Old Kingdom 04: Across the Wall (20 page)
I mean, I think she would have if I’d talked to her about it. Maybe. Once I ignored her trying to pull away and I just kept kissing, sticking my tongue in even harder and putting my hands down the back of her jeans. Then she started jiggling about, and I thought it meant she was getting excited, till I realised it was sort of panic and she was just trying to get loose of me. I let go and said sorry straight away because I could see in her aura she was really frightened, and I’d gotten sort of scared as well. Anyway, she was mad at me for a week and wouldn’t let me even hold her hand for two weeks after that.
It was only a few days after we had gotten back to the holding-hands stage that the Lightning Bringer showed up again. Outside the school, on his black motorcycle, just like he’d done six years before. I felt my heart stop when I saw him, as if something from a nightmare had just walked out into the sun. An awful fear suddenly becoming real. Which it was, because this time he was smiling at Anya. My Anya! And all those electric tendrils were reaching out for her, blue-spark octopus tentacles, wrapping around and caressing her like I wanted to do but didn’t know how.
I tried to hold her back, but she ignored me, and I felt these shivers going through her, like when a dog’s fur ripples when you scratch in exactly the right place. Then she pulled her hand out of mine and pushed me away, and I saw her looking at the Lightning Bringer just like Carol had six years before, with her mouth slightly open and her tongue just whisking around to leave her lips wet and her chest pushed forward so the buttons went tight …
I screamed and charged at the man, but he just laughed, and the blue energy came gushing out with his laughter, smacking into me like a fist, and I went down, winded. He laughed again, beating me with Power, so all I could do was crawl away and vomit by the bushes next to the gate. Vomit till there was nothing to come up except black bile that choked and burned till it felt like it was taking the skin off the inside of my mouth and nose.
When I finally got up, the Lightning Bringer and Anya were gone. For a second I thought maybe she’d gone home, but I knew she hadn’t. She didn’t stand a chance. If the Lightning Bringer wanted her, he’d take her. And he’d do whatever he wanted with her, till he got tired and then she’d be just like Carol. An accidental-death-by-lightning statistic. I think it was then that I realised that I didn’t just like Anya, I was in love with her. I’d been petrified of the Lightning Bringer for six years, terrified of what he could do, and of the darker fear that I might somehow be like him.
Now all I cared about was Anya and how to get her back, back safe before the thunderclouds in the distance rolled over the town and up the mountain. Because I knew that was where the Lightning Bringer had gone. I felt it, deep inside. He’d gone to get closer to the clouds, and he’d gone to call a storm. It was answering him, the charge building up in the sky, answering the great swell of current in the earth. Soon they would come together.
I think it was about this time that I completely flipped out. Totally crazy. Anyway, the Darly twins later said they saw me running along the mountain road without my shirt, bleeding from scratches all over and frothing at the mouth. I think they made up the frothing, though the scratches were certainly true.
Basically, I turned into a sort of beast, just following the one sense that could lead me to Anya. I could tell where she’d gone from the traces of her apricot aura and the blue flashes left by the Lightning Bringer. They were intermingled, too, and in some deep recess of my mind I knew that they were kissing and those tree-strong hands were roaming over her, her own clasped tightly around him as they’d never been properly clasped around me.
I think it was that thought that started the animal part of me howling … but I stopped soon enough, because I needed the breath, just as the first thunderheads rolled above me with the snap of cold air and a few fat drops of rain, the lightning coming swift and terrible behind.
I ran even faster, pain stitching up my side, eating into my lungs, and then I was staggering out onto the lookout parking area, and there was the black motorcycle silhouetted against the lightning-soaked sky. I looked around desperately, practically sniffing the aura traces on the ground. Then I saw them, the Lightning Bringer pressing his black-clad body against Anya, her back on the granite stone that marked some local hero’s past. She was naked, school dress blown to the storm winds, lips fastened hungrily to the man, arms clasped behind his head. I watched, frozen, as those arms sank lower, hands unzipping his leather trousers, then fingers lacing behind muscular buttocks.
He raised her legs around him, then thrust forward, his hands reaching toward the sky. With my strange sight I saw streamers fly up from his outstretched fingers, streamers desperately trying to connect with the electric feelers that came questing down from the sky. When they did connect, a million volts would come coursing down through the man’s upraised arms—and through Anya.
I ran forward then, leaping onto the Lightning Bringer’s back, lifting my hands above his, making the streamers he’d cast my own. He stumbled, and Anya fell away from him, rolling partly down the hill.
Then the lightning struck. In one split, incandescent second it filled me with pure light, charging me with Power, too much Power to contain, Power that demanded a release. It was an ache of pleasure withheld, the moment before orgasm magnified a thousand times. It had to be released before the pleasure burned all my senses away. Suddenly I knew what the Lightning Bringer knew, knew how I could have not only the Power, but the ecstasy of letting part of it run through me to burn its way, uncaring, as I took my pleasure.
‘You see!’ he crowed, crouching before me, shielding his eyes from the blazing inferno that my aura had become. ‘You see! Take her, spend the Power! Feed her to the Power!’
I looked down at Anya, seeing her naked for the first time, her pale skin stark against the black tar of the parking area. She was frightened now, partly free from the Lightning Bringer’s compulsion.
