The World Of Shadows (trilogy), Desert Storms (213,638 words), A Delusion Of The Dead (208,036) and The Spinning Men (220,938). Is based upon the true story of a forensic profiler who following a brutal double child murder, suffers a breakdown and is then left struggling to live with the consequences of post traumatic stress.
Woven into this first person narrative are fourteen interconnected story lines in second person.
The trilogy also tells of vaguely familiar characters called Tony Bear, Gordon Brawn, John Presscoat, Saddam Hussun, George Brush, the Reverend Jerry Fullwell, Donald Rumfields, Dick Chain and their terracotta army of nodding dog politician’s, while they jig to the hip snapping rhythms of executive privilege in the green zones, where no one is safe from Operation Archangel because when the Puppet Master pulls upon the strings, all must dance.
To read further extracts from The Spinning Men go to http://writing.com/authors/nemisis (spelt nemisis because nemesis was registered).
The Spinning Men.
His physical and psychological systems, now in the full throws of an allergic reaction to flower pollen, began to shutdown as though sections in a grid around which flowed the spark of life, the random electrical firings of instinct and intellect. At first the unused sections, the luxury of dreams and imagination, of memory, that vast repository of archetypes and myths. The unessential niceties of society’s historical treadmill, of countless generations, innumerable civilisations and their ideologies of cohesion. Then the blood supplies to his intestine and stomach, feeling like a gnawing hunger as even essential sections were now closing down.
The room, an ornate picture from one of the fairy stories he read to the girls when they were younger, started to become increasingly distant. As if either it was slowly drawing away from him, or George were moving back from it. Through the vales of time and space, the collective contortions of the world all around his invisible security bubble, lives green zone with only the occasional incoming shoe to dodge. While what sounds remained, were like the buzzing of a swarm of bee's. As a hand reached out to him from another dimension, alien gravity’s conspired to crush the wind from him. For with each airless gasp like a fish out of water, a single thought came into his mind, a burst of Neon Lights saying: "Breathe ... breathe ... breathe ... "
Even though he wanted to reach out, to grasp desperately at the swirling clouds of particles, the washes of primary colour, the dribbles of fading memory, he was completely paralysed, for though he willed his hand to move, it would not wipe away the annoying blob of snot upon the end of his nose. Or put his fingers, now those of a stranger, in his ears to stop the popping, the distant rumble, the squarkings and gibberish of ghosts.
"Breathe ... breathe ... breathe ..."
"It is all right Mister President," reassured Condalisa Mice wiping his nose. "Doctor Hare is on his way, there is no need to panic, just keep breathing sir, I will have a word with Mrs Maretail and ask if she will delay the start of the conference."
“Breathe ... breathe ... breathe..."
Then he heard the purposeful whoosh ... whoosh ... whoosh of its wings, the Angel of Death.
While still more distant yet, George fancied he could hear Angels singing their collective praise, their glory to the Lord on high. Radiance so bright, so all consuming it was as if several nuclear bombs had gone off at the same time, sending a flood of neutrinos through everything like a sudden convulsion as the pressure wave smashed into him.
The world of a serial killer or child murderer was an altogether darker and colder place, in which the cracked and distorted mirrors magnified the images several hundred times as if through an electron microscope. This was deep space beyond the social illusions, an airless void forced into grotesque distortions, where imbalance gives way to frenzy and a more personal form of anamorphoses. A world in which neither compass, or starlight navigation can serve as anything other than a reminder, a fragile length of thread from which it was possible to retrace your steps through the mazes. Carefully clicking like a bat in the featureless confusions, the sad, sick delusions and addictions of those with murder in mind.
The only certainty I had, as I began again another descent into the airless void, where malevolence and primal cunning dangled like moss from stunted trees, hanging from a long rope, turning slowly as I shone the inadequate beam of light from my torch into the blackness, was that the perpetrator had previous, because abducting two young children, required not just luck if he was to get away with the crime, it required previous experience in at least some of the skills, the personal abilities required to abduct and murder. It also needed a degree of understanding and knowledge about their greatest challenge if they were to remain free, modern forensics and policing. As far as I was concerned, he had committed previous related crimes; rape, sex with a minor, experience with the effects of date rape drugs and so on.
Despite expecting a clean record, with no previous for which he had been cautioned or convicted, it still came as a blow, an uncertainty and confusion. As I began another tiring day of randomly dropping down into the blackness. Hoping to touch the bottom, or shine my weak light upon some clue, some fact, some anomaly or artefact of murder. When, for a fraction of a second the angles were correct and like a stone within Stonehenge, everything was perfectly aliened as the sun touched the Earth’s rime. If there was any element for doubt about this information, then it was only that he had not yet been convicted for previous crimes. But that did not necessarily mean he had no previous.
What really surprised John Presscoat when he returned briefly to his den, in order to retrieve the gifts he had to distribute before totally plonking out and making a complete arse of himself, was not the fact that seventy year old Councillor Nelly Sevensons was stood astride his Election Agent Henry Woodford, only partially clothed with a wildness, an intensity in her eyes he had never seen before, but that she was pinning his neck to the floor with her Zimmer frame, while cracking a red cord that normally fastened back the curtains, as if it were a whip and she an expert in its various uses, repeatedly only inches above Henry’s head.
He lay completely frozen, a look of terror and bewilderment upon his face as he was choked, eyes bulging and cheeks a high blood pressure red. Showing only too clearly the broken veins from years of alcohol abuse, until he contracted hepatitis following a blood-transfusion. All things in moderation as the Consultant told him before being discharged from hospital - still yellower than the average Oriental and weak as a kitten.
Not that he anticipated a near death experience, blood transfusion and Hepatitis just having his tonsils out, any more than as he sat drinking tea and keeping Nelly Sevensons company, until the sun went down and she, along with all the others he secretly believed to be Vampires. Members of the local undead who hung around graveyards, or sat upon the Leisure Services Allotments sub-committee, could finally go outside. He expected Nelly to start taking her clothes off and force him onto the floor, shouting that he had been a naughty boy, a very naughty boy, while pinning him down by his neck with her Zimmer frame.
At first John was not sure if it was the effects of the cocaine, as a warped personal fantasy played and replayed in his melting brain, before an audience of sighing walls and ghostly figures. Because neither Nelly, now shouting that she was Mistress Whiplash or Henry, red faced and clearly in some emotional and physical distress, drifting into and out of consciousness with the aluminium tube crushing his windpipe, appeared to notice him.
John even tried coughing loudly several times and knocking on the door. But they continued to ignore him as though he was not part of their reality or this room.
Only when John hesitantly tapped Nelly upon the shoulder, did she take her foot off Henry’s chest and turning to face him like the turret of a tank being automatically trained upon its next target, swung her Zimmer frame around as if a Martial Arts weapon, aluminium Nan Chucks and started shouting at John.
“ There you are, you naughty, naughty boy.”
When John heard the curtain cord snap close to the right side of his face, he thought she might be about to take his eye out.
Lost for words he stood there, not sure what to do. Other than instinctively punch Councillor Sevensons because she was choking his Election Agent...
