I promised a story piece around every Wednesday... but I didn't promise when. Still, I just finished up the first part. It's a little longer, but it's a bit more action packed. All the feedback from the last part was invaluable and I look forward to seeing more of it. Oh, there's also a regular blog post at the end of this story piece, so if you don't feel like reading the story and just feel like checking up on me, skip down there. There's also some links to some funny pictures you might enjoy.
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“Barrenhollow Blues”
A serial novel in progress (Week 2 of ???)
By Cliff Hicks
Chapter One
Anyone who tells you that all thieves sleep lightly is lying. Some do, I’m sure. Some sleep so lightly that even a mouse pissing will wake them up. I would like to stress, however, that I am not one of those kinds of thieves.
I was sleeping quite soundly when someone broke into my house. And while normally I wouldn’t have woken up, I, being the paranoid thief that I am, have several alarms configured to wake me up in just such an occasion as that one.
As one of the alarm spells shook me from my slumber, there were two large gentlemen breaking into the ground floor of my home. I am, of course, using the term “gentlemen” loosely, but “armed thugs” just sounds so thuggish. And it would be awfully presumptuous of me. Still, they were breaking into my place.
I heard them move straight towards the stairs, meaning they were intent on something particular. Me, I had rightly assumed. So when the two well-armed fellows busted through my bedroom door with crossbows drawn, pointing straight at my bed, I was more than ready for them.
I wasn’t in the bed.
Despite the fact that my door was in splinters on the ground, I wasn’t all that concerned. The two men rushed into the room, unloading their crossbows into the pillows I’d put under my sheets to look like me. The loud twangs gave them away and they charged the bed, shucking their crossbows aside and drawing short swords. Only one of them made it to the bed, as I’d shoved a knife through the throat of the second before he was more than few steps into the room.
Instead of simply laying in bed while these two men rushed in to kill me, I was hanging on a perch above my door. Everyone always wonders why people like large bedrooms. I have but two words: high ceilings.
After pitching the first corpse aside, I ran towards the second man, whom I caught completely off guard. Now while I’m sure he was expecting me to be attacking him with a knife or a blade of some kind, I was planning on finding out exactly what the hell these two thugs were doing in my house. So instead of a knife, I kicked my heel into his throat. Not quite enough force to crush it, but more than enough to knock him out. There’s a satisfying sound of an unconscious body slumping to the floor that you just can’t get anywhere else.
Less than an hour later, I was interrogating the bastard in my basement. All of these old houses have basements that sprawl on forever – deep, cold and barren, like a whore’s heart. And just as isolated.
A good four stories beneath the surface, I walked into the room where my captive was bound to a wall by chains. “So,” I said to him, “it looks like you didn’t listen when they were giving you a briefing and told you the part about me having done four years in military and espionage with the Imperial Army during the last War.”
The man sneered at me. He was wholly unremarkable in every way possible, as nondescript a thug as you could possibly find. No remarkable facial features, no scars, no facial hair. The man who I’d killed earlier had the exact same lack of remarkableness. It was uncanny and disturbing. Call it the thief in me, but I like some detail I can latch onto, something I can attach to these people so that I can remember them in years past and draw strength from them.
Just because I’m good at killing people doesn’t mean I like it much.
“Doesn’ matter. There’ll be more. More killers, more robbers, more people coming for you. You’re gonna be lookin’ over your shoulder the rest of your life. Jus’ gimme the stones an’ lemme go and you can have yer life back,” he spat. “Otherwise i’s never gonna stop… never.”
“The stones? What do you want the…”
“No questions, jus’ yes’r’no, right now,” he wheezed.
I cocked my head to the side a little, staring at him carefully, weighing my options and humoring this presumptuous little prick for a moment. It felt like hours before my voice broke the silence. “No.”
“Y’r funeral,” he said, spitting blood onto the stone floor. “An’ mine. Firastican vitae en morte.” I could hear the words rolling off his lips, but it was as if my body was moving through molasses in an attempt to stop him, running only a few feet before I was blasted back against the wall of my torture chamber when his body exploded into flames, consuming him into ashes immediately. Dead men tell no tales.
