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Vampire Cities
Vampire Cities
Vampire Cities
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Vampire Cities

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Anderson has some extraordinary visitations. The intensity of these visitations increases and their nature changes as he moves through youth to adulthood.

In a gothic retreat a traumatic event changes his life. The self-destructive behaviour which follows seems at first to give an insight into one of the universe’s greatest secrets - a secret that will have an enormous effect on human civilisation.

A strange but powerful artefact is presented to him. In the deserts outside of Las Vegas he is asked to find the city of light. He searches through London, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and finally Sydney for this city that will become the venue for his apotheosis. Dark forces are at his heels as he races around the world protecting his secret. Finally the Sydney Olympics beckons him to the city of light.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 20, 2013
ISBN9780992300913
Vampire Cities
Author

d'ettut

d’ettut is an enigma and intends to stay that way. They have no vested political interests apart from a desire to help facilitate a movement which could bring about an equitable global society. They do not aspire to any particular role in such a movement nor do they wish to gain anything financially. The books are intended to assist in the quest to help the world gain social fairness.Their literary style varies. None of it is intended to be entertaining. It is confronting, didactic and enlightening (one hopes). They write about social justice and target youthful, very literate, Harry Potter-type readers who are now real-world savvy and, like Harry, are bursting to take on the establishment. d’ettut’s first four works are presented as novels and describe social despondency in all its manifestations.Greenwars (1998), the first novel, essentially covers the fact that technology and its evolution can outstrip social evolution. Moral and ethical development of society is not able to keep pace with its own driving technology. This is all described in the form of an animal allegory; a kind of 21st century Animal Farm.The second novel, Pie Square (2000), describes a different aspect of social evolution. In this situation it is the benign exploitation of youth through a highly sophisticated interactive electronic based fast food chain. Using this device young people are groomed for a more creative and constructive contribution to society.In Vampire Cities (2000) the brashness, the harshness, of unfettered capitalism is the main theme. But the subthemes rock!Amber Reins Fall (2006) looks in detail at an individual struggling in the 1960s and early 1970s to come to terms with contemporary society and the need for there to be a progressive evolution towards a moral betterment. The main protagonist invents the self-help concept.The fifth work, OWL: One World League (2017), is neither fiction nor fact. It is a literary work called fusion fiction which creates a ‘sugar coated political treatise’ condemning overpopulation, encouraging world government and issuing a clarion call to form a new global cyber-democracy ‘before it’s too late’; ‘before the elite snuff out social media’.Fusion fiction they define as literary ‘bisociation’, to borrow a term used by Koestler and Edward de Bono. It’s a pairing of semi fictional plots with slabs of ‘borrowed’ and authentic text taken selectively from journals relevant to their thesis with no formal quotation or referencing. d’ettut says, ‘Like Andy Warhol paintings of unacknowledged Campbell’s soup cans, this is a collage of written down ideas, a creative plagiarism, to send a cerebral message.’OWL is supplemented by the website http://owlvoter.com/ which dares readers to unite and light the fire of revolution (or is it transformation?) for 21st century redemptive politics.

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    Book preview

    Vampire Cities - d'ettut

    Vampire Cities

    by

    d’ettut

    Copyright 2013 d’ettut

    All rights reserved

    Cover illustration © Danny Pantic 2000

    This is an IndieMosh book

    published by MoshPit Publishing

    an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

    http://www.indiemosh.com.au

    Smashwords Edition, License Statement

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    To the evil professor,

    the streakers of Scotland Island and

    the creative drunks of the world.

    Any resemblance between the fictional characters in this novel and persons living or dead is purely co-incidental.

    PROLOGUE

    1952

    AND THERE YOU GO, Anderson, his father said. The goodies win again. The baddies are done for.

    Anderson knew this always happened. His Eagle comic told him that PC 49, honest hard-working policeman, like a cheerful uncle, frightfully clever, always caught the crooks. And Dan Dare - he always beat the Treens, those horrible green things from outer space. Yes, Dad was right. Good always won. Bad always lost.

    Why do the baddies always lose? asked Anderson.

    Because of the Nemesis, his father replied. Anderson felt secure with the weight of Dad pressing down on the end of the bed.

    What’s a nemesis? he demanded.

    Ahh, his father started in a distant tone. Anderson wondered whether his Dad really knew what he was talking about. Even when the baddies think they have gotten away with it, they haven’t. There is something in the universe that dumps on the bad guys but not the good.

    Oh, said Anderson.

    Anderson thought about King Arthur and Merlin and the knights. Good knights, the ones in white, always seemed to win. Black knights, well, they won a few fights, but not always.

    At the end of the story, the goodies always win, don’t they Dad? He said this again to comfort himself as the weight on the bed disappeared.

    Of course, his father reassured him. Good night, son.

