Just realised that National Novel Writing Month is coming up again pretty soon in November. Every year I keep telling myself that I’m not going to put myself through that again, but it seems I’m always a sucker for punishment when it comes to writing fifty-thousand words in thirty days.
Thought I’d post up chapter two of last years, just for kicks. Who’s with me this year? Oh and just a warning, I was at the time going through a period of watching a lot of The Mighty Boosh.
Chapter II:
Second chapter already. Didn’t take long now did it? Now just sitting here on the front steps, the daily burn and draw, taking in the scenery. Far right in the distance there are those gigantic towers that make up the skyline now. One day they just shot straight up out of the ground and took over the skies. Does my head in sometimes thinking about how they did that, but really I’m not that much of a thinker. I’m more of a ponderer I’d say. There’s a pond down in the park, all dark and dirty, filled with all kinds of pond scum and the likes. I go down there sometimes, try to fish a little, but the fish in there are the super-intelligent kind, from hundreds of years of evolution. They know exactly what to do with a hook when they find one. They’re the real thinkers.
Sometimes when I throw my line in, I’ll find that one of them just slowly takes my line and wraps it around a giant chunk of wood, then they pull on the line thrice, three times that is, and wait until I’m certain I’ve got one hooked and then I yank and yank my guts out and end up snapping the line in two, while they sit there in their little swimming circles, chuckling away to themselves, sipping on their iced seaweed daiquiris and discussing notes on Captain Ahab and their hero who thwarted that monomaniacal maniac.
Other times they will write you a note, cleverly unhook the bait straight off the hook and then attach their little condescending notes to the line. Not on the hook most of the time mind you. It’s mostly tied up using some kind of double hitch half-knot or something like that anyway. I’m not too good with knots. The note will always be along the lines of:
Ingenious fish-catching device you have devised there old chap.
Most a pity however that it seems that the fish community,
Is today unable to aid you in your little games,
As we have prior engagements to meet our friend,
Billy the Six, the six armed octopus in his garden
For high tea this afternoon.
You are of course more than welcome to join us monkey boy,
Should you be so inclined. We do hope you won’t mind
Getting your toes wet just a little.
Sincerely yours,
Huckleberry Finn
Quite a hilarious show of wit and sarcasm. Sometimes I go down there for that alone.
I am not however here to tell you about the pond and the fish in the pond tonight though. I’ll leave that ditty for another, more appropriate time. Tonight we also leave our strange tale of the record from Luci and the quest for New Emitex. Rest assured we won’t leave you hanging for too long on that one either. But for now our story will descend into a darker time, a night much like tonight, around the same time, the moon had fallen asleep behind one of the towers to the right skyline to dream about unthinkable things, cheese and wet dreams, just like tonight, and I was asleep. Actually that part is different, because I’m not quite asleep right now, though for all intents and purposes, I may as well be.
To get on with it anyway, I was asleep, and so was Falcon I assumed in the other room. I was having this weird dream about working as a checkout chick in a normal supermarket and there were all these people just buying groceries and I just kept scanning all these groceries though the checkouts and putting them in plastic bags, over and over again; real trippy stuff. But yea, so I was asleep, dreaming, until I hear like this strange creeping sound, the sound that those creeper plants make while they’re growing up your wall. You know? That low rumble, almost inaudible, but this time it was clear as day, and there was no mistaking it.
I climbed up from out of my bed. I was in the depths that night, sunken at least six feet under. It took me a little while to wade through all the extra pillows that had somehow fallen on top of me. I pretended like a was one of those cute little blind molerats that they’re always showing on those nature documentaries, burrowing my way though, until I was finally free. I was still blind however, having somehow misplaced the light switch. In my pocket I’d put a lighter. I knew I had a lighter. Westy the trout was keeping it safe for me. Westy had a terribly well developed habit for the pipe, so he used it far more often than I ever did anyway. Still, you never know when you might be in need of a lighter I always say. Like just say you’re out at a bar some night and some really cute bird asks if you’ve got a light, then there’s no need to feel like a twat, digging around in your pocket, pretending like you’ve lost it. You just say, “Hey Westy, you got that lighter I spotted you before? It sure is dark in here isn’t it?”
“Oh hi hi there Mr Fisher, sure thing, I’ve got it right here. And yes, it is quite dark in here now that you mention it. What’s going on then?”
“I think I heard something outside.”
“Outside the house, there’s always something outside the house.”
