Last Saturday I photographed my first gay wedding. I didn't know it was a gay wedding until I was on my way; I found out when the other photographer I was meeting texted to let me know there would be two brides. My reply was simply, 'Oh, ok.'
It seems a bit strange to me but apparently a lot of people were freaked out by this wedding. The venue I shot at doesn't want any publicity about it. Other people have made comments about how you need 'an open mind' and 'a big heart' to deal with such an event.
For fuck's sake. This is the 21st century. Who cares? If two people love each other and want to make the same lifelong commitment as anyone else, why shouldn't they be allowed to? Who gives a shit what they want to do with each other? Don't give me that shit about it being in the Bible. So is stoning people for having affairs and if we enforced that one then most of the people I know would be dead.
Honestly I was totally unfazed by the whole event. I did notice that there was no first kiss or much smooching at all during the event. I'm sure this was done deliberately so as not to offend some of the older relatives that were there. Some people don't like things that make them awkward or uncomfortable shoved in their face. I get that, so kudos to the brides for making that decision. That level of thoughtful planning just makes me all the more irritated that people are being all self-righteous about the event. Part of me wishes they had put on some kind of BDSM routine for their first dance or invited all the single guys up to play the soggy biscuit game in the middle of the dancefloor. It was really a very tasteful, well organized and sanitized almost to the point of blandness event. In short, there was nothing to offend anyone, which is why people being offended by it is bugging me so much. Get over it, old people. The fact is, you signed contracts with a client, so you can't suddenly get all fussy about it because people are gossiping about it. Grow some love spuds and stand up for yourselves. People will respect you far more for it.
As you may be able to tell, bigotry and downright ignorance are a couple of things that irritate me immensely. I'm not pro-gay rights or anti-old, stupid white people. I just don't see why people care so much about other people's lives. In short, get over it.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
Travel Opportunities
I'm having formatting issues with this post, apologies if you read an earlier version that looked terrible...
Here's another short story I've written. It's a science fiction piece that I wrote based around an old idea I had years ago. Like the last story I wrote, I'm publishing this as a taster of what my writing is like. I'm hoping over the next few months to generate some interest in my writing. I'm going to keep writing and publishing regardless of whether people like it or not, but it would be nice to have some fans :) Incidentally, in my last post I was moaning about Amazon being difficult because I has published my story Trickster on here and at Smashwords for free. A couple of emails later and they published it on Kindle, but at 99c... I still don't get why they don't publish it for free. I guess if you want to read it for nothing, don't get it from Amazon! However, please feel free to buy my novel Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance. That's not free; my short stories are free because I can complete them in a day or two. Novels are something else. My novel is available through the following links:
Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance at Smashwords;
Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance at Amazon.com;
Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance at Amazon.co.uk;
Anyway, here's the story called Travel Opportunities...
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I woke with no idea of who I was or where I was.
It was always like that after every jump. In those first few minutes, the only thing I could remember was ‘you’re not supposed to remember,’ but that didn’t make the disorientation any easier to deal with.
I raised myself up onto my elbows to look around. I was lying in a large bed, but in the predawn darkness it was impossible to make out any details of the room around me. I had the impression that it was spacious, but the lack of detail did not help my amnesia.
A soft rustling made me glance to my left. There was a girl in the bed next to me; I could make out long, flowing hair that spread out across her pillow. She was sleeping on her side, facing away from me. The bed sheets were draped across her waist, revealing her slender frame. Whoever she was, she liked to sleep naked.
I lay there watching her breathing, hoping the sight of her would trigger a memory, but nothing came. I thought about waking her but without knowing who I was supposed to be, that idea seemed foolish.
I slipped out of the bed and stood up, stretching. The floor was cold, made of some kind of tile. I crossed the floor, half walking, half hopping, trying to find my way in the gloom. I could make out the outline of an open doorway and I headed towards it. I reached for a light switch once I was on the other side of the doorframe, found it and then closed the door before turning the light on so that I wouldn’t wake the sleeping girl.
I was standing in a huge, luxurious bathroom that looked like something from a Mediterranean villa. I smiled wryly at that notion; for all I knew, I could be in a Mediterranean villa.
I walked over the counter, which held two large white basins. Above them was a long mirror, and I studied my reflection in it.
Whichever version of me this was, he liked to look after himself.
The only thing that always seemed to be the same was my eyes. Sometimes I looked younger than I remembered being, sometimes older, and sometimes I could barely recognize myself but it was always the same eyes that stared back at me from the first mirror that I found.
This version was younger. If I had to guess, I’d say I was twenty-five, maybe less. My dark hair was longer than I thought it should be and messy from sleep, and there was stubble on my chin, not five o’clock shadow, but designer stubble that was meant to be there. Physically, I was in great shape. It was a long time since I remembered having a six-pack like this one. I turned and looked at myself in profile. I didn’t have to suck anything in to look good. I was naked, like the girl in the bed. I wondered if she was my wife, but there was no ring on my left hand.
I turned on the shower and waited for it to run hot. The spray of water on tile seemed to reverberate around my head, like voices at a party. There was no sense in the sound, but there were emotions. I remembered fear, and pain, and elation.
I’ve done this before.
Jump. That was the only word that seemed to stick in my mind. I had jumped, from somewhere, to somewhere: here, but where I had come from I had no idea. Instinctively though, I knew the body I was in was not my own. That body was somewhere else.
I shook my head. Crazy idea, I told myself. It’s probably just a dream I was having.
I knew that wasn’t true.
I stepped into the hot shower and let the water soak my hair before I raised my face up to the spray. The droplets drummed onto me and I stood there unmoving, almost as if they could beat some sense into my still cloudy mind.
I’m not supposed to remember. Not yet.
I heard the shower door open and then the girl was behind me. “Weren’t you going to invite me?” she asked, kissing my left shoulder as she wrapped her arms around me and pressed her body against mine, letting the water wash over both of us. I turned, trying to get a better look at her face, but the spray was still in my eyes.
“I didn’t want to disturb you,” I told her truthfully. She planted soft kisses on my back and murmured, “You can disturb me as much as you like.” There was an accent, one I couldn’t place. It sounded European. I turned to face her, blinking away the water from my eyes, and she reached up and kissed me, biting at my bottom lip and tugging on it. My hands slipped around her waist. Her body was perfection. I pulled back and looked at her. She had green eyes, pale skin and dark red hair. She was beautiful, and I had no idea who she was. I leant down and kissed her again, and she responded passionately.
Maybe this will help me remember.
After the shower, I got dressed, and made my way through the house. It was more of a mansion than a house; there was a large, curving staircase leading down from the upper level to the reception area by the front door. There was marble everywhere.
I found my wallet on the kitchen counter. Black Italian leather. There was a driving license in there, with my face staring blankly outwards.
My name was Alex Stone, and I knew that I was fifteen years younger here than in my own world.
Sitting next to the wallet was a set of keys, but only one of the keys caught my eye. It had a red fob with a yellow badge on it; in the center of the yellow badge was a black prancing horse. It seemed that in this world I drove a Ferrari. I smiled to myself.
Okay, this doesn’t seem so bad.
“Do you have a trace on him?”
Sitting in front of the computer terminal, one of many in the laboratory, Jenner could only shrug at the question, and the man standing behind him repeated it. “I asked, do you have a trace?”
“I’m working on it,” Jenner replied irritably.
“That’s not an answer,” the tall black man in the Air Force uniform stated, glaring down at Jenner’s gleaming bald head. He watched Jenner tense under his imperious gaze. “It’s the best I can give you at the moment, General,” came the measured reply, as he focused on the readout in front of him.
The General shook his head. Since the experiment had begun, Jenner had grown increasingly uncooperative. If it wasn’t for the fact that nobody else understood the system, he would have been removed from the project long before. “We can’t carry on like this,” the General warned. “We need our man back.”
“I’m well aware of the problems you have,” Jenner hissed, still refusing to look at the man standing behind him. Instead, his attention was fixed on the screen directly ahead of him, and the imposing device beyond.
The two men were standing in a large, dimly lit laboratory that resembled an aircraft hanger. The high ceiling was shrouded in darkness, and the walls of the huge room were barely visible in the low light. Half of the lab was filled with rows of computers, not unlike a NASA control room. Most of the stations were dark and lifeless, their screens switched off, their seats empty. Only at the center of the front row was there any activity; that was where Jenner sat, watched by the General. Behind them stood two sentries, unmoving, waiting silently for orders.
The opposite side of the chamber was dominated by a huge metallic ring, shaped like an enormous donut. The torus formed the heart of the transmission generator, that powered the experiment. Jenner had designed it years before, long before the military had appropriated both it and him. Jenner was no soldier: he was the archetypal mad scientist. He has built the first torus prototype in the basement of his home, a primitive machine cobbled together from scrap and spare parts. When his house had begun to draw as much power as the entire neighborhood, the power company sent out engineers to investigate. When he began to pump more power back into the grid than the three nearest power stations combined, the National Security Agency knocked on his door.
He made no secret of how much he resented having control of his work taken away from him. As far as he was concerned, the military did nothing but hinder him. As if to confirm his opinion, the General spoke again. “We need to get him back and end this fiasco,” he reiterated. “This will be ... what, the thirtieth jump?”
“Thirty-eighth,” Jenner replied, “and every time he jumps, his signal gets weaker. It’s like he’s forgetting who he is. Sooner or later, we’re going to lose him completely.”
“Then we need to end this now.”
“You don’t have to keep telling me,” Jenner answered irritably. “If we lost him, the results could be disastrous. He could change history in another world, and there’s no telling what effect that could have on us.”
“I’ve been through something similar before,” the General said darkly. “It won’t be us that feels the effect if he does that. It will be future generations.”
Jenner turned and looked up at the General for the first time. He wondered what untold story lay behind such certain words. “Well, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen, shall we?” he said dryly. “The problem I’m having is that I don’t know if it’s our instrumentation that’s at fault, or if he’s deliberately trying to evade us.”
“Evade us?” the General asked, looking concerned. “That doesn’t even make sense. What in the name of God would make him want to do that?”
“You seem different today,” said the girl, who I had learned was called Delphine. We were sitting on a balcony outside the bedroom, looking down the hillside and out over the ocean beyond. I still didn’t know which ocean it was. She was wearing a silver silk kimono; I was only wearing a towel.
“Different how?” I asked over my cup of coffee, wondering what I was doing wrong. She was looking at me quizzically, and gave a small shrug. “I don’t know. You seem ... nice.”
I chuckled at that. “Does that mean I’m usually not nice?” I said it as lightly as I could but it was a serious question. The more I could find out about this incarnation of me, this universe I was in, then the sooner I could be on my way.
Delphine tipped her head slightly to one side before answering me, as though she was measuring me up. Her auburn hair tumbled around her shoulders, framing her beautiful face. “You tell me,” was her careful reply.
She’s smart. She knows something’s wrong.
“I feel different,” I told her. “I don’t know what it is. I woke up feeling like a new person.” Again, I kept the tone light, but she took what I said seriously. “You can’t just change overnight, Alex.”
I shrugged. “Maybe you can,” I told her. “Maybe I had an epiphany or something.” She frowned at me. “An epiphany?” She didn’t know what it meant.
“Yeah, you know, like a revelation. A sudden realization.”
“Okay,” she said, drawing the word out as though she was suspicious of my newly extended vocabulary. “So what did you suddenly realize last night?”
That was a tricky question. If I got the answer right, I could find out a whole lot about who Alex Stone was. If I got it wrong, I would get laughed at, or worse. After a moment’s consideration, I told her, “I need to change how I live my life.” At that, she threw her head back and laughed loudly. That seemed to be the wrong answer.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked, when she had finally stopped laughing at me.
“Why not?” I replied. “What’s so great about my life, anyway?”
“Do you really need me to spell it out for you?” Delphine asked with a wide grin.
“Yes,” I replied quickly. “I’d find that really helpful.”
“You’re crazy today,” Delphine told me, but she leant forward as she said it and continued to speak. “You’re Alex Stone. You’re drive race cars for Ferrari. You live in Monaco. You have the most amazing girlfriend in the world, and you’re fabulously rich. So tell me, why in the world would you want to change any of that?”
She had a point. The life she had just described sounded amazing. Only a madman would want to give it up, but maybe that’s just what I was: a madman. Why else would I be thinking the way I was? Maybe I was imagining the notion that I was from a different world. Maybe I’d just taken too many knocks on the head, but I didn’t think so. Something told me that this wasn’t my real life. I looked at Delphine, who sat was waiting for an answer. “I don’t know,” I said eventually, “but maybe I do need to change who I am.”
“There is something different about you today,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“You seem ... vulnerable,” she replied. “Less arrogant than usual.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not a bad thing.” She was staring at me intently, and for a moment I thought she was going to throw the pot of coffee at me, but then she stood, pulling at the belt of the kimono. It slipped apart and she pushed the robe off her shoulders, letting it fall to the ground. She stood before me naked, the cool air raising goosebumps all over her body as she prowled towards me and climbed into my lap. “Come on, crazy Alex,” she cooed in my ear, “take me back to bed.”
After we had made love, I lay on my back with one arm behind my head and the other around Delphine, who lay pressed up against me, her head resting on my chest and her arm draped across me.
I’ve done this before.
I was trying to remember my own life, while at the same trying to figure out who Alex Stone was. Those two puzzles were playing havoc with my mind.
I knew I was older than Alex. I knew I had some kind of military background. I could sense it in my behavior. I had been trained to observe, to regard everything from a tactical standpoint. That was why they had selected me, but selected me for what?
I knew enough about the life I was now inhabiting to know that I could happily stay. Being a racing driver sounded okay to me. There was something in my nature that craved that speed, that level of adrenalin rush. To cap things off, I had a beautiful girl lying next to me in bed. Delphine was dangerously intoxicating, an intelligent, insightful, sensual creature.
I’ve done this before.
That thought kept cropping up in my mind. It wasn’t lying in that bed that seemed so familiar. It was trying to remember. I’d been in this situation before, waking with the amnesia that accompanied each dimensional jump.
Dimensional jump.
What had I been doing? This wasn’t the first time I’d felt this kind of confusion. It wasn’t the second, or third, or fourth. I had no idea how many times I’d been through this slow awakening, but I knew it had happened many times before. It was unsettling; trying to remember brought on a creeping sense of dread that nothing around me was real.
I looked down at Delphine. She had fallen asleep. Was she not real? Was any of what I was experiencing real?
The feeling of déjà vu hit me again. I’d known this dread before, multiple times. Once I’d understood where I was, what was happening, that the life I was living was not my own, I’d been dragged away and sent tumbling into another body, another bout of amnesia, another mystery. At any moment, I was supposed to feel that sensation again.
It didn’t come. Something had changed in the last jump. At this point in the other jumps, the many other jumps, I had realized I did not belong and I had made a conscious decision that I had to move on and find my own identity, not steal someone else’s.
I didn’t feel that way now. Delphine had been right. There was something different about me, and I knew what it was.
I wanted to stay.
“We’re struggling to keep track of his signal.” Jenner looked perplexed as he studied the readout. The frown that creased his brow told it’s own story: the man did not understand what he was seeing.
“Why?” asked the General, sounding displeased.
“I really don’t,” shrugged Jenner. “Normally the signal’s easy to find, but the signature is completely different this time. It’s almost like he doesn’t want to be found.”
“That ridiculous,” sneered the General. “Why wouldn’t he want to be found?”
“That’s a good question,” Jenner replied. “Perhaps you can ask him that yourself when we get him back here.”
“I’d like the chance,” growled the General. As he said it, the console beeped and Jenner glanced around it. “I think you’re going to get it,” he said, the sense of satisfaction obvious in his voice. “We’ve just locked on.”
“You’ve got him?” came the excited reply, and Jenner nodded. “If I can keep the signal marked for a few more seconds, I can initiate transition.”
“It’s about damn time,” the General replied. “I want to know what the hell he’s being doing.”
“That makes two of us,” agreed Jenner, as he typed a set of coded instructions into the console. In response, the transmission generator began to pulse into life, slowly at first and then more rapidly as it drew in more and more energy.
“Just a few more seconds,” Jenner said, studying the instrumentation. The General glanced around at the two sentries who were watching the unfolding events impassively. “Standby,” the General told them. “He may be hostile on reentry. Stay close, and wait for my command.”
“We’ve got him,” Jenner stated. “There’s a signal lock.” He looked up at the General. “Give the word.”
The General looked past Jenner to the table that stood in front on the transmission generator. Lying on it, seemingly unconscious, lay the body of a middle aged man. He was clad in a white jumpsuit, and his greying hair was cropped short. Crows feet spread out from his closed eyes. There was no sign of life behind the closed lids, no darting of the eyes that hinted at activity. This man was completely comatose.
