Link to Paragraph Ten: http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-para-10.html
Jeremy picked himself up from the cabin floor and looked around him for his little sister Jemima. In his eight years of life he’d experienced a lot of things out here in the desert plains, but the shock that had pummelled their tiny home was certainly a new one for him, and was much bigger than any quake - if that was what it was - that he’d ever felt before. That morning, their mother had told him to keep an eye on Jemima before she’d gone off to town for a lunchtime meeting with one or other of his many uncles, but he wasn’t sure whether she’d quite anticipated this happening. In fact, now he came to think about it, he wasn’t even sure whether mother would be coming back at all. In the past she’d been known to leave them to fend for themselves for perhaps a day or two at most, and usually she came home with stacks of candy bars and the sorts of toys you usually only saw for sale at gas stations, but if the “Big One” had finally hit, who was to say whether or not she would ever return? Jemima had scrambled for cover, just like they had told her to at the schoolhouse, and was now sitting curled up in a ball in the fireplace and covered from head to toe in soot. “Jem...?” he called across to her in an urgent stage whisper, as if the merest sound might bring the entire house collapsing down on top of them. On hearing his voice, she opened her eyes, blinking away the soot and tears, and looked right across at him. He smiled and scrambled over to her, and they held onto each other tightly, looking at the debris of their home and listening to the creaking of the old stone chimney stack above their heads. He whispered a few words of encouragement to her with a confidence that he didn’t really feel. Her entire body was still shaking with fear, but he thought for a moment and decided that what he really needed to do was persuade her to move, but when he tried to tell her this, she just shook her head and refused to budge, so he hugged her as tightly as he could and wondered quite what to do next. Up above their heads there was a sudden loud “Crack!” and, before he knew what was happening, Jemima had bolted across the room and thrown herself under the old kitchen table, which was still steadfastly standing upright on its solid oak legs despite the plaster and wood that had fallen onto it and scattered the breakfast things all over the floor. “Okay,” thought Jeremy, “One more dash and we ought to make it to the door...” He looked across at where the remains of the kitchen door still remarkably remained on its hinges and realised that he’d made a far better job of fixing it than even his mother thought him capable of. Wondering whether their luck would hold out, he briefly explained to Jemima about what they should do, but she stubbornly shook her head once more. Then she froze, a look of abject terror crossing her face, and pointed a tiny finger over his shoulder and back towards the door. Jeremy turned, and framed in the shattered glass fragments that were all that remained of the window was the most terrifying face that he had ever seen. Luckily, it didn’t seem to have spotted them yet as it was far too busy spitting the sand from its mouth. At precisely that moment, however, the creature seemed to notice them and locked its eyes on his, before growling angrily “Aaargh! Just when I thought I’d got myself ahead of the game...” Jeremy clung onto Jemima for all that he was worth and was rather amazed when the creature spoke again. “I don’t suppose you could spare me a glass of water, could you?”
To be continued...?
Link to Paragraph Twelve: Coming soon...?
Meanwhile... If it makes life simpler, the entire “Story so far” can now be found over on the “Writers’ Group” Blog which may very well end up being its natural home... Just click on this link: http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-part-1.html
The water tasted good, washing away the soot and sand; that had been one hell of a fall. It’d taken him a while to coax the girl out from under the table because at first he hadn’t realised that he’d had another involuntary shift. No wonder she’d looked so terrified. Just why he’d i-shifted into a gruesome gargoyle this time was a total mystery. Those damned i-shift’s were always like that, you could end up as literally anything. They were really beginning to be a problem. At first it was one, maybe two a year, but now… well, he’d had three in the last month, or was it four? And then there were the things he’d started to i-shift into. The last time he’d had what he'd begun to refer to as a wobble, he'd reformed as one of Frankie’s damned tulpa creatures. That had been nasty; they stank like a barrel of rotting offal and seemed to have a permanent erection that they insisted on rubbing whenever the opportunity arose – which was practically all of the time. Still, once he’d shifted back to good old Max and explained that no, her mother hadn’t sent him from hell to gobble her up, and no, he wasn’t her latest uncle, and yes, he was an angel (well kind of anyway), she’d scrambled out from under the table and gone to stand with her brother. He looked around the room, it was a mess; dishes and cups littered the floor, every surface was covered in plaster dust with the occasional brick thrown in for good measure and a huge piece of wood (a roof joist?) lay at an angle across that very nice (probably early American homestead) oak table. Yes, that had been one hell of a fall. No sign of Tamara though, no sign at all - not so much as a fluttering eyelash. This was definitely the right place though, so it must be simply the wrong time. He looked at his watch. Mickey Mouse’s white gloved hands were telling him that it was ten off four. Even a nanosecond out and Tamara would be in another here, parallel and filling the same space, here but not here and not really somewhere else, but not here and somewhere else all at the same time. Yes-sir-ee, time really was such a bitch. Oh well, there was only one thing for it. He needed a portal and he needed it now. Smiling, he reached out to the girl standing nervously by the dusty stove: ‘Hey sweetheart. Come over here, I want to show you something. Come on now, don’t be shy, I’m not going to bite you.” But he knew that he would; perhaps her mother had sent him after all.
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