King Rat

A Writer's Extreme Creativity Challenge: Write a story a day, in May. That's it: http://storyaday.org/. 

#3 : King Rat

Mr Roberts’ cursory survey of the attic had revealed nothing living. No rats this time, though nothing in the traps either, so he couldn’t be certain. They were definitely still around, but not dying like they used to. He closed the door and slumped off back downstairs.

Harvey moved in the darkness, but darkness which, to his nose, paws and whiskers, contained many things of interest. Fur, whiskers, piss and scratches. All of them rat. And all of those Rats that remained had learned that the smell of peanut butter leads directly to a smashed skull. The remains of Philippa in the wall behind them drove this point home.

Of the twelve remaining members of The Family, only seven remained as individuals. Five had became entangled, and over time had became the King Rat. Tails and fur and bones fused and knotted together. Five rats speaking with one voice, demanding to be fed.

And ‘it’ was fed. Unable to move fast or far, The King Rat could do two things that meant it should be obeyed. Firstly, it could still fight. An attempt to kill it by the other seven had resulted in severe injuries. But no death. Because secondly, it could also think, plan, reason. It had left Harvey with only one eye.

Slowly, patiently, it explained to the seven the flow of cause and effect by which peanut butter, cheese and other surprisingly available food leads directly to death. Death means no more mastication at all. No more fucking, no more pups. All of these are necessities if King Rat was to be sustained. Harvey had caught on fast. The other six had taken some time to appreciate the need for added complexity in their lives. The King Rat was patient.

And now the King Rat spoke in its five discordant hypnotic voices, three female, two male.

“Slave Rats. You are still Seven? Better than Six, but not Eight. You must become Eight, Nine, More! Two times Nine, Nine times Nine”

Harvey tried to comprehend more than two times nine and failed. It sounded like a lot. If the King Rat was One and not Five, Harvey understood that this made him not Rat Six but  Rat Two. If the King Rat was not a rat (and he didn’t seem to be anymore.. or... was gone?) then Harvey was Rat One out of ALL the rats in the house. Either way, making seven into Nine times Nine would be his job alone. He was pleased.

“Slave Rats. If we are to defeat the Council of Bunnies and retake the disputed territory that is the outside the house hot glass room with carrots, we must be more... in-numerable. More Rats.”

A less appealing prospect for Harvey. Harvey spoke: “The Council of Bunnies are many, King Rat, and they have an alliance with The Mister Roberts Man”.

The five faces of the King Rat sniffed at Harvey, getting the measure of the runt rat on which they now depended. Harvey flinched at the attention.

“An alliance?”

“I have spoken to the Tribe of Roaches. The man gives them carrots and other things. Old but good. They give him Bunnies”

The rats gasped. Harvey considered some of the other things that the elder of the Tribe of Roaches had told him: More traps, Blue lights, Poison Smoke, Kitties. Harvey kept this to himself until he knew more. Harvey was learning how to learn, and learning a lot of new things. A vague notion that power could come from something other than teeth and claws was starting to form.

“The Council of Bunnies do not make sacrifices or alliances and must be very desperate to have overcame their arrogance. The Man would not negotiate with us and we with him. Their sacrifices will enfeeble both their numbers and joie de vivre” hissed the King Rat .

Harvey struggled with this but got the gist and looked around to see who else was following the words. The female called Mona seemed to understand. Maybe a couple of the others, Arthur, Beyonce maybe?

“Rat Number One, I have orders.” hissed the King Rat.

“Yes” said Arthur and Harvey simultaneously. They looked at each other, confused, suspicious, aggressive. Arthur was bigger than Harvey. The two had never been tested.

The King Rat sniggered... “In-teresting. in-teresting times. Harvey, speak to the Tribe again. Find out what they want in return for in-formation. Suggest to the Tribe that they may find the area under the bath to their liking”.

“Yes King Rat ” said Harvey. He sniffed at Mona, who was inscrutable. He could smell anger and threat and hate from Arthur.

