Excerpt: Hesperus/Phosphorus

Excerpt #2: No I don't want to pay to publish my novel--

Tom broke down crying, he could still feel Denny's gurgling adams apple under his squeezing hands. Fuck me, I am going to the worst hell.

Not to worry, mortal. I will make sure you go to the best hell. Tom was certain the strange rocks clattering sound was some sort of mental laughter. Your new companion approaches.

Tom picked up the binoculars where they had fallen to the deck. They had dropped there when he had thrown Denny's body into the ocean. Scanning the ocean he saw a huge hump followed by a shark fin. What the fuck?! "A huge shark is going to guide me?"

As the huge fish drew closer, Tom noticed two things. First, the shark was gigantic, it must have been close to the length of the yacht, at least thirty-five feet. The hump was a grayish-blue with large circular splotches of pale green arrayed in stripes. Secondly there appeared to be a pile of mud oddly stuck to the creatures hump.

Tom gulped down a whiny comment. Fighting back some tears at the impossible predicament he found himself in he open the side rail gate as the huge shark slid up against the yacht slapping water up on to the deck with a splash. He gingerly step onto the slick spongy surface of it's skin and half crawled and crouched up to the hump. As he got closer to the hump he saw some yellow and whitish hard objects protruding from the mud. "What now?"

Arrange the bones as if they were still within a humans body. Tom's eyes jerked back to the yellowish objects within the mass of mud.

Holy shit! They're bones. Tom's eye's popped open. "Ah-are those, Denny's?"

The darker older looking fragments seemed to be from a skull as well as smaller bones from the spine and collar bones. Tom did his best to lay them out as he thought they would be found in a person's body, he tried not to think about the clean white bones and where they had just came from.

Now, shape the mud around the bones as if you were shaping a human from clay. Tom grabbed hand fulls of the dirty silt and mud mixture and smoothed them around the bone structure. As Tom worked his way upwards from the obviously new feet bones his eyes widened with disbelief, packing the mud around the bones they unnaturally shifted in his hands to orient themselves properly with respect to the other bone joints.

What initially looked like a haphazard set of bones became perfectly aligned metatarsals and as Tom smoothed the mud upwards towards the ankle the foot hardened to look perfectly sculpted. Each area the bones unnaturally twisted within the depths of the mud aligning themselves before the surface hardened like a perfect mahogany skin.

When he got to the the last few globs of mud he realized he had used every ounce of mud that had been on the shark's back. He smoothed the mud over the skull's face forming the cheeks and a smooth brown head. Tom gave a sigh as the mud hardened to a perfect even texture. He then smoothed the last glob of mud over the forehead of the skull and without consciously thinking, his right index finger inscribed a cryptic rune on the golem's forehead.