“No Westy, inside, out in the lounge or something, like a low rumbling, you know like a creeper vine climbing up the side of your house.”
“Oh, yes of course!”
So I got the lighter anyway and lit it up. One of those new models where it can light up the whole entire room. A LIGHTer brand lighter. The jet flame extending about seven inches from the tip. Whatever, I’m getting off track here. Just kick me or something when I start to linger too long on a subject. It’s a tendency I have sometimes, especially when I’m really tired like I am now. This is the good part anyway, so don’t quit on me just yet.
Behind the door I knew there was something, but I didn’t know what it was, so naturally I opened the door. I’m not one to just sit behind a door while I know there’s something interesting behind it. It was still all dark behind the door when I opened it, but what hit me first was the smell, real jungle, or more closely, like a deep tropical rainforest delight. I reached around for the light switch and was hit by a flurry of green light, but coming slow, almost trickling down at a plodding pace from high up above and behind the green canopy. After about a minute or two, it had fully engulfed me and the room and I could see that the whole room was a gigantic overgrown mass of growing and decaying plant matter.
Far out it was good. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and I almost wondered if I was still dreaming, but no, this was too real, not like my dreams.
When my eyes became accustomed to the light I started to notice all the little details presenting themselves to me, the tiny flowers that were springing up right before my eyes, quickly budding, blooming, and then turning to tiny helicopter seeds that took off with their tiny piston engines in search of a new land. There were hundreds of them, thousands probably, and perhaps even a hundred thousand or more. I could hear their miniature rotors heaving and hoeing though the air, lifting them to dizzying heights around my nose. I almost breathed one in, but merely sneezed a bit, the force of which toppled me over, and I fell with an almost inaudible thump down to the moist ground below.
It was all mossy and wet, slippery and soft, so nice to sit on. I saw, glowing on the ground, the incandescence of a few neon mushrooms. “Rare delicacies these are!” thought I, carefully harvesting the few brilliant specimens. “They’d go great with a spot of jagger root tea.”
The kitchen was relatively unchanged, and I boiled Mr Kettle just like I always do, and poured his hot juices into the cup for a perfect jagger root and neon mushroom tea. Blowing the steam away to cool it down I returned to the rainforest within, only to find that I wasn’t alone.
There, perched upon the sill of the open window was a little green man. No, not an alien or anything like that. He was more like a goblin or something, but he had all this grass and leaves and moss growing all over him and twigs and bits of branches sticking out everywhere from his body. He was really ugly looking, and could certainly have done with a haircut. That grassy, unkempt mane certainly couldn’t have been doing him any favours with the ladies, if you know what I mean.
“So who are you supposed to be then hey? The Green Goblin?” I asked him in a casual tone — the tea was starting to kick in around that time I think.
“My name is Bartholomew Pumpernickel. I am part of the Spirit of the Forest.”
“Part of the Spirit of the Forest? Which part, the bleedin’ left pinky toe?”
“We are a collective conscience of myriad individual beings”
“You’re a what?” Yep, it was beginning to kick in.
“Never mind puny mortal. I am simply here because I used to live on this very spot and I was just driving past with my friends and wondered if I might be able to get a photo with the house. Here, here’s my camera. Watch it though, it’s an old style film camera, so you have to wind it and look through the viewfinder.” He gave me the camera with the utmost of care and relaying a few more thousand instructions on how to use it properly.
“Oh right, I thought maybe you were going to have a go at us for destroying like the natural habitat or something. I would have told you that, you know, it wasn’t us, it was whoever lived here before we moved in, but hey, that was you wasn’t it?”
Young Bart isisted that I take a shot from outside the house, that he had a little trick that he wanted to catch on camera so that he could show all his other forest spirit buddies. I was still only in my jocks and socks, but I figured that it was the middle of the night, no one would be around, and I’d only be outside for a few minutes anyway.
So I get outside and begin to go through the instructions on how to work this great big old wooden camera, when I notice the house begin to shake there in front of me, and start to lift up from its struts. Something was growing from under the house, and growing fast, and before I could do anything at all, the giant fig tree from below had lifted the house clear off the ground about ten metres in the air and had it swinging around quite violently from side to side.
It was then that I saw Bart hanging from the front porch screaming something down to me. “Take it! Take it! Take it now before it’s too late!”
But before I could finish winding the film, taking off the lens cover and lens hood, set the shutter speed and focus, I noticed the little green man come hurtling down towards me. It was Bartholomew of course, behind him, a dazed and confused Falcon, wondering what in all hell was going on.