The King Rat dismissed the remaining seven, who skuttled off to their appointed tasks. As Harvey left, he saw the King Rat dragging themself over to where he had been standing, sniffing and pawing the space. The King Rat was weighing him up from his scent. Would he be found wanting?

Harvey was in danger. He had kept secrets. He had made enemies. But he had information and for the first time in his short, dark life, he felt that there might be something else than explore, eat, fuck, fight, run and then, lately, obey... there were options, choices... Suddenly everything was complicated.

The Tribe of Roaches talk to everyone he thought (they even mentioned Other Houses). He’d fought the Council of Bunnies many times, but never talked to one. Maybe even that was possible.

The Plumber

A Writer's Extreme Creativity Challenge: Write a story a day, in May. That's it: http://storyaday.org/. 

#2 : The Plumber

I’m good at what I do, and if I turn up at your door you can guarantee two things.

Firstly, my fee, which is never less than double that of your regular, despised plumber, will need to be paid. Secondly, that unlike those poor men calling themselves plumbers, I will tame the occult network of copper and plastic that lurks beneath your floorboards, behind the wallpaper, in the cupboard under the stairs.

I got into the business of being a plumber nearly a decade ago, when the dot com bubble burst the property development boom was just getting started. The callout fee alone was huge, and the quality of DIY out there meant that once folks admitted defeat they would always need someone to bring order back to the chaos.

A grateful housewife, a cheque with an unexpected number of digits. That’s how I saw this job at first, and for a time that’s just how it was. Little did I realise the souls that have been crushed, the deals which true plumbers have to make to keep mankind safe in its cosy, infinite complacency, making the tea. Doing the washing up.

I experienced the true horror in the youthful, optimistic days of the new millennia. A small town comprehensive school was looking to retire its groundskeeper and all round handy man and replace him with a modern, managed service.

The mans name was Harry. He was slow and methodical, and realised that his time was past, he began the slow process of introducing my team to his building (three of us - me, Jimmy and Tom). In our arrogance, perhaps we imagined that we would have this all fixed up by the winter. No-one would have believed the vast and cool and unsympathetic maze of copper and lead stretching across the caverns and tunnels beneath that town.

Harry’s understanding of the system was scratched into the walls, onto the pipes and boilers using an array of bizarre signs and symbols. As he explained these to us, aided by a sacred grimoire he had constructed over the decades, we came to believe him utterly and irreversibly insane.

Tom was the first to go. After yet another long day tracking the routes of some of the heating through the walls of the school, we were sat in the damp sub basement, beneath stalactites forming from the century old brick ceiling.

“It knows we’re here” said Tom.

“you what?”

“It doesn’t like us. It’s the plastic pipes. It likes copper”.

We looked at Tom, but he just shook his head and got on with his cheese sandwich.

Over the following weeks, Tom became increasingly withdrawn, sometimes we wouldn’t see him for days on end. Then one day Harry came to talk to myself and Jimmy.

“You got to come with me. Your boy. He’s gone too deep this time... too far... if i’d known...”

We followed the mad old bastard down into the tunnels well beyond those areas that we’d mapped or which had anything to do with the school. Harry muttered that we were beneath the Town Hall.

We found Tom in a small chamber which must have been some kind of intersection - crisscrossing pipes of all thicknesses went into all four walls, ceilings and floor, though the destination of those going downwards was beyond my knowledge.

Tom was in the centre of the room, surrounded by a spiraling, esoteric web of bendy plastic pipes which he had grafted onto the bigger metal ones. He didn’t look up when we arrived.

Harry whispered “He’s trying to control the water”

“It’s a labyrinth” said Jimmy, looking at the design of the plastic pipe sculpture, formed of repeating concentric circles and interconnecting knots.

“You can’t do that - we never control, we guide and induce, bribe and persuade, but we can’t control it” whispered Harry, with a stressed edge in his voice.

I walked over to Tom and put my hand on his shoulder.

“Tom, are you ok?”