Not for much longer, thought the General. He nodded, and said, “Do it.” Jenner pressed a red button in front of him, and a klaxon sounded, its warning blasts repeating as he counted down.
“Ten ... nine ... eight ....”
The General waited impatiently, unsure of what was going to happen. There had been too many false hopes, too many failures over the past few weeks. He could ill afford another one now.
“Seven ... six ... five ...”
The sense of anticipation in the laboratory grew as Jenner watched the clock at the top of his screen count down and called out the final numbers.
“Four ... three ... two ... preparing for transition ... now!”
It hit me like a blow to the chest.
I was standing in the garage, looking down on my Ferrari 458 Italia. It was almost as beautiful as Delphine. She was still in bed; I’d told her that I wanted to go for a drive and clear my head, and she’d been quite happy about that.
I was about to open the car door when the sucker punch struck me. I cried out and staggered backwards, collapsing onto the concrete floor. I gasped for air, but there was no air. Everything around me was turning black. Panic swept over me. Am I dying? Is this what it feels like when you die? I tried to call out for Delphine, but no sound came from my mouth. I was paralyzed.
I realized what was happening to me in the last moments I had left. It wasn’t death I was experiencing. It was almost worse than death. They were extracting me.
The garage faded away and a roaring sound approached, as if I was sailing up to the world’s biggest waterfall. I couldn’t breathe. I was drowning in the darkness.
“Try to relax!” I heard somebody shouting in my ear. I tried to lash out but my arms could not move. I was in restraints. “Don’t fight it!” the voice cried. “It’s going to be okay! You need to relax!”
The darkness slowly began to recede, and I could make out shapes and shadows. There was a face close to mine, the face of the man who was talking to me. Beyond him were two armed guards, dressed in navy blue uniforms, their hands resting on the handles of their holstered pistols. Behind them was a huge metal ring that glowed and pulsated with light, throwing off an eerie blue glow. It was at least fifty feet across and was supported on four struts. It roared with the sound of the waterfall, although that sound was growing fainter with every passing second.
“Mike, it’s Jenner,” the man standing closest to me called out. “Carl Jenner. Do you remember who I am?” He had his hands on my shoulders, trying to calm me down, but I fought back in the restraints. “Get off me!” I snarled at him. “Get your hands off me!”
“You need to calm down,” Jenner said, trying to stay placid even as I fought him. “You have to relax, Mike. You have to remember who you are.”
“My name is Alex!” I shouted at Jenner, who shook his head. “No, that’s not your name,” he told me. “Your name is Mike. This is the real world. You’re home.”
“What?” I gasped. It felt like somebody was standing on my chest. I could hardly breathe. My head was swirling, worse than any hangover I’d ever known.
“You’re home, Mike,” Jenner said. “It’s over. We’ve brought you back.”
That was six months ago.
Since my return I’ve been kept here like a lab rat, while they run experiments on me. Every day, somebody comes to see me. It’s always someone different. I’ve never seen the same doctor twice in a row, although I’ve seen them all many times. Sometimes they come to draw blood, or listen to my heart, or put electrodes on my head and study my brain. Sometimes they just want to talk to me.
My real name is Michael Cooper. At one point, I was an Air Force pilot. I flew F-15s in the first Gulf War before I retired. I’d gone to work for the TSA, running security at airports, checking baggage, that kind of thing. It had been ten years of mindless, soul destroying work, so when I’d been approached about taking part in a scientific research program that promised travel opportunities, I’d jumped at the chance.
I let out a sneering laugh. Travel opportunities. I should have known better.
Of course, I couldn’t believe it when they told me what they were trying to do: jump into parallel universes. I was going to be the scout.
I never believed it would work; neither did any of the others. Only Jenner seemed convinced. He thought I would be able to transport myself into other versions of myself and explore the parallel universes through their bodies. It turned out he was right.
The problem was, I never came straight back. It took thirty-eight attempts to get me back to my own body. I only really remember the last life, when I was Alex. Everything before that is just a blur. As a research mission, it was a failure, and they put everything on hold trying to figure out how they could send and return me in one jump instead of thirty-eight.
So all I do now is sit and wait. I’m not allowed to leave. All the prodding and probing; they’re trying to figure out if the problem is with their system or with me. They don’t know the answer, and until they do, I’m stuck here.
It’s not much of a life, not compared to what I was taken from. There I was rich, successful, adventurous, and I had Delphine. Here I have nothing and no-one. It’s not much of a comparison. Sitting here, day after day, I long ago came to one inescapable conclusion.
I want to be Alex again.
It wasn’t hard to get to the lab. When you’ve been somewhere for as long as I’d been at the facility, people get complacent. The guards were so used to seeing me walking around, going between different examination rooms, that they barely noticed me anymore.
There was nobody else there. It was Friday night, and nearly everyone else in the facility had been allowed to go back into the real world.
Not me.
I locked the door behind me and walked over to the large torus that powered the transmission generator capable of ripping holes in time and space. It hummed menacingly, a low, throbbing sound that seemed to want to shake me apart atom by atom.
I looked at the machine. Could I ever get back to the world where Alex and Delphine existed? It seemed like a dream in comparison to where I was standing: a secret Government research facility with me trapped deep inside like a rat in a cage.
Jenner had told me that there were an infinite number of universes out there, so similar to each other that it was virtually impossible to distinguish one from another. I looked down at the remote transmitter on the table next to the torus, that gave me the power to jump between worlds, and picked it up. Maybe, just maybe, this little glowing blue box will be able to take me straight back to Delphine. It was a shot in a million; no, a shot in a billion, billion trillion. It was an impossible quest, searching for that diamond in the rough. What if I didn’t find her first time? I could jump again, and again if I had to. I could keep searching. I might even have some fun doing it.
There was one problem though: the amnesia. I would always forget who I was when I landed. It took hours for everything to come back to me. If I was going to be making a lot of quick jumps searching for Delphine, I need to cheat. I needed a crib sheet.
I set down the small transmitter and searched the desk, finding some paper and a pen. I quickly wrote a set of instructions to myself, using the glow of the transmitter to illuminate the page, and then taped it to the back of the transmitter. I clutched it tightly; I knew it would come with me into the parallel worlds, even though my body would be left behind, comatose. It was the only part of the whole system that would physically travel between the different realities. I had no idea how it worked; I only hoped that my note would be enough to help me succeed in my mission.
I looked around the lab. There was nothing to keep me there, nobody to stop me. No guards or scientists. No family or friends. No wife or children.
There were shadows all around me now. The only light close to me was the soft blue glow from the transmitter in my hand, pulsing invitingly, tempting me to press the button that would tear me from this world and into another.
And then there was darkness.
Here's another short story I've written. It's a science fiction piece that I wrote based around an old idea I had years ago. Like the last story I wrote, I'm publishing this as a taster of what my writing is like. I'm hoping over the next few months to generate some interest in my writing. I'm going to keep writing and publishing regardless of whether people like it or not, but it would be nice to have some fans :) Incidentally, in my last post I was moaning about Amazon being difficult because I has published my story Trickster on here and at Smashwords for free. A couple of emails later and they published it on Kindle, but at 99c... I still don't get why they don't publish it for free. I guess if you want to read it for nothing, don't get it from Amazon! However, please feel free to buy my novel Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance. That's not free; my short stories are free because I can complete them in a day or two. Novels are something else. My novel is available through the following links:
Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance at Smashwords;
Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance at Amazon.com;
Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance at Amazon.co.uk;
Anyway, here's the story called Travel Opportunities...
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Travel Opportunities
By Paul Rawlins
Copyright 2013
1
It was always like that after every jump. In those first few minutes, the only thing I could remember was ‘you’re not supposed to remember,’ but that didn’t make the disorientation any easier to deal with.
I raised myself up onto my elbows to look around. I was lying in a large bed, but in the predawn darkness it was impossible to make out any details of the room around me. I had the impression that it was spacious, but the lack of detail did not help my amnesia.
A soft rustling made me glance to my left. There was a girl in the bed next to me; I could make out long, flowing hair that spread out across her pillow. She was sleeping on her side, facing away from me. The bed sheets were draped across her waist, revealing her slender frame. Whoever she was, she liked to sleep naked.
I lay there watching her breathing, hoping the sight of her would trigger a memory, but nothing came. I thought about waking her but without knowing who I was supposed to be, that idea seemed foolish.
I slipped out of the bed and stood up, stretching. The floor was cold, made of some kind of tile. I crossed the floor, half walking, half hopping, trying to find my way in the gloom. I could make out the outline of an open doorway and I headed towards it. I reached for a light switch once I was on the other side of the doorframe, found it and then closed the door before turning the light on so that I wouldn’t wake the sleeping girl.
I was standing in a huge, luxurious bathroom that looked like something from a Mediterranean villa. I smiled wryly at that notion; for all I knew, I could be in a Mediterranean villa.
I walked over the counter, which held two large white basins. Above them was a long mirror, and I studied my reflection in it.
Whichever version of me this was, he liked to look after himself.
The only thing that always seemed to be the same was my eyes. Sometimes I looked younger than I remembered being, sometimes older, and sometimes I could barely recognize myself but it was always the same eyes that stared back at me from the first mirror that I found.
This version was younger. If I had to guess, I’d say I was twenty-five, maybe less. My dark hair was longer than I thought it should be and messy from sleep, and there was stubble on my chin, not five o’clock shadow, but designer stubble that was meant to be there. Physically, I was in great shape. It was a long time since I remembered having a six-pack like this one. I turned and looked at myself in profile. I didn’t have to suck anything in to look good. I was naked, like the girl in the bed. I wondered if she was my wife, but there was no ring on my left hand.
I turned on the shower and waited for it to run hot. The spray of water on tile seemed to reverberate around my head, like voices at a party. There was no sense in the sound, but there were emotions. I remembered fear, and pain, and elation.
I’ve done this before.
Jump. That was the only word that seemed to stick in my mind. I had jumped, from somewhere, to somewhere: here, but where I had come from I had no idea. Instinctively though, I knew the body I was in was not my own. That body was somewhere else.
I shook my head. Crazy idea, I told myself. It’s probably just a dream I was having.
I knew that wasn’t true.
I stepped into the hot shower and let the water soak my hair before I raised my face up to the spray. The droplets drummed onto me and I stood there unmoving, almost as if they could beat some sense into my still cloudy mind.
I’m not supposed to remember. Not yet.
I heard the shower door open and then the girl was behind me. “Weren’t you going to invite me?” she asked, kissing my left shoulder as she wrapped her arms around me and pressed her body against mine, letting the water wash over both of us. I turned, trying to get a better look at her face, but the spray was still in my eyes.
“I didn’t want to disturb you,” I told her truthfully. She planted soft kisses on my back and murmured, “You can disturb me as much as you like.” There was an accent, one I couldn’t place. It sounded European. I turned to face her, blinking away the water from my eyes, and she reached up and kissed me, biting at my bottom lip and tugging on it. My hands slipped around her waist. Her body was perfection. I pulled back and looked at her. She had green eyes, pale skin and dark red hair. She was beautiful, and I had no idea who she was. I leant down and kissed her again, and she responded passionately.
Maybe this will help me remember.
***
After the shower, I got dressed, and made my way through the house. It was more of a mansion than a house; there was a large, curving staircase leading down from the upper level to the reception area by the front door. There was marble everywhere.
I found my wallet on the kitchen counter. Black Italian leather. There was a driving license in there, with my face staring blankly outwards.
My name was Alex Stone, and I knew that I was fifteen years younger here than in my own world.
Sitting next to the wallet was a set of keys, but only one of the keys caught my eye. It had a red fob with a yellow badge on it; in the center of the yellow badge was a black prancing horse. It seemed that in this world I drove a Ferrari. I smiled to myself.
Okay, this doesn’t seem so bad.
2
“Do you have a trace on him?”
Sitting in front of the computer terminal, one of many in the laboratory, Jenner could only shrug at the question, and the man standing behind him repeated it. “I asked, do you have a trace?”
“I’m working on it,” Jenner replied irritably.
“That’s not an answer,” the tall black man in the Air Force uniform stated, glaring down at Jenner’s gleaming bald head. He watched Jenner tense under his imperious gaze. “It’s the best I can give you at the moment, General,” came the measured reply, as he focused on the readout in front of him.
The General shook his head. Since the experiment had begun, Jenner had grown increasingly uncooperative. If it wasn’t for the fact that nobody else understood the system, he would have been removed from the project long before. “We can’t carry on like this,” the General warned. “We need our man back.”
“I’m well aware of the problems you have,” Jenner hissed, still refusing to look at the man standing behind him. Instead, his attention was fixed on the screen directly ahead of him, and the imposing device beyond.
The two men were standing in a large, dimly lit laboratory that resembled an aircraft hanger. The high ceiling was shrouded in darkness, and the walls of the huge room were barely visible in the low light. Half of the lab was filled with rows of computers, not unlike a NASA control room. Most of the stations were dark and lifeless, their screens switched off, their seats empty. Only at the center of the front row was there any activity; that was where Jenner sat, watched by the General. Behind them stood two sentries, unmoving, waiting silently for orders.
The opposite side of the chamber was dominated by a huge metallic ring, shaped like an enormous donut. The torus formed the heart of the transmission generator, that powered the experiment. Jenner had designed it years before, long before the military had appropriated both it and him. Jenner was no soldier: he was the archetypal mad scientist. He has built the first torus prototype in the basement of his home, a primitive machine cobbled together from scrap and spare parts. When his house had begun to draw as much power as the entire neighborhood, the power company sent out engineers to investigate. When he began to pump more power back into the grid than the three nearest power stations combined, the National Security Agency knocked on his door.
He made no secret of how much he resented having control of his work taken away from him. As far as he was concerned, the military did nothing but hinder him. As if to confirm his opinion, the General spoke again. “We need to get him back and end this fiasco,” he reiterated. “This will be ... what, the thirtieth jump?”
“Thirty-eighth,” Jenner replied, “and every time he jumps, his signal gets weaker. It’s like he’s forgetting who he is. Sooner or later, we’re going to lose him completely.”
“Then we need to end this now.”
“You don’t have to keep telling me,” Jenner answered irritably. “If we lost him, the results could be disastrous. He could change history in another world, and there’s no telling what effect that could have on us.”
“I’ve been through something similar before,” the General said darkly. “It won’t be us that feels the effect if he does that. It will be future generations.”
Jenner turned and looked up at the General for the first time. He wondered what untold story lay behind such certain words. “Well, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen, shall we?” he said dryly. “The problem I’m having is that I don’t know if it’s our instrumentation that’s at fault, or if he’s deliberately trying to evade us.”
“Evade us?” the General asked, looking concerned. “That doesn’t even make sense. What in the name of God would make him want to do that?”
3
“You seem different today,” said the girl, who I had learned was called Delphine. We were sitting on a balcony outside the bedroom, looking down the hillside and out over the ocean beyond. I still didn’t know which ocean it was. She was wearing a silver silk kimono; I was only wearing a towel.
“Different how?” I asked over my cup of coffee, wondering what I was doing wrong. She was looking at me quizzically, and gave a small shrug. “I don’t know. You seem ... nice.”
I chuckled at that. “Does that mean I’m usually not nice?” I said it as lightly as I could but it was a serious question. The more I could find out about this incarnation of me, this universe I was in, then the sooner I could be on my way.
Delphine tipped her head slightly to one side before answering me, as though she was measuring me up. Her auburn hair tumbled around her shoulders, framing her beautiful face. “You tell me,” was her careful reply.
She’s smart. She knows something’s wrong.
“I feel different,” I told her. “I don’t know what it is. I woke up feeling like a new person.” Again, I kept the tone light, but she took what I said seriously. “You can’t just change overnight, Alex.”
I shrugged. “Maybe you can,” I told her. “Maybe I had an epiphany or something.” She frowned at me. “An epiphany?” She didn’t know what it meant.
“Yeah, you know, like a revelation. A sudden realization.”
“Okay,” she said, drawing the word out as though she was suspicious of my newly extended vocabulary. “So what did you suddenly realize last night?”
That was a tricky question. If I got the answer right, I could find out a whole lot about who Alex Stone was. If I got it wrong, I would get laughed at, or worse. After a moment’s consideration, I told her, “I need to change how I live my life.” At that, she threw her head back and laughed loudly. That seemed to be the wrong answer.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked, when she had finally stopped laughing at me.
“Why not?” I replied. “What’s so great about my life, anyway?”
“Do you really need me to spell it out for you?” Delphine asked with a wide grin.
“Yes,” I replied quickly. “I’d find that really helpful.”