    The room was plunged into the darkness of desolation as the bedroom light was switched off, and the door closed. Alien territory now. Anderson shivered. Good night, Dad, he called out into the void.

    Anderson tugged at his pillow with both hands, burrowing his head into its protective field. Thoughts flooded in. Grownups seem to forget so much. Mummy said out of sight, out of mind. It was true. They said one thing. Weeks later, they forgot they had said it. But Anderson didn’t. He knew the truth. He had seen things. And when he saw something, even in his mind he would never let it go. He could explore it. Think about it. Add it to other things he knew. Build up, bit by bit, a bigger truth.

    One of his friends, who talked to him in the night, told him, Man’s greatest failing is his forgetfulness. Anderson, you mustn’t forget, you must create awareness from all the little truths.

    What’s a truth? Anderson had asked his friend.

    His friend whispered, The super-rich are aliens, like the Treens. They have everything. They govern this world in secrecy.

    Wow, Anderson said. Does Dad know that?

    He keeps forgetting, his friend said, he has thought about it, but his awareness crumbles quickly with time. The Aliens rely on you not seeing the whole picture.

    CHAPTER ONE: MIRRORS ON THE MARIONETTES

    THE DREAM

    IT WAS A BRIGHT DAY. An incredibly bright day when primary colours explode. Blue sky intimidates with its infinity. Red is the fiery arc of a ruptured artery on the battlefield. Green, it just shines and shimmers. It is jungle. Smoke rises, forming white vaults in the blue.

    "And then there was the wailing. A sound that hollows out the stomach as the innocents die in the roar of slaughter.

    "Through the dusty window and down the hill I could see them all. The masses were on a merciless rampage. Everything sacred was broken. The hoards were moving, aimlessly attacking each other, clubbing each other. Crushing skulls. It was a mindless moving sheet of hate that destroyed everything in its path. Small delicately decorated cottages were stripped of tender support. Verandahs crashed down. Fences were uprooted. Windows and doors were pummelled in. And worst of all were the children. The strongest of taboos was shattered. The small bodies thrown to the ground and hacked at with anything that had come loose in the furore. Broken glass, fence palings, anything at all.

    "Glinting in the sun it seemed as though a red spray was moving towards me up the hill. And deep inside myself there was that flicker of awareness. The empty fear of a patriarch about to lose more than his life. I tasted fear in my mouth and a feeling of total doom overcame me. Murderers were clambering onto the porch, smashing our windows, fleeing the intangible. Destroying themselves and very soon ourselves. Death I could feel was so very near. My friends in the room screamed. We glanced at each other’s faces and knew this was the end.

    In absolute desperation and desolation I turned a gun to my beloved family -my all, my beloved children. A quicker death. We are all together. Forgive me! I cried and pulled the trigger.

    Anderson opened his eyes and gazed around the inside of the small steamer cabin. He could never understand why people called them steamers. They were not steam ships any more. They were just an ordinary smallish tourist ship that plied the waters from Athens through the Mediterranean to the various Greek Islands that have lured people for thousands of years. Steamers had survived as a name because it was associated with so many of the cognoscenti who have flocked to the birth of our civilisation and literature to pay their homage.

    Miles sat on the bottom of the other bunk. He had been a friend through university and was the only psychologist Anderson knew offering therapy that made sense to anybody who was sane.

    What do you think it means? asked Miles.

    "It’s repetitive, comes in waves. Scared the hell out of me for a few nights and then left me for months. But the dreadful story is the same every time. There is this feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. Utter and total emptiness.

    I originally thought it was a premonition - the end of the world, especially when I had the one on the island. You remember, lying alone in the dark on my stomach in the warm sand, looking towards the horizon and then seeing that sudden cosmic burst as the horizon melted into a nuclear totem. But the feeling was similar then, you know! I felt the whole of the planet shudder and drop from below the warm sand that I was lying on. I was suspended, totally alone, floating in space.

    Miles looked menacingly at the retsina perched precariously on the narrow shelf next to the small dark cubicle that served as a shower and occasional piss-hole. A thick glass tumbler sat enticingly next to the bottle.

    Originally I thought the image of the children being destroyed - no doubt by their own family members - was symbolic of the total selfishness of today’s society. Putting the individual above and beyond that of family, Miles said in an uncharacteristically professional way. I’d like to link that to your ending of the world, because it had a message. The message was the ending of civilisation. I related them to the fact that you are in the last stages of a mid-life crisis and you are having a vision of the end of your life.

    Anderson remained lying on the bottom bunk and worked his fingers hard on the stubble on his jaw and then tried in vain to feel thickness in his thinning hair as he ran his hand through it.

    Look, I think it’s much more than that somehow. These dreams have been going on for the best part of twenty years. I know I look sixty, feel fifty and think thirty, but that’s bullshit about mid-life crisis! Bullshit!! That’s the sort of bull you hear from boring salaried executives and others who have run out of road after twenty years of bashing at one particular theme. They don’t have anything else in their lives to pour their energies into.

