Cheating the Game

X stood by his window and looked out to the horizon. The sky was the color of gray steel and the clouds were gathering again for another bout of rain. It always rained here. Sometimes less, often more. He was cold and all he sensed from the island was disturbance. A mixing of forces and powers that were not meant to be. Odds were not in his favor, the darkness was rising. He needed to balance the odds, even if it meant cheating. 

So, X cheated, and created a monster.

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On the shore of sea where X was imprisoned in the black tower, the Hazers were celebrating the ceremony of choosing their new queen. A woman, with magic mirrors on her eyes and a stone in her hand. A woman who went by the name of Cin. A woman who was scared and sacred. And slowly getting high on the smoke of all the herbs that the natives were burning. They were also going to burn the big and scary thing they'd caught. They were going to burn it to honor their new queen. The thing was grinning though, for some strange reason. 

Cin walked up the thing, also known as the butcher in some other world. 

"I'm going to beat you," she said, "I will find the boy and take him back to the land of living."

"Haze is a strange place, m'dear," the butcher growled at her. 

"So far it is in my favor. You're going to burn and I will let these people do it, because I know you'll wake up from your sleep wherever you are."

"I might wake up brain damaged or deranged."

"That, is totally your problem. M'dear."

She walked away and left the hazers to take care of the butcher. They threw him careless on a pile of dry wood and sat around gathering kindling for the fire. The butcher worked the bonds on his arms. They felt loose earlier but suddenly he felt like his wrists had grown bigger. The hazers set fire to the kindling and stuffed it into the makeshift pyre they had created for the butcher. Dark smoke erupted from the kindling and small fires started to inside the pile of wood. Butcher's clothes started to smoke and his hair caught fire. The Hazers watched him with bored, spaced out looks on their faces. Only Cin laughed at him because she had beaten him at last. 

Inside the fire, the butcher found the cold little core of his soul, where he had put the pillow on his wife's face and burned the whole lot of people in a nightclub. He remembered that fire was his friend, his favorite and these people had given him something that made him feel alive once again in this godless land. The flames licked his skin like hungry lovers and burned through his bonds. His clothes were on fire, so was his hair, so was his skin, but in his mind, he was cool. He got up from his make shift pyre, grabbed the nearest spaced out hazer and ripped him into two chunks. He carnaged through the island like a force of nature, killing the natives with his bare hands till the blood of their bodies soaked through his hair and skin and doused the fire, leaving him a stinging, burnt scar of a man. He was still looking for the girl, Cin, wherever the fuck she was hiding. 

He found her deep inside one of the huts with the other women, who had formed a protective ring around her. They were willing to die for her. So he killed them all. 

Finally, the butcher faced Cin. He was going to take his time on her. His hands itched to tear her throat out as she cowered back into the corner of the hut. He grabbed her arm and started to drag her out. 

Outside, a loud noise fell upon the village like a hammer of an angry god. The ground under the butcher's feet shook with the vibrations. It felt like an earthquake. Then the sound blasted the air again, like machine parts grinding against each other and iron demons getting crucified in an industrial hell. 

Silence stretched on like a dying relationship.

And then, the bass dropped. 

This was X cheating the system by taking part in the game where he was the prize. 

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Chapter 15. The pawn becomes the player. 

Next, Bass Monster VS The Butcher

Big and Scary

Haze stank.

It was an all permeating stink that reached into the very pores of a person's skin and made all the hope sweat through. Cin was still hopeful. She had found a small muddy river and now had her head dunked into the water. She drank the water that might make her sick later, but for now it tasted like manna from heaven. She was still clutching the stone for some reason and so engrossed with drinking the water that she didn't realize the crowd of Hazers that had gathered behind her. 

One of the little Hazers walked up right behind her and put a piece of cloth over her shoulders. She shrieked again and almost hit the creature with the stone in her hand. It shrank away from her. She saw the crowd and realized that they were not there to harm her. All of them had a benign peace and calmness in their eyes. Their faces were big and round and...cute. Some of them moved towards her, they took her hands and urged her to follow them. Their small shuffling gait made them easy to follow and Cin followed. It is a tribe of women, Cin thought.