“You’re crazy today,” Delphine told me, but she leant forward as she said it and continued to speak. “You’re Alex Stone. You’re drive race cars for Ferrari. You live in Monaco. You have the most amazing girlfriend in the world, and you’re fabulously rich. So tell me, why in the world would you want to change any of that?”
She had a point. The life she had just described sounded amazing. Only a madman would want to give it up, but maybe that’s just what I was: a madman. Why else would I be thinking the way I was? Maybe I was imagining the notion that I was from a different world. Maybe I’d just taken too many knocks on the head, but I didn’t think so. Something told me that this wasn’t my real life. I looked at Delphine, who sat was waiting for an answer. “I don’t know,” I said eventually, “but maybe I do need to change who I am.”
“There is something different about you today,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“You seem ... vulnerable,” she replied. “Less arrogant than usual.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not a bad thing.” She was staring at me intently, and for a moment I thought she was going to throw the pot of coffee at me, but then she stood, pulling at the belt of the kimono. It slipped apart and she pushed the robe off her shoulders, letting it fall to the ground. She stood before me naked, the cool air raising goosebumps all over her body as she prowled towards me and climbed into my lap. “Come on, crazy Alex,” she cooed in my ear, “take me back to bed.”
***
After we had made love, I lay on my back with one arm behind my head and the other around Delphine, who lay pressed up against me, her head resting on my chest and her arm draped across me.
I’ve done this before.
I was trying to remember my own life, while at the same trying to figure out who Alex Stone was. Those two puzzles were playing havoc with my mind.
I knew I was older than Alex. I knew I had some kind of military background. I could sense it in my behavior. I had been trained to observe, to regard everything from a tactical standpoint. That was why they had selected me, but selected me for what?
I knew enough about the life I was now inhabiting to know that I could happily stay. Being a racing driver sounded okay to me. There was something in my nature that craved that speed, that level of adrenalin rush. To cap things off, I had a beautiful girl lying next to me in bed. Delphine was dangerously intoxicating, an intelligent, insightful, sensual creature.
I’ve done this before.
That thought kept cropping up in my mind. It wasn’t lying in that bed that seemed so familiar. It was trying to remember. I’d been in this situation before, waking with the amnesia that accompanied each dimensional jump.
Dimensional jump.
What had I been doing? This wasn’t the first time I’d felt this kind of confusion. It wasn’t the second, or third, or fourth. I had no idea how many times I’d been through this slow awakening, but I knew it had happened many times before. It was unsettling; trying to remember brought on a creeping sense of dread that nothing around me was real.
I looked down at Delphine. She had fallen asleep. Was she not real? Was any of what I was experiencing real?
The feeling of déjà vu hit me again. I’d known this dread before, multiple times. Once I’d understood where I was, what was happening, that the life I was living was not my own, I’d been dragged away and sent tumbling into another body, another bout of amnesia, another mystery. At any moment, I was supposed to feel that sensation again.
It didn’t come. Something had changed in the last jump. At this point in the other jumps, the many other jumps, I had realized I did not belong and I had made a conscious decision that I had to move on and find my own identity, not steal someone else’s.
I didn’t feel that way now. Delphine had been right. There was something different about me, and I knew what it was.
I wanted to stay.
4
“We’re struggling to keep track of his signal.” Jenner looked perplexed as he studied the readout. The frown that creased his brow told it’s own story: the man did not understand what he was seeing.
“Why?” asked the General, sounding displeased.
“I really don’t,” shrugged Jenner. “Normally the signal’s easy to find, but the signature is completely different this time. It’s almost like he doesn’t want to be found.”
“That ridiculous,” sneered the General. “Why wouldn’t he want to be found?”
“That’s a good question,” Jenner replied. “Perhaps you can ask him that yourself when we get him back here.”
“I’d like the chance,” growled the General. As he said it, the console beeped and Jenner glanced around it. “I think you’re going to get it,” he said, the sense of satisfaction obvious in his voice. “We’ve just locked on.”
“You’ve got him?” came the excited reply, and Jenner nodded. “If I can keep the signal marked for a few more seconds, I can initiate transition.”
“It’s about damn time,” the General replied. “I want to know what the hell he’s being doing.”
“That makes two of us,” agreed Jenner, as he typed a set of coded instructions into the console. In response, the transmission generator began to pulse into life, slowly at first and then more rapidly as it drew in more and more energy.
“Just a few more seconds,” Jenner said, studying the instrumentation. The General glanced around at the two sentries who were watching the unfolding events impassively. “Standby,” the General told them. “He may be hostile on reentry. Stay close, and wait for my command.”
“We’ve got him,” Jenner stated. “There’s a signal lock.” He looked up at the General. “Give the word.”
The General looked past Jenner to the table that stood in front on the transmission generator. Lying on it, seemingly unconscious, lay the body of a middle aged man. He was clad in a white jumpsuit, and his greying hair was cropped short. Crows feet spread out from his closed eyes. There was no sign of life behind the closed lids, no darting of the eyes that hinted at activity. This man was completely comatose.
Not for much longer, thought the General. He nodded, and said, “Do it.” Jenner pressed a red button in front of him, and a klaxon sounded, its warning blasts repeating as he counted down.
“Ten ... nine ... eight ....”
The General waited impatiently, unsure of what was going to happen. There had been too many false hopes, too many failures over the past few weeks. He could ill afford another one now.
“Seven ... six ... five ...”
The sense of anticipation in the laboratory grew as Jenner watched the clock at the top of his screen count down and called out the final numbers.
“Four ... three ... two ... preparing for transition ... now!”
***
It hit me like a blow to the chest.
I was standing in the garage, looking down on my Ferrari 458 Italia. It was almost as beautiful as Delphine. She was still in bed; I’d told her that I wanted to go for a drive and clear my head, and she’d been quite happy about that.
I was about to open the car door when the sucker punch struck me. I cried out and staggered backwards, collapsing onto the concrete floor. I gasped for air, but there was no air. Everything around me was turning black. Panic swept over me. Am I dying? Is this what it feels like when you die? I tried to call out for Delphine, but no sound came from my mouth. I was paralyzed.
I realized what was happening to me in the last moments I had left. It wasn’t death I was experiencing. It was almost worse than death. They were extracting me.
The garage faded away and a roaring sound approached, as if I was sailing up to the world’s biggest waterfall. I couldn’t breathe. I was drowning in the darkness.
***
I was crying out, and there were hands on me. Beneath my screams I could hear a voice calling to me, but I couldn’t understand what it was saying. I was burning inside; it felt as though I was being consumed.“Try to relax!” I heard somebody shouting in my ear. I tried to lash out but my arms could not move. I was in restraints. “Don’t fight it!” the voice cried. “It’s going to be okay! You need to relax!”
The darkness slowly began to recede, and I could make out shapes and shadows. There was a face close to mine, the face of the man who was talking to me. Beyond him were two armed guards, dressed in navy blue uniforms, their hands resting on the handles of their holstered pistols. Behind them was a huge metal ring that glowed and pulsated with light, throwing off an eerie blue glow. It was at least fifty feet across and was supported on four struts. It roared with the sound of the waterfall, although that sound was growing fainter with every passing second.
“Mike, it’s Jenner,” the man standing closest to me called out. “Carl Jenner. Do you remember who I am?” He had his hands on my shoulders, trying to calm me down, but I fought back in the restraints. “Get off me!” I snarled at him. “Get your hands off me!”
“You need to calm down,” Jenner said, trying to stay placid even as I fought him. “You have to relax, Mike. You have to remember who you are.”
“My name is Alex!” I shouted at Jenner, who shook his head. “No, that’s not your name,” he told me. “Your name is Mike. This is the real world. You’re home.”
“What?” I gasped. It felt like somebody was standing on my chest. I could hardly breathe. My head was swirling, worse than any hangover I’d ever known.
“You’re home, Mike,” Jenner said. “It’s over. We’ve brought you back.”
5
That was six months ago.
Since my return I’ve been kept here like a lab rat, while they run experiments on me. Every day, somebody comes to see me. It’s always someone different. I’ve never seen the same doctor twice in a row, although I’ve seen them all many times. Sometimes they come to draw blood, or listen to my heart, or put electrodes on my head and study my brain. Sometimes they just want to talk to me.
My real name is Michael Cooper. At one point, I was an Air Force pilot. I flew F-15s in the first Gulf War before I retired. I’d gone to work for the TSA, running security at airports, checking baggage, that kind of thing. It had been ten years of mindless, soul destroying work, so when I’d been approached about taking part in a scientific research program that promised travel opportunities, I’d jumped at the chance.
I let out a sneering laugh. Travel opportunities. I should have known better.
Of course, I couldn’t believe it when they told me what they were trying to do: jump into parallel universes. I was going to be the scout.
I never believed it would work; neither did any of the others. Only Jenner seemed convinced. He thought I would be able to transport myself into other versions of myself and explore the parallel universes through their bodies. It turned out he was right.
The problem was, I never came straight back. It took thirty-eight attempts to get me back to my own body. I only really remember the last life, when I was Alex. Everything before that is just a blur. As a research mission, it was a failure, and they put everything on hold trying to figure out how they could send and return me in one jump instead of thirty-eight.
So all I do now is sit and wait. I’m not allowed to leave. All the prodding and probing; they’re trying to figure out if the problem is with their system or with me. They don’t know the answer, and until they do, I’m stuck here.
It’s not much of a life, not compared to what I was taken from. There I was rich, successful, adventurous, and I had Delphine. Here I have nothing and no-one. It’s not much of a comparison. Sitting here, day after day, I long ago came to one inescapable conclusion.
I want to be Alex again.
***
It wasn’t hard to get to the lab. When you’ve been somewhere for as long as I’d been at the facility, people get complacent. The guards were so used to seeing me walking around, going between different examination rooms, that they barely noticed me anymore.
There was nobody else there. It was Friday night, and nearly everyone else in the facility had been allowed to go back into the real world.
Not me.
I locked the door behind me and walked over to the large torus that powered the transmission generator capable of ripping holes in time and space. It hummed menacingly, a low, throbbing sound that seemed to want to shake me apart atom by atom.
I looked at the machine. Could I ever get back to the world where Alex and Delphine existed? It seemed like a dream in comparison to where I was standing: a secret Government research facility with me trapped deep inside like a rat in a cage.
Jenner had told me that there were an infinite number of universes out there, so similar to each other that it was virtually impossible to distinguish one from another. I looked down at the remote transmitter on the table next to the torus, that gave me the power to jump between worlds, and picked it up. Maybe, just maybe, this little glowing blue box will be able to take me straight back to Delphine. It was a shot in a million; no, a shot in a billion, billion trillion. It was an impossible quest, searching for that diamond in the rough. What if I didn’t find her first time? I could jump again, and again if I had to. I could keep searching. I might even have some fun doing it.
There was one problem though: the amnesia. I would always forget who I was when I landed. It took hours for everything to come back to me. If I was going to be making a lot of quick jumps searching for Delphine, I need to cheat. I needed a crib sheet.
I set down the small transmitter and searched the desk, finding some paper and a pen. I quickly wrote a set of instructions to myself, using the glow of the transmitter to illuminate the page, and then taped it to the back of the transmitter. I clutched it tightly; I knew it would come with me into the parallel worlds, even though my body would be left behind, comatose. It was the only part of the whole system that would physically travel between the different realities. I had no idea how it worked; I only hoped that my note would be enough to help me succeed in my mission.
I looked around the lab. There was nothing to keep me there, nobody to stop me. No guards or scientists. No family or friends. No wife or children.
There were shadows all around me now. The only light close to me was the soft blue glow from the transmitter in my hand, pulsing invitingly, tempting me to press the button that would tear me from this world and into another.
And then there was darkness.
#
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Trickster
I've published a short story today. It's called Trickster. I put it on Amazon and on Smashwords, and if you keep reading down here, you will see it below.
It's not my intention to make any money from this story; rather, it's intended to be a sample of one of my writing styles. I want it to be freely available, so people are encouraged to look at more of my work. That's easy on here, and it's easy on Smashwords.
It's not so easy on Amazon.
Amazon doesn't let you give your books away for free. This is rather annoying. It seems you can force them to do it, by price matching other sources such as Smashwords, but I don't see why I can't give away a sample story if I decide to. I guess it's their website and being the hydra that they are, Amazon will always win, but still... it annoyed me.
Anyway, here's my story. For free. Up yours, Amazon!
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Trickster
By Paul Rawlins
Copyright 2013
1
Let me get one thing straight from the start. I’m not a very nice person.
There. I’ve said it. I’m sure plenty of you are thinking, hey, he’s probably okay. Everyone thinks they’re not that nice once in a while. Don’t think that. Don’t kid yourselves. I’m not trying to be self deprecating here, I’m trying to be honest, which is ironic because honest is the last thing I normally am.
I’m a conman. I make my living by tricking people out of their money, their possessions, their homes and occasionally their lives. I’m not going to tell you my name, because that would just make things awkward for me. The whole point of what I do is to be able to inhabit a different skin depending on where I am and whoever my victim happens to be. Telling you my name, bank account details and social security number is just going to compromise what I love doing, and frankly I don’t want that to happen.
So, why am I telling you this? Why put my livelihood at risk, not to mention my personal safety? I’m not kidding about that last bit, by the way; I know there are people out there that would happily see me dead for what I’ve done to them and their families. I can’t blame them. I’d probably feel the same if they’d done it to me, but they didn’t, mainly because they’re stupid and I’m not.
The reason I want to tell you about what I do is just that; there’s so many stupid people out there who are very, very easy to dupe. I’m sure you think the mere idea of taking advantage of someone like that is reprehensible but trust me, it’s a fact. Old Fred down the street might seem sweet and doting but wave the offer of quick bucks under his nose and he’ll thrown money at you like there’s no tomorrow. It’s hard to feel sympathy for people when they’re that gullible.
Of course, not everybody is that gullible. Nine times out of ten, they’re just ignorant. They don’t know better and they trust what I say because I sound confident, I look successful, I seem like the sort of person you’d want to listen to. They don’t think they need to look into my credentials, to see if I really am who I say I am, and more fool them is my response to that.
I’ve been doing this for a long time now, about twenty years all told. I started young and I learned fast, and I’ve never stopped paying attention to details. That’s the real trick: the details. Get those right, and everything is easy. Get them wrong, and you’re more than likely going to end up in a prison cell wondering where you went wrong.
I’m going to tell you about the three most common scams I run, but I’m going to leave the details out. I’m not writing an instruction manual on how to be a conman; this is meant to be a warning to keep you on your toes, so don’t go trying any of this stuff. It won’t work, unless you know the details.
2
The first scam I like to use is one I’m sure you’re all familiar with. It’s identity theft. You’ve heard the stories and seen the commercials, warning you about the dangers of leaving your information out there for all to see. Those salesmen tell you to buy the latest, greatest software and gadgets to protect all your valuable information from people like me. Most of the time it’s complete garbage of course; no amount of gizmos can protect you against being stupid. I’d go so far as to say the people selling you protection against con artists like me are just as guilty as I am. They’re taking advantage of the same people, using the same kind of tactics and extracting the same money from vulnerable people who really shouldn’t be giving it away to anybody. Those people are just scumbags in my opinion. At least I have the honesty to admit what I am, and recognize my own sins.
Identity theft can work on many different levels. It can be as simple as using a stolen credit card, or it can be as complex as cloning the information from stolen credit cards and selling it on, although I don’t do that. There’s too much risk and too many overheads involved when you go down that route. I like to keep it simple, which means involving as few people as possible. I don’t exactly go around advertising my profession, and I always work alone.
This scam is split into two stages: getting your victim’s information, and using that information. There’s a few different ways that I can get hold of the information I need. The simplest, and dirtiest, is to go through a victim’s trash. It’s disgusting and it’s smelly, but you can find all sorts of goodies this way. I reserve this method for when I know there’s something important to be found that’s worth the stench. That, or I use it when I’m really desperate.
Another way to get information is to intercept mail, straight out of the mailbox. Again, this needs to be a targeted act. If you hang around somebody’s mailbox for several days hoping to get something juicy, they’re going to get suspicious. I only do this if I know something important is going to be delivered. It’s a quick in and out, smash and grab technique.
The main way to get to people’s information, though, is electronically: either by hacking into their email or by stealing their phone. This method can be very fruitful, but it’s not without it’s drawbacks. Thanks to those unscrupulous salesmen and their scaremongering techniques, more often than not the real big targets are well protected behind encryption and firewalls. Honestly, it’s just not worth it. I’m not a hacker; I haven’t got the patience for it and I don’t enjoy staring at a computer screen all day. If I wanted to do that and get rich, I’d have been an accountant.