    They looked at each other intensely for a few seconds. Anderson put his head back and inspected the rust stains on the bottom of the bunk above him and wondered how they had got there. Miles went over to the cracked and stained sink, turned on the tap and pissed into the brown water.

    Christ, Miles, think of the hygiene, warned Anderson.

    Piss is like distilled water. Nothing to fear here. Cleaner than the stuff coming out of the tap.

    Miles considered the pact he and Anderson had made to cruise the islands for three weeks to record and share dreams as the basis of an experimental book. They weren’t too sure whether it was to be a novel or a psychology text. What they hoped was, that by describing their dreams and concentrating on little else other than the occasional glass of wine and attacks on Greek cuisine, there would be a cumulative effect, one dream affecting another so that the articulation and the images would become clearer.

    The underlying themes had so far been difficult to find. Nor was it easy to bind two separate course of dreams together. Rather than two tributaries converging to form a stream, they were running further away from each other. And the fear was that ultimately the tributaries would dry up and disappear. And at this point Anderson’s dreams were dominating. Miles, for whatever reason, wasn’t participating much anymore.

    Anderson looked through the crusty porthole at a pink layer of pollution that hung over the top of the barely rippling water. The shabbier parts of Piraeus poked through the smog. The strong smell of fish tainted the air.

    I am not sure coming here is really going to work, Miles. All I’m getting is repetition upon repetition of the same dream! I’m not really getting the visions I’d hoped for.

    Stick with it, Anderson, we’ve got a few more days to go. The creativity drought might break.

    THE DRUNK

    The patio door was open and the warm Mediterranean breeze wafted into the hotel room, billowing out a thin white gauze-like curtain and flickering a candle flame Anderson had lit on the small cast-concrete coffee table. The brick walls of the hotel room were white-washed to purity. The decor was crisp. The view from the patio to the vine-covered hills was very relaxing. The vineyard that swept up to the twenty-year-old hotel met the bottom of the patio some ten feet down. The building was in accord with the ancient monuments at Mount Olympus. Miles and Anderson were impressed by the reception. The wide corridors were paved in terracotta tiles. Wall hangings and murals reinforced the illusion of antiquity.

    Miles leaned over the balcony and stared at the blackness engulfing the vineyards below. Look at the fireflies or glow worms or whatever they are! It makes the grapes look as though they are phosphorescent. Perhaps this is the magic of the nectar of the gods. Perhaps, my friend, this is the alchemy that makes retsina such a terrific drink. He finished his wine and snapped the stem of his glass against a mock marble mantelpiece.

    Anderson walked to the balcony and shared his friend’s amazement. My god, these little illuminated beings are either sucking the goodness out of or putting it in those very noble grapes. No wonder this is Mount Olympus. No wonder the gods liked it here. This hotel is probably on the site of some long lost, arcane and probably bizarre wine ritual.

    Anderson put his hand into a blood-red ceramic bowl and plucked out a large black olive. He rolled it between his fingers to test its firmness and then flicked it into his mouth.

    "Miles, this dream thing really is a battle. I know there’s no structure. There’s no denouement. It’s all very subconscious, psycho stuff, but my worry is that I’m tapping into something that maybe I’m not supposed to know about. I haven’t told you this before, but when I drink, I have real visions. Sometimes these visions are much stronger than the dreams, and I seem to have a more realistic place in them. I have a formula for reaching that state. I’m usually alone, in some godforsaken restaurant, travelling on a job. And the epiphanies, if you can call them that, usually occur after I’ve quaffed more than one but less than two bottles of wine.

    And there’s a recurrent theme in the epiphanies too. It’s like somebody’s trying to talk to me, Anderson rushed on before Miles could interject. Don’t try to tell me that I enter some sort of psychotic dimension because it’s just too real. Perhaps the blood chemistry is altered and so is the mind, but it’s more like a medium for some form of communication. It’s as if I become super-aware or even telepathic. The thoughts are just so articulate. There is a clarity that I wouldn’t have thought was possible if I were merely pissed or just going crazy.

    Miles interrupted as he topped up his glass of retsina. Anderson, you and I have known each other for years and I’ve seen you wax lyrical many times, both drunk and sober. You’ve praised the ‘terra rosa’, the beautiful red earth almost poetically and I’ve seen you consume most of the stock of good wine of a few restaurants around Australia. I’ve been with you. But I’ve never seen you as the medium or extrasensory recipient for anything but some pretty bloody obscure political philosophies that make the extreme right and left both squirm. I hate to say it, Anderson, but the ravings I’ve heard from you, with that crust of red crud around your moustache, haven’t really smacked of cosmic insight.

