Exercises in Verbumancy

About the Book

At the tail end of August 2011 I found myself in a new town far from anyone I really knew; I was bored, I was listless and didn’t have a great deal to occupy my time with. I didn’t even have the internet. In a bid to keep myself busy and do something productive with my time I decided to try and do more writing and really get stuck into the whole blogging thing. So I started what I would later call the Pictonaut Challenge.

I’m sure over the years everyone’s heard the expression a picture paints a thousand words. That was the essence of the whole project. At the start of every month I posted a picture that I had found on my many and varied wanderings across the blasted heath of the World Wide Web. This image would then serve as the inspiration for a short story or wordascope of roughly a thousand words. At the end of the month I would post my efforts. I invited my blog’s small readership and my various friends to join in with the project and promptly cranked the story-forge up to eleven, dialled into the imagination exchange and set the word banks to maximal. *pew*pew*

I managed against all reason and personal expectation to keep the challenging running without break, pause or hiatus for 42 months, before finally collapsing with literary exhaustion at the end of February 2015.

This book presents the 42 short stories (and a smattering of companion pieces) that resulted from the Pictonaut Challenge. The images themselves are not included as, unsurprisingly, I don’t own the rights to the vast majority of them, nor do I have the finance or legal nous to go about acquiring and licensing them.

The stories presented here have been proof-read and slightly edited from their original incarnations, but have otherwise remained as close as possible to their original state.

I can only hope you have as much fun reading them as I did writing them.

John Steele

Rogue Verbumancer

September 2015

More information about the Pictonaut Challenge and the works of John Steele, Rogue Verbumancer, as well as the wordascopes of all the other participating authors can be found at:

http://rogueverbumancer.com/

September 2011 – Grenade in the Rain

A score of fireflies dance in the air above a glistening plaza, their tails aflame with crimson light; tiny specks of vibrant red amidst the washed out greys of humanity. Some circle and hover, weaving slightly. Others hang still and motionless in the air.

*

A young woman dressed in a yellow coat stands wreathed in fireflies, her face streaked with rain; a silver ring sits upon her finger. She stands motionless, an island of calm in a stormy sea of activity. In her ringed hand she holds peace and reconciliation, in the other she holds war and justice. She sits astride a fulcrum of possibility.

*

A far off man peers through his third eye. Through it he sees far off truths. It is a window into the hearts and minds of all men. It is judgement and it is wrath. It is an extension of will and action; the might that makes right.

*

There are no fireflies in the plaza, only the red dots of laser sights.

It is not only rain on her face, there are also tears.

She has a grenade in her hand, the silver ring on her finger is its pin.

The far off man is a sniper, his third eye a scope; bullets are his only route into the hearts and minds of men.

The sniper’s name is Jenkins.

He does not know the woman’s name.

*

Voices whisper in Jenkins’ ear, a flurry of orders, a cacophony of indecision and panic. Jenkins barely hears any of it. All he can hear is the imagined sobs of the woman he is looking at. She looks so sad. What made her sad? Was it the sadness that brought her here to the plaza? There must be a reason behind it all. She must have friends, a home, people who love her, people who would miss her if she was gone. She must have a name. Jenkins didn’t feel that he could kill someone with a name.

The scope had a way of divorcing a man from reality, separating him from consequence or feeling, leaving you with just that roving tunnel of judgement; a narrow view into eternity, at the expense of everything else. It brought things so far away into such shocking clarity, things you could never hope to see with the naked eye. Sometimes Jenkins thought the things he saw through the scope weren’t real, that they were a mirage or an illusion, a window into a different time or a different place. Sometimes he thought he was looking into the barren country that exists in the sliver-thin moment before death. He often found himself looking over the top of the scope just to make sure the things he was seeing were really there. The stress of the job does funny things to a man.

Someone in his unit, Hobbes, kissed his bullets before he put them into the magazine. He said it was so that there’d be at least a little love before they died. Whether it was with blood spurting from a ragged hole in their head, or the wet sucking of an open chest wound, just over the heart. Everyone’s heart gets broken sooner or later he’d say at least I have the decency to do it with a kiss.

Since the war Jenkins had never seen a raw manifestation of beauty like the woman in the plaza, it was as if each successive year had withered a little bit more in the ruined world that remained; it was death by inches. The only emotion you really saw these days was fear, be it written all over a face or lurking behind the veiled curtains of the eyes. That this woman was sad astounded Jenkins, no one admitted something like that any more. The fear of what would happen was too great. Perhaps something inside of her had finally just snapped.