Assuming that one of these methods yields some usable information, what I then do with it varies. If it’s something valuable, I will make a one time hit and take a large amount of money. Usually I do this by withdrawing cash; electronic bank transfers can be reversed way too easily for my liking. If I’ve got notes in my hand, I know I’ve succeeded. I like to be able to hold the money I make.
Judging when it’s worth striking a victim using this method is tricky. It’s the same problem intelligence agents have when they crack an enemy code. How do you use the knowledge you have without revealing yourself to the enemy? If you keep turning up where they are, they’re going to know you’re onto them. That’s one of the biggest pitfalls with identity theft.
When all’s said and done, I tend to keep away from this scam these days. It’s what I call an entry level job. If you can survive a few years doing this type of work and not get caught, then you’re probably good enough to go on to bigger and better things. The problem is most people get greedy, and start to leave trails behind them, like footprints in the snow. If you don’t cover your tracks when you do this kind of scam, you get caught. It’s as simple as that. If you think there’s a good chance that you will be caught, walk away. If you think the reward is worth the risk, well, that’s your choice, not mine. Personally I would never do that. No reward is worth spending the rest of my life in prison.
The main reason why I don’t like this scam anymore is that it’s become a high risk, low reward scenario. In this day and age of internet security and cameras on every ATM and street corner, it’s too easy to get caught. Nine times out of ten, I don’t use the details I’ve acquired. Unless you’re doing this on a large scale, on the level of organized criminal gangs, it’s just not worth it. They make it work by skimming off small amounts from large numbers of people, hoping nobody notices. I do it the other way around and believe me, people notice when thousands of dollars suddenly disappear. As such, I save this scam for the special occasions, for the people who, quite frankly, deserve to be taken for every penny. The executives, the high rollers looking down on everyone thinking that they’re better than you and me, when the fact is they’re no different. They’re just as corrupt as I am, and when I get their money, I don’t consider it a crime.
I consider it justice.
3
The second scam that I indulge in, way more frequently than identity theft, is one that I call impersonation. Quite literally this involves pretending to be someone I’m not and getting my victim to willingly give me their money. This one is not just about borrowing a stranger’s credit line, but physically standing in front of my victim and convincing them that I’m a long lost relative or an old friend of the family.
That’s a challenge.
Sometimes I wonder if I hadn’t become a conman, if I’d have been any good as an actor. Think about it. Both jobs require you to convincingly become someone you’re not, and to make people believe in what you’re saying so completely that they suspend disbelief and accept an obviously false persona. There are actors that do what I do when I’m running this particular scam. They call it The Method; I call it business. Those actors live the part they’re playing. They stay in character, even when they’re not performing. They never let their guard down for a second, because if they do then they lose the integrity and real life qualities of the character they inhabit.
That’s exactly what I do when I’m running this scam. Really, Robert De Niro has got nothing on me when I’m on my game.
The victims in this scam are wide ranging. That’s why I like it. There’s no limit to the scenarios that you can dream up. There’s no particular demographic that you need to target. If you’re good like me, you can fool pretty much anyone. Of course, there are some that are easier to fool than others. Like most scams, the older the victim, the better. Those people tend to be more trusting and that makes things all the easier. It’s not just the elderly though. Sometimes I like to do this one on single mothers. That can be a lot of fun, because if I find the right one then they’re desperate to keep me around. Personally, I can’t stand kids but when I’ve got a hot momma willing to do anything for my attention, it kind of makes putting up with the rug rats worth it. After all, I can always walk away when I get sick of them.
My best memory from this scam was when I moved in with a family for a week. That time I didn’t do it for the money. Well, I did; the mother had been in a road accident and I’d turned up at the hospital pretending to be a long lost relative, looking for a piece of the action. The thing was, the husband in that family was so uptight that I couldn’t help but wind him up, just to see the reaction. After a couple of days I forgot about the money completely and just spent the rest of the week trying to annoy him. It got to the point where he was about to kill me and then I just left; I disappeared into the night and he’s never seen me since. I still wonder from time to time what he’s doing now, and when I do that, I laugh.
If that seems frivolous, remember the aim of this scam is not to wipe the victim out. I want to string them along for as long as possible, getting them to drip feed me money and gifts at a rate where they don’t realize just how much I’m sucking out of them. It just happened to be that that time, annoying that guy was worth more to me than the money.
The hardest part of this scam is knowing when to cut and run. Just because I find some dumb old broad willing to be suckered in doesn’t mean all her friends and family are going to fall for it. In fact, the more friends and family they have, the less likely this will work. I tend to target the loners with this one. It’s much easier to fool someone when they haven’t seen their family in years.
I can’t always tell, going in, exactly what I’m dealing with. I do my research, don’t get me wrong. Doing the opposite, and going in blind, is about the worst thing you can possibly do in this business. That’s a one way ticket to disaster. All the same, I don’t always get it right. I’ve had my closest calls running this scam. The worst one was a very wealthy man who I was close to taking over a million dollars from, until his nephew from Australia, who he’d never met, decided to come visit. The only problem was, I was already in his house, pretending to be the same nephew from Australia. I’d been there for a month, and I’d neglected to keep tabs on what the real nephew was doing while I was there. It turned out he’d won some round the world tickets on a radio show and was using them to visit family he’d never met. That sort of thing you can’t plan for. I still remember the look on that old man’s face when he realized what was going on. I was out the back door and running as fast as I could before they got a chance to come after me. I left everything behind that day: clothes, books, even a motorbike I’d picked up at an auction and had been restoring. It all had to go, because if I’d have gone back for any of it, I’d have been caught. That’s what I have to do sometimes. I can’t have any kind of emotional attachment to anyone or anything. I can fake it, sure. I have to, to make this job work, but I can never, ever let it happen for real.
4
The third scam that I like to run is a classic. It’s the life insurance fraud. This one has been around forever, and I’m sure you know how it works. The lonely widower meets a dashing stranger who sweeps her off her feet in a whirlwind romance, captivating her and becoming her most trusted companion. Then, when the old crone decides to croak, he’s left as the sole beneficiary of her estate and the owner of all her worldly possessions.
This scam is my favorite; this is the big pay day. I find this one a little bit easier than impersonation, because I don’t have to worry about blending into the background quite so much. When I’m running this scam, I’m playing a rogue, a mysterious stranger, which suits me because really that’s how I am most of the time. That said, it does require a particularly strong stomach for a few reasons.
First off, I’ve sometimes got to do things that are, well, how should I put this, a little icky. Just because the old goat is approaching her ninetieth birthday doesn’t mean she still doesn’t want to get jiggy with it now and then. Yeah. Granny gets horny, too.
Most of the time this isn’t an issue. I can talk my way out of it, promising them some loving after they’ve had their nap or telling her that we’d spent all morning making mad, passionate love only she’d forgotten because she’s old and her memory isn’t what it once was, and frankly, I’m spent from the earlier ravishing and need time to recharge my batteries.
On the whole, those tactics work, and Granny’s panties cool off before I have to take the plunge, if you can excuse the phrase. Occasionally though, and regrettably as far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t always get me off the hook and Granny doesn’t want to take no for an answer. At those times it less sweet old Granny and more Big Bad Wolf, and that’s when I have to grit my teeth and pray that it will all be over soon. It’s better than saying no, believe me. Those wolves have big teeth and sharp claws. I know, I have the scars to prove it.
The second issue I encounter when running this kind of scam is that, as the name suggests, it involves death, and more often than not it means I’ve got to be around when Granny finally kicks the bucket. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve watch die for the sake of a few thousand dollars.
It doesn’t bother me anymore. It did at first; it completely freaked me out. Death isn’t something you like to think about. None of us goes around planning for our deaths. The only time you do that is when you find out that you’re terminally ill, and most times it’s too late to do anything except say a few goodbyes and either look back on a life of good works or wallow in self-pity and regret. I’d say it’s about a 30/70 split between those two.
Seeing someone die is strange. Sometimes I can’t even tell it’s happened, especially if they’re sedated and out of their minds. They just kind of slip away and it’s only when the nurse comes to check on them that I realize it’s happened. That’s the best way to go. The other end of the scale involves gurgling, bulging eyes and gripping hands. Those are the people determined to hang on to life to the very last second. I hate those ones. They really make me feel every it, every last second, until the light goes out in their eyes and their bodies shut down. Seeing it happen never ceases to amaze me. It’s like an old engine chugging and rattling away until it finally runs out of gas and then coughs and splutters to a halt. The last few seconds, where everything has stopped, and there’s just a few creaks and groans as all the moving parts decide to finally quit and settle into their new, permanent positions are exactly the same as a person dying. The mind goes and then the body shuts down once it’s stopped getting it’s instructions. I don’t like to watch it, but sometimes it has to be done in the line of duty.
The third issue I have is what I call death plus. Sometimes, grandma is a fighter. Sometimes she’s got her wits about her, and figures me out. Sometimes she tries to take control of the situation and take me for a ride, in every sense. That’s when this scam can get messy.
I said at the outset I’d leave out details, and I’m definitely going to do that here. I’ll leave it to your imagination what happens when things don’t go as intended when running this scam. I suppose one way to look at it is that it’s a business. If you have someone working for you, you fire them. You get rid of the dead wood in order to protect your interests and maximize your profits. It’s what you have to do if you want to succeed, and it means making ruthless decisions. I won’t say exactly what those decisions are, but I will say this: next time you hear about some rich old widow drowning in her bath or falling down the stairs, have a look into it. See if there was some younger, suave man lurking in the shadows of her life, waiting for the opportunity to take what wasn’t his.
Chances are, that was me.
5
So there you have it. That’s pretty much how I work. My modus operandi as my mother used to say. If you’re sensible, and cautious, and you know when to cut your losses and walk away, then you can make a good living being a conman. I don’t pay taxes. I don’t pay insurance. I get to keep every penny that I keep, squirreled away safely in an off-shore account that the IRS doesn’t need to know about. I buy everything in cash; I don’t have credit cards or store cards or cell phone contracts or any of the other things that weigh people down in this day and age. In fact, it’s a much more fiscally responsible way to exist if you ask me. You can’t run up debt or get yourself in trouble with the banks. You let other people do that on your behalf, and enjoy the rewards of their greed.
It’s not all good news, though. There are downsides to what I do. Don’t go thinking that it sounds exciting. Yeah, it can make you rich, and it can give you a massive high when a job you’ve been working on for so long finally pays off, but it can also make you something else that no amount of wealth can compensate for. It can make you lonely.
I’m incredibly lonely. I don’t have anyone I can talk to about what I do. I don’t have a wife, or a girlfriend, or a partner. Sure, there are girls, plenty of them; there always are when you have money, but it’s the cash they’re interested in, not me. There’s nobody I can come home to and talk to about my day at work; nobody I can hug when I’m feeling down. I can’t even tell my dad what I do; he thinks I sell insurance. When I do get to see him, and he’s asking about my life and asking when I’m finally going to find myself a good woman, I’m forced to lie to the one person I shouldn’t have to lie to, ever. At those times I hate myself and I wish that I could find an honest job, buy a house, get the wife and family that my dad longs for, settle down and become one of the countless people that I’ve ripped off over the years.
It’s night when it hits me the worst, in the early hours when I’m in a motel somewhere and I’m not working, when I’m just killing time and I have the chance to think about what I do. I don’t have a home to go to where I can switch off. I never switch off. I don’t have a dog that can spoon up to me at night and love me regardless of what I’ve done that day. I can’t have a dog with my lifestyle, even though I’d love one. I can’t even have a fish.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I don’t want you to be fooled by this sudden sob story, because then you’ll become sympathetic, and you’ll consider comforting me, and you’ll think about offering me the tiniest crumb of condolence and when you do that, you’ll lower your guard.
If there’s a moral to this story, then that’s it: never lower your guard. Don’t be taken in. Don’t be fooled. Don’t believe the lies, because if you ever do, I’ll get you.
It's not my intention to make any money from this story; rather, it's intended to be a sample of one of my writing styles. I want it to be freely available, so people are encouraged to look at more of my work. That's easy on here, and it's easy on Smashwords.
It's not so easy on Amazon.
Amazon doesn't let you give your books away for free. This is rather annoying. It seems you can force them to do it, by price matching other sources such as Smashwords, but I don't see why I can't give away a sample story if I decide to. I guess it's their website and being the hydra that they are, Amazon will always win, but still... it annoyed me.
Anyway, here's my story. For free. Up yours, Amazon!
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Trickster
By Paul Rawlins
Copyright 2013
1
Let me get one thing straight from the start. I’m not a very nice person.
There. I’ve said it. I’m sure plenty of you are thinking, hey, he’s probably okay. Everyone thinks they’re not that nice once in a while. Don’t think that. Don’t kid yourselves. I’m not trying to be self deprecating here, I’m trying to be honest, which is ironic because honest is the last thing I normally am.
I’m a conman. I make my living by tricking people out of their money, their possessions, their homes and occasionally their lives. I’m not going to tell you my name, because that would just make things awkward for me. The whole point of what I do is to be able to inhabit a different skin depending on where I am and whoever my victim happens to be. Telling you my name, bank account details and social security number is just going to compromise what I love doing, and frankly I don’t want that to happen.
So, why am I telling you this? Why put my livelihood at risk, not to mention my personal safety? I’m not kidding about that last bit, by the way; I know there are people out there that would happily see me dead for what I’ve done to them and their families. I can’t blame them. I’d probably feel the same if they’d done it to me, but they didn’t, mainly because they’re stupid and I’m not.
The reason I want to tell you about what I do is just that; there’s so many stupid people out there who are very, very easy to dupe. I’m sure you think the mere idea of taking advantage of someone like that is reprehensible but trust me, it’s a fact. Old Fred down the street might seem sweet and doting but wave the offer of quick bucks under his nose and he’ll thrown money at you like there’s no tomorrow. It’s hard to feel sympathy for people when they’re that gullible.
Of course, not everybody is that gullible. Nine times out of ten, they’re just ignorant. They don’t know better and they trust what I say because I sound confident, I look successful, I seem like the sort of person you’d want to listen to. They don’t think they need to look into my credentials, to see if I really am who I say I am, and more fool them is my response to that.
I’ve been doing this for a long time now, about twenty years all told. I started young and I learned fast, and I’ve never stopped paying attention to details. That’s the real trick: the details. Get those right, and everything is easy. Get them wrong, and you’re more than likely going to end up in a prison cell wondering where you went wrong.
I’m going to tell you about the three most common scams I run, but I’m going to leave the details out. I’m not writing an instruction manual on how to be a conman; this is meant to be a warning to keep you on your toes, so don’t go trying any of this stuff. It won’t work, unless you know the details.
2
The first scam I like to use is one I’m sure you’re all familiar with. It’s identity theft. You’ve heard the stories and seen the commercials, warning you about the dangers of leaving your information out there for all to see. Those salesmen tell you to buy the latest, greatest software and gadgets to protect all your valuable information from people like me. Most of the time it’s complete garbage of course; no amount of gizmos can protect you against being stupid. I’d go so far as to say the people selling you protection against con artists like me are just as guilty as I am. They’re taking advantage of the same people, using the same kind of tactics and extracting the same money from vulnerable people who really shouldn’t be giving it away to anybody. Those people are just scumbags in my opinion. At least I have the honesty to admit what I am, and recognize my own sins.
Identity theft can work on many different levels. It can be as simple as using a stolen credit card, or it can be as complex as cloning the information from stolen credit cards and selling it on, although I don’t do that. There’s too much risk and too many overheads involved when you go down that route. I like to keep it simple, which means involving as few people as possible. I don’t exactly go around advertising my profession, and I always work alone.
This scam is split into two stages: getting your victim’s information, and using that information. There’s a few different ways that I can get hold of the information I need. The simplest, and dirtiest, is to go through a victim’s trash. It’s disgusting and it’s smelly, but you can find all sorts of goodies this way. I reserve this method for when I know there’s something important to be found that’s worth the stench. That, or I use it when I’m really desperate.
Another way to get information is to intercept mail, straight out of the mailbox. Again, this needs to be a targeted act. If you hang around somebody’s mailbox for several days hoping to get something juicy, they’re going to get suspicious. I only do this if I know something important is going to be delivered. It’s a quick in and out, smash and grab technique.
The main way to get to people’s information, though, is electronically: either by hacking into their email or by stealing their phone. This method can be very fruitful, but it’s not without it’s drawbacks. Thanks to those unscrupulous salesmen and their scaremongering techniques, more often than not the real big targets are well protected behind encryption and firewalls. Honestly, it’s just not worth it. I’m not a hacker; I haven’t got the patience for it and I don’t enjoy staring at a computer screen all day. If I wanted to do that and get rich, I’d have been an accountant.
