Thursday, 4 September 2014

"Momentum" - A short story that my new novel is based upon.





Momentum”


The dark pool or dank putrid water that lay in a perfectly formed circle, started to show a slight ripple on the viscous surface. The gloom that was a sheltered cloud covered sky, hid the usually vibrant moon light as it danced across the glass like reflective surface now broken as a figure slowly and deliberately rose from within its hidden depths.

Jason Tanner stood transfixed to the spot he was standing and could not move, every muscle he owned, and thought that as the brain guiding his body, he had control over them, but he was frozen in place with confusion and fear and although he fought the hard fight they would not obey even the smallest of smallest of commands.

The palms of his hands started to sweat, and a cold numb feeling came over him as the air turned wet and sour at the same time. An earthy metallic taste ran down the back of his nose and into the deep recesses of his mouth, as he tasted the thing that was corrupting his being.

Although his tongue was almost completely dry he had no problems swallowing the bitter acrid flavors of the air around him.

The figure was dark and heavily veined like a tree rising from the depths of a putrid earth. As time passed, moments not minutes or hours, the skin filled out and gained a subtle pink translucence to it, almost mesmerizing and child like, it was somewhat like witnessing a gross birth.

Jason tried to speak but found no voice, run, but had no legs, just the sound of his ever increasing heartbeat and the rasping of his elevated breathing is all that survived now deep in his ears.

Then from nowhere an unearthly scream like a falcon mixed with the scream of a dying crow filled his mind as the thing emerged half way onto our plane of existence.

The body although humanoid was elongated and the facial features were, well missing, sockets but no eyes, a nose but just breathing holes with closure skin flaps, no form or shape, and a mouth that looked unformed, no it looked like someone had changed their mind half way during evolution and said “let’s just leave it.”

 The skin flaps that covered the area where a mouth should have been by were wrinkled and with the nose formed a teardrop illusion of form. No teeth, no orifice at all just a knotted mass of what could be called skin and sinew.

The screaming in Jason’s head stopped as the figure stood before him the last of the transformation from tree husk to awkward pinkish baby.

Jason laughed at himself at that thought and envisioned a nappy on the atrocity before him. It was a nervous laugh and one which he would regret, not now but much, much later. A babble of sounds filled Jason’s head and then as if from nowhere it translated into words and phrases he understood.

“You mean to mock me child” The shape transmitted to him mentally.

Jason looked at the now fully formed visage that stood before him as it stepped from the pool of putridity. The right arm slowly rose and the delicate almost fragile digits on its hand moved like the tentacles of an octopus dancing in the water. The index finger brushed his cheek and opened the skin from just the most delicate of touches, and his cheek opened up from the point at which it lay to jaw as the tip brushed his face as it traced the damage.

“mmm you deform easily” the thing thought in his mind again.

“I am going to have fun with you for an eternity aren’t I boy?”

“I am not a boy! I am a man” Jason thought to himself with abrupt anger and pain as the wound on his face bled onto his chest and burnt like sulphur.

“You are what I say you are child, I have lived many of your so called lives and each time I confront one of you, you struggle with your mortality and are brash and angry” it replied with a single monotone thought.

“What are you” Jason imagined himself saying without words.

A tense moment passed and then the thing slowly moved forward towards Jason and its movements reminded him of a praying mantis moving in for the kill

“Child I am you, you are I and we are one” it thought back at him, and at the end Jason thought he detected a slight chuckle an evil playful sneer that filled and rolled around his mind like an unwanted echo. As he tried to decipher the things riddle he felt warmth on his chest, he looked down to see the malevolent creature had an elongated tendril hand strategically placed on his chest directly over his still beating heart.

A burning sensation filled his senses as the thing took from him that which it needed most, his blood drained from his body as the tips of the things fingers buried just under the skins surface. His blood flowed slowly through the siphon like fingers and into the overgrown and yet fully formed foetal man. Jason felt like he was bathed in a vat of boiling water and the thing started to glow an eerie yellowish glow as it slowly absorbed his life essence.

“What are you doing to me” Jason shouted in his mind. “Please don’t kill me” he pleaded.

“I can’t kill you boy we are one” it stated once more.

The darkness and mire that engulfed Jason in the landscape he was in drifted and started to swirl in a mass of dull grey and blacks with very little else in the way of color.

 Nearly unconscious now he drifted into a state of ease where the world had stopped and he thought it was the end, his end, “So this is what death feels like”.

“Not death boy! Life! ………….This is what life feels like, we are one, one are we, return we must” the voice stated once more and Jason lost all feeling now as he passed out.

A gulp of air and the sound of panic and absolute despair left Jason’s lungs as he broke the surface of the bath he was laying in. Water splashed and slid from all sides of the porcelain container he lay in, as he thrashed like a newborn taking his first breath of air.

 Sitting upright he started to regain some composure and was visibly shaken by the ordeal that was still fresh within his mind, but that could have been the fact that the water he was now sitting in was also freezing cold.

His cheek was red and looked like he was slapped and on his chest were five distinct welts that surrounded his heart. Jason felt each red mark as a dizzy uneasy feeling came over him. His senses reeled and as he regained his position upright in the cold water he thought he heard a dark chuckle in his mind.
Copyreight - Graeme Hawke 2014

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