The butcher was dragged through rough foliage and branches struck his face. Every strike from a leaf only made him calmer and saner. He was one focused motherfucker. He was going to kill all these things whoever they were. And for now, this was the only delicious thought in his head. He twisted his arms and tested the bonds that tied his hands. He could break these bonds. He knew it. The ropes were tied by an amateur and their whole tribe was going to pay for that little mistake. The men dragged the "thing" they had caught to their village where the women would have prepared for the feast. They were going to butcher the new thing they had caught because it rode a beast of iron and its skin was all black. 

Cin was led to a small encampment where children of the Hazers played by hiding between the grass huts. Everything was so green and plants grew anywhere there was soil. The strange stench was even stronger here and Cin was beginning to suspect the source of the stink. She looked closely at one of the little people. This one's eyes were huge and little red veins were standing out in the whites of her eye. She realized what the smell was. All these females were high.  They talked to her in their high pitched ululating voice and she could do nothing but stare at them. A sudden noise caught her attention and she looked in the direction where the noise was coming from. 

The men of the tribe were coming back and they had caught something big and scary. 

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Hat tip to @tweettabulous for suggesting the word Hazers! She is awesome, you should follow her on twitter :)

This is chapter 14

Natives of The Haze

Cin stumbled through the green, stifling flora. The air grew oppressing and hotter as she waded into the jungle looking for fresh water. The leaves of trees were shaped strangely and the branches were of different dark colors. She put her hand against a tree and wiped her forehead. She needed to find water fast. There was a small hill up ahead and she walked towards it. From the top of the hill, she saw that the forest spread out evenly all around her, but it was thin in some places to the south. As Cin made her way towards the probable water source, the figure with the stone slowly walked up behind Cin and gently tapped her shoulder with the stone. 

Cin shrieked and fell from the small hill. She tumbled head over heels and crashed to rest at the bottom of the hill. The sharp stone rolled down with her. Scared and bewildered, Cin gathered herself up and grabbed the stone to fling at her mysterious attacker who was nowhere to be seen. She heard running water nearby and made her way towards it, all the while keeping the stone held tight in her hand. The natives gathered to watch the girl who had picked up their god stone without burning up into flames. She was the chosen one of the stone god and they will give her to the stone god once he awoke in the darkness. The whispered in voices to each other of the gifts that the stone god would bestow upon them once he got his bride. 

The butcher rode the bike hard. Miles crunched under the wheels of his bike and wind whipped his hair like a cloak behind him. The last time he had felt happiness like this was when he had choked his wife to death on her own pillow. He rode faster, till tears streamed from his eyes and world around him blurred in a uniform gray. He could feel the sea wind in the air and the breeze carried a hint of salt. He knew he'd reach there soon. The butcher was lost in the thoughts of delicious murder of X and he failed to the grass rope that was tied across the road. By the time he saw that rope, it was too late. He was whisked up from his bike and the momentum of his speed rolled him to quite some distance before he came to a stop in a sorry heap.

"Fuckery." he muttered to himself.

Then bodies fell upon him. Holding him tight as nimble fingers tied his hands with rope and someone put a cloth over his eyes. Things, he thought, things he would kill soon. As they dragged him away, there was a mad smile playing on the butcher's lips.

-----

Let's call this dreamworld like space HAZE. And these are the strange people here. 

Chapter 13.

How Things Change

The bottle of  vodka was empty and her kitten was gone. Cin was in the pits. She opened another bottle of vodka and poured it in a shot glass. Her glasses were lost and all she saw was a blurry view of the world around her. The vodka did its work, her brain turned cartwheels in her head and soon, the room was spinning too fast for her to hold on. She fell to the floor in a vodka infused sleep and dreamed. She was going to find that bass and the stupid boy who was sending her the sos messages. 