Assuming that one of these methods yields some usable information, what I then do with it varies. If it’s something valuable, I will make a one time hit and take a large amount of money. Usually I do this by withdrawing cash; electronic bank transfers can be reversed way too easily for my liking. If I’ve got notes in my hand, I know I’ve succeeded. I like to be able to hold the money I make.
Judging when it’s worth striking a victim using this method is tricky. It’s the same problem intelligence agents have when they crack an enemy code. How do you use the knowledge you have without revealing yourself to the enemy? If you keep turning up where they are, they’re going to know you’re onto them. That’s one of the biggest pitfalls with identity theft.
When all’s said and done, I tend to keep away from this scam these days. It’s what I call an entry level job. If you can survive a few years doing this type of work and not get caught, then you’re probably good enough to go on to bigger and better things. The problem is most people get greedy, and start to leave trails behind them, like footprints in the snow. If you don’t cover your tracks when you do this kind of scam, you get caught. It’s as simple as that. If you think there’s a good chance that you will be caught, walk away. If you think the reward is worth the risk, well, that’s your choice, not mine. Personally I would never do that. No reward is worth spending the rest of my life in prison.
The main reason why I don’t like this scam anymore is that it’s become a high risk, low reward scenario. In this day and age of internet security and cameras on every ATM and street corner, it’s too easy to get caught. Nine times out of ten, I don’t use the details I’ve acquired. Unless you’re doing this on a large scale, on the level of organized criminal gangs, it’s just not worth it. They make it work by skimming off small amounts from large numbers of people, hoping nobody notices. I do it the other way around and believe me, people notice when thousands of dollars suddenly disappear. As such, I save this scam for the special occasions, for the people who, quite frankly, deserve to be taken for every penny. The executives, the high rollers looking down on everyone thinking that they’re better than you and me, when the fact is they’re no different. They’re just as corrupt as I am, and when I get their money, I don’t consider it a crime.
I consider it justice.
3
The second scam that I indulge in, way more frequently than identity theft, is one that I call impersonation. Quite literally this involves pretending to be someone I’m not and getting my victim to willingly give me their money. This one is not just about borrowing a stranger’s credit line, but physically standing in front of my victim and convincing them that I’m a long lost relative or an old friend of the family.
That’s a challenge.
Sometimes I wonder if I hadn’t become a conman, if I’d have been any good as an actor. Think about it. Both jobs require you to convincingly become someone you’re not, and to make people believe in what you’re saying so completely that they suspend disbelief and accept an obviously false persona. There are actors that do what I do when I’m running this particular scam. They call it The Method; I call it business. Those actors live the part they’re playing. They stay in character, even when they’re not performing. They never let their guard down for a second, because if they do then they lose the integrity and real life qualities of the character they inhabit.
That’s exactly what I do when I’m running this scam. Really, Robert De Niro has got nothing on me when I’m on my game.
The victims in this scam are wide ranging. That’s why I like it. There’s no limit to the scenarios that you can dream up. There’s no particular demographic that you need to target. If you’re good like me, you can fool pretty much anyone. Of course, there are some that are easier to fool than others. Like most scams, the older the victim, the better. Those people tend to be more trusting and that makes things all the easier. It’s not just the elderly though. Sometimes I like to do this one on single mothers. That can be a lot of fun, because if I find the right one then they’re desperate to keep me around. Personally, I can’t stand kids but when I’ve got a hot momma willing to do anything for my attention, it kind of makes putting up with the rug rats worth it. After all, I can always walk away when I get sick of them.
My best memory from this scam was when I moved in with a family for a week. That time I didn’t do it for the money. Well, I did; the mother had been in a road accident and I’d turned up at the hospital pretending to be a long lost relative, looking for a piece of the action. The thing was, the husband in that family was so uptight that I couldn’t help but wind him up, just to see the reaction. After a couple of days I forgot about the money completely and just spent the rest of the week trying to annoy him. It got to the point where he was about to kill me and then I just left; I disappeared into the night and he’s never seen me since. I still wonder from time to time what he’s doing now, and when I do that, I laugh.
If that seems frivolous, remember the aim of this scam is not to wipe the victim out. I want to string them along for as long as possible, getting them to drip feed me money and gifts at a rate where they don’t realize just how much I’m sucking out of them. It just happened to be that that time, annoying that guy was worth more to me than the money.
The hardest part of this scam is knowing when to cut and run. Just because I find some dumb old broad willing to be suckered in doesn’t mean all her friends and family are going to fall for it. In fact, the more friends and family they have, the less likely this will work. I tend to target the loners with this one. It’s much easier to fool someone when they haven’t seen their family in years.
I can’t always tell, going in, exactly what I’m dealing with. I do my research, don’t get me wrong. Doing the opposite, and going in blind, is about the worst thing you can possibly do in this business. That’s a one way ticket to disaster. All the same, I don’t always get it right. I’ve had my closest calls running this scam. The worst one was a very wealthy man who I was close to taking over a million dollars from, until his nephew from Australia, who he’d never met, decided to come visit. The only problem was, I was already in his house, pretending to be the same nephew from Australia. I’d been there for a month, and I’d neglected to keep tabs on what the real nephew was doing while I was there. It turned out he’d won some round the world tickets on a radio show and was using them to visit family he’d never met. That sort of thing you can’t plan for. I still remember the look on that old man’s face when he realized what was going on. I was out the back door and running as fast as I could before they got a chance to come after me. I left everything behind that day: clothes, books, even a motorbike I’d picked up at an auction and had been restoring. It all had to go, because if I’d have gone back for any of it, I’d have been caught. That’s what I have to do sometimes. I can’t have any kind of emotional attachment to anyone or anything. I can fake it, sure. I have to, to make this job work, but I can never, ever let it happen for real.
4
The third scam that I like to run is a classic. It’s the life insurance fraud. This one has been around forever, and I’m sure you know how it works. The lonely widower meets a dashing stranger who sweeps her off her feet in a whirlwind romance, captivating her and becoming her most trusted companion. Then, when the old crone decides to croak, he’s left as the sole beneficiary of her estate and the owner of all her worldly possessions.
This scam is my favorite; this is the big pay day. I find this one a little bit easier than impersonation, because I don’t have to worry about blending into the background quite so much. When I’m running this scam, I’m playing a rogue, a mysterious stranger, which suits me because really that’s how I am most of the time. That said, it does require a particularly strong stomach for a few reasons.
First off, I’ve sometimes got to do things that are, well, how should I put this, a little icky. Just because the old goat is approaching her ninetieth birthday doesn’t mean she still doesn’t want to get jiggy with it now and then. Yeah. Granny gets horny, too.
Most of the time this isn’t an issue. I can talk my way out of it, promising them some loving after they’ve had their nap or telling her that we’d spent all morning making mad, passionate love only she’d forgotten because she’s old and her memory isn’t what it once was, and frankly, I’m spent from the earlier ravishing and need time to recharge my batteries.
On the whole, those tactics work, and Granny’s panties cool off before I have to take the plunge, if you can excuse the phrase. Occasionally though, and regrettably as far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t always get me off the hook and Granny doesn’t want to take no for an answer. At those times it less sweet old Granny and more Big Bad Wolf, and that’s when I have to grit my teeth and pray that it will all be over soon. It’s better than saying no, believe me. Those wolves have big teeth and sharp claws. I know, I have the scars to prove it.
The second issue I encounter when running this kind of scam is that, as the name suggests, it involves death, and more often than not it means I’ve got to be around when Granny finally kicks the bucket. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve watch die for the sake of a few thousand dollars.
It doesn’t bother me anymore. It did at first; it completely freaked me out. Death isn’t something you like to think about. None of us goes around planning for our deaths. The only time you do that is when you find out that you’re terminally ill, and most times it’s too late to do anything except say a few goodbyes and either look back on a life of good works or wallow in self-pity and regret. I’d say it’s about a 30/70 split between those two.
Seeing someone die is strange. Sometimes I can’t even tell it’s happened, especially if they’re sedated and out of their minds. They just kind of slip away and it’s only when the nurse comes to check on them that I realize it’s happened. That’s the best way to go. The other end of the scale involves gurgling, bulging eyes and gripping hands. Those are the people determined to hang on to life to the very last second. I hate those ones. They really make me feel every it, every last second, until the light goes out in their eyes and their bodies shut down. Seeing it happen never ceases to amaze me. It’s like an old engine chugging and rattling away until it finally runs out of gas and then coughs and splutters to a halt. The last few seconds, where everything has stopped, and there’s just a few creaks and groans as all the moving parts decide to finally quit and settle into their new, permanent positions are exactly the same as a person dying. The mind goes and then the body shuts down once it’s stopped getting it’s instructions. I don’t like to watch it, but sometimes it has to be done in the line of duty.
The third issue I have is what I call death plus. Sometimes, grandma is a fighter. Sometimes she’s got her wits about her, and figures me out. Sometimes she tries to take control of the situation and take me for a ride, in every sense. That’s when this scam can get messy.
I said at the outset I’d leave out details, and I’m definitely going to do that here. I’ll leave it to your imagination what happens when things don’t go as intended when running this scam. I suppose one way to look at it is that it’s a business. If you have someone working for you, you fire them. You get rid of the dead wood in order to protect your interests and maximize your profits. It’s what you have to do if you want to succeed, and it means making ruthless decisions. I won’t say exactly what those decisions are, but I will say this: next time you hear about some rich old widow drowning in her bath or falling down the stairs, have a look into it. See if there was some younger, suave man lurking in the shadows of her life, waiting for the opportunity to take what wasn’t his.
Chances are, that was me.
5
So there you have it. That’s pretty much how I work. My modus operandi as my mother used to say. If you’re sensible, and cautious, and you know when to cut your losses and walk away, then you can make a good living being a conman. I don’t pay taxes. I don’t pay insurance. I get to keep every penny that I keep, squirreled away safely in an off-shore account that the IRS doesn’t need to know about. I buy everything in cash; I don’t have credit cards or store cards or cell phone contracts or any of the other things that weigh people down in this day and age. In fact, it’s a much more fiscally responsible way to exist if you ask me. You can’t run up debt or get yourself in trouble with the banks. You let other people do that on your behalf, and enjoy the rewards of their greed.
It’s not all good news, though. There are downsides to what I do. Don’t go thinking that it sounds exciting. Yeah, it can make you rich, and it can give you a massive high when a job you’ve been working on for so long finally pays off, but it can also make you something else that no amount of wealth can compensate for. It can make you lonely.
I’m incredibly lonely. I don’t have anyone I can talk to about what I do. I don’t have a wife, or a girlfriend, or a partner. Sure, there are girls, plenty of them; there always are when you have money, but it’s the cash they’re interested in, not me. There’s nobody I can come home to and talk to about my day at work; nobody I can hug when I’m feeling down. I can’t even tell my dad what I do; he thinks I sell insurance. When I do get to see him, and he’s asking about my life and asking when I’m finally going to find myself a good woman, I’m forced to lie to the one person I shouldn’t have to lie to, ever. At those times I hate myself and I wish that I could find an honest job, buy a house, get the wife and family that my dad longs for, settle down and become one of the countless people that I’ve ripped off over the years.
It’s night when it hits me the worst, in the early hours when I’m in a motel somewhere and I’m not working, when I’m just killing time and I have the chance to think about what I do. I don’t have a home to go to where I can switch off. I never switch off. I don’t have a dog that can spoon up to me at night and love me regardless of what I’ve done that day. I can’t have a dog with my lifestyle, even though I’d love one. I can’t even have a fish.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I don’t want you to be fooled by this sudden sob story, because then you’ll become sympathetic, and you’ll consider comforting me, and you’ll think about offering me the tiniest crumb of condolence and when you do that, you’ll lower your guard.
If there’s a moral to this story, then that’s it: never lower your guard. Don’t be taken in. Don’t be fooled. Don’t believe the lies, because if you ever do, I’ll get you.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
If you go down to the woods today...
Today is quite an important day for me. After a few (20) years of fiddling around with writing, starting stories and forgetting to finish them and coming up with ideas that never make it beyond a scrap of paper, I finally published a novel.
I say published in the loosest possible sense. E-published I suppose is more accurate. It's the future you know; ebooks supposedly make up 30% of book sales in the US now. To me though, unless you can hold a book in your hand, it's just not the same.
I suppose I shouldn't be talking like that, because it's demeaning what I've achieved. I wrote a book. A real book, that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. Nobody else wrote that story, or created those characters. It all came from me. It's unique. It means I have left a mark on the world, no matter how small or insignificant it might be. Nobody can ever take that away.
I've no idea how this publishing thing is going to go. A large part of me believes it will fall flat on it's face and go nowhere and it will just become some kind of embarrassing side note to my life that's better left forgotten. A small part of me thinks it might just be the start of something amazing.
The thing is, I know my writing isn't that bad. There's no reason my book shouldn't sell, and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to publish the other two manuscripts I have completed this year. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to write the five stories I have in development at the moment. In another couple of years I could have published 8 books. That would be a dream come true, particularly if they became self-sustaining and generated enough revenue so that I could write and make a decent living, but I know that's just a dream for now.
Incidentally, the book I published today is Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance. I published a large chunk of an earlier draft on this blog a while ago. It's still there if you wanted to take a look. If you wanted to buy a copy of the finished version and compare the two, then you know that would be very nice of you.
For the first month, Satisfaction is available at 50% off, just $1.49, with the following coupon: MH93C. It's valid until March 1st 2013. You can find my book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/280265 … It will also be on Amazon in the next day or two.
Who knows where this will lead. Somewhere? Nowhere? Round and round in circling futility? Your guess is as good as mine.
Thanks for reading
Paul
I say published in the loosest possible sense. E-published I suppose is more accurate. It's the future you know; ebooks supposedly make up 30% of book sales in the US now. To me though, unless you can hold a book in your hand, it's just not the same.
I suppose I shouldn't be talking like that, because it's demeaning what I've achieved. I wrote a book. A real book, that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. Nobody else wrote that story, or created those characters. It all came from me. It's unique. It means I have left a mark on the world, no matter how small or insignificant it might be. Nobody can ever take that away.
I've no idea how this publishing thing is going to go. A large part of me believes it will fall flat on it's face and go nowhere and it will just become some kind of embarrassing side note to my life that's better left forgotten. A small part of me thinks it might just be the start of something amazing.
The thing is, I know my writing isn't that bad. There's no reason my book shouldn't sell, and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to publish the other two manuscripts I have completed this year. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to write the five stories I have in development at the moment. In another couple of years I could have published 8 books. That would be a dream come true, particularly if they became self-sustaining and generated enough revenue so that I could write and make a decent living, but I know that's just a dream for now.
Incidentally, the book I published today is Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance. I published a large chunk of an earlier draft on this blog a while ago. It's still there if you wanted to take a look. If you wanted to buy a copy of the finished version and compare the two, then you know that would be very nice of you.
For the first month, Satisfaction is available at 50% off, just $1.49, with the following coupon: MH93C. It's valid until March 1st 2013. You can find my book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/280265 … It will also be on Amazon in the next day or two.
Who knows where this will lead. Somewhere? Nowhere? Round and round in circling futility? Your guess is as good as mine.
Thanks for reading
Paul
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Evolution of a story: GhostWalker
This week, I finished reviewing the latest and what I hope is the final version of my novel GhostWalker, which I first conceived of and wrote in 1993, when I was 18. It was initially written as a screenplay and it was appalling: laughable dialogue and phenomenally bad plotting meant that, in retrospect, it was unintentionally hilarious. That initial version only exists as a hard copy sitting in a folder under a bed somewhere in England. I need to get it back one of these days.
Between that version in 1993 and the version of the story that exists now, some twenty years later, I made numerous attempts to rewrite the story. The amount of effort I put into the story is a testament not only to how incredibly awful that first version was (I'm not even exaggerating here; when I do finally get my hands on that original copy, I'll scan it and upload so you can see for yourself) but also that at the heart of the tale lay a pretty good action adventure.
Honestly, I've been toying around with this story for so long that I've lost track of when I started to rewrite it again and how the plot and characters began to evolve. Apart from the first missing draft, I think I still have all the subsequent versions. The problem is they were written on so many platforms that there was never any version control and numerous copies and saves has wiped out any trace of when they were first written.
Based on a bit of deduction and memory (the latter of which can best be described as hazy), I think I began rewriting the story at around the 10 year anniversary mark, in 2003. This would make sense, firstly because 10 years seems like a logical time to revisit a long dead story, and secondly because at that time I was living with my ex, not having a great time and I would avoid reality by sitting behind a computer screen and working either on college assignments or this story.