After a few minutes, I drew myself back up to my feet and dusted my clothes off. “Bastard.” It was time to find out just what the hell I’d gotten myself into. I moved back up the stairs and into my room, getting a change of clothes so I’d look like I’d fit in with the slumlands a bit more. I knew I had an old friend to see, and I thought to myself that if he didn’t have some answers, it was going to be a very bad morning indeed.
* * *
“What do you mean you can’t move them?” I asked River, my fence of many years. “You’re the one who set me up with the damn job, and you quoted prices to me!”
River wiped grease off his hands, almost as if he was wiping his hands of me. “Well, now I’m unquoting prices to you,” that gravelly voice of his said to me. Like all criminals of Barrenhollow, River had a legitimate business to keep himself low profile – he fixed carts and wagons. “There’s no way I can move those stones. Not now, not ever. You’d be better off giving them back to the House you stole them from.”
“Give them back? Are you MAD?” I was shouting almost at the top of my lungs now. “If the House of Camdion found out who stole those stones, they’d have an entire legion burning down my front gate right now, Hollow rules or not!”
“Well, then give them or charity or something. Toss them in a gutter somewhere. I don’t care what you do with them, but get them out of my shop!” he threatened. “I feel uneasy just having them in here.”
“What’s gotten into you, River?” River wasn’t his real name of course – I don’t even know what his real name was – but it was what everyone called him, as anything that moved in this town flowed through him.
“Look, Barrett,” he said to me as he put his hand on my shoulder. I never liked when he did that. It meant bad things. “You’ve been like a son to me since you’ve gotten back from the war. I mean it. I know people always tell fellows things like that right before they lay into them with the bad news, but in my case it comes from my heart. If I had another way out of this, I would take it.” He paused and took a long deep breath, lowering his eyes before he raised them back up to match my stare, a resolve I liked even less behind those dark brown orbs of his. “I don’t. Go. Get rid of the stones and forget you ever touched them.”
“River…”
“NO. I want you to go. Now.”
“River…”
“Barrett. Now.” I had forgotten I was holding the bag with the stones in my hand the whole time, but I remembered as he looked down at the bag with a sense of trepidation and fear. “And take those cursed things with you.”
I turned away from him and walked towards the entrance of his garage. As I reached the doorway, I paused to look back, only to see him shake his head at me and turn away. I tucked the bag into my pocket and moved away from the garage. There would be no answers here, and only more questions that I didn’t even want to ask.
--------------
So? More action, yes? Not quite as much as I know everyone was hoping for, but we've still got more coming. The story's just getting started and I don't want to fire all barrels right at the beginning. Please leave more feedback, as I'm genuinely interested.
Now, on to other things...
The pictures I was talking about? This is me in 1999. Not bad, but not great. This second picture, however, is one of the best pictures I've ever seen taken of me. This is me in early 1997. Both of these pictures were taken during my tenure at The Daily Nebraskan, where I put in five years. The first one is just me at a party the DN was holding. I don't even remember who that is next to me, truth be told. The second picture, however, was the first column headshot the DN ever took of me. They hadn't given me any warning, they hadn't told me even that pictures were going to be taken -- I basically just showed up for work one day and they said "We're running your first column tomorrow. Go get a mug shot taken." As it turns out, they delayed my column by a day because of breaking news, so I came back the next day, clean shaven and having actually slept (in that second picture, I've been up around 48 hours), and a new mug shot was taken. And this mugshot never saw print. It was, however, shown at EVERY Daily Nebraskan semester end banquet I ever attended. At every banquet, they would show all these pictures of staff members at parties, looking goofy and whatnot. Well, I figured when I left the DN that the picture was gone, which would have been a shame, because I'm particularly fond of it. As it turns out, the DN celebrated 100 years of publication not long ago and they put together a collection of all these slides and posted them to the web. So there you have them.
In other news, I've been listening to this new Audioslave album a lot since it came out on Tuesday. If you have heard of them, it's Chris Cornell (who used to be the lead singer of Soundgarden) with the three musicians (and NOT the rapper) of Rage Against the Machine. They've formed this new band that's great with this cool, energetic sound... I'm really digging the CD, so you might want to check it out.
That's all for tonight (although technically it's morning, but hell with it) ... so enjoy your story section, and I'll try and post other random thoughts from work tomorrow.
