It was that feeling of being paralysed with fear, when you feel your heart literally skipping a beat. Utter gut-wrenching fear.  

When I willed myself back to sleep for the final time, convincing myself that the shadows in my room where exactly that, just shadows, I dreamt in lurid technicolour. All my senses were alive. The room was awash with smells - peppermint, chocolate cake, citrus, lavender - and I could hear the noises of rain falling outside, and yet also cheerful birdsong. This didn't seem odd at all, everything felt perfectly normal. And that was the bizarre thing, because it was the middle of the day and I was getting ready for bed. Brilliant sunshine streamed in from all sides, even though I have only one smallish window. I laid back against a mountain of pillows and shut my eyes, everything switched off. Not just the colour, but the smell and the sounds. It was all darkness.

I was sleeping, but aware that I was sleeping. I could feel a baby curled up next to me. It didn’t move or make any noise, but I instinctively knew it was my baby. It belonged to me, it was mine. Then all of a sudden I was rolling on top of it, I could feel myself doing it, but I couldn’t stop. I was suffocating my own baby and it was terrifying. I managed to pull it out from under me, only to reveal that it wasn’t alive. It was fake, a doll. As I rocked its squishy body back and forth in the half-light, its eyes opened and closed, plastic eyelids closing over plastic eyes in a plastic face. As its eyes opened for the last time, they rolled in their sockets and focused in on me, staring me down. Then I woke up.

And now for the weather...

In the words of the Fast Show, it has been Scorchio! and I'm completely unable to cope with the heat. All day I resist the urge to scream 'I'm melting!' like the wicked witch of the west. Instead however, my coping strategy has turned to taking naps in the middle of the afternoon and then having a leisurely BBQ. Such is life. However it does mean I'm struggling to find something new to blog about today. I could wax lyrical about creamy potato salad and glowing citronella candles and the pale butterflies that float around, ghost-like, at dusk and the distant, plaintive honk of a train, but I really don't have the energy. So suffice to say dinner was lovely, and thank goodness the heat is set to break.

"Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative" - Oscar Wilde

Narwhals

Pinch punch, first day of the month.

Friggin narwhals are friggin real. I didn't know this. My mind is well and truly blown.

I'm familiar with the concept from fantastical old-timey maps, the kind that have Poseidon/Neptune in the corner and giant squids and misshapen countries and various sea serpents and mermaids. I thought it was in good company, I thought there couldn't possibly be such a thing as a horned whale because that's just silly, but no. Apparently the Narwhal pulled a duck-billed platypus on me and turned out to be friggin REAL. 

I found this out via daytime TV of all things. The presenter was inspecting a walking stick that was made from Narwhal tusk, which supposedly was often mistaken for unicorn horn. I kept thinking, 'Don't tell me they're real too, I might just start believing in Father Christmas and the Easter bunny again.' Despite my crushing cynicism, I think they might genuinely be a new favourite animal of mine, they're so weird they're almost beautiful. 

watch this national geographic video to see them in action (you may want to tune out the voiceover if you don't like puns) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO58kt-jETA

So yeah, the wonderful keeps on happening.

The copycat quoteth

I have nothing original/witty to say for myself today. Sorry folks. However, my reading of Huxley's, surprisingly dense, Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell continues apace so I thought I'd ride on his coattails again and share some of my favourite quotes so far, a sort of 'diet' Huxley. Here goes.

"Most visualizers are transformed by mescalin into visionaries. Some of them - and they are perhaps more numerous than is generally supposed - require no transformation; they are visionaries all the time."

"That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul."

(Huxley gets us people, he's one of us.)

"For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe's phrase, ' the world is essentially fruitful.' He is the man who feels that 'what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply'."

"If you go to New South Wales, you will see marsupials hopping about the countryside. And if you go to the antipodes of the self-conscious mind, you will encounter all sorts of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos. You do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials. They live their own lives in complete independence. A man cannot control them. All he can do is go to the mental equivalent of Australia and look around him."

"Most dreams are without colour...about two-thirds of all dreams are in black and white."

"Reading these accounts, we are immediately struck by the close similarity between induced or spontaneous visionary experience and the heavens and fairylands of folklore and religion. Praeternatural light, praeternatural intensity of colouring, praeternatural significance - these are characteristic of all the Other Worlds and Golden Ages. And in virtually every case this praeternaturally significant light shines on, or shines out of , a landscape of such surpassing beauty that words cannot express it."

I love Huxley's way of writing, even if I do have to re-read it several times to understand. And I may even get around to reading one of his novels one of these days. And despite his descriptions of the wonderful effects of mescalin and other drugs, I still have absolutely no urge to try it.