If I ever do publish the finished version of GhostWalker, which I fully intend to do this year, and it's successful, and there's interest, I'd like to publish an essay on how the story evolved, both for my own satisfaction and also as a guide to other writers struggling with their creations. The amount of work that's gone into the story far outweighs any financial benefit that it could ever bring me, but on the other hand it's been an incredible learning exercise on how not to write a story.
So, and this is really for my sake than anyone else's, I've decided to try and map out the various iterations of this story and figure out where the story changes occurred. As to why I made the changes, I can't be sure. I can only assume that as I re-read each version I realized that some elements - characters, pacing, structure - didn't feel right and I altered things until the general pace and atmosphere of the story matched my imagination. It's fair to say that where the story is 20 years after it was originally conceived is so far removed that the two stories are hardly recognizable.
My first pass at sorting out the mess is to figure out the order all the drafts hang together. This has taken me about four hours to do, but I think I have it. 20 years of labor and several hours of headscratching has resulted in the following list:
DRAFT DATE WORDS (k)
A 1993 -
1 2003 42
2 2005* 44
3 2005* 43
4 2005 35
5 2006 79
6 2006 92
7 2006 108
8 2010 105
9 2011 79
10 2012 83
This bit of organization threw up a couple of interesting things. Firstly, although I have 10 different drafts, there are some which are minor and only five that have substantial changes: drafts 1, 5, 6, 7 and 9 have the major alterations. The biggest change was between 8 and 9. By draft 8 the story had become a boring, bloated mess. A year after writing it I tore it apart and completely rebuilt the first half of the story as draft 9, changing it from a interminably boring opus into what it was supposed to be in the first place: fun and exciting. Draft 10 rewrote the second half of the story.
Rather like draft 8, this blog post has become overlong and far too dull. I'm bored of writing this now, so I'll stop. If you want to hear more, a) let me know and b) get a life.
Between that version in 1993 and the version of the story that exists now, some twenty years later, I made numerous attempts to rewrite the story. The amount of effort I put into the story is a testament not only to how incredibly awful that first version was (I'm not even exaggerating here; when I do finally get my hands on that original copy, I'll scan it and upload so you can see for yourself) but also that at the heart of the tale lay a pretty good action adventure.
Honestly, I've been toying around with this story for so long that I've lost track of when I started to rewrite it again and how the plot and characters began to evolve. Apart from the first missing draft, I think I still have all the subsequent versions. The problem is they were written on so many platforms that there was never any version control and numerous copies and saves has wiped out any trace of when they were first written.
Based on a bit of deduction and memory (the latter of which can best be described as hazy), I think I began rewriting the story at around the 10 year anniversary mark, in 2003. This would make sense, firstly because 10 years seems like a logical time to revisit a long dead story, and secondly because at that time I was living with my ex, not having a great time and I would avoid reality by sitting behind a computer screen and working either on college assignments or this story.
If I ever do publish the finished version of GhostWalker, which I fully intend to do this year, and it's successful, and there's interest, I'd like to publish an essay on how the story evolved, both for my own satisfaction and also as a guide to other writers struggling with their creations. The amount of work that's gone into the story far outweighs any financial benefit that it could ever bring me, but on the other hand it's been an incredible learning exercise on how not to write a story.
So, and this is really for my sake than anyone else's, I've decided to try and map out the various iterations of this story and figure out where the story changes occurred. As to why I made the changes, I can't be sure. I can only assume that as I re-read each version I realized that some elements - characters, pacing, structure - didn't feel right and I altered things until the general pace and atmosphere of the story matched my imagination. It's fair to say that where the story is 20 years after it was originally conceived is so far removed that the two stories are hardly recognizable.
My first pass at sorting out the mess is to figure out the order all the drafts hang together. This has taken me about four hours to do, but I think I have it. 20 years of labor and several hours of headscratching has resulted in the following list:
DRAFT DATE WORDS (k)
A 1993 -
1 2003 42
2 2005* 44
3 2005* 43
4 2005 35
5 2006 79
6 2006 92
7 2006 108
8 2010 105
9 2011 79
10 2012 83
This bit of organization threw up a couple of interesting things. Firstly, although I have 10 different drafts, there are some which are minor and only five that have substantial changes: drafts 1, 5, 6, 7 and 9 have the major alterations. The biggest change was between 8 and 9. By draft 8 the story had become a boring, bloated mess. A year after writing it I tore it apart and completely rebuilt the first half of the story as draft 9, changing it from a interminably boring opus into what it was supposed to be in the first place: fun and exciting. Draft 10 rewrote the second half of the story.
Rather like draft 8, this blog post has become overlong and far too dull. I'm bored of writing this now, so I'll stop. If you want to hear more, a) let me know and b) get a life.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
A snippet of writing from the mind of an idiot
Just because I feel like it, here's three chapters of the latest story I'm working on. There's no real context to these as they form the middle section of the first act of this story. This is really the pivotal point for the story that sets up the rest of the adventure.
I like to take the basic conventions of story telling and play around with them. In my first ever (unpublished, crap) novel, I had a fairly traditional boy meets girl, boy loses girl structure but rather than the normal boy wins girl back third act I went more with boy hates girl and wishes she was dead and is glad when the other boy he lost her to dies horribly. That was a bit of a mean spirited story, really. Most of my stuff turns out that way. I don't write nice stuff; as my wife likes to say, "Why can't you write stuff I'd enjoy?" Sadly, that's just not me. But anyway, back to the point. This is the sequel to a novel I've already written and shopped around to a few agents without any success whatsoever. If you're wondering why I'm writing a sequel to a story that nobody is remotely interested in then don't worry because I'm wondering exactly the same thing myself. The only answer that I can give you is simply this: I like writing stories.
5 - Date Night
“Hit me again,” Sebastian ordered the barman, his speech slurred by the alcohol already flowing through his system. The barman, a young, olive skinned man with slicked back black hair, looked Sebastian up and down and shrugged. “I think you have had enough for tonight, my friend,” he said in an apologetic tone.
Sebastian glowered at him. “What are you, my mother?” he sneered. “I didn’t ask for your opinion, I asked for a drink so please, can I have another Ouzo?”
As he spoke, Dan eased himself onto the empty stool beside his brother and slapped his hand down on his shoulder. “You hanging in there buddy?” he asked Sebastian, glancing up at the barman as he spoke and making it clear with his expression that Sebastian wasn’t getting another drink.
“You could say that,” Sebastian muttered, staring down at the bar before raising his head and shooting daggers at the barman. “Of course, I’d be having a lot more fun if this asshole decided to do his job and give me a drink.”
“And that’s why you’re not having any more right now,” Dan told his brother brightly. “It’s kind of traditional not to insult your barman when you want a drink.”
“I don’t need you or him or you or anyone else telling me I’ve had enough to drink!” Sebastian exclaimed angrily, slamming his fist down onto the bar and knocking his empty glass sideways. Dan reached and picked it up, handing it to the barman. “You really don’t do being drunk very well, do you?” he said to his brother dryly.
“That’s rich coming from a guy who got demoted because of his drinking,” came the slurred reply.
“Touché,” Dan replied with a grin, “although in my defense that was a very long time ago.”
“Well, let’s just say I’m making up for lost time, then,” Sebastian sniped back.
Dan put his arm around his brother’s shoulder. “You’ve well and truly caught me up, mister,” he said encouragingly. “Let’s go sit down at our table and I’ll get us a couple more drinks.”
Sebastian let the offer sink into his addled mind and mulled it over. He wore the expression of a man trying to work out an incredibly complex equation in his head but after a few moments he nodded slowly in agreement, and Dan helped him to his feet and led him across the room to a table in the corner, where Sebastian slumped down into a wicker chair.
“Don’t got anywhere,” Dan ordered his brother, who could only mumble an unintelligible response. He walked back over to the bar. “Sorry about that,” he said to the barman in a bright tone.
“Your brother, he had a bad day today, no?”
Dan laughed. “It could have been a lot worse. This morning I thought we were all going to jail. As it is, all that’s happening is we’re being escorted out of the country tomorrow.”
“That is not so good.”
“Not when everything we’ve been working towards for the last couple of years is here, no.”
“Perhaps you will be allowed to come back when he is not so drunk?”
Dan laughed at the suggestion. “It’s not the drinking that the problem,” he told the barman. “It’s what he did when he was sober that’s the problem. Your Navy doesn’t take kindly to people stealing boats and sailing around so close to the Turkish mainland. It makes them kind of antsy, you know what I’m saying?”
“There have nearly been wars over such things.”
“Exactly,” Dan said with a sense of satisfaction, before adding, “although it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. All the Greeks and Turks I know are great. You all seem to get along.”
“Maybe we are too similar,” the barman answered with a grin.
Dan gave a little nod. “You might be onto something there.” He glanced to his and his eye was caught by the person at the end of the bar. She hadn’t been there a moment before, but he hadn’t noticed her come in. He glanced around to where he had left Sebastian; his brother was now slumped down in the chair and seemed to be asleep. He turned his attention back to the woman at the far end of the bar and his heart leapt a little as the two of them made eye contact for a moment. Dan quickly broke off his gaze and looked down at the bar, but a moment later he found his attention making his way back to the woman, and when he looked to where he sat their eyes met again. This time she smiled, a wide, dazzling smile.
Dan was immediately hooked. She was beautiful, and he guessed she was in her late twenties. Her skin was deeply tanned and her hair bleached blonde, both from spending too much time in the sun. She wore a short black dress and the way she sat with her legs crossed showed plenty of her long legs. She seemed completely out of place at the otherwise deserted bar.
Dan glanced around. She didn’t seem to be with anyone else, which seemed strange to him. Women like her didn’t wander around alone in Greek tourist towns out of season. He pondered that thought for a moment, and then stood up. There seemed to be only one way he would find out anything about this sudden and welcome distraction to the day’s less than enthralling events.
He casually walked down the bar towards the woman, who watched him curiously as he approached. He took the empty seat next to her and then casually glanced over at her, almost as if he hadn’t noticed she was there. “Well, hello there,” he said with a broad grin. The woman looked at him with only the slightest interest, but Dan was not deterred. “I couldn’t help but notice you staring at me from over here,” he went on, “but that’s okay: if I was you, I’d be staring at me too.”
The woman raised her eyes to meet his and her expression was matched by her tone of voice. “Is that really the best you can do?” she asked disdainfully. Her Californian accent was immediately apparent. “I’m sitting here on my own in this bar and you think you coming up to me and hitting on me with an arrogant line like that is going to work?”
“It seemed like it was worth a shot,” Dan replied, riding the insult like a heavyweight boxer sidestepping a punch, “especially since we’re both American. I’d hate for you to be drinking alone so far from home.”
“The cockiness didn’t work so now we’re trying for the sympathy vote, hmm?” came the snapped reply.
Dan blew out his cheeks. “Is this how you get all your dates? By waiting for them to come and say hi and then ripping them to shreds?”
“What makes you think I’m looking for a date?” she asked dryly.
Dan shrugged and glanced around him. “Well, let’s see,” he began. “You’re in a bar, on your own, you’re dressed up and you’re sitting up here on display for all to see, practically screaming for attention. I’d say that would mean you were looking for something.”
She gave him a wry grin. “You’re half right,” she told him. “Only it’s not a date I’m looking for.”
“What are you looking for, then?”
She gave him a measured gaze before she coolly replied, “You.”
6 - Business Proposal
“Me?” Dan asked after a momentary pause as her statement took the wind out of his sails. “You don’t even know who I am.”
“You’re Daniel Fox, the archeologist. The man who’s just passed out in the corner is your brother Sebastian.”
Dan looked at her suspiciously. “So who does that make you, then?”
“My name is Katherine Whitlock.”
Dan shrugged. “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”
“I doubt it,” she replied. “I’m not a celebrity like you two.”
Dan laughed at that. “I’d hardly call myself a celebrity.”
“In the right circles, you are,” Katherine replied. “It’s your work that brought me here.”
The laughter left Dan’s voice. “My work?” he asked. Katherine reached into her bag and pulled out a tatty looking paperback book. Dan cocked his head to the side and looked at the cover. It read ‘Modern Myths and Fables’ by Daniel Fox. He rolled his eyes in disbelief. It was the same book Samaras had had in Athens. Seeing it then had made him angry; now all he could do was laugh at the girl.
“Oh my God,” Dan sniggered. “Please don’t tell me that piece of trash brought you all the way out here.”
“Why not?” Katherine replied. “It’s a good book.”
“It’s garbage,” Dan shot back.
“You wrote it,” she pointed out archly.
“Yeah, I wrote it because idiots like you lap that kind of crap up. Atlantis; Lemuria; the Loch Ness Monster, it’s all a load of recycled nonsense that people can’t get enough of.”
“That may be true,” Katherine replied, “but if it is, then why are you here investigating one of your own ‘pieces of crap’?”
Dan’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think you have any idea what we’re doing here?” he asked her in a low voice.
“Oh, come now, Mister Fox, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to put the pieces together.”
Dan rolled his eyes. “I think you might have got the wrong end of the stick somewhere along the line, here,” he told Katherine. “We’re on an archeological expedition. We’re not looking for Atlantis if that’s what you’re thinking. You want Graham Hancock if that’s your thing.”
“I didn’t say anything about Atlantis.”
Dan shook his head. “Whatever you think we’re doing here, you’re wrong.”Katherine held up the well thumbed book in her right hand. “Page two hundred forty seven,” she said quietly, reading the expression on Dan’s face. “You can tell me I’m wrong but I know from that look I’m not.”
Dan pushed his hands against the bar and stood up. “I’m sorry,” he said to Katherine, “I’ve obviously made a mistake here. You enjoy the rest of your evening; I’m going to look after my brother.” He turned away, not waiting for a reply, and quickly made his way back over to where Sebastian was snoring away, his head lolling down on his chest. Dan reached down and shook his shoulder.
“Come on, we need to leave,” Dan told his brother sternly, but all he got in response was a series of grunts. Dan let out an exasperated sigh and shook Sebastian again. This time Sebastian raised his arm and waved his hand as though he was swatting away an irritating fly. “For God’s sake,” muttered Dan, looking down at his incapacitated brother.
“Need some help?” came the soft female voice from behind Dan. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Katherine standing there, looking down at the stuporous Sebastian. He glared at her. “Not from you, thanks,” he said darkly, as he leant down and tried to lift his brother to his feet, but it was to no avail. The best he could manage was to push him back into his seat. Dan slumped down in the opposite chair and let out an exasperated gasp.
“I’m really not sure what I’ve done to deserve such a hostile reaction,” Katherine said as she perched herself on the arm of Sebastian’s chair and looked at Dan.
“You’re involving yourself in our business, which makes you nosey, and I don’t like nosey people,” Dan told her flatly.
“I can see there’s no beating around the bush with you,” Katherine observed.
Dan glanced around the near empty bar and then looked back at Katherine. “Look, why don’t you just go away? I’m sorry I came and talked to you. It was a mistake. I need to get my brother back to our place when he wakes up and I don’t need you making things more difficult than they already are.”
“I didn’t come here to make your life more difficult. In fact, I came here to make it substantially easier.”
“And how are you going to do that exactly?”
“I’m willing to fund your expedition and provide you with the technical resources and equipment to complete your study.”
Dan blew out his cheeks. “This is reality, lady. Strange women do not come up to guys in bars and try to buy their services. I think you’ve been watching too many movies. Now will you please just leave me alone?”
Katherine was undaunted by Dan’s unwilling response. “I want to hire you. I need your help and I’m willing to pay you well for it.”
Dan put his head into his hands before looking up at Katherine. It seemed pointless trying to argue with her anymore so he simply stated, “That’s not how we work, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve wired one million dollars into your offshore account in Jersey. You can call them and check if you like,” she added, seeing the startled look on Dan’s face. “If you get me what I want, I will wire in another nine million.”
“I hate to break it to but we’re leaving in the morning and I don’t think we’re going to be back any time... well, ever,” Dan said, his head reeling from alcohol and the sudden rush of unexpected information. “If we’re both talking about what I think we’re talking about, I can’t do a lot for you, no matter how much money you throw my way.”
“I’m aware of your problems with the Greek government,” Katherine told him. “I can help you with that. All I need is your consent.”
“And if I still say no, do we get to keep the million dollars?” Dan asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Katherine said calmly. “Think of it as a charitable donation. I’m a fan of your work and I want to see you continue.”
Dan looked up at the beautiful, mysterious woman who sat opposite him, calmly regarding him. “Are you for real?” he finally asked. “You’re not some kind of psycho stalker or something?”
