Saturday, July 18, 2009

Two (Which Contains an Exceedingly Rare Room, and a Revelation)

Behind the door, the air smelt of antiquity and darkness. "The Exceedingly Rare Room," said Adelaide.

"Books?" Russell asked.

"No." She slid open the nearest cabinet. Inside were rows of small glass bottles, sealed with wax and badly labeled. "For instance," she said. "Water from the Pool of Mnemosyne. Would you like to remember everything?"

Russell remembered too much already. "No. And that one?"

"Oil." Adelaide swirled the bottle. "Rendered from the very last of Steller's sea cows. Smells awful." She reached back into the cabinet.

Russell regretted that his choice wasn't more intriguing.

"This will do." In Adelaide's hand was a bottle of brown apothecary glass.

"What is it?" Russell asked.

"Something to keep for later." She put the bottle in her pocket and slid the cabinet shut.

The day was not at all going as Russell planned, and this was the last straw. "Later when? And what? It was a simple resurrection spell."

"A spell?" She looked confused. "What are you talking about? And, out of curiosity, has anything ever been simple like you say?"

"It is you, madam, who have guaranteed that this is no longer simple. But the page I was translating was indeed a resurrection spell."

"Funny," Adelaide said, "I thought it was a magic trick. A complicated bit of flash to distract while you really did something else."

Russell would have sighed if he could. Vampires did not perform magic tricks like parlor magicians. What had this woman been reading?

Adelaide had been reading MR MARVEL'S RULES OF CONJURE. She had read it years ago and never stopped, picking up similar books along the way.

Those were not at all the sort of books Russell had been reading. "What I wish to do is raise someone with whom I can actually speak."

"You could do it with a ventriloquist. Easiest thing in the world," she said." But you want the real thing, don't you? That's much harder."

Russell almost asked Adelaide to produce a ventriloquist who spoke Anglo-Saxon. "I need to hear the words as they ought to be spoken."

"Why?" Adelaide opened another cabinet, which was empty, and put the heavy key inside. She pushed it to the back corner and shut the door.

Russell wasn't used to having to explain himself. He grasped for the words, then said, "Because dead shouldn't mean forgotten."

He hadn't meant to forget. It had slipped away without him noticing, one small piece at a time, until there was nothing left to remember. Russell had decided to fill up the forgotten space inside himself with words. Words from dusty and forgotten languages no one spoke. He stacked them in tottering piles, breathed in their dusty, lost histories, and tried not to think about whatever it was that he had forgotten.

Russell left the dust of his almost memories and spoke again. "If I am going to remember these words, it must be as they actually were."

3 comments:

  1. I just hate a good idea stay there, gathering dust. And this has just turned 1 year old. Please, save it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. First, thank you. I'm so glad you liked this enough to want it to continue. (A year! It doesn't seem that long to me. Wow.)

    I will also be honest. I loved writing this story, loved the characters, loved the insanity brought about by collaborating with someone in 140 character (or fewer) bursts when neither of us were giving the other any sort of warning about what might happen next. And I would definitely love to formally collaborate on a project with Megan again, possibly even a continuation of this one.

    But the thing is, I don't know if I would want to do so on twitter. Watching the story get hijacked by the outside commenters was a really difficult thing to recover from, and write around. And that form - the back and forth of it - worked best when it could be instantaneous. That's harder to maintain now, as both of our lives have greatly increased in busy-ness since this time last year, and we're separated by even more time zones.

    So I guess right now, my response is, it may be possible to resurrect the story, but the delivery would probably change (alternating blog entries, maybe?) And I will say thank you again, for your interest and support.

    -- Kat

    ReplyDelete
  3. I join Kat here in saying thank you. It's so wonderful of you to pipe up for its continuation.

    I really enjoyed the characters and was curious about where the story was heading, but, as Kat says, the Twitter format became a bit uncomfortable. I'd love to collaborate on a project with Kat though, and maybe this would be a fun place to start.

    Right now we are both very busy, but maybe in the near future? If anything happens, we'll be sure to let you know.

    In the meantime, Kat has an amazing story in STORIES, a new-ish anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio: http://books.google.com/books?id=n2gOQgAACAAJ&dq=stories+neil+gaiman+al+sarrantonio&hl=en&ei=aNxeTObmN468sQPqg_mpCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA

    ReplyDelete