CONTINUES NEXT WEEK IN "THE SILVER KEY"
DARKLIGHT - An Oceanear Tale by Nathan J.D.L. Rowark
Darklight is a prequel to the Carriage Thirteen Trilogy by Nathan J.D.L. Rowark - Available in Red Skies Press Anthology Techno-Goth Cthulhu soon!
Part 3
Moving away from home had been an uncomfortable experience for all three of the students, especially Becca. Aside from attending a new university, she had least reason to move out from beneath her parent’s roof of patronage. Now she had to shuffle bills, like she had watched them fastidiously tend to for most of their lives. The red ones would go at the front, the green to the back. From a very early age Becca had understood the colour code. What she hadn’t realised was why the papers marked green, for 'go' she assumed, often remained shelved whilst the red ones were quickly placed in envelopes with accompanying slips that her father needed to sign on his return from work.
“It’s grown up stuff.” Becca’s mother had informed her, “You’ll understand such things when you get older.”
Of course she was right. She had no choice but to grasp such particulars. It was either that or watch their antiquated television set (which they could not possibly afford to replace) walk out the front door, whilst cradled in the glib arms of a student-hating bailiff.
Struggling to hold silent the whispered screams resonating beneath her throbbing skull, Becca crept up to Simon’s bedroom door and listened for movement. Spreading her hands across the cheaply painted slats of wood adorning the opening, she noticed beside her feet, the altercation between a figure and the dimly lit corridor still streaming its beams across the threshold.
Realising that it too might be able to observe her shadow from the other side; Becca cautiously retraced her tip toed steps back into Phillip’s arms.
“It’s here!” she whispered.
“I doubt if a shadow will hear you, let alone see you!” Phillip scoffed, “The thing that has Simon in its grasp, now that’s a problem.”
“If it can’t sense us or hurt us then why did we run away?”
“Because it’s bloody scary, that’s why!” Phillip reasoned, “And we don’t want our flatmate rediscovering us in his current condition do we?”
“I should never have chosen this area to rent in.” Becca revealed. “Getting you two to move into such a place, making you co-sign my tenancy of terror. I’m so sorry. I just wanted better grades, you know, to get a better job at the end of it all. Bow University is one of the best in London, right now.”
Phillip reached out a hand for Becca’s shivering limbs, moving her closer to him in the darkness.
“How is this your fault? You couldn’t have known all this would happen.”
“But I did in a way, kind of,” she confessed.
Her curves' disciple gripped tighter the skin surrounding her quivering forearm, “What’s that supposed to mean?” Phillip questioned, in an urgent tone laced by suitable panic.
“We got a great deal, didn’t we? It was half the rental value of those living outside of the Hill Top Estates, just a stroll across the tarmac.”
“And…” her flatmate pushed.
“And it used to be the site of a haunted house, reputed to be the most haunted collection of bricks and mortar ever built on our shores. You know what I think about silly urban legends like that, don’t you? I assumed such tales were down to the imaginings of fools.”
Phillip groaned. “When we get out of this you’re buying me a drink!” he demanded, “Why didn’t you tell us this before, because you were worried we wouldn’t move in?”
“It seemed stupid not to take the opportunity to grab this accommodation because of some silly ghost story,” Becca spat. “The price was much more affordable here, so that we could save some money to one side and make it look nice. The food doesn’t pay for itself you know, and most weeks I don’t see either you or Simon dipping into your pockets to contribute.”
“True, but we do pay our fair share on other things - mostly. We contribute to the food situation by eating it, thus we keep the fridge clear of harmful bacteria that can grow on things left too long to ferment.”
Becca shook her head. “If you wrote a paper on blagging, you would so get an A.”
“Says Miss I-won’t-tell-those-sharing-the-house-it’s-full-of-dead-people.” Phillip growled, “What were you going to do when Elvis and Marilyn knocked on the door for dinner, huh?”
“Keep quiet,” Becca whispered, “I can hear someone moving at the top of the stairs.”
Beyond the thin planks separating them from their irrational guest, a being no longer known to his lodging friends rapped hard against the timbers.
“Don’t say a word.” Phillip gasped.
Bringing back a hammer-like fist, the clenched palm of an imprisoned student threw forward his appendage, strong enough to shake the very hinges off his intended target.
“I think he knows were in here!” a male voice crackled, sore with worry, “How good is that door lock?” Becca’s live in demanded.
“Not too sound,” she remembered, “It keeps getting stuck, and before you say it, I’ve already added it to the list of complaints for the landlord to deal with.”