Jenkins could only see her through the scope, perhaps she wasn’t real at all. Perhaps she was just an illusion conjured up by a tired and diseased mind. Perhaps she was the only real thing in this dark, benighted world. A single, lone manifestation of something grander than the truth, a lone flower at the heart of the desert. Jenkins liked flowers.

What right did he really have to snuff out her life? What had she done to him? Who was he to hand out the final judgement? He was naught but a man, and not a wise man at that. A wise man would not be found lying on a roof top in a storm like this.

*

Rain streaks the face of the far off man.

*

The whisper in his ear tells him to take the shot. In that moment Jenkins realise he cannot kill her, no more than he could crush a lone flower beneath his heel. His scope creeps upwards, the red dot of his laser sight dancing away. It skirts across the woman’s cheek; a tiny, ethereal hand offering her what scant comfort it can. The scope alights upon a figure perched on another roof top; all clad in black, slick with rain, skin glistening. The figure looks cold, ugly, heartless, a thing of evil without mercy, a spectre, a circling vulture waiting for something to die. Jenkins sees into their heart and their mind, he sees nothing good, nothing of value. He is become judgement and he is become wrath. He is the might that makes right. He is so very tired and so very sad. His finger twitches.

A crack of thunder fills the air.

Practiced hands slide the rifle’s bolt along its oiled path again and again. Cylinders of machine lathed brass pirouette through the air, falling with a hiss on the wet roof top.

One by one, the frenzied storm of fireflies wink out.

That was how the revolution came. Because a grown man couldn’t bear to see a woman cry.

They never did find out her name.

October 2011 – The Writing of the Wall

The main building was an edifice of its time, a monument to its decade; a soaring concrete behemoth, grey and washed pale. It was a relic of the early 60s, and like so much from that era, time had not treated it well. Any colour it had once had was bleached and faded. Whites had become nicotine stained yellows, brazen reds had become the colour of old blood, bright blue had become the colour of mould and decay. This was the Sanatorium of St. John and Cross.

*

I, Doctor Montgomery Barnston, arrived late on a Thursday afternoon in mid-December amidst a downpour that had not let up since I’d left the city five hours earlier. It was a long drive to the lone and isolated heath upon which St John and Cross was built.

As I gripped the handrail to climb the stairs to the main entrance a peel of thunder rang out across the landscape. The suddenness of it startled me and reflexively I withdrew my hand from the rail. I discovered it coated with a mixture of rotten paint and rusted iron. Wiping my hand on my sodden coat I proceeded up the stairs without the handrail’s assistance.

The reception hall of the sanatorium smelt faintly of damp and antiseptic; the smell of hospitals and age. I was greeted by a young duty nurse sitting behind one of those glass reception windows, she had deep black circles under her eyes and an air of haggard weariness.

I’m here for a consultation. Dr Hemming requested me, I informed the nurse.

She stifled a yawn and directed me to an office on the third floor and buzzed me into the building proper.

I found Dr Hemming asleep at his desk, a restless looking doze, punctuated by murmurs and fidgets. I rapped my knuckles sharply on the doorframe. Dr Hemming awoke suddenly with a startled shriek and a look of terror. His darting and panicked eyes rapidly settled into the steady gaze I remembered from our few previous meetings. I noticed that he also seemed haggard and exhausted, his face pale and his eyes ringed.

Sorry to startle you Geoff, it’s me, Monty. Monty Barnston? For the consultation.

Monty? Monty, ah yes. Sorry about that, you gave me quite the fright, must have dozed off. What with the closure and relocating all the patients I’m a bit run ragged at the moment. We all are. Dr Hemming sighed. I suppose I better take you to see him.

I was lead through a winding series of corridors, Geoff talking as we walked.

The patient in question is over in the west wing, he said.

How long has he been here? I asked.

I’m afraid we’re not entirely sure. A great deal of the patient records were lost just after the war when a fire destroyed the majority of the original hospital. So all we know is that he’s been her since at least since the late 40s.

But that was over seventy years ago! How old is he?

Ninety? Maybe older. It’s all guess work really, we don’t even know his name, one of the nurses back in the 50s took to calling him Bede. In the absence of his actual name, it stuck.

I take it you tried asking him? I replied wryly.

In the entire time here’s been here he’s not spoken more than a handful of words. His name wasn’t among them.

Does he present any other major symptoms, asides from the chronic hypergraphia you mentioned on the phone? I enquired.

Nothing that can’t be categorised as a by-product of the hypergraphia. There is however one curious aspect to his writing.

Oh?