Katherine stood up and looked down at Dan. “I’d advise you to check your bank account,” she told him. “If you and your brother are interested, meet me for breakfast at the Megisti hotel at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.” She gave him a little nod. “Good luck getting him to bed.” With that, she walked away, and Dan turned to watch her make her way swiftly from the bar. He looked back down to where Sebastian was snoring away in the chair opposite him, and shook his head.
“What the hell was that about?” he wondered aloud.
7 - Breakfast Brief
“I’m never drinking again,” Sebastian moaned to himself as he stared down at the glass of freshly squeezed orange juice as though the glass was filled with fresh blood.
“I think you’re still too drunk to be officially hungover yet,” Dan observed, looking into his brother’s bloodshot eyes.
They were sitting on the deck of the Hotel Megisti, overlooking the harbor. Between them was a lavish continental breakfast laid out on the table, along with fresh fruit and coffee. It was almost eight, and they had been expected when they had arrived ten minutes earlier. Sebastian leant forward, holding his head in his hands. “I think my head is going to explode,” he said feebly. Dan grinned at him and helped himself to a bread roll from the table.
“A bit of food and some coffee and you’ll soon be feeling better,” he reassured his brother.
“I’m going to be sick if I eat anything.”
“You were already sick four times last night,” pointed out Dan. “Do you know how hard it was getting you back to the hotel?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sebastian said.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Dan replied chirpily. “Just think, in a couple of hours you’re going to have the Greek police knocking on the door and taking you to the airport. I’m sure they’re not going to be as accommodating as this.”
“God, I hope I feel better by then.”
“Me too,” agreed Dan, “although having a million dollars sitting in our bank account helps to ease the pain of being deported.”
Sebastian looked up at his brother with a pained look on his face. “I can’t believe I missed all this last night. You make it sound like something out of a James Bond movie.”
“It pretty much was,” Dan said merrily. “Beautiful, mysterious woman approaches me in a bar with an intriguing offer and a huge pile of cash. How are we supposed to say no to that?”
“You know we aren’t supposed to leave our hotel, don’t you?” Sebastian told him. “This is only going to piss off the Greeks even more.”
“If it wasn’t for the money, we wouldn’t be here, believe me,” Dan said.
“I’m glad it attracted your interest,” came the voice from the entrance to the deck. The two brothers looked up to see Katherine standing in the doorway. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail and wore a long, flowing white dress with thin brown belt around her waist that accentuated her curves. The two brothers stood, Dan sharply, Sebastian unsteadily as she walked over to greet them.
Katherine shook Dan’s hand. “Nice to see you again, Mister Fox. I’m glad you made it.”
“Thanks for the invite.”
“I trust you checked your bank balance?”
“I did. That was very generous of you.”
“Not at all.” She turned her attention to Sebastian. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been better,” Sebastian replied grudgingly. Katherine grinned. “Ouzo will do that to you.” She sat down and the brothers did likewise. She looked between them. “It’s strange, you know,” she observed, “from everything I’d heard about you two Sebastian was supposed to be the level headed one and Dan more of the fool. I have to say that hasn’t been my impression so far.”
“Thanks,” Sebastian said. “I just had a bad day yesterday, that’s all.”
“In more ways than one,” pointed out Katherine as she leant forward and rested her elbows on her knees, locking here fingers together in a businesslike manner. “Let’s see if we can’t get today off to a better start.”
"How did you find us here, Miss Whitlock?" Dan asked.
"Katherine, please."
“How did you find us?” Dan repeated. He had no intention of making small talk, and Katherine quickly stopped trying.
“Through your backers,” she told him. “It wasn’t hard. People with money know other people with money. We talk.”
“You have money, then?”
Katherine arched an eyebrow at Dan. “Do you have many people throwing millions of dollars at you?”
Dan shrugged at that. “Okay, that’s a fair point,” he conceded. “I’m still not one hundred per cent sure why you did that.”
“It’s perfectly simple. I want you to find the Eye of Andromeda.”
“That’s what I thought,” Dan said despondently. “I also thought I made it clear last night that Eye is a nothing but a myth.”
“Not according to your book,” Katherine pointed out.
“I told you, that book is a load of crap. It’s a work of fiction spun around some ancient legends. The Eye is a fable, like Atlantis,” Dan said emphatically.
“Then why do you happen to be excavating in exactly the area you purport the Eye to be and why do the papers filed at the Greek Interior Ministry state that one of your objectives is to find the Eye as an artifact of historical significance?”
Dan was shaking his head even as Katherine spoke and as soon as she had posed her question he answered her back. “The truth is we were using it as a cover to excavate early Minoan temples. In case you didn’t know, there’s a lot of tension in this part of the world between Greece and Turkey. That big lump of land over there,” - he pointed out across the harbor - “that’s Turkey. If we find something big, something that could become a tourist attraction, both countries are going to want it and they’re both going to be breathing down our necks. We don’t want that, which is why we used the Eye as a cover story. Nobody takes it seriously which is why everyone was leaving us alone.”
“But the Eye is real,” insisted Katherine.
Dan shook his head. “It’s not. The stuff you’re reading is just legends, half of which I’m responsible for. The book you’ve got is the first book I ever published. It contained a chapter on the Eye and that’s where most of the rumors and stories about it come from. The fact is, I wrote that story to help sell the book. People lap that kind of thing up. It doesn’t mean it’s true. There’s no science or fact behind the story. It’s just that: a story.”
“The Eye is real.”
“You’re not getting it, are you?” Dan said with a dismissive wave.
Katherine glared at him. “It’s you who isn’t getting it,” she said firmly. “I don’t know how many time I have to tell you that the Eye is real.”
“Listen, lady...” Dan began, but he felt his brother’s hand plant on his forearm even as the words left his mouth.
“Our host seems pretty insistent that she knows something about this Eye,” Sebastian told Dan. “Maybe we should hear her out before deciding if this is worthwhile or not?”
“I can tell you now it’s not,” Dan snapped back. “She a lunatic. She might be a rich lunatic but she’s still a lunatic.”
Katherine chuckled. “This is a little bit more like what I was expecting from you two,” she said with a broad smile.
“I’m glad we don’t disappoint,” Sebastian told her, not taking his hand from Dan’s arm. “Now, what exactly is it that you know?”
“Before I begin, I need you to understand that everything I am going to tell you is in the strictest confidence and may not be used by you or any other competitor. If it is, then I will withdraw all funds from your offshore account, not just the money I deposited.”
“You can’t do that!” Dan protested.
“I can and I will,” Katherine assured him coolly. “When I enter into business with someone I expect a certain level of professionalism. If it is absent, I ensure they are suitably punished. Make no mistake about that.”
“You must be a lot of fun at kids’ parties,” Dan said dryly.
“I don’t joke about my investments, Daniel,” Katherine replied.
“You’re clearly serious about your work,” Sebastian observed.
“I am,” Katherine confirmed, “and I expect anyone working for me to be equally serious. Now, shall we get down to business?”
The two brothers glanced at one another. As objectionable as Katherine seemed, there was something undeniably intriguing about her confidence and the notion that she knew something that she clearly believed to be tantalizing.
“Alright,” Sebastian said. “We’re on board.” He felt Dan’s arm tense under his grip but he squeezed his fingers tighter before his brother could speak and continued. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
Katherine sat back as a smile of self-satisfaction spread across her face. “Excellent,” she said. “I’m glad you’ve seen sense. You’re going to be a huge asset.”
“I usually get people telling me I’m a huge ass,” Dan told her dryly.
“Hopefully not this time,” was the sardonic reply, before Katherine’s tone shifted to a more serious nature. “The Eye is real. You're just looking for it in the wrong place.”
“How do you know that?” Sebastian asked.
“I’ll come to that,” Katherine told him. “The Greeks built temples to honor their gods. The Eye was, or is, a temple built to worship a star, specifically Alpheratz in the constellation of Andromeda. It’s the brightest star in the constellation, representing the head of Andromeda, which is where the Greek designation for the temple came from.”
“Why would the Greeks build a temple to a star?” Sebastian asked. “That’s more an Egyptian trait, or Mezoamerican. That’s not something the Greeks would have done.”
“I don’t believe they did build it,” Katherine replied, leaning forward again and becoming more animated. “I believe they discovered it, or rediscovered it to be more precise, and renamed it. I think the real temple is much older than any civilization you associated it with.”
Dan and Sebastian glanced at each other. “Was that in your book?” Sebastian asked Dan, who shook his head slowly. Sebastian turned back to Katherine. “You said we’re looking in the wrong place? You don’t think it’s at Megisti?”
“No, I don’t. I think the sunken temple you are investigating is not the temple of the Eye itself. I think it is one of four cardinal markers related to the true position of the Eye.
“Each one of the markers is one hundred and twenty miles north, south, east and west of the temple of Andromeda, which lies at the center, forming the outline of a bright star. Megisti is the southern most marker.”
“That would put the temple somewhere smack bang in the middle of Turkey,” Sebastian pointed out.
“Yes, it would,” agreed Katherine.
“That would mean the Greeks couldn’t have built it.”
“Exactly.”
The two brothers looked at one another again, this time with a new spark of interest.
“Okay, you’ve got our attention,” Sebastian told Katherine. “Now you’re telling us you know where the Eye is located?”
“I suspect I do, and I have evidence to prove it.”
“Evidence?” asked Dan, suddenly intrigued. “What evidence?”
I like to take the basic conventions of story telling and play around with them. In my first ever (unpublished, crap) novel, I had a fairly traditional boy meets girl, boy loses girl structure but rather than the normal boy wins girl back third act I went more with boy hates girl and wishes she was dead and is glad when the other boy he lost her to dies horribly. That was a bit of a mean spirited story, really. Most of my stuff turns out that way. I don't write nice stuff; as my wife likes to say, "Why can't you write stuff I'd enjoy?" Sadly, that's just not me. But anyway, back to the point. This is the sequel to a novel I've already written and shopped around to a few agents without any success whatsoever. If you're wondering why I'm writing a sequel to a story that nobody is remotely interested in then don't worry because I'm wondering exactly the same thing myself. The only answer that I can give you is simply this: I like writing stories.
5 - Date Night
“Hit me again,” Sebastian ordered the barman, his speech slurred by the alcohol already flowing through his system. The barman, a young, olive skinned man with slicked back black hair, looked Sebastian up and down and shrugged. “I think you have had enough for tonight, my friend,” he said in an apologetic tone.
Sebastian glowered at him. “What are you, my mother?” he sneered. “I didn’t ask for your opinion, I asked for a drink so please, can I have another Ouzo?”
As he spoke, Dan eased himself onto the empty stool beside his brother and slapped his hand down on his shoulder. “You hanging in there buddy?” he asked Sebastian, glancing up at the barman as he spoke and making it clear with his expression that Sebastian wasn’t getting another drink.
“You could say that,” Sebastian muttered, staring down at the bar before raising his head and shooting daggers at the barman. “Of course, I’d be having a lot more fun if this asshole decided to do his job and give me a drink.”
“And that’s why you’re not having any more right now,” Dan told his brother brightly. “It’s kind of traditional not to insult your barman when you want a drink.”
“I don’t need you or him or you or anyone else telling me I’ve had enough to drink!” Sebastian exclaimed angrily, slamming his fist down onto the bar and knocking his empty glass sideways. Dan reached and picked it up, handing it to the barman. “You really don’t do being drunk very well, do you?” he said to his brother dryly.
“That’s rich coming from a guy who got demoted because of his drinking,” came the slurred reply.
“Touché,” Dan replied with a grin, “although in my defense that was a very long time ago.”
“Well, let’s just say I’m making up for lost time, then,” Sebastian sniped back.
Dan put his arm around his brother’s shoulder. “You’ve well and truly caught me up, mister,” he said encouragingly. “Let’s go sit down at our table and I’ll get us a couple more drinks.”
Sebastian let the offer sink into his addled mind and mulled it over. He wore the expression of a man trying to work out an incredibly complex equation in his head but after a few moments he nodded slowly in agreement, and Dan helped him to his feet and led him across the room to a table in the corner, where Sebastian slumped down into a wicker chair.
“Don’t got anywhere,” Dan ordered his brother, who could only mumble an unintelligible response. He walked back over to the bar. “Sorry about that,” he said to the barman in a bright tone.
“Your brother, he had a bad day today, no?”
Dan laughed. “It could have been a lot worse. This morning I thought we were all going to jail. As it is, all that’s happening is we’re being escorted out of the country tomorrow.”
“That is not so good.”
“Not when everything we’ve been working towards for the last couple of years is here, no.”
“Perhaps you will be allowed to come back when he is not so drunk?”
Dan laughed at the suggestion. “It’s not the drinking that the problem,” he told the barman. “It’s what he did when he was sober that’s the problem. Your Navy doesn’t take kindly to people stealing boats and sailing around so close to the Turkish mainland. It makes them kind of antsy, you know what I’m saying?”
“There have nearly been wars over such things.”
“Exactly,” Dan said with a sense of satisfaction, before adding, “although it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. All the Greeks and Turks I know are great. You all seem to get along.”
“Maybe we are too similar,” the barman answered with a grin.
Dan gave a little nod. “You might be onto something there.” He glanced to his and his eye was caught by the person at the end of the bar. She hadn’t been there a moment before, but he hadn’t noticed her come in. He glanced around to where he had left Sebastian; his brother was now slumped down in the chair and seemed to be asleep. He turned his attention back to the woman at the far end of the bar and his heart leapt a little as the two of them made eye contact for a moment. Dan quickly broke off his gaze and looked down at the bar, but a moment later he found his attention making his way back to the woman, and when he looked to where he sat their eyes met again. This time she smiled, a wide, dazzling smile.
Dan was immediately hooked. She was beautiful, and he guessed she was in her late twenties. Her skin was deeply tanned and her hair bleached blonde, both from spending too much time in the sun. She wore a short black dress and the way she sat with her legs crossed showed plenty of her long legs. She seemed completely out of place at the otherwise deserted bar.
Dan glanced around. She didn’t seem to be with anyone else, which seemed strange to him. Women like her didn’t wander around alone in Greek tourist towns out of season. He pondered that thought for a moment, and then stood up. There seemed to be only one way he would find out anything about this sudden and welcome distraction to the day’s less than enthralling events.
He casually walked down the bar towards the woman, who watched him curiously as he approached. He took the empty seat next to her and then casually glanced over at her, almost as if he hadn’t noticed she was there. “Well, hello there,” he said with a broad grin. The woman looked at him with only the slightest interest, but Dan was not deterred. “I couldn’t help but notice you staring at me from over here,” he went on, “but that’s okay: if I was you, I’d be staring at me too.”
The woman raised her eyes to meet his and her expression was matched by her tone of voice. “Is that really the best you can do?” she asked disdainfully. Her Californian accent was immediately apparent. “I’m sitting here on my own in this bar and you think you coming up to me and hitting on me with an arrogant line like that is going to work?”
“It seemed like it was worth a shot,” Dan replied, riding the insult like a heavyweight boxer sidestepping a punch, “especially since we’re both American. I’d hate for you to be drinking alone so far from home.”
“The cockiness didn’t work so now we’re trying for the sympathy vote, hmm?” came the snapped reply.
Dan blew out his cheeks. “Is this how you get all your dates? By waiting for them to come and say hi and then ripping them to shreds?”
“What makes you think I’m looking for a date?” she asked dryly.
Dan shrugged and glanced around him. “Well, let’s see,” he began. “You’re in a bar, on your own, you’re dressed up and you’re sitting up here on display for all to see, practically screaming for attention. I’d say that would mean you were looking for something.”
She gave him a wry grin. “You’re half right,” she told him. “Only it’s not a date I’m looking for.”
“What are you looking for, then?”
She gave him a measured gaze before she coolly replied, “You.”
6 - Business Proposal
“Me?” Dan asked after a momentary pause as her statement took the wind out of his sails. “You don’t even know who I am.”
“You’re Daniel Fox, the archeologist. The man who’s just passed out in the corner is your brother Sebastian.”
Dan looked at her suspiciously. “So who does that make you, then?”
“My name is Katherine Whitlock.”
Dan shrugged. “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”
“I doubt it,” she replied. “I’m not a celebrity like you two.”
Dan laughed at that. “I’d hardly call myself a celebrity.”
“In the right circles, you are,” Katherine replied. “It’s your work that brought me here.”
The laughter left Dan’s voice. “My work?” he asked. Katherine reached into her bag and pulled out a tatty looking paperback book. Dan cocked his head to the side and looked at the cover. It read ‘Modern Myths and Fables’ by Daniel Fox. He rolled his eyes in disbelief. It was the same book Samaras had had in Athens. Seeing it then had made him angry; now all he could do was laugh at the girl.