“I don’t think that will be much use to us right now. They’ll take it out of our deposit if the door caves in, I hope you know that!” he reminded.
Turning to face the vast emptiness of lodgings that by day had seemed built on an architect’s appreciation of the claustrophobic, Phillip repositioned a chair underneath the Darklight and proceeded to climb toward it.
“What are you doing?” Becca despaired, “That thing out there will be in here soon!”
Peering into the throbbing white flame, he could see a dank study just beyond its opening.
“It’s a tunnel!” the film goer exclaimed, not a light, “The glow is to facilitate something burrowing toward us. Help me down!”
Becca reached out for the student’s meagre legs as he gripped tight the entrance’s tingling sides with his fingers. Gradually, Phillip began to descend by a backward step that caused his feet great imbalance. Arms outstretched in the darkness, a law student fumbled below him as if blind.
“Are you here?” she questioned, waving a hand to inadvertently chop away his stance.
“Careful!” he advised angrily, “I’m almost down!”
Crouched low, Phillip jumped back on to the floor, as Becca struggled in the gloom to make out the spark of their strange oraphis again. It had still remained in Phillip’s grasp, drawn down to the floor by the tenacity of her accomplice. Although still suspended above them, the Darklight had now expanded in length. Letting go of its sides, a lover of all things surreal watched the curves wash across the ground like a spilt can of lucid paint.
“It has no elasticity!” he realised, excited, “Let’s grab its widths apart. Take the right side.”
Becca did as she was told, unwilling to delay any expedient escape plan that could hurry her away from the twisting handle of their besieged refuge. Gripping her nails apprehensively around its sparking corners, she promptly leapt away after receiving a nasty bout of electrical charge from its ends.
“I can’t!” she whined.
“Then you can tell our guest when he bursts through those panels that there is such a word after all, can’t you?” Phillip decided.
Taking stock of the worsening situation, and that of their diminishing personal safety, Becca held on to the uncomfortable sheet made of rippling forces and tugged hard toward a counter direction. Like a curled blanket it unfurled as predicted, leaving the room covered with its open spaces.
“Shall I go first?” Becca’s live in enquired, surveying the bizarre equipment through the chasm and cross quarters on the other side from them.
“We’ll do it together!” she politely gestured toward the portal, “Let’s just hurry, okay?”
After an obligatory count to three, two flatmates, ill experienced in the necessities of occasional outbound trav
el, slithered into a mass of teeming electrons. First, they appeared not to fit through the hole, faces pressed up against the thing as if the detail on the reverse were but a vividly drawn painting. With persistence, Becca felt her hands seeping through the curtains streaming fabrics until eventually relinquishing her of an arm. In panic, she pushed against the finite blockade much harder with her remaining limbs to see them too evaporate into its strange mists. Phillip was almost through, just his bulbous head remained to turn and smile at her before disembarking to meet its body. Upon crossing the turbulent furore of tingling charges and counter charges, Becca stood in front of her protector, and amongst surroundings quite dissimilar to their normal living space. The metallic tips of her crumbling shoes appeared to have absorbed most of the lightening generated around her. Becca began to sob.
Seeing the feminine traveller’s trembling legs beneath the pleats of her ambitiously high skirt, Phillip abandoned his reconnaissance of the study to take her shaking hands in his.
“You aren’t crying for your shoes, are you?” he checked sternly.
Becca shook her head forward. “I’ll never be able to afford another pair like this. What will I wear to interviews when we graduate in a few months time?”
Phillip unhanded the woman, estranged from her designer attire, and continued to survey the book repository around them. Everything seemed fresh and new, yet the smell emanating from the floorboards told him something may have died beneath them. Every literary work sitting dusty on a shelf appeared quite recently pressed, just unread. On taking down a rather curious looking pamphlet entitled Matter and the Spirit, Phillip flicked open its cover and attempted to decipher its text.
“It says this document is the original land dwellers edition. What does that mean?” he asked himself.
“It’s like I said earlier,” Becca stated, “There could be more of them in here, aquatic monsters like the one that possessed Simon.”
Phillip’s worried gaze affirmed to her she was right.
“They’ll be coming for us soon. Maybe they don’t know were here yet.”
“And that would give us the advantage!” her partner assured, “We need to leave here before that thing in our house breaks through and follows us.”
“That thing is still Simon!” Becca shouted, “I saw a tear running down his cheek earlier. He’s still alive in there!”
