Excerpt: Plotless

1

David looked up through the haze that surrounded him. His eyes burned, but he couldn’t move his arms to rub them. All he could do was watch as a man sat at a typewriter.
Click, click, click. That was the noise. Or was it tap tap tap? Tap tap tap tap tap, ding. It was an old fashioned thing, with chunky circular keys and wooden sides. But David was more interested in the man sat at the typewriter. Who was he, and what was he writing? More importantly, why was David seeing him so much in his dreams lately?
David began the motions of walking, but found that he’d forgotten them, and he stumbled to the ground. Crawling? Yes, he could crawl, and he dragged himself along the ground (having finally remembered the basics of controlling his arms) to get a closer look through the dream mist at the man who made the tap, tap, tap sound.
He got close enough to feel the air movements made by the tapping. As he approached, the taps became heavier, and heavier, and heavier, before they became deafening thuds that rattled David’s bones. Gritting his teeth, and fighting the feeling that told him getting any closer was a bad idea, he pulled himself up onto the edge of the desk. The man who was sat there seemed to half-notice him and smile a little bit, before turning back to his typewriter, the shocks from which were now visible as knife-edged shockwaves cutting through the haze.
He looked at the paper, trying to make out the letters as they were stamped there in slow motion by the judges’ hammers within the machine.
Boom – t.
Boom – h.
Boom – e.

Boom – e.
Boom – n.
Boom – d.

David had some gut instinct that whatever story was written there, it was still unfinished. But then the man who had written it took the paper, pulled out his chair on the invisible ground (making the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, bringing the pounding in David’s head to fever pitch) and walked away, his footsteps growing louder as he walked away.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.
2

David looked around him, blinking in the raw daylight that shone on him. He was outside? No, wait, that’s glass there. Can’t be summer, but it’s really hot anyway. Fire, that’s the reason. A fire was warming his body from its freezing condition; he noticed his body remembering how to shiver, so he figured out that he must have been really cold at some point recently. Or did he have a fever?
His eyes remembered how to blink, and he rubbed sleep from his eyes as his brain set to work, remembering the definition of ‘amnesia’. No, no, no, he thought. Not amnesia. He hadn’t undergone any kind of trauma that could have triggered it. And besides, he could remember his name. And his age, twenty one again. But why had it become winter all of a sudden? Turning his blinking gaze to the window, he saw patches of snow around the grass outside. The sun was low down in its arc, providing blinding light but little heat to the Earth.
Turning his attention back to the room he sat in, he could see it was fairly basic: an open fire, a couple of chairs and the bed he was lying on. On, not in; there were no sheets to speak of. Unless he was lying on top of them, but the back of his body hadn’t regained is feeling yet, and remained fuzzy and numb. In a small panic, David remembered that rooms normally have doors, but he couldn’t make one out anywhere in the mist (haze?) that clouded his vision. He tried to sit up to get a better look, but either his abdominal muscles had seized up or they’d simply forgotten how to lift his torso. At least my brain isn’t trying to think in fragments anymore, he thought to himself as he closed his eyes (or they forgot how to re-open after they blinked).
Just as he was trying to think what a door looked like, one opened in a rare gesture of gratitude for him. A woman carrying a steaming mug smiled at him. She smiled like a woman younger than she was, but David had no idea who she was or where he’d seen her before.
“Good morning Dave,” the woman said as she placed the mug in his hands, still smiling. David’s nose remembered that the smell rising from the mug was tea. He took a grateful gulp of the liquid, not caring that it burned his tongue and throat, just wanting its warmth to spread through his body and take away the shivering and numbness. “Cold morning, isn’t it?” the woman asked, not sounding like she expected a response and sitting down on one of the room’s bare wooden chairs. She pulled it towards the fire. Fingernails on a blackboard rang out from somewhere or other.
David decided to try and get a few things straight. “What’s the date today?”
The woman thought for a moment. “Full moon’s tomorrow, and it’s really cold too, and there haven’t been any New Year celebrations yet, so I’m going to say some time in the third week of December.” She sighed and looked out of the window. “Nowhere around here sells calendars. I hear they have them in the city. You should know, you’ve just come from there, right?”
David assumed she was telling the truth, for now. “Right. They probably sell them somewhere. Can’t say I’ve ever needed one.” His muscles remembered how to make him sat up, and his brain commanded them to. He noticed he was wearing plain clothes. Probably cotton. He also noticed there was a small bundle of his belongings sitting on one of the chairs. Hopefully there would be some clues in there as to where he was or what he was doing.
“How could you not need a calendar?” The woman asked, bemused. “We’d probably have one if it wasn’t so far to the city on foot.”
On foot? David figured he’d come on foot, but if it was a long way, he must have had some kind of vehicle. Or animal to ride. If only his mind hadn’t forgotten the names of all the animals and vehicles he knew. He knew there was a big wooden thing that travelled across the water. But what was it called?
“Hey, are you alright this morning? Everybody else is already up.”
“Everybody else?” David couldn’t remember where he was or how he got there (the last thing he knew he went to bed in his house), but wherever he was there were other people too. Maybe somebody he could get some information from.
“Yeah, the other guests who are staying here. You sure you’re alright? We’ve got some medicine around, if you need it.”
“I’m fine.” David sat up on the edge of his bed, hoping he remembered how to stand and walk. “I just need a little time to clear my head.”
The woman shrugged and stood up, walking for the doorway. “Well, you’d better hurry up. We’re only serving breakfast for the next twenty minutes.”
So they have timepieces but not calendars? David thought, as he rubbed his face down. The woman left the room, letting the door swing shut behind her.
Silence, but for the crackling of the fire, was all that was left in the room. And David’s bundle of belongings beckoned him closer. Leaning out into the small room, he grabbed the chair and pulled it towards himself. There it was again: nails on a blackboard. There was no blackboard in sight, but David remembered that was the noise he was hearing, no doubt about it.