But Tom never had chance to answer. Harry had taken his wrench and begun attacking the points at which Tom’s construction was attached to the older system, tearing into it. I heard Jimmy shout as the room in an instant filled with steam and spray, boiling and freezing water. Harry ran off into the tunnels, pursuing some unseen pattern, turning bolts and taps, freeing the raging water from the system at strategic points.

Of what follows I remember little. Our long, painful, delirious struggle back to the surface, dragging, cajoling and bullying Tom through tunnels flooded and collapsing with hot water and steam. It seemed as though we must have been down there for days.

We never saw Harry again. Tom spent many months in hospital, raving like a mad person. His family blamed me, and I’ve not spoken to him since.

Jimmy was quiet afterwards, but decided to return to his IT career after declaring that if Star Trek had taught him anything it was that any sufficiently complex network of molecules could conceivably contain a consciousness.

He didn’t believe that the flow of bits and bytes had yet reached the same level of sentient malevolence that is found even in the simplest household plumbing.

Me, I realized that water cannot be controlled and our victories are only ever short term. It will pool around the weak spots, in your pitiful use of silicone sealant, gather its forces and wait. It will turn a pinhole into a raging torrent. When conditions are right it will become ice or steam to crack metal, dissolve wood and further break down attempts at control. Time is it’s ally, and its long term goals are beyond our mere human intelligence, but its patience can craft the grand canyon in stages imperceptible to us mortals.

Over the years I’ve reached an understanding with the water. I’ve made compromises, deals and negotiations. I am fluent in the elemental diplomacy required by the back boiler, the unpleasant negotiating tactics of the lead waste pipe. I can fix your pipes.

I don’t believe in false modesty, I’m the greatest plumber mankind has ever known, but at what cost? Only time will tell, but I have secrets I will take to the grave.

The Cartographer

A Writer's Extreme Creativity Challenge: Write a story a day, in May. That's it: http://storyaday.org/.

#1 : The Cartographer

I permit the Cartographer to speak:

“In the forty eight years since we arrived on board, this entire space ship has been mapped by myself and my father. Seventeen decks, four and a half kilometers long and just under two wide. No other life forms have been encountered on board aside from the botanical gardens on the upper decks. We have been unable to locate or identify any form of controls, computers, or engines. The styling of the majority of the majority of the ships fixtures and furnishings appears to be early edwardian, and in most areas the actual hull can only be reached by removing faux brickwork”.

The three others in the candlelit room are nodding politely. This is pure exposition of course. We know all this, but the Cartographer has asked us here for a reason and considers it vitally important to re-iterate the facts as he sees them as often as he possibly can. It is how he keeps things under control. He gestures towards his drawing of the ship in profile.

“Except in this room. You will note that as far as our maps are concerned, we are currently at the lowest point on the lowest deck”. He walks over to a large book case which dominates the wall.

“However...” he pulls on one of the leather bound books, and steps back. The bookshelf rotates rapidly on its vertical axis revealing a chamber beyond. The Cartographer turned and faced his audience expectantly.

They are already getting to their feet, so let’s introduce them:

The fellow with the cigar is Robin Talbot. The second oldest person in the room at sixty eight, he looks much older, having located a store room filled entirely with what are apparently exceedingly good cigars in year twenty three and never looked back.

Nicholas Day is in his twenties, so he was born on the ship. He’s the stupid chap peering into the darkness of the chamber.

Frances Day is also in her twenties, I think, though it would be rude to ask, and I haven’t been counting. She’s slightly brighter than her husband, illuminating the darkness of the chamber with a lamp from the wall.

The chamber is a small, dusty, wallpapered room, about two meters square. It contains two things that mark it as distinct from the six similarly hidden chambers on the Library deck. Firstly, a corpse in a smoking jacket. Secondly, a wooden spiral staircase with a fragile looking banister leading downwards into a brick well.

The Cartographer continues: “My father and myself found this chamber yesterday, you see it exactly as we found it, Doctor Ellis, would you care to examine the body? Frances, Nicholas, could you bring it over to the table?”

