Starbright Illustrations

Here are the first 1199 words of a short story I’m trying to write. I’ve got the idea in my head that as well as producing an image for Illustration Friday it’ll be cool to have a short piece of fiction to go along with it. Neither are quite finished yet of course, but I was feeling excited enough about this new idea to want to post these early versions.

The word on Illustration Friday this week is Propagate, and I thought some story about a small action that had large and unpredictable repercussions would be cool.

The tricky bit is going to be coming up with an illustration that has something to do with both the word and the story that I write based on the challenge word.

So far all I have is the scan of a sketch, but it’ll be going into Inkscape and Gimp as soon as possible. The piece of short fiction being illustrated will also grow from these two pages here to be a proper short story.

Propagate.

Quint always stopped whatever he was doing to watch a sunset. It was a sort of rule of his, although he didn’t observe it quite as perfectly as he thought he did. If a particularly interesting show was on TV, or if he was in the shower for example, sunsets could end up being ignored now and again, but he certainly had more time for sunsets than most.

Today all he had been doing was reading the paper, as he looked up to turn the page he noticed through his twelfth floor window that the first darkening of the sky before sunset had begun. From where his building was, in Kilburn, he could see from Hampstead Heath, at the outskirts, into town as far as the tall buildings at the centre of London. It was a summer day, the smog added a beautiful ochre accent to the sunset and he appreciated the sudden cooling of the air coming in through the open window into his stuffy little flat.

Quint reached to the left for the newspaper he had put down just a few moments ago. It wasn’t there. Quint’s fingers moved from side to side looking for it, and knocked into his half empty glass of Montepulciano. The glass teetered and started to fall, Quint made a grab for it sending it sailing away off the ledge, and along with it an old paperweight he had been using to prevent his newspaper blowing away. The paperweight didn’t matter, it had been picked up at an old second-hand store for four quid and no good reason, but the glass, the glass had been delicate and expensive, still was, it hadn’t quite reached street level yet, though it had of course disappeared into the dark zone between his reading light and the street light many floors below. He watched the fuzzy orange circle made by the street light and fancied that he saw a twinkle, and heard a noise. He continued staring for a few moments more, then reached out and found the newspaper on his right, closed the window and went back to his story.

The glass meanwhile was lying on the pavement, shattered into pieces, shards and dust, its cargo of red wine already strewn to the winds. But the paperweight had bounced. Bouncing is not something that a glass paperweight usually does, but this one had. Without leaving a single chip of glass behind. It had bounced from the pavement down a staircase and through the open door of the building services room of Quint’s block of flats.

The building services room’s functional title did little to disguise the terrible stinking hole that it actually was. It was a pit filled with odorous things of every conceivable kind, some confined to the three huge metal bins, but most lying where they had been dropped or thrown. The way this paperweight bounced was most unusual, it ricocheted of the bottom step and skipped across the room to a very dark corner at the back where no such paperweight had fallen before. The orange sodium gleam of the streetlight was reflected in the facets of the paperweight, dazzling and glinting as car headlights were momentarily reflected and then were gone. After a while this beautiful little bauble attracted the gaze of something that had never been much interested in the goings on of the building services room before. The gaze of something that usually remained safely dozing away from human eyes, sometimes for centuries at a time. A few seconds later the paperweight was gone.

*

The creature had had to journey very, very far in a short period of time to snatch its prize from the building services room. It had journeyed through the quietest of places and prided itself on being able to go on its way without making a sound or leaving a mark. But its absence had been noted. When it returned to its usual haunt there was an awareness of its business. A wakefulness, and an awareness that demanded an answer, demanded words of explanation.

“It’s mine,” the creature said to its acquaintances, others of its ilk, “I found it, and finders keepers, as everyone knows.”

Its acquaintances took this statement at face value, their wakefulness faded, they turned over and went back to sleep. They had been dozing for a very long time and only woke now and again to exchange a meagre few words. Things returned to their usual sleepy calm and the incident might have been very unimportant, if only Quint had let things lie.

*

Quint was in the building services room with a tape measure, a calculator and a football. He was bouncing the ball, doing calculations, and plotting points on the building services room floor. He had brought a marker pen for the job, but had found that he didn’t need it. Simply raking the toe of his shoe along the floor left a clear enough mark in the grime.

Quint was in the building services room because he had noticed that the paperweight was not among the remains on the street beneath his window. It had taken a few days to register. He had walked to the bus stop, to the supermarket, to the underground and back again, stepping over the little pile of glass each time until it had dawned on him. The paperweight wasn’t there, and there wasn’t enough broken glass to account for it. He looked around, trying to work out where it had gone, and that’s what had led him to the stairs leading down to the building services room.

Rather than search through the detritus and effluvium of the room’s floor he was putting his knowledge of geometry, ballistics and probability theory to work in finding the missing paperweight.

The problem was that his calculations were leading him to an unequivocally empty corner of the room. After running the numbers one more time, he put his equipment down and went to simply stand where he believed his paperweight should be. He noticed that a crack in the wall right next to him. He pulled his pencil from behind his ear and poked it into the gap. He knocked on the wall, listened at it, and after running the pencil up an down again he found that there was a large hollow panel secured by some sort of mechanism. Perhaps the paperweight had somehow ended up behind it.

He probed the mechanism holding the panel with his pencil and found that it was a strange mixture of the simple and the complex. It was made of the simplest of materials, he glimpsed wood and rope, but it wasn’t a simple latch that could be lifted from this side of the door. Quint looked for a keyhole, but couldn’t discover one. He decided that there must be some way to trip the mechanism and open the door from this side. He poked, prodded and hacked, without any success, but also without any intention of giving up.

In the end it took five days, but Quint finally managed to open the door, the first ever to figure out the way without being taught….

But what is Quint going to find?

Oh it’s so exciting. I’ll try and finish it as soon as I can.