The butcher woke up in the dreamworld and he was lying on his back in a desert. There was no way he was going to reach the sea from here. He got up and started walking. Something shone at a distance. A distant flash of chrome which left rainbows in its wake. He hazarded a guess and started to walk in the direction of the strange flash of light. It could be a mirage, but it could be anything in this place. The sand shifted and moved under his feet like a living animal but he pressed on. The sun glared down at him like a single eye of a furious god. He pressed on. He saw the shining object clearly now and a smile appeared on his face. It was a gleaming Harley Davidson on the road. Just looking at the bike stung his eyes and made them water. It was a marvelous sight as it stood on the road. A road which stretched from the desert to the sea. He knew it'd lead him to the sea. He got on the bike and kicked it to life. It roared like an angry animal. He liked it. He liked it a lot already. He was going to the beach.

Cin woke up on a beach. An eagle (a seagull?) flew overhead as she opened her eyes. There was the loud sound of surf somewhere and it added to the raging sound of hangover in her head. The other side of the beach was full of green plants of some kind she didn't know the names of. She rolled over and tried to get up. Cool sand squished in her fingers and stuck to her clothes. She wanted to drink some water but she knew that the sea water was not meant for drinking. She got up finally and stumbled away from the beach, into the foliage, looking for a water source. The sea called to her but it was not the water she needed. A pair of eyes watched her from the jungle. The thing watching her held a sharp stone in its hand and warily followed Cin. 

In the black tower, the pressure dropped. There was a noticeable change in the air quality. Things were changing. Fast. X got up from his bed and went to his window. He could feel her somewhere far to the east, she had managed to reach here. He also felt another black presence far in the west, and it was heading towards him. Fast. Things were changing. He hoped they'd change for good. Little did he know that he was going to be wrong. So wrong. 

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I missed two days! Shame on me! But here is Chapter 12. Our characters reach a strange dreamlike place. Will they meet up? What happens now? We'll know soon!

The Day The Eagle Landed

The eagle circled the black tower. In the nameless, timeless, godless place there were few things that lived the eagle had found its way here through dreams of dead children and broken hopes of lovers left forever alone. The eagle zeroed in on the window in the tower and glided on stale sea air towards it. X felt the presence before he even saw the bird. He went to the window and extended his arm for the eagle. The talons dug in sharp on his arm, but the bird was gentle. There was a small vial attached to the eagle's leg. X took the vial, the bird looked at him, and said "good luck, kid." 

Then, with a small poof, it was gone. The eagle disappeared and X was left with the vial in his hand. There was a small drop of blood in the vial. It floated in the glass chamber without touching its walls, immune to gravity. X crushed the vial in his hand, the glass broke and pierced his palm. His blood mixed with the drop of blood and it shocked his system like a bold of electricity. He fell to the floor as convulsions raked his body, his spine arched and his eyes rolled back in his skull. He could not draw enough air in his lungs to scream and all the came out of his mouth was a guttural sound, exclaiming his pain. Then, the pain stopped. There was a dull throb behind his eyes and he was able to breathe again. He looked at his palm. There was a pyramid tattooed in the skin of his palm. He moved his hand the three dimensional image of the pyramid tattoo also moved. 

A voice, sweet like sin, spoke in his head, "Open the pyramid, set me free."

Strangely, X knew the voice. He needed to get out of here. Even if he had to move mountains and level cities, he'd do it. And fuck the help if she didn't make it to the tower soon. He had the bass and he was going to do some damage with it. 

The butcher was getting ready to do some damage on his own. The old man had given him a motley collection of drugs and soon he was going to sleep the little sleep. The drugs were going to slow down his soul and send him into a sleep where he'd be free to explore the dreamlands and find the black tower. 

And when he found the black tower, he was going to kill X. 

Slowly.

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For no particular reason, this is Chapter 11 and the Second Movement of this story arc.