NOW PLAYING: Audioslave - "Hypnotize"
Lyrics: "Well, it's time to see, / You've got to give or you're gonna receive / It's time to see / You've got to live if you wanna believe / You can be."
-------------
“Barrenhollow Blues”
A serial novel in progress (Week 2 of ???)
By Cliff Hicks
Chapter One
Anyone who tells you that all thieves sleep lightly is lying. Some do, I’m sure. Some sleep so lightly that even a mouse pissing will wake them up. I would like to stress, however, that I am not one of those kinds of thieves.
I was sleeping quite soundly when someone broke into my house. And while normally I wouldn’t have woken up, I, being the paranoid thief that I am, have several alarms configured to wake me up in just such an occasion as that one.
As one of the alarm spells shook me from my slumber, there were two large gentlemen breaking into the ground floor of my home. I am, of course, using the term “gentlemen” loosely, but “armed thugs” just sounds so thuggish. And it would be awfully presumptuous of me. Still, they were breaking into my place.
I heard them move straight towards the stairs, meaning they were intent on something particular. Me, I had rightly assumed. So when the two well-armed fellows busted through my bedroom door with crossbows drawn, pointing straight at my bed, I was more than ready for them.
I wasn’t in the bed.
Despite the fact that my door was in splinters on the ground, I wasn’t all that concerned. The two men rushed into the room, unloading their crossbows into the pillows I’d put under my sheets to look like me. The loud twangs gave them away and they charged the bed, shucking their crossbows aside and drawing short swords. Only one of them made it to the bed, as I’d shoved a knife through the throat of the second before he was more than few steps into the room.
Instead of simply laying in bed while these two men rushed in to kill me, I was hanging on a perch above my door. Everyone always wonders why people like large bedrooms. I have but two words: high ceilings.
After pitching the first corpse aside, I ran towards the second man, whom I caught completely off guard. Now while I’m sure he was expecting me to be attacking him with a knife or a blade of some kind, I was planning on finding out exactly what the hell these two thugs were doing in my house. So instead of a knife, I kicked my heel into his throat. Not quite enough force to crush it, but more than enough to knock him out. There’s a satisfying sound of an unconscious body slumping to the floor that you just can’t get anywhere else.
Less than an hour later, I was interrogating the bastard in my basement. All of these old houses have basements that sprawl on forever – deep, cold and barren, like a whore’s heart. And just as isolated.
A good four stories beneath the surface, I walked into the room where my captive was bound to a wall by chains. “So,” I said to him, “it looks like you didn’t listen when they were giving you a briefing and told you the part about me having done four years in military and espionage with the Imperial Army during the last War.”
The man sneered at me. He was wholly unremarkable in every way possible, as nondescript a thug as you could possibly find. No remarkable facial features, no scars, no facial hair. The man who I’d killed earlier had the exact same lack of remarkableness. It was uncanny and disturbing. Call it the thief in me, but I like some detail I can latch onto, something I can attach to these people so that I can remember them in years past and draw strength from them.
Just because I’m good at killing people doesn’t mean I like it much.
“Doesn’ matter. There’ll be more. More killers, more robbers, more people coming for you. You’re gonna be lookin’ over your shoulder the rest of your life. Jus’ gimme the stones an’ lemme go and you can have yer life back,” he spat. “Otherwise i’s never gonna stop… never.”
“The stones? What do you want the…”
“No questions, jus’ yes’r’no, right now,” he wheezed.
I cocked my head to the side a little, staring at him carefully, weighing my options and humoring this presumptuous little prick for a moment. It felt like hours before my voice broke the silence. “No.”
“Y’r funeral,” he said, spitting blood onto the stone floor. “An’ mine. Firastican vitae en morte.” I could hear the words rolling off his lips, but it was as if my body was moving through molasses in an attempt to stop him, running only a few feet before I was blasted back against the wall of my torture chamber when his body exploded into flames, consuming him into ashes immediately. Dead men tell no tales.
After a few minutes, I drew myself back up to my feet and dusted my clothes off. “Bastard.” It was time to find out just what the hell I’d gotten myself into. I moved back up the stairs and into my room, getting a change of clothes so I’d look like I’d fit in with the slumlands a bit more. I knew I had an old friend to see, and I thought to myself that if he didn’t have some answers, it was going to be a very bad morning indeed.