Pulling open the straps of his bundle, Dave spread out its contents on his bed, feeling a sting of pain in his hand. What was that red liquid? It had a name, but he couldn’t bring it to mind. It was leaking out of his finger, and a little of it was on the object that had drawn his… what in the world was it? Wine? …wine from his body: a short blade, only the length of his hand, attached to a wooden handle. A knife. Dave couldn’t remember what it was used for, but he knew at least that it was called a knife. Sucking his finger, he moved it to one side to look through the rest of his belongings. A small pouch with a few coins in it, and some pieces of paper. Paper, he thought. That was what that story was being typed on. But how did he know what “typing” was? Or a “typewriter” for that matter? He couldn’t recall either of those concepts from his life, but he knew what they were, and the noise made by one being done using the other. Click, click, click. Tap, tap, tap. Boom, boom, boom.
Rummaging through the rest of the objects that lay strewn about, he found a few more objects amongst the collected bits of fluff and debris that had tumbled from the depths of the bundle: a compass, a large iron key (what it opened he had no idea), a map he had no idea how to read, and what looked like a ticket for something. He picked it up, and examined it in the blazing winter sunlight.
His brain scrambled about, trying to remember how to read. Slowly, he pronounced each letter to himself, concentrating hard to remember. “S – H – I – P – P – A – S – S. Ship pass.” Now he remembered what the wooden things that travelled the oceans were called: ships. So wherever he was, he’d arrived here by ship, from somewhere with a city. So far, so good. His brain couldn’t remember the names of any oceans, so he pocketed the ship pass and had a look at the map he couldn’t read to try and work it out.
Unfolding its pages and spreading it out, he was greeted with a dusty recollection of part of the world. There was only one ocean that he could see, assuming he hadn’t got it the wrong way around and it was really the only land mass, but it appeared to be called the ‘Inner Ocean’. A large island in the map’s centre had the markings of a city on it: buildings, roads, and a port. Thankful that his brain knew what a port was, he read out the city’s name slowly: “Zephyr City”. Since it was the only city on the map, he assumed that was where he had come from, but as he looked closer he saw a small trail of dotted lines: leading from the far North of the map, across the Inner Ocean from Zephyr City, down through the city to the island he guessed he was on. It didn’t have a name, and the trail passed right through it, across the ocean further to the south. At the far southern end of the map, a circle marked the name of a location with a name too long for David to pronounce. Satisfied that he had a few leads to go by, David folded the map again, gathered his belongings (carefully placing the knife in what he recognised as a sheath that had also fallen out of the bundle), and tied the bundle together. Sighing and pulling on some clothes he found under the bed – a pair of grey trousers and a hard-worn jacket – he stepped out of the doorway into the unknown.

So I simply wrote “the end”, and finished the story there. I say finished, but really I left it unfinished. I felt like the characters and the plot had ran out of steam, so to speak. What I mean is, I lost the inspiration to continue writing, and left my characters behind. Not that that matters, of course. I have plenty of other ideas, and my deal on this book will carry over to the next one I write. The story will never be finished, I’m afraid to say, and you’ll never know what happens to the characters, or the world, or anything else that was supposed to happen in the novel. I’m never coming back to these characters, or this world, and if you’re reading this, something’s the matter. Somebody once posed me the question: “what if all of the stories we wrote spawned alternative universes? What if, somewhere out there, every time you write, your stories became real? What if they existed anyway, and we’re simply channelling the links between those worlds into our own world?”
What if; what if. Of course, you’d have to be crazy to believe anything as ridiculous as that. And I’m glad to say I’m perfectly sane.
But what if?
What if?
Click click click.
Tap tap tap.
Boom boom boom.
And so we gain an insight into another world.
But here’s a better what if.
What if those universes could cross over the other way?
Do their authors tell them stories of our universe?
Is our world just as prone to invasion as theirs?
And, more importantly, what if you were, or I was, manipulated by one of their authors?
Click, click, click.
What if, what if, what if.
Tap, tap, tap.
Take a look into another universe. Go ahead, the gateway lies before you, on the pieces of paper, in the words the shape of a universe.
Boom. Boom. Boom.