Sales for this book are at last taking off. I was beginning to think that an anthology of sci-fi and paranormal erotic stories was a bad idea...
This excerpt is from a story called, 'The equinox of Thirteen,' the Thirteen in question being a girl trapped on a rain-sodden island with the last few all-female survivors of her species. Her increasingly lucid dreams predict how, on the equinox, all the ancient mysteries will be revealed.
Book: Of angels, mice and men
Story: The equinox of Thirteen
Excerpt #1
The diary of Thyrza, once known as Thirteen.
The sycamore's severed hands clogged the gutters. I kicked them up, freed the water from the random dams, and watched it swirl then flow through the ancient drain's rusted iron bars to its inverted freedom. The rain was relentless, fell in leaden drops that quickly drenched then chilled the flesh. I gazed up into it; obese and lifeless clouds, blurred by their plummeting progeny, spanned the entire sky with an unbroken sheet of the dreariest grey. They buried the hilltops, smothered the daylight, and eroded my hope, yet I trudged ever onwards through the rolling heathered hills.
A fluttering at my breast alerted me. I reached into my waxed woollen coat and produced the tiny glass phial. Inside it, perfectly synchronised to the eight stages of daylight, my time-beetle had reached its seventh metamorphosis. It flapped its newly formed wings violently against the glass and would soon, thus confined and unable to find a mate, revert back to a pupa to safely see out the approaching darkness. I reckoned I had another league to walk and barely enough time or strength to do it, but the dreams had grown so incredibly real, and I knew I had this one opportunity to test their veracity: the Equinox; a stranger; an end to suffering.
The rain eased from lead through bullets to shot; the change - though slight - was so welcome that I thanked its god out loud. We had many words for rain, some derived from weaponry, others from bodily functions. Bullets, shot, swords and daggers were enjoyed by no one, while surely everybody's favourite was spitting, with perhaps crying the next. Pissing was as bad as it ever got. Whatever words we used, it was always raining and it was said it hadn't stopped for a thousand years.
I stepped between the skeletons of the first line of trees, swished my feet through layers of their sodden bloody flesh and stared up through the spindly bones into the darkening sky. Night was almost upon me. I stopped and checked my beetle again. She was quietly spinning, covering herself in a silken sheath that would soon set as hard as stone. Within it, her body would liquefy, and remain fluid till some unknown mechanism alerted her to the rising sun. By a similarly unerring process, a product of some mysterious function that had not yet been determined, the bodies of these god-given di-chromatic creatures were a living calendar. At the summer's height, their exoskeletons were completely white; at the winter solstice, they were, as one, totally black. By the morrow, my beetle would be black and white in equal measure, the two symmetrical wing-cases in total contrast. By that fact alone, I could determine that day was in perfect balance with night, and that the Equinox - my moment of truth - was nigh.
As predicted by my ancient map, I stumbled out of the forest and into the blackened ruins as the last drops of daylight pissed into night's stygian sewer. I gazed around at the ivy-clad monuments, wonder crying from my eyes. Our legends said these crumbling cathedrals were built by an extinct race who called themselves Mon; if that were true, I thought they must have been impossibly strong and relentlessly resourceful: the geometric shapes of the massive structures resembled nothing in nature, and were apparently constructed from substances found nowhere else on the island. On our last foolhardy foray here, some seventy winters ago, Fourteen had become Eleven: three of our sisters had sickened and ceased, much as creatures around us sicken and cease. It was unknown that we could be taken thus. Our god-like certitude was mortally wounded; our confidence forever cracked. Soon,
others were taken. Sisters Seven, Eleven and Twelve succumbed. Then we were Eight.
others were taken. Sisters Seven, Eleven and Twelve succumbed. Then we were Eight.
I was the first Wo to have ventured into Forbiddenland in an age. The air was said to be fetid, the earth poisonous, and I stepped fearfully through the unnaturally parallel avenues, my nose, eyes and ears primed, terrified of the sickening and cowed by the ceasing. At the intersection of two wide avenues, stood an impossible spire, ten times taller than the tallest tree; its surface perfectly smooth and rounded; its peak piercing the blackness above me. I opened my coat and took out my five-worm phial, shook it and waited till the tiny crawling creatures within woke and shared their glow. By the soft green light, I could discern symbols carved into the towering structure's cuboid base, mysterious intricate shapes, the meaning and purpose of which I could only wonder at. As my index finger traced the grooves, my eyes fell upon an impossible image, a picture plucked from real life. From my life. A floating sphere with a cube suspended below it by a web of ropes. And in the cube, next to a simple depiction of a licking flame, a single smiling waving figure.
Sister Ten, the one I lovingly called Tess, had built a similar fabulous craft - a basket slung beneath a massive silken bag of heated air - then floated slowly upwards and disappeared through the clouds as though swallowed. Weeks later, her ripped and shattered ship was found clinging to a craggy cliff, though no trace of Tess's beautiful body was ever recovered. Scattered nearby, protected from the elements by crevasses and rocky overhangs, we discovered several soggy paintings of a fiery yellow ball in a cloudless azure sky, and yet others of a glowing golden crescent suspended on a sheet of black and set amongst myriad pointed pinpricks of light. I took an example of each, dried and folded them carefully and determined to carry them with me everywhere. On occasion, I took them out, hugged them to my breast and sobbed, loss and longing tearing at me in equal measure. What sights Tess had seen and at what cost! But I would gladly have changed places with her, just to see for myself what she had seen. I imagined time-beetles flying beyond the clouds too; perhaps they mated there, imprinted the preordained schedule of day and night onto their future offspring before falling back to the dim, grey, watery Earth.
I shared Tess's dreams of flight, while harbouring dreams of my own. At night, when I closed my eyes, these hopes became a diaphanous reality. A lush, green land; a cloudless sky; days of blazing light; nights of golden crescents and silver sparks. I foresaw that, at the Autumnal Equinox, a mysterious Wo would appear from the same sombre sky that had taken Tess. She was stronger than us, different in many ways to us, and showed us incredible things. We Seven multiplied, produced offspring in our own image, just as beasts produce their own likenesses. We proliferated; filled the land; ploughed and tilled; laboured, laughed and loved. Then, fulfilled and replete, we said our goodbyes and ceased without sickening, closing our weary eyes for the final time. Throughout the incredibly lucid dream, the stranger chanted mysterious words that reverberated in my head and finally dragged me back to my dank reality.
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