Excerpt: The Stroke of Midnight

The lightning cracked across the sky, lighting up the landscape for a brief moment with a strange, eerie, white light which made everything as bright as day, yet completely alien at the same time. The stars were obscured by the black clouds that rolled in from the east, covering the sky horizon to horizon. The rain came several minutes later, pouring torrentially out onto the fields and creating rivulets, streams, and rivers all across it. Farther, past the fields, it got caught in the leaves of thousands of trees, falling from one leaf to another, and another, and another, and finally coming to land on the branch strewn ground.

Back in the middle of the field, on top of a hill, the rain spattered down on the roof of a large house. The house was tall, three stories high, with a sharply slanted black roof. It was shaped rather like a flattened T, the main part facing north, and another part attached to the side, facing east. The gables were overflowing with rainwater, which slid straight down the steep roof in sheets. Outside the elegant front door was a pathway leading to the end of a very long driveway on which an old beat up blue pickup truck stood, with one mirror missing, and looking extremely out of place in front of the house. The back was beginning to fill up with water, but most drained out. The driveway it was sitting on wound away north, disappearing into the trees only a few hundred feet away from the house, presumably to join up with a road somewhere in the distance.

Inside, the house was empty. One long black coat hung forlornly in the entry room, with one pair of boots set neatly on the floor underneath it and a hat hung up on a pin beside it. The enormous dining table in the kitchen was bare and covered in dust, eight chairs set neatly around it looking as though they had not been disturbed for months. The counters in the kitched were similarly dust-covered, and the cupboards were empty. The refridgerator was still running, but there was nothing inside it. The couches and chairs in the living room had not been sat on for months. Bookshelves lined every wall of every room of every floor of the house, and every single shelf was stacked full of books that looked as though they had never been removed from them.

One room still lived, however. On the top floor of the house, in the room at the end of the part facing east, several hundred candles were lit, sitting on every surface and even lining the floor. A dark oak desk sat at the very far end, with a large window above it, the rain falling down it in in sheets and the lightning flashing in the air. Every single inch of the desk was covered in papers. Papers scattered in no order, every page covered on both sides with tiny handwriting in black ink. The papers were spilling on the desk and lay hither and thither on the floor, spreading out from the desk like leaves from a dying tree. Several lay so close to the candles that wax had dripped on top of them and fastened them to the rough wooden floor.

And there, in the very center, was an old man with pure white hair sitting in an old, leather chair in front of the desk and scribbling without ceasing, tossing each page carelessly into the air as he finished with it. His beard, bright white as his hair, was short, but his hair was long, tangled and unkempt, falling around his shoulders and trailing on the desk. The ends were black - stained by the ink that they trailed in as the man wrote furiously, hunched over his desk and writing like there was no tomorrow.

He was going to die.