* * *
“What do you mean you can’t move them?” I asked River, my fence of many years. “You’re the one who set me up with the damn job, and you quoted prices to me!”
River wiped grease off his hands, almost as if he was wiping his hands of me. “Well, now I’m unquoting prices to you,” that gravelly voice of his said to me. Like all criminals of Barrenhollow, River had a legitimate business to keep himself low profile – he fixed carts and wagons. “There’s no way I can move those stones. Not now, not ever. You’d be better off giving them back to the House you stole them from.”
“Give them back? Are you MAD?” I was shouting almost at the top of my lungs now. “If the House of Camdion found out who stole those stones, they’d have an entire legion burning down my front gate right now, Hollow rules or not!”
“Well, then give them or charity or something. Toss them in a gutter somewhere. I don’t care what you do with them, but get them out of my shop!” he threatened. “I feel uneasy just having them in here.”
“What’s gotten into you, River?” River wasn’t his real name of course – I don’t even know what his real name was – but it was what everyone called him, as anything that moved in this town flowed through him.
“Look, Barrett,” he said to me as he put his hand on my shoulder. I never liked when he did that. It meant bad things. “You’ve been like a son to me since you’ve gotten back from the war. I mean it. I know people always tell fellows things like that right before they lay into them with the bad news, but in my case it comes from my heart. If I had another way out of this, I would take it.” He paused and took a long deep breath, lowering his eyes before he raised them back up to match my stare, a resolve I liked even less behind those dark brown orbs of his. “I don’t. Go. Get rid of the stones and forget you ever touched them.”
“River…”
“NO. I want you to go. Now.”
“River…”
“Barrett. Now.” I had forgotten I was holding the bag with the stones in my hand the whole time, but I remembered as he looked down at the bag with a sense of trepidation and fear. “And take those cursed things with you.”
I turned away from him and walked towards the entrance of his garage. As I reached the doorway, I paused to look back, only to see him shake his head at me and turn away. I tucked the bag into my pocket and moved away from the garage. There would be no answers here, and only more questions that I didn’t even want to ask.
--------------
So? More action, yes? Not quite as much as I know everyone was hoping for, but we've still got more coming. The story's just getting started and I don't want to fire all barrels right at the beginning. Please leave more feedback, as I'm genuinely interested.
Now, on to other things...
The pictures I was talking about? This is me in 1999. Not bad, but not great. This second picture, however, is one of the best pictures I've ever seen taken of me. This is me in early 1997. Both of these pictures were taken during my tenure at The Daily Nebraskan, where I put in five years. The first one is just me at a party the DN was holding. I don't even remember who that is next to me, truth be told. The second picture, however, was the first column headshot the DN ever took of me. They hadn't given me any warning, they hadn't told me even that pictures were going to be taken -- I basically just showed up for work one day and they said "We're running your first column tomorrow. Go get a mug shot taken." As it turns out, they delayed my column by a day because of breaking news, so I came back the next day, clean shaven and having actually slept (in that second picture, I've been up around 48 hours), and a new mug shot was taken. And this mugshot never saw print. It was, however, shown at EVERY Daily Nebraskan semester end banquet I ever attended. At every banquet, they would show all these pictures of staff members at parties, looking goofy and whatnot. Well, I figured when I left the DN that the picture was gone, which would have been a shame, because I'm particularly fond of it. As it turns out, the DN celebrated 100 years of publication not long ago and they put together a collection of all these slides and posted them to the web. So there you have them.
In other news, I've been listening to this new Audioslave album a lot since it came out on Tuesday. If you have heard of them, it's Chris Cornell (who used to be the lead singer of Soundgarden) with the three musicians (and NOT the rapper) of Rage Against the Machine. They've formed this new band that's great with this cool, energetic sound... I'm really digging the CD, so you might want to check it out.
That's all for tonight (although technically it's morning, but hell with it) ... so enjoy your story section, and I'll try and post other random thoughts from work tomorrow.
NOW PLAYING: Audioslave - "Hypnotize"
Lyrics: "Well, it's time to see, / You've got to give or you're gonna receive / It's time to see / You've got to live if you wanna believe / You can be."
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