We had some linguists from the university look at it, they said it was an untranslatable derivation of Akkadian cuneiform, possibly of his own creation. That is of course assuming it does actually have any actual meaning.

*

We walked the rest of the way to the west wing in silence, the drab plasterboard walls and short bristle carpet finally giving way to cream coloured tiles and varnished wood. It, to me, resembled a school, a hospital and a prison all at once, while not truly resembling any of these places. We stopped before a large steel door, painted a faded duck egg blue white the number 213 stencilled onto it in dirty white letters. Dr Hemming took a hefty looking iron key from his pocket and slid it into the keyhole. The key turned with a stiff clunk and the door began to swing open. The room was windowless, with black walls. It was lit by only a single bulb and the light it provided was minimal at best. As I recall it smelt faintly musty. An odd dry, crypt like smell. As odd as it may sound, it smelt like time. Time gone and passed, time turned to dust, it was how I imagined the bottom of an hourglass would smell. A small emaciated figure sat before one of the walls, festooned and cowled in a ragged and stained bed sheet. This was Bede.

Bede dipped a proboscis like finger into a tiny pot in his hand and scratched with his nail onto the wall like it were a crude quill. Slowly moving into the room I realised the walls were not in fact black, but covered in a densely packed script; leaning closer I saw it was comprised of tiny and neat dagger shaped strokes, intersecting with and stacking upon each other; some were barely thicker than a hair.

Hello Bede, I said I’m Dr Barnston

Bede remained engrossed in his writing, not even acknowledging my presence. I crouched down next to him.

What are you writing about? I asked.

Bede’s head snapped to face me, cowl falling from his head. Now distracted from his writing I finally saw what he looked like. He was hideously bald, his scalp dotted with liverspots. At the centre of his face sat a small button shaped nose that seemed almost stunted and withered, not quite freakish in its appearance but possesséd of a strange peculiarity that made the entirety of his face seem just plain wrong, slightly off, ill fitted to this world. A lizard like tongue massaged toothless gums; that was when he spoke to me. His vocal cords were long since atrophied by disuse, almost to the point where they could no longer be used, but all the same he spoke. The words he uttered were almost sub-vocal in their pitch, like an errant breath of wind in a desert summer; quiet, fleeting, dusty, and in a strange way almost threatening, a faint promise of an approaching sandstorm that would flay you to the bone. His response to my question was but a single word, but oh what he conveyed in that word. The word was: Everything...

I raised my gaze so that I could look him in the eye. It is a decision that I will regret until the day I die, and I fear that it is a day which is a dreadfully long way off. Though life may stretch out before me, I feel it is a mere blink of the eye of something far vaster and more ancient than I could possibly comprehend.

Bede was blind, that much was immediately evident, but his eyes were not the milky white of age-borne cataract; His eyes were orbs of a striking, luminescent white, without any form of smear or occlusion. They were, despite there obvious deficiency in ordinary sight, perfect. Looking Bede in the eye I saw… I cannot remember what I saw. I can only remember how it left me feeling. What I saw in those eyes was fleeting, but eternal. I only held his gaze for a scant few seconds but those seconds seemed to stretch out into infinity. I remember that it felt like falling through the skin of reality, as if into a vast and unquenchable void, remorseless in its grand infinity, pitiless in its unfathomable ways, resplendent in its isolation. And all the while, as I fell through the inky non-blackness of a void I will never remember, it felt like I was screaming; a scream without sound, a scream that would not end, forever seeking to echo off surfaces that did not exist. A scream upon which worlds could be built, upon which empires could rise and fall. Late at night I often find myself wondering more and more frequently if that was the truth of what I saw; that Bede was everything turned inside out, that all of the cosmos was held within those cold, white, unblinking eyes and that all of creation was just the endless, tortured scream of reality.

I blinked and tried to shake away the cobwebs of confusion that choked my brain, to affirm to myself that I was really alive, trying vainly to grasp where I was and even who I was.

Everything? I managed to choke out.

Bede nodded sagely, as if he knew the exact nature of what I had seen in his eyes, and the precise magnitude of what it truly was.

Everything, he replied.

Bede placed his little pot of ink on the floor of the room and wiped his finger on his bed sheet robe.

I am finished now, Bede said

You’re not going to write anymore?

My tenure is over.

What do you mean?

But Bede did not answer, he was already crawling into the corner of the room, curling himself into a tight little ball, wrapping his stained bed sheet about him. He closed his eyes and died.

Any further consultation as to the mental state of Bede and his move to the new hospital seemed somewhat moot after