“Oh my God,” Dan sniggered. “Please don’t tell me that piece of trash brought you all the way out here.”
“Why not?” Katherine replied. “It’s a good book.”
“It’s garbage,” Dan shot back.
“You wrote it,” she pointed out archly.
“Yeah, I wrote it because idiots like you lap that kind of crap up. Atlantis; Lemuria; the Loch Ness Monster, it’s all a load of recycled nonsense that people can’t get enough of.”
“That may be true,” Katherine replied, “but if it is, then why are you here investigating one of your own ‘pieces of crap’?”
Dan’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think you have any idea what we’re doing here?” he asked her in a low voice.
“Oh, come now, Mister Fox, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to put the pieces together.”
Dan rolled his eyes. “I think you might have got the wrong end of the stick somewhere along the line, here,” he told Katherine. “We’re on an archeological expedition. We’re not looking for Atlantis if that’s what you’re thinking. You want Graham Hancock if that’s your thing.”
“I didn’t say anything about Atlantis.”
Dan shook his head. “Whatever you think we’re doing here, you’re wrong.”Katherine held up the well thumbed book in her right hand. “Page two hundred forty seven,” she said quietly, reading the expression on Dan’s face. “You can tell me I’m wrong but I know from that look I’m not.”
Dan pushed his hands against the bar and stood up. “I’m sorry,” he said to Katherine, “I’ve obviously made a mistake here. You enjoy the rest of your evening; I’m going to look after my brother.” He turned away, not waiting for a reply, and quickly made his way back over to where Sebastian was snoring away, his head lolling down on his chest. Dan reached down and shook his shoulder.
“Come on, we need to leave,” Dan told his brother sternly, but all he got in response was a series of grunts. Dan let out an exasperated sigh and shook Sebastian again. This time Sebastian raised his arm and waved his hand as though he was swatting away an irritating fly. “For God’s sake,” muttered Dan, looking down at his incapacitated brother.
“Need some help?” came the soft female voice from behind Dan. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Katherine standing there, looking down at the stuporous Sebastian. He glared at her. “Not from you, thanks,” he said darkly, as he leant down and tried to lift his brother to his feet, but it was to no avail. The best he could manage was to push him back into his seat. Dan slumped down in the opposite chair and let out an exasperated gasp.
“I’m really not sure what I’ve done to deserve such a hostile reaction,” Katherine said as she perched herself on the arm of Sebastian’s chair and looked at Dan.
“You’re involving yourself in our business, which makes you nosey, and I don’t like nosey people,” Dan told her flatly.
“I can see there’s no beating around the bush with you,” Katherine observed.
Dan glanced around the near empty bar and then looked back at Katherine. “Look, why don’t you just go away? I’m sorry I came and talked to you. It was a mistake. I need to get my brother back to our place when he wakes up and I don’t need you making things more difficult than they already are.”
“I didn’t come here to make your life more difficult. In fact, I came here to make it substantially easier.”
“And how are you going to do that exactly?”
“I’m willing to fund your expedition and provide you with the technical resources and equipment to complete your study.”
Dan blew out his cheeks. “This is reality, lady. Strange women do not come up to guys in bars and try to buy their services. I think you’ve been watching too many movies. Now will you please just leave me alone?”
Katherine was undaunted by Dan’s unwilling response. “I want to hire you. I need your help and I’m willing to pay you well for it.”
Dan put his head into his hands before looking up at Katherine. It seemed pointless trying to argue with her anymore so he simply stated, “That’s not how we work, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve wired one million dollars into your offshore account in Jersey. You can call them and check if you like,” she added, seeing the startled look on Dan’s face. “If you get me what I want, I will wire in another nine million.”
“I hate to break it to but we’re leaving in the morning and I don’t think we’re going to be back any time... well, ever,” Dan said, his head reeling from alcohol and the sudden rush of unexpected information. “If we’re both talking about what I think we’re talking about, I can’t do a lot for you, no matter how much money you throw my way.”
“I’m aware of your problems with the Greek government,” Katherine told him. “I can help you with that. All I need is your consent.”
“And if I still say no, do we get to keep the million dollars?” Dan asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Katherine said calmly. “Think of it as a charitable donation. I’m a fan of your work and I want to see you continue.”
Dan looked up at the beautiful, mysterious woman who sat opposite him, calmly regarding him. “Are you for real?” he finally asked. “You’re not some kind of psycho stalker or something?”
Katherine stood up and looked down at Dan. “I’d advise you to check your bank account,” she told him. “If you and your brother are interested, meet me for breakfast at the Megisti hotel at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.” She gave him a little nod. “Good luck getting him to bed.” With that, she walked away, and Dan turned to watch her make her way swiftly from the bar. He looked back down to where Sebastian was snoring away in the chair opposite him, and shook his head.
“What the hell was that about?” he wondered aloud.
7 - Breakfast Brief
“I’m never drinking again,” Sebastian moaned to himself as he stared down at the glass of freshly squeezed orange juice as though the glass was filled with fresh blood.
“I think you’re still too drunk to be officially hungover yet,” Dan observed, looking into his brother’s bloodshot eyes.
They were sitting on the deck of the Hotel Megisti, overlooking the harbor. Between them was a lavish continental breakfast laid out on the table, along with fresh fruit and coffee. It was almost eight, and they had been expected when they had arrived ten minutes earlier. Sebastian leant forward, holding his head in his hands. “I think my head is going to explode,” he said feebly. Dan grinned at him and helped himself to a bread roll from the table.
“A bit of food and some coffee and you’ll soon be feeling better,” he reassured his brother.
“I’m going to be sick if I eat anything.”
“You were already sick four times last night,” pointed out Dan. “Do you know how hard it was getting you back to the hotel?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sebastian said.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Dan replied chirpily. “Just think, in a couple of hours you’re going to have the Greek police knocking on the door and taking you to the airport. I’m sure they’re not going to be as accommodating as this.”
“God, I hope I feel better by then.”
“Me too,” agreed Dan, “although having a million dollars sitting in our bank account helps to ease the pain of being deported.”
Sebastian looked up at his brother with a pained look on his face. “I can’t believe I missed all this last night. You make it sound like something out of a James Bond movie.”
“It pretty much was,” Dan said merrily. “Beautiful, mysterious woman approaches me in a bar with an intriguing offer and a huge pile of cash. How are we supposed to say no to that?”
“You know we aren’t supposed to leave our hotel, don’t you?” Sebastian told him. “This is only going to piss off the Greeks even more.”
“If it wasn’t for the money, we wouldn’t be here, believe me,” Dan said.
“I’m glad it attracted your interest,” came the voice from the entrance to the deck. The two brothers looked up to see Katherine standing in the doorway. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail and wore a long, flowing white dress with thin brown belt around her waist that accentuated her curves. The two brothers stood, Dan sharply, Sebastian unsteadily as she walked over to greet them.
Katherine shook Dan’s hand. “Nice to see you again, Mister Fox. I’m glad you made it.”
“Thanks for the invite.”
“I trust you checked your bank balance?”
“I did. That was very generous of you.”
“Not at all.” She turned her attention to Sebastian. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been better,” Sebastian replied grudgingly. Katherine grinned. “Ouzo will do that to you.” She sat down and the brothers did likewise. She looked between them. “It’s strange, you know,” she observed, “from everything I’d heard about you two Sebastian was supposed to be the level headed one and Dan more of the fool. I have to say that hasn’t been my impression so far.”
“Thanks,” Sebastian said. “I just had a bad day yesterday, that’s all.”
“In more ways than one,” pointed out Katherine as she leant forward and rested her elbows on her knees, locking here fingers together in a businesslike manner. “Let’s see if we can’t get today off to a better start.”
"How did you find us here, Miss Whitlock?" Dan asked.
"Katherine, please."
“How did you find us?” Dan repeated. He had no intention of making small talk, and Katherine quickly stopped trying.
“Through your backers,” she told him. “It wasn’t hard. People with money know other people with money. We talk.”
“You have money, then?”
Katherine arched an eyebrow at Dan. “Do you have many people throwing millions of dollars at you?”
Dan shrugged at that. “Okay, that’s a fair point,” he conceded. “I’m still not one hundred per cent sure why you did that.”
“It’s perfectly simple. I want you to find the Eye of Andromeda.”
“That’s what I thought,” Dan said despondently. “I also thought I made it clear last night that Eye is a nothing but a myth.”
“Not according to your book,” Katherine pointed out.
“I told you, that book is a load of crap. It’s a work of fiction spun around some ancient legends. The Eye is a fable, like Atlantis,” Dan said emphatically.
“Then why do you happen to be excavating in exactly the area you purport the Eye to be and why do the papers filed at the Greek Interior Ministry state that one of your objectives is to find the Eye as an artifact of historical significance?”
Dan was shaking his head even as Katherine spoke and as soon as she had posed her question he answered her back. “The truth is we were using it as a cover to excavate early Minoan temples. In case you didn’t know, there’s a lot of tension in this part of the world between Greece and Turkey. That big lump of land over there,” - he pointed out across the harbor - “that’s Turkey. If we find something big, something that could become a tourist attraction, both countries are going to want it and they’re both going to be breathing down our necks. We don’t want that, which is why we used the Eye as a cover story. Nobody takes it seriously which is why everyone was leaving us alone.”
“But the Eye is real,” insisted Katherine.
Dan shook his head. “It’s not. The stuff you’re reading is just legends, half of which I’m responsible for. The book you’ve got is the first book I ever published. It contained a chapter on the Eye and that’s where most of the rumors and stories about it come from. The fact is, I wrote that story to help sell the book. People lap that kind of thing up. It doesn’t mean it’s true. There’s no science or fact behind the story. It’s just that: a story.”
“The Eye is real.”
“You’re not getting it, are you?” Dan said with a dismissive wave.
Katherine glared at him. “It’s you who isn’t getting it,” she said firmly. “I don’t know how many time I have to tell you that the Eye is real.”
“Listen, lady...” Dan began, but he felt his brother’s hand plant on his forearm even as the words left his mouth.
“Our host seems pretty insistent that she knows something about this Eye,” Sebastian told Dan. “Maybe we should hear her out before deciding if this is worthwhile or not?”
“I can tell you now it’s not,” Dan snapped back. “She a lunatic. She might be a rich lunatic but she’s still a lunatic.”
Katherine chuckled. “This is a little bit more like what I was expecting from you two,” she said with a broad smile.
“I’m glad we don’t disappoint,” Sebastian told her, not taking his hand from Dan’s arm. “Now, what exactly is it that you know?”
“Before I begin, I need you to understand that everything I am going to tell you is in the strictest confidence and may not be used by you or any other competitor. If it is, then I will withdraw all funds from your offshore account, not just the money I deposited.”
“You can’t do that!” Dan protested.
“I can and I will,” Katherine assured him coolly. “When I enter into business with someone I expect a certain level of professionalism. If it is absent, I ensure they are suitably punished. Make no mistake about that.”
“You must be a lot of fun at kids’ parties,” Dan said dryly.
“I don’t joke about my investments, Daniel,” Katherine replied.
“You’re clearly serious about your work,” Sebastian observed.
“I am,” Katherine confirmed, “and I expect anyone working for me to be equally serious. Now, shall we get down to business?”
The two brothers glanced at one another. As objectionable as Katherine seemed, there was something undeniably intriguing about her confidence and the notion that she knew something that she clearly believed to be tantalizing.
“Alright,” Sebastian said. “We’re on board.” He felt Dan’s arm tense under his grip but he squeezed his fingers tighter before his brother could speak and continued. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
Katherine sat back as a smile of self-satisfaction spread across her face. “Excellent,” she said. “I’m glad you’ve seen sense. You’re going to be a huge asset.”
“I usually get people telling me I’m a huge ass,” Dan told her dryly.
“Hopefully not this time,” was the sardonic reply, before Katherine’s tone shifted to a more serious nature. “The Eye is real. You're just looking for it in the wrong place.”
“How do you know that?” Sebastian asked.
“I’ll come to that,” Katherine told him. “The Greeks built temples to honor their gods. The Eye was, or is, a temple built to worship a star, specifically Alpheratz in the constellation of Andromeda. It’s the brightest star in the constellation, representing the head of Andromeda, which is where the Greek designation for the temple came from.”
“Why would the Greeks build a temple to a star?” Sebastian asked. “That’s more an Egyptian trait, or Mezoamerican. That’s not something the Greeks would have done.”
“I don’t believe they did build it,” Katherine replied, leaning forward again and becoming more animated. “I believe they discovered it, or rediscovered it to be more precise, and renamed it. I think the real temple is much older than any civilization you associated it with.”
Dan and Sebastian glanced at each other. “Was that in your book?” Sebastian asked Dan, who shook his head slowly. Sebastian turned back to Katherine. “You said we’re looking in the wrong place? You don’t think it’s at Megisti?”
“No, I don’t. I think the sunken temple you are investigating is not the temple of the Eye itself. I think it is one of four cardinal markers related to the true position of the Eye.
“Each one of the markers is one hundred and twenty miles north, south, east and west of the temple of Andromeda, which lies at the center, forming the outline of a bright star. Megisti is the southern most marker.”
“That would put the temple somewhere smack bang in the middle of Turkey,” Sebastian pointed out.
“Yes, it would,” agreed Katherine.
“That would mean the Greeks couldn’t have built it.”
“Exactly.”
The two brothers looked at one another again, this time with a new spark of interest.
“Okay, you’ve got our attention,” Sebastian told Katherine. “Now you’re telling us you know where the Eye is located?”
“I suspect I do, and I have evidence to prove it.”
“Evidence?” asked Dan, suddenly intrigued. “What evidence?”
Saturday, July 14, 2012
The W word
I don't normally write anything on here about what I do when I'm not writing, because I do do other things apart from writing. In fact, the writing just fills in gaps between the other things I do. Apart from cooking, cleaning, shouting at a small dog and generally irritating my wife, my main other occupation is photography.
I don't think I'm a great photographer by any means. That's not just the old false modesty thing, you know, when someone goes "Golf, eh? Never been much good at it," right before they hit a hole in one and look smug. I'm talking about an honest technical appraisal of my own capabilities and my ability to operate the cameras I have.
I've owned DSLR cameras for about 8 years now and like most things in life I've played with them sporadically. I always shot with natural light mainly because I didn't know how to use a flash. But since the start of this year, a kindly chap has taken me under his wing and taught me an awful lot about how to do good photography and really it's not that hard. Most people go wrong because they're scared of all the buttons and settings, but if you take your time and learn what they all do and then do a bit of reading on how it all works then you will find yourself coming on leaps and bounds.
As a case in point, at the start of the year I was bumbling through weddings barely understanding what I was doing. Now I can shoot a full wedding, process the images, print and deliver them to a client and have them turn around and say how much they like the pictures.
It's that last part that made me write this. It's so nice to see people comment on a picture and say how much they love it. The praise is not directed at me; there's nothing to say who the photographer was. Instead, what they like is the mood and the emotion of the image, and that's what I strive to shoot. I'm not technically the best but I like to think I can capture how people feel, and when they come back and comment to that effect, it makes me feel like I've done a good job.
That said, I'm still learning the trade, and I will use the rest of this year to improve my skills. Next year, though, I'm going to be taking off and making some good money doing something I really enjoy, and you can't ask for more than that, can you?
I don't think I'm a great photographer by any means. That's not just the old false modesty thing, you know, when someone goes "Golf, eh? Never been much good at it," right before they hit a hole in one and look smug. I'm talking about an honest technical appraisal of my own capabilities and my ability to operate the cameras I have.
I've owned DSLR cameras for about 8 years now and like most things in life I've played with them sporadically. I always shot with natural light mainly because I didn't know how to use a flash. But since the start of this year, a kindly chap has taken me under his wing and taught me an awful lot about how to do good photography and really it's not that hard. Most people go wrong because they're scared of all the buttons and settings, but if you take your time and learn what they all do and then do a bit of reading on how it all works then you will find yourself coming on leaps and bounds.
As a case in point, at the start of the year I was bumbling through weddings barely understanding what I was doing. Now I can shoot a full wedding, process the images, print and deliver them to a client and have them turn around and say how much they like the pictures.
It's that last part that made me write this. It's so nice to see people comment on a picture and say how much they love it. The praise is not directed at me; there's nothing to say who the photographer was. Instead, what they like is the mood and the emotion of the image, and that's what I strive to shoot. I'm not technically the best but I like to think I can capture how people feel, and when they come back and comment to that effect, it makes me feel like I've done a good job.
That said, I'm still learning the trade, and I will use the rest of this year to improve my skills. Next year, though, I'm going to be taking off and making some good money doing something I really enjoy, and you can't ask for more than that, can you?
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