From behind a strange contraption humming in the centre of the room arose a figure that had cleverly concealed himself away. Seeing the half clothed woman and her famished looking squire cross into his dominion had caused the innovator much distress. Revealing the clanking chains of his tethered wrists into the streaming daylight, Professor Julian Styles moved in to greet them cautiously.
“Are you spirits from the other side?” he questioned, “Refugees of some such hellish indignation?”
“I am Phillip,” a forthright male declared, “And this is a friend of mine. Her name is Becca.”
“A strange name for one so pale,” the pioneer grinned, “I shall fetch you a mirror!” he decided.
“I would have rather had ale,” Phillip smiled to his housemate.
The underachiever appeared much more relaxed again, seeming to no longer fear attack from his homicidal comrade on the estate.
“These writings are anachronistic, everything around us is wrong,” Becca realised.
“I know!” her boyish companion beamed, “There’s a broadsword on the wall next to an old battle axe. The way the native is dressed, it doesn’t conform to any single period of time.”
“So this is a collector’s palace of sorts?” she puzzled.
“Or a manor,” Phillip reminded her. “This is Hill Top Manor. I’m sure of it!”
“But it was demolished. It’s where we live now!”
“And so is this!” reminded the movie nerd.
On returning to his shaken visitors, an unkempt genius revolved a reflective pane in their direction. To the pair’s amazement, they seemed to shimmer and drift as if ghostly apparitions.
Becca panicked, “We're dead!”
CONTINUES NEXT WEEK
THE STRANGE (AND REMARKABLE) ADVENTURES OF WALLY AND ROY by Todd Nelsen
Part Two
Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub, and who do you think they be? The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker, all put out to sea.
We’re in trouble, I thought.
“Roy…”
“Yeah, what, Wally?”
“We’re going to have to go down there, man. You know that. We can’t stay here forever.”
“Yeah,” Roy said. “I know.”
“Well…,” I nudged him with my shoulder. “What are you waiting for?”
Roy heaved a sigh. “You see that, Wally? How high do you think we are? What do you think would happen if I just hopped through like you say?”
“I see some… water,” I prompted politely. “Maybe if you kind of maneuver yourself and twist this way and --”
“You mean the little blue patch to the left, now hidden by that CLOUD?” he asked.
I bit into my lower lip. “I guess so,” I said. “Yeah.” It wasn’t such a bad idea, was it? “Why the hell not?”
“Do I look like a bird to you, Wally?” he asked. “I don’t think I look like a bird, do I?”
“No.” No, he didn’t look like a bird, I thought. Well, he did resemble a fancy pigeon (skinny at the top and fat in the middle), but I felt better not to mention it at this present juncture between us.
“I’ll tell you what, Wally,” he said. “Why don’t you try it, if you think it’s such a grand idea? Go ahead. Let’s see how well that goes. My bet is you’ll make it the whole way down.”
“Maybe I will,” I retorted. “Maybe I won’t. But I’m no chicken. I know that.”
Roy was now offended. “That’s a good thing, Wally,” he said. “Because chickens can’t FLY.”
I was feeling a little piqued. We both were. Roy’s mood had begun to sour the second we had worked up the courage to remove the not-quite-so-rubber-plug-cork. Mine had soured on account of his mood, of course. Now that we were looking into the abyss, yet again, our moods were downright intolerable. It was as if every frustration we had felt up to this point had culminated to this very moment.
(I hate it when that happens, don’t you?)
I hunched up in a ball, my feet beneath me, in what I took to be the perfect jump-into-the-dimensional-portal stance, assuming that is what it was. It was about 5 feet in diameter, more than enough to get a first-rate, bird’s eye view of the cloud covered vista below us. Also, more than enough to leap through it, that is if I was really going to do it. But it was high. Real high. Like, in an airplane high. Like the sort of high John Denver sang about before he smacked his Rutan LongEZ into the Pacific Ocean in 97.’
“You sure you don’t need some more gas, Mr. Denver? You’ve only got half a tank in the right and less than a quarter in the left. Umm… I don’t think that’s gonna do it. You could crash trying to change that over.”
“No, no, I’ll be fine. Colorado sky, Rocky Mountain high, I’m leavin’ on a jet plane, man… it’s gr-o-o-o-vy, baby. (puff) (puff) Chill out.”
And-a-rub-a-dub-dub,
John Denver’s in the tub.
PLUNKITY.
PLUNK.
PLUNK.
PLUNK.
splash
I could see mountains to the right. A low valley was cupped before them. The only thing that appeared to be working in our favor (I was quite happy about it, by the way) was that they were right side up. Meaning, we were looking DOWN on them.
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