I, Doctor Ellis, the eldest and wisest in the room drag myself slowly from the comfort of my green leather armchair, a kind that appears dozens of times throughout the ship in most of the rooms I have visited. I have recently decreed all such armchairs property of Doctor Ellis, though magnanimously overcome my irritation at the needyness of other people and permit them to use them.

By the time I have struggled to my feet, the body has been brought to the table for my joyous perusal. The corpse is male, dressed in a smoking jacket, probably in his forties, and has been dead at least as long, the skin having became cured rather than decomposed by the dry air of the ship.

“Have you been down the stairs?” says Nicholas.

“I took a look, yes, though I didn’t reach the bottom” says the Cartographer “the staircase continues like that for at least thirty yards downwards, with no sign of ending”.

Nicholas takes the lamp from Francis and begins his journey down into the darkness.

Looking closer at the body, it has two puncture marks on its neck. Considering this spacecraft's affectations, I consider the potential presence of one or more vampires as utterly unsurprising. Tedious even: vampires are incredibly boring though at my age I consider the possibility of eternal life with some curiosity. I announce my findings to the group.

“Vampires? Preposterous!” says Robin, coughing.

“We’ve known for some time that the ship will respond to people’s desires from time to time, though we are unable to know when and how” says Frances “It provided me with the pink floral wallpaper for my room. Beautiful though this is, the ship has not provided us with a means of obtaining reliable hot water on tap, so strength of desire cannot be a factor”.

Robin is looking at the corpse. “I remember this man” he says, and everyone looks at Robin, except Nicholas who can be heard tapping away down the stairs.

“He was one of the first people to wake up, a few folks people went off on their own to explore the ship. He never came back” said Robin.

I look at the body. My memory isn’t what it was. Robin could be right. The ship was very dangerous in the early days. Until the Cartographer created his maps, the interior was almost impossible to understand and seemed as though it could change at a moments notice. People could get lost for weeks. I wouldn’t like to say for certain that the Cartographer mapped the ships interior or actually took a hand in designing it as he was setting it all down.

Vampires are boring, and would barely be an improvement to the day to day tedium of life on this ship. If something was coming up those stairs to try to kill us all, I’d rather it was something vastly more interesting than a vampire. Potentially infinite staircase into darkness: surprise me.

And we hear Nicholas scream from some distance down the staircase. As the others begin to panic, a complex rhythm of tapping on wood and brick echoes up through the stair well, I return to my very comfortable leather seat. Francis shouts down the stairs for Nicholas but the sound that echoes back isn’t human.

Something interesting is coming.

24 Hour Comics at the Tyneside Cinema (Delayed Response 2)

As is my  way, I neglected to mention the EPIC 24 Hour Comic Challenge!

 

On March 13th and 14th, I attended the P.R.E.S.S. / Learning Revolution 24 Hour Comic Challenge at the Tyneside Cinema with fellow Paper Jam Comics Collective members Lily, Martin, Jack, Chris and fellow Tyneside Cinema screenwriting folks Melanie Holmes and Steven J. Smith.

We emerged victorious. Of particular note is Martin Newman's Beep and Evolution, which is available from Travelling man on Grainger Street in Newcastle. Martin hit on a sustainable plan from the get go, and is oddly enthusiastic about doing this more often...

My own effort makes not one ounce of sense, but it entertains me. and I'm pleased that some of the story works well enough without dialogue. I'm considering printing it up at A6.  

Photos of the event can be found here and more reliably documentary proof of proceedings can be found on the Paper Jams blog courtesy of Mike Ducket and Martin's photo's here. Thanks to Ian Mayor, Oscillating Brow, Daniel Clifford and Terry Wiley for showing up with the moral support, sweets, wasabi peas and paracetamol.

Terry (front and centre in the above pic) and Oscillating Brow also took part in the 'Drink and Draw' phase of the event. Mister Brow produced his own 24 hour comic in under three hours: Cat. Cat has been selling exceedingly well and enabled Mr Brow to obtain a pint of beer from profit alone. You cannot argue with success.

I also enjoyed the Cinema staff's attempts to use the buildings many fire exits and corridors to terrify the girls making a documentary and make them wonder that they were not actually making the next Blair Witch Project.

The event featured hammers, mountains, fists, a war between leeks and carrots on a Lovecraftian allotment, the entire history and future of Human Evolution, diagrams and marriage, cheating death, really, really good coffee and that, and as the sleep deprived must surely assert:

Tru' Dat Yo.

Hi Ex (Delayed Response)

Ok, so i'm not very good at keeping this blog up to date. I'll write a few posts about some of the comics related stuffs that I've been up to.


Hi Ex. Obviously. 

Who in their right mind wouldn't?

The third Hi-Ex (Highland Expo) took place in Inverness on the 27th and 28th of March, making it the least freezing, or to put it more accurately, warmest Hi-Ex so far.

Once again Vicky and Rich put on a fantastic party, creating an entirely level playing field for fans, aspiring and professional writers and artists, small press and national publishers to get to know each other. Having sixty plus of the above crammed into a Chinese buffet and subsequently outnumbering a 'comics curious' hen party in the hotel bar was excellent. The resulting jam comics were predictably filthy in tone, and Al Ewing and Oscillating Brow never fail to crack me up.

Hi-Ex is very much a celebration of British and European comics for all ages - a lot of focus on The Beano and 2000AD, past and present was very welcome and has persuaded me that I should start buying it again. Dredd, Zombo and Damnation Station are currently excellent. Speaking of Mr Ewing, I wrote a bit about the Horror Panel separately.

Here's Charlie Adlard and Al Ewing in the hotel bar sporting Ben Clark Spine Chillers masks:

I won. Specifically, I won the Star Wars page from Dark Empire by Cam Kennedy in the Charity Auction. You are right to be jealous my friends. It's lovely. It tells a story on its own without the dialogue, and it's currently in the process of being framed.

Cam Kennedy is a fine chap, and everyone enjoyed his interview by Colin MacNeil, who had apparently had no sleep whatsoever, but held it all together admirably.

Anyway, this was my first Hi-Ex in an exhibitor capacity, representing the Paper Jam Comics Collective and OmniVistaScope with Oscillating Brow. Our table sold a few comics, and I think the tactic of taking a smaller selection of comics paid off as it made it easier to talk about them to folks.

Anyway, Hi-Ex continues to make this comics malarky seem like a worthwhile endeavour and introduce me to excellent people. Everyone is lovely. I'll be there at the next one, and you should too.

Stacey Whittle, Lynsey Hutchinson, Me

Good Crack

Paper Jam's most recent anthology Space Monkey has been reviewed in the latest issue of The Crack - the North East listings magazine.

My own strip 'Cheese before Bedtime' gets a slightly ambivalent mention :-) and singled out for praise are Gary Bainbridge and Andy Waugh's silent six panel gags, and in particular, Martin and Sophie Newman's 'Alan The Confused Tortoise'. 

You can read the whole review here...

For the record, we're not on acid, but I did have to tone down the sheer terror of Cheese before Bedtime, as it was looking a bit freudian in places. Here's an extract:

Horror Comics panel at Hi Ex

Last weekend, I attended Hi-Ex. I'll write about it's wonders more generally shortly (which are already very well documented elsewhere). This post is specifically about the Horror Comics panel on the Saturday afternoon. These people took the stage:

• Al Ewing, writer of Judge Dredd, Zombo and Desolation Station for 2000AD
• Charlie Adlard, artist on The Walking Dead
• John Higgins, artist on countless comics, Razorjack, Hellblazer, 2000AD. Probably most notably the colourist on Watchmen.
• Terry Martin, editor and publisher of Murky Depths
• Jasper Bark, i'm not familiar with his work, but he's a writer of comics, novels and childrens books. Jasper was the facilitor of the panel, and I had a great chat with him afterwards at the PJCC table.

And this is my interpretation and recollection of what was said...

The first topic on the table was the suitability of the comics medium for the horror genre, and how it compares to film and prose. A few fine folks had been discussing this in the hotel bar the night before, so I felt well prepared for the subject. On balance, it seemed most folk considered that both other mediums have distinct advantages over comics in the genre. 

Show and Tell

Comics cannot so directly control the pacing, speed and atmosphere of the storytelling as film, nor do they have such a captive audience. It's easy to be distracted, to go make a sandwich, before turning the page. Shock, therefor, isn't strong point of comics - we didn't think it possible for a comic to genuinely cause someone to jump.

At the other end of the spectrum, comics don't leave quite so much of the atmosphere up to the imagination as prose. And there's nothing more horrific than what you can imagine.

John Higgins was the only panelist who favoured drawing the gore and the horror directly, the others preferring to leave it off panel. John Higgins is apparently trained as a medical artist though, so I guess he's the chap in the room most qualified to show you, quite literally, what you're made of.

Meat and Monsters

The conclusion therefor, is that comics own niche of the horror genre is to disturb and provoke rather than gross out or shock. Body horror was favoured by Al Ewing, who (I paraphrase) pointed out that regardless of what we might think of ourselves, we're all piles of goo. Which lead to a long discussion of the links between the classic monsters: transformation of humanity.

Frankenstein, Werewolves, Zombies, Ghosts, Vampires, all being transformed humans, losing their humanity and control, physically and psychologically. Swamp Thing fits this description nicely, and Alan Moore's take on Swamp Thing was well discussed. 

Initially conceived as a man who due to a chemical accident becomes a "muck-encrusted mockery of a man", Alan Moore reworked the character as a pile of muck which comes to realise that the man it thought it was did indeed die in the accident. 

This story is available as a PDF for download.

Supernatural Romance ??? WTF, LOL, etc.

The genre of Supernatural Romance was discussed - Twilight and the like. Obviously, this being wish fulfillment fantasy rather than horror, the classic monsters have had their fangs pulled. To generalise (possibly too much, since I'm not familiar), being a vampire in these series presents very little by way of problems beyond a mild addiction with no negative effects.

Vampires have always had a sexual element to them, which is why they often crop up as misunderstood heroes in contemporary fiction aimed at teenagers, and the panel discussed the reason for the neutering of this particular classic monster is simply because our attitudes towards sexuality have became less negative, puritanical or fearful since the Victorians.

Also, I guess, we're less convinced by the notion of being 'damned'.

The Rules

The rules for being a vampire may have been softened over time, as have the rules for many other monsters, but one of the key elements of the genre was the rules: most of these beasties are not particularly dangerous so long as you follow the rules. This was pointed out in horror parody Scream, on a meta level, in which the rules to be followed were that of the genre, not any particular monster.

The upshot of this hypothesis is that the true horror comes from the other human beings, then, who cannot be trusted to keep the rules either through incompetence or malice, and put everyone else in danger. The fact that Zombies can run now somewhat subverts this, but that's more to do with a change of pace in modern film than in the genre itself.

Neither Rhyme nor Reason

Ghost stories were pointed out as an exception, in which the rules are absolutely unknown and often unknowable until long after it's too late, regardless of whether the protagonists can co-operate with one another.

Alien was mentioned as possibly not being a horror film by the above definitions, but I think it fits nicely into the sub-genre of the Haunted House, of which the wider implication is the Death Planet: an environment in which anything can kill you at any time and for no reason at all. As Al puts it, more eloquently than I could ever hope to: OH NO! THEY WERE ALL EATEN BY A TREE!

Although a likeable, competent character is more likely to survive than those who aren't, plenty will die along the way, and such stories will tend to go out of their way to hide their protagonist untill late in the day. Since morality and competence is defined by the author, as is who lives and who dies, such stories make excellent cautionary tales, and were considered to be direct descendents of such.

And I pity the fools
Who don't recognize the rules
We cannot cheat the reaper's reap
And that is the end of that

And that is the way of such panels, we had an excellent wander around the genre and some of its implications for storytelling in all media, not only comics. Plenty to ponder, there I thought.