Finding The Boy

Evening fell, as the butcher drove with Cin in his car. She had her face stuck to her window by the time they reached the old man's place. He had somehow managed a villa's manager to give him the keys to the place and not bother him for the duration of his stay. The butcher didn't ask questions because he had seen the old man do some weird things. He was in handcuffs in a police cell when the old man had magicked him to the bar somewhere and given him beer and a cigar. He was devoted to the old man's will. No questions asked. 

The butcher stopped the car at  the entrance, got out and pulled Cin out of the car too. He half dragged, half carried her out of the car to the patio where the old man was sitting. Cin was pushed into a chair.

"She was drinking," the butcher said.

The old man kept looking at the sun setting through the clouds. He picked a glass of water from the table in front of him and offered it to Cin.

"Have some water, my dear."

Groggy and half drunk, Cin took the glass of water and drank it. She knew she was in a jam but she didn't know how deep the jam went.

"I have no idea what you guys want from me." she said after a while. "I just want to go back to my hotel and sleep."

The old man smiled at her. "Sure, you can leave, but first I've to tell you something about your dreams."

The last fumes of hangover left Cin's head when she heard that. "What about the dreams?"

"The dreams of a tower, and perhaps a boy who plays really bad music."

Cin stared at the old man. "It's not that bad. Just heavy, with a lot of bass."

"Ah, my dear, this is where you're mistaken. The music that the boy plays comes from the mouth of machines and it has no soul. The real music, is of wood and string and soul and poetry."

He patted his guitar to emphasize his point. 

"I need to find the boy. I need his music. I have certain projects that can only succeed with that kind of music."

"It will only lead to pain and suffering."

"I don't mind as long as I don't have to suffer."

The old man looked at her, turned his head a bit, and smiled.

"I like that. I like that a lot. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'll give you some free advice."

"I'm listening."

"This guy here," he pointed at the butcher, "killed his wife, his neighbors and most of his colleagues some days back."

"Shit happens."

"Right, so this fellow is going to find the boy before you. And when he finds the boy, he is going to snap his head off his neck and eat his brains."

It was Cin's turn to look at  the old man whose hands were shaking and his hair was slowly coming apart in disarray.

"Race you to him," Cin said and got up to leave the villa. 

No one stopped her.

Getting Down To Business

X was not able to shake the uneasy feeling that he had done something wrong. 

He had felt a presence near his window but in his mad frenzy with the music he had pushed it all away. Maybe it was a friend, maybe an enemy. He'd never know. 

Below the tower, the black sea churned angrily. Waves slammed against the tower's foundation but it had borne the waves for god knew how much time. This was a godless, timeless place anyway. It was just the console, the bed and X in the room. He didn't feel hungry here. He didn't even feel like sleeping, but he slept out of habit. He had once thought of jumping out of the window and ending it all, but a fear had come over his mind and the thought had rushed from his head like a scared animal. 

He remembered how to make music, that was all he needed some days. There was the bass. That was enough. And he knew help would come.

The help that X wanted, was sitting in a bar somewhere in a small village community and drinking her fear away. 

A forest of vodka shot glasses was littered on the table in front of her. The kitten, Blue was munching on a fish that a waitress had left for him. 

"Blue," Cin slurred, "mom washn't there. She wash NOT. I shaw her, but sheeee was NOT there!!"

Blue eyed her suspiciously and went back to his fish.

Cin addressed the empty glasses. "It wash a placsh of memories, dead thingshh. The mushic wassh sooo bad. Ghosht music. And that motherfucking tower. Oh mother. Mother..."

She put her head down on the table and drifted into the strange dreamless sleep of drunk people. Blue licked her ear and tried to wake her up but she was already snoring. The waitress came to their table and stood over  her.

"Oh damn it, not another one." she sighed. "Henry! There is a passed out case here! Send someone!"

Henry, the bartender, grumbled as he took out his cellphone and started to call people who carried drunk people home. There was not going to be any need of it though.