I started toward her and she screamed, face crumpling. And somewhere in the midst of all the burning, flowing Power I remembered her fear— and something else, too.
‘I love her,’ I said to the Lightning Bringer. Then I kissed him right in the middle of his forehead.
I don’t know what happened next because I was knocked unconscious. Anya says that both of us turned into one enormous blue-hot ball of chain lightning that bounced backward and forward all across the parking area, burning off her fringe and melting both the motorcycle and the bronze plaque on the stone. It didn’t leave anything at all of the Lightning Bringer.
When I came to, I was a bit disoriented because I had my head in Anya’s lap and I was looking up at her—but since her fringe was gone, I didn’t know who she was for a couple of seconds. She had her dress back on again too, or what was left of her dress. It had some really interesting tears, but I was in no state to appreciate them.
‘You’d better go,’ I croaked up at her, my voice sounding horribly like the Lightning Bringer’s. ‘He might be back.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, rocking me backward and forward as if I needed to be soothed or something. I liked it, anyway.
‘I’m just like him,’ I whispered, remembering when I wouldn’t stop kissing her, remembering the feel of the Power, wanting to use it to make myself irresistible, to slake its lust and my own on her, make her just a receptacle for pleasure …
‘No, you’re not,’ she said, smiling. ‘You always gave me the choice.’
I thought about that for a second, while the dancing black spots in front of my eyes started to fade out and the ringing in my ears quieted down to something like school bells.
‘Anya … can you see auras?’ I said.
‘Sometimes, with people I know well,’ she whispered, bending down to kiss me on the eyes, her breast brushing my ear.
‘What color’s mine?’ I asked. It seemed very important to know, all of a sudden. ‘It’s not blue and kind of … kind of … electric, is it?
‘No!’ she answered firmly, bending over to kiss me properly on the lips. ‘It’s orange, shot with gold. It looks a lot like marmalade.’
INTRODUCTION TO DOWN TO THE SCUM QUARTER
T
HIS IS THE OLDEST PIECE OF MY WORK
you will find in this book. Written in either 1986 or 1987, it was published in two Australian gaming magazines,
Myths and Legends
and then
Breakout!
It is not a story as such, but an interactive narrative experience: in other words, a ‘choose your own adventure’ in which the protagonist’s story proceeds according to the choices the reader makes, which direct him or her to read particular paragraphs.
But unlike the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ or ‘Fighting Fantasy’ books, it is not a serious interactive narrative that is on offer. ‘Down to the Scum Quarter’ is a loving parody of the paragraph-choice game format. It’s also something of an homage to one of my favorite books,
The Three Musketeers
by Alexandre Dumas, and to the best movie version of that book, done as two films:
The Three Musketeers
and
The Four Musketeers
, directed by Richard Lester, from scripts by George McDonald Fraser (whose own novels are also excellent).
Because much of my work is serious and can be quite grim, people are sometimes surprised that I also write humourous stories and that I like to make people laugh when I talk to audiences. I also try to have moments of humour and lightness even in my grimmest novels, because life has moments of laughter and comedy even amid darkness and despair. Similarly, when writing humourous stuff, I approach it seriously and try to mix in enough solid, ‘real’ stuff to underlie the comic material.
‘Down to the Scum Quarter’ I wrote purely for myself, and then I looked around to see if I could find somewhere to publish it. It may be sad to admit it, but even seventeen years later a lot of it still makes me laugh. Possibly because the whole concept of the paragraph adventure game lends itself to parody.
And speaking of such, I should alert interested readers to the fact that there are three or four paragraphs in ‘Down to the Scum Quarter’ that you will never be directed to by other paragraphs. Paragraphs 96 and 97 are two examples. When I wrote those two, I thought there was a story waiting to be written from them, and even now I suspect there still is.
But enough of this rambling. Lady Oiseaux has been kidnaped and the night is yet young. Strap on your rapier, slap on your plumed hat, and sally forth!
DOWN TO THE SCUM QUARTER
A FARCICAL FANTASY SOLO ADVENTURE
How to Play
1. Decide whether you’re going to cheat or not. Most people cheat in solo adventures, even if they don’t admit it. If you’re not going to cheat, get a six-sided die.
2. Go down to the local costume rental shop and get a Three Musketeers outfit. This is called ‘getting into character’.
3. If you’re old enough, stop by the liquor store on the way back and pick up a few bottles of cheap red wine.
4. Rent a video of
The Three Musketeers
. Start watching it, and practice knocking the tops off the wine bottles with your plastic rapier. This is called ‘getting the atmosphere’.
5. Give up after you break the rapier, and open a bottle with a corkscrew. Drink all of it.
6. Read ‘The Prelude’.
7. Select five items from the list of equipment (unless cheating, in which case you presume you always have exactly what you need).
8. Go to ‘The Adventure Begins!’
9. Carefully evaluate the situation, choose a course of action, and go to the paragraph indicated, rolling a die when necessary.
The Simple Method:
Get a 6-sided die, and ignore steps 2–5.
THE PRELUDE
Your beautiful mistress, the Lady Oiseaux, has been kidnaped. There is only one slim clue that may lead you to her—a brief message, scrawled in pale-gold eye paint across the side of her hijacked palanquin: