A COUPLA NEW BOOKS - LONG WALK

According to all records I haven't posted anything so much as a fullstop for about two years and four hundred months. So, having since had three books rejected for various reasons, I decided to post them up here a chapter at a time. If you have too much time on your hands then feel free to enjoy...

LONG WALK HOME

(you can read the full book at: gettingbackalive.blogspot.com)

Prologue

Short Sprint to Freedom

He wakes thinking about sex. It’s the first thing on his mind. Today he will grow up. Today he will become a man. Today he will pack bags, no, just one bag, take as little as possible. He’ll slip out of the house, start running and not stop until he finds life. He’s had enough of living with domesticity. The boredom and the routine is killing him. It’s time to wake up and do the right thing. It’s time to run away. All he needs do now is steal his father’s money and break his mother’s heart. It’s a tough thing but it won’t take long. He’ll be in the arms of a good woman, no two good women, before you can say
Just desserts.

In a city not that far away a short angular man, with brutal creases in his brow, stands and stares into the sun. The glare is hard but he doesn’t flinch. He has plans too. Plans to break this madness which is gripping the city. He turns and stares hard at the temple. Those age old stones which cry out about justice and God. Those rocks hewn by the hands of the creator. God lives here, heaven and earth collide in there like two angry wrestlers, fighters joining forces to bring truth to the earth. And now there’s a blemish on the building. A growing, murderous faction who plot to undo the people of God and bring this temple crashing to its knees. They must be stopped. He can see them now, a sweating shadowy group of misfits. Lepers, builders, criminals, widows, prostitutes, killers, revolutionaries. All those set to desecrate the home of a perfect God. They’re plotting now, right in front of him, right in front of the Chief Priests and Scribes, the men who know and serve the Most High. They laugh and snort and spit in the face of authority. He balls his fists and tastes bile in his mouth. They` re poisoning this holy city, they are going to bring death on everyone. He won’t let it happen. He will bring death on them. He will execute the men, make slaves of the women and smash their children on rocks. It’s been done before to preserve truth. It can be done again. God will be pleased. Pleased and relieved. The blight that is discolouring the city will be no more. All he needs is the permission and authority. He turns, he walks, he breaks into a run. The adrenalin gives him wings, the excitement of the coming violence spurs him on.

Hannah counts the days, presses a hand to her flat stomach. There is no one around, she pushes back the material and studies the white skin. It doesn’t look any different. There is no more shape, no change to the flesh. But she knows, it’s true, deep down her spirit picks itself up off the floor and dusts itself down. It’s been a long time coming. Too many lonely nights, too many arguments, too many failed attempts. She feared the worst would come. But now this. Now a glimmer of hope, light at the end of this long and buckled tunnel. She slides her hand over her warm stomach. It feels no different. But she knows. It will never be the same again.

Outside, near the local brothel, her husband stands and stares. There’s a crowd of men loitering nearby, none of them wishing to appear they’re in any kind of queue. But they are. And woe betide the man who tries to move up a place. Not many prostitutes are beautiful. Most are down on their luck, good at their trade and not there for the view. You wouldn’t ache to kiss them on the lips. But this one is different, this one might never have been a prostitute. The men often wonder silently how she ended up like this, without a husband and family to accompany her beauty. But she’s alone, and she services the men and her body gives them what they want. Hannah’s husband has only watched from a distance. And they have seen him on many occasions standing there, wondering. He has a wife and she would be disgraced and the prostitute stoned if he crossed the brothel doorstep. But he can’t help wondering. Can’t help standing there imagining he is in the queue with these men, waiting for pleasure and adventure that isn’t just the same as the night before. He’ll never do it of course. He won’t abandon Hannah. But he can’t tear himself away either. It’s excitement enough to stand there and loiter and pretend he’s one of the free.

And in the queue, right at the back, stands a young man with one bag stuffed with money. He’s made it to the city. He lived through the terror of stealing from his father and ransacking his mother’s heart. And now he’s free. He ran hard and with every step he felt better. Now he knows, his life will really begin. He’ll never be the same again.

1. The Prodigal

It haunts him, the thought of eating human flesh. The memory of it. The taste that lingers and hangs like a culinary shadow in the dark recesses of his taste buds. Just when he thinks he’s shaken it off he recalls again the frantic tearing of uncooked white flesh and the desperate swallowing, for no reason than life itself. He had to stay alive. He had to do the undoable. He had to swallow. Though it almost made him throw up, almost rendered the whole process pointless. Now that would have been sickening. Summoning up the courage and the madness to eat a dead man, only to bring him all back up and end up more empty than before he started. He shakes it off, he has no need to remember it, he’s since found other food, other things he’d never imagined swallowing. He’ll continue to push away the memory until one day he’ll wake up and not be able to recall the taste of human flesh anymore. But when? The journey could be over any day now, yet the weariness and depression loom larger than ever.
He’s tired, starving, lonely and dying of thirst. He just wants to make his own grave and lie in it.

* * * * * *

If he’d have known what was in store when he started all that time back, he might never have put one foot in front of the other. His mind twists and turns now as he walks. It flicks up a thousand snapshots of the journey past. All the way back to a desperate day when he woke up under a pile of rubbish in a grim dawn of realisation, that day he staggered up and left the city life behind.

This journey is going to be a long one, any reason to delay it is useful. When you have a sordid past and a difficult future it is best to make the most of the present moment. Even the littlest things seem magical to him now that he is unsure of everything else.
So he stops and stares at a rock. Just another stone, like a thousand others on the road there. And a thousand other stones on a thousand other roads. Nothing remarkable. But he stares at it like a toddler, as if discovering it for the first time, having never seen that particular stone with that particular shade of grey before. Like God looking down at another benevolent act on planet earth.

He can’t put it off forever though.
He starts walking.
The days tick by.
Tick. Tick. Tick.

He’s been on the road three weeks now, though it feels longer. Three weeks since he limped away from squalor. Three weeks of traipsing across wasteland, leaving civilisation behind with each step; twenty-one days of desert and sun and loneliness and long, long nights. Only the cold moon for company in the dark, and the blazing sun each morning, sucking the water and the life from his bones. Sucking out his reason for living, his reason for the long walk home.

There are days when he thinks his time in the city might just all be a bad dream. A year of his life condensed into one night’s musings. He’ll wake up one morning and find he’s not walked through war zones and battlefields, or played the cheat and the liar, or done so many dark deals in the alleys behind houses and inns to raise a little more cash to keep his miserable existence going. He could have dreamt it all. It might still be possible, too much good cheese and fine wine before bed. But he never does wake up, not from that dream, instead his half-sleeping and disturbed nights always lead to the next day and the next. One hell after another, a cursed life that had come upon him like a plague he couldn’t shake off. Where did the good times go? He never saw this plague coming.

‘Don’t move or I’ll disembowel you where you stand.’
The white noise in his head is interrupted by a low volcanic rumble of a voice. It isn’t the first time he’s been threatened. He turns, raising his scum-spattered hand as he moves, his broken, claggy nails jutting upwards towards the sun like talons.
Standing in front of him is the ugliest man he’s ever seen. Dressed in rags and smelling like death warmed up. A hood of bandages has been pushed back around his face, revealing dark hair matted with some kind of strange pink and grey filth. Everything about the man has a grey tinge to it. Except his eyes, his eyes shine like torches blazing in the depths of a cave.
‘What do you want? I’ve done you no trouble…’
‘Shut up. Gimme your food.’
‘I haven’t got any food.’
The bandaged figure is taller and skinnier than him, a wiry spindle-chested bandit with a face of rotting paper mache. Wilting strips of hard grey flesh hang off it, dried and dead like peeling wallpaper.
‘What happened to you?’
The man sneers and his grey lips crack and shed a shower of dust. He coughs and sand trickles from the corners of his mouth.
‘You’re from some other world…’
The bandit sneers and raises his grey eyebrows.
‘You could say that, never thought I’d see the light of day again, that’s for sure. Got any money?’
The bandit waves the broken spear in his left hand, strapped across his skeletal hips there is a filth smeared dagger. Hanging next to it there is something that looks for all the world like a jawbone. His head swims. Has the bandit just finished stripping the flesh off it? He staggers back a little as the possibilities splash across his mind like a bucket of tripe.
‘You don’t look well,’ the bandit says.
‘I’ve been through a lot lately.’
The bandit laughs. ‘Not as much as me. Ever seen death close up?’
‘I think I’m looking at it now.’
‘Ever seen hell? I mean on the other side?’ the bandit snorts and shakes his head. He lowers his spear and stares up into the burning sky. He slumps and crouches in the dust.
‘Sit down with me will ya, sit down. It’s been a long time since I talked.’
He coughs and spits and his spit sits like a globule of grey and pink lava. He spits again and now there are two pink and grey eyes staring up at them from the dust. The prodigal sits.
‘Leprosy eats away at you,’ the bandit says and the prodigal recoils as he thrusts his left arm in the air. It’s a stiff solid stump wrapped in dirty cloth. He waves it at the prodigal.
‘Kills your body, and your soul, eats away at your flesh and your dignity, till there’s nothing left of you. Look.’
He raises his head and pulls the bandages down from his neck. A single line of knotted flesh runs from one ear to the other. An off-white cable of thin skin linking one side of his head to the other. The bandit runs his finger across it, remembering the moment as he caresses the hard tissue.
‘Did this myself, you know. Couldn’t think of another way to finish it. I wasn’t poor you know, I know what you’re thinking. I can see it in your eyes. You think I was some street beggar, drooling and shedding fingers and toes in the gutter, shaking a bowl and wailing to scare the kids away.’ He shakes his head. ‘I wouldn’t have been shoved in the ground with such dignity if that was true. I had money, I had position, I had power… and I had this.’ And he raises the stump again and waves it at the prodigal. ‘Didn’t have a lot of money by the end though. Wasted a lot of it on crackpot cures, on magic and sorcery and tricksters. In the end there was nothing left to do but shuffle off this mortal coil. So that’s when I did it, took the dagger and sliced my neck. Head swam, stomach spasmed, clothes ran with red, blood and stench everywhere. Died with dignity. I don’t think.’
The prodigal shifts uneasily.
‘This making you queasy? You ain’t heard the best of it yet.’
He spits again and wipes more sand and dust from his lips.
‘It’s real you know, the world on the other side. It’s not all ghost stories and fables. It’s out there – like another dimension really, felt like melting through an invisible wall. Like finding a secret doorway in the horizon. Lots of other people were there. Didn’t get to see much of paradise though. Got dragged away.’
‘To hell?’ the prodigal asks, his voice is dry and reluctant,
The bandit laughs. ‘Thanks! That’s a compliment, you reckon that’s where I should be? No pearly gates for me then? Just straight to hell and stoke up the burners. Another one for the spit. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but it wasn’t like that.’
‘I didn’t mean…’
‘I don’t care what you meant. What happened is what happened. And this story is my latest curse, cause who’s gonna believe it? There was an earthquake down under, and it was as if a hand reached down like a plume of smoke and grabbed me by the collar, yanked me up and tore me through a hundred layers of sand and clay. Next thing you know I’m sitting up caked in grave dirt, coughing up phlegm and dust and death all over everything. And with this intact.’
He jabs his good hand at the scar again. Runs his healthy fingers across his throat.
‘And now I’m starving. Haven’t eaten for days. Whoever woke me up and brought me back neglected to leave a three course meal by the grave. I’ve been wandering about ever since, desperate for something. Found this bit of bone, some old animal, but no meat on it.’
He waves his good hand at the jawbone strapped to his waste.
‘Still, might be able to kill something with it and devour that.’
And his eyes blaze at the prodigal as he says this, then he flaps his stump.
‘Don’t panic, I ain’t gonna start with you. Man you’d have to think I was desperate to start eating human flesh.’
He picks up his spear and jabs the prodigal in the chest with it then shrugs.
‘Not that much meat on you anyway.’
The bandit gets up.
‘I wouldn’t go that way if I were you,’ he gestures up the road. ‘Long way to any life up there, I’d go back the way you were coming, that’s where I’m going. I’m going to find a few old mates and scare ‘em to death.’
And the bandit starts along the road, stepping in the sandy tracks the prodigal has left behind him.
As he goes the bandage on his bad arm begins to unravel, strip by filthy strip it disengages from his old flesh and falls away. And as the prodigal watches new fingers emerge from the shroud. Soft white pink knuckles, clean nails, smooth joints. The bandit glances back and gives him a simple wave. A simple wave with a once dead hand.