    Miles grabbed a handful of black olives, popped one into his mouth and scooped a piece of feta out of another bowl with a silver spoon.

    Miles, all the time I was ranting and raving, I swear my mind was clear. Anyway the visions only occurred when I was by myself. In particular, on those rare occasions when I drank by myself at home in the music room. I can’t prove it. I can only describe it to you and see what you think. I’ve not told you about one weird experience I had.

    Miles settled back in a large wicker chair. It was padded with bright floral covers and squeaked on the tiled floor. Three empty bottles stood on the mantelpiece. He casually leant over the side of the chair, grabbed his favourite horse-shaped wooden handled corkscrew he carried everywhere, and proceeded to uncork another bottle. The great liberator of the soul, this stuff, he said. Better than any Rorschach test or thematic apperception test to get a therapy session started.

    Anderson stood facing the vineyards. He wondered why and how grapes could make such a transition from humble fruit to a mind-altering substance. Perhaps the Greeks, thousands of years ago, had wondered exactly the same thing in exactly the same spot. He wondered if any of them had been plagued by the same hauntings.

    He only had two or three days in England before returning to Sydney. The thrust and parry of commercial life would soon submerge any sensitivity of thought he had been able to cultivate over the last three weeks. His thoughts had started at a leisurely pace in the business-class section of the jumbo on the way to Athens and became more frenetic as the dream experiment progressed. As Miles and he meandered around the Greek Islands and talked, he knew his awareness of something troubling would not get much more sensitive. He decided to take the gamble and reveal some of his secrets, perhaps even a lot of them, to Miles. Secrets that he hadn’t shared with him before.

    Miles, I remember a long time ago, back in Adelaide. In my twenties. I got pissed one night - I don’t think I was taking anything else - when I had this really vivid dream or sort of half dream in which I felt as though my soul, whatever that is, was literally dragged out of my head. I had visions and images of witches and all that sort of stuff. But I suspect that was me fabricating a story to cover the phenomenon in the only way that I could. The experience was horrifying. Fortunately it only occurred once or twice and then I forgot about it until more recently when I had a completely different sort of experience. But I’m experiencing something similar in all these episodes.

    Miles looked nervous and for the first time that day poured himself a mineral water. He looked at Anderson expectantly. I think you’d better tell me about it, he said quietly.

    Anderson dabbed at his lips with a serviette. I know what paranoia is. I know from personal experience the effects amphetamines can have. I remember babbling to myself and having the odd hallucination at the very beginning of university days. But even when my senses weren’t telling the truth, I knew what was causing the effects.

    Anderson hesitated. There have been several occasions when I have got to that second bottle of wine and then isolated myself in the music room back home where I keep the CD player and all the classical CDs. It’s hard to describe, but I tell you, the CD player has actually spoken to me.

    There was a stunned silence. Miles looked away from Anderson then looked back quickly and said, You’re not joking, are you?

    "It didn’t speak to me verbally, it sent messages or things like messages through the LCD unit. There is no noise, just visual stuff. Fluctuations on this gauge that responded to statements or things I said aloud. What I mean is, I knew where the fluctuations indicating volume or whatever should be. If said some thing the green lines would move in the opposite direction to where they should be. For example, if the CD player was going up in volume and the little spiky things should have increased, they actually decreased. And I would ask something like, ‘Is there somebody there?’ or ‘Are you listening?’ and that’s when these reverse peaks would occur. It was definitely a message. It was like somebody was in the machine trying to get out or trying to communicate with me.

    As part of the episode, I would even say things like, ‘No one is going to believe this if I tell them, are they?’ and I would get a response. Anyway, I asked a few questions very specifically and I was smart enough at the time, even though I was fairly pissed, to write them down. I should have videoed the damned thing when I was talking to it. But I didn’t. So nothing at all can be proved.

    Anderson, are you sure it wasn’t the wine talking?

    Of course the booze was involved, but I believe that’s the whole point. I think I got myself into a state drinking alcohol that set up some sort of brain rhythm that effected my mental or psychic communication. I’ve got my theories about who I might be communicating with.

    Communicating with yourself, Anderson, said Miles. Perhaps communicating with your unconscious, possibly with guilt!

    Look, I know it sounds insane at the worst and pissed brain stuff at the best. I’m telling you, there is something there, said Anderson. He poured the remnants of the fourth bottle of wine into his glass, grasped the chilled liquid and walked towards the door. He paused momentarily to look at Miles, opened the door, gazed down the cavernous hallway towards music wafting from the live Greek band and said, I’m going for a stroll. I’ll see you later, unless you want to join me.

    I’ll finish this drink and go to bed. Anderson walked towards the sound of balalaikas and electric guitars.

    Miles felt beneath his chair and picked up a leather-bound journal. With a concerned expression on his face he drew a pen from the

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