The waitress drifted from the table to take other orders.  

A man sitting some tables away saw that Cin was alone now. He walked up to her table and took out a picture from his coat pocket. It matched the face on the table. He picked her up from table, put her arm around his shoulder and started to drag her out of the bar. 

"Come on," he said, "we're going."

"Where arrh we goiiinnnggg?" Cin asked.

"We're going to meet the old man." the butcher replied.

In the bar, Blue left munching the fish and jumped from the table to follow the strange man who was taking his human away.

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Chapter 9! Next chapter, end of first act. And we plunge into second act :D

As always, all typos are mine. You can hit me on twitter @69fubar to talk about this story arc, or as the old ways were, leave a comment :)

That Bass

Dr. Cin walked up the stairs of the apartment complex. There was a slight growth of mold on near the stairs and the whole building smelled of so many things that she couldn't even begin to recognize the smells. Most of all the smells were of home. Of food. Of clothes drying in the sunlight. Sounds of laughter and music from apartments drifted in the morning light. There were not elevators in the building and Dr. Cin was breathless by the time she reached the sixth floor. She faced the door of her mother's apartment and patted her hair once. Blue poked his head out of her carry-bag and meowed. 

"Hush, now," she told the kitten.

Blue disappeared back into the handbag. To sleep again. This kitty sleeps a lot, Cin thought to herself.

She raised her hand to ring the bell, when the door opened. Her mother was standing on the other side. She left the door open and walked back inside.

"Hi, mom," Cin said to the empty space left by her mother. She walked inside the room. There was a kitchen to the right and a parlor to the left where her mother interpreted dreams for people who wanted to know about the shitness of their lives. She spun them quite a yarn and people believed what they wanted to believe. Her mother had gone somewhere deeper into the house, looking for some music maybe. Cin knew that her mother liked to play music when she conducted one of her dream interpretations. It was always old jazz or devotional hymns. Cin hated it, but she had to endure it. She wanted answers, to know more about the bass. The visions in her dreams. 

While Cin battled with her thoughts in her mother's apartment, X was getting ready to send out another SOS. He had taped his fingers this time and there were tissues wedged in his nose already. Even if he bled, he was not going to fade out. This shit was going to be heavy. He stretched his arms and flexed his fingers and turned on the console.

Cin laid down in the chair her mother had installed in the parlor. She brought an old  gramophone record with her from the back of the house and soon strange, haunted music was floating in through the single speaker. She drifted from consciousness and in her dreams she saw the tower. It rose from the sea like a black nail. An insult to the sky, the water and the air around it. Cin moved closer to the tower and through the window she saw a boy with tissues stuffed in his nose and tapes on his fingers. For a moment, he raised his head, looked straight through her and then went back to fiddling with something on his table. The sound from the window was a vibration straight from hell. It shook Cin's soul and her essence and every thought in her head. She fell back and the sound chased her. It had claws and sharp teeth that bored into her head and tried to eat away everything that she had ever known and remembered. She fell and fell and then the water hit her like a cold fist of steel. All air went out of her lungs and she took in mouthful of water in her lungs. There was a weight on her chest that wouldn't budge and the sound was still with her under the water too. In a dark, cold moment, she knew she was going to die in this dream. 

Then she felt something brush her face. Once, twice and something sharp dug in her nose. 

She winced and opened her eyes. Blue, her kitten was standing on her chest with its paws on her chin and it was biting her nose. She fell from the chair and puked out sally water from her lungs. The room smelt of sea by the time she was done puking. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. There were no gramophone records on the table either. The flat was deserted, cobwebs hung from the ceiling and there was a musty smell of abandonment in the house.

Cin picked Blue, kissed the kitty on its nose, grabbed her bag and went out of the house as fast as she could.

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Our heroine meets her mother or does she?

Chapter 8

All typos are mine!

Just in case you want to talk about the story, hit me on twitter after 7PM IST --> @69fubar

Cheers!

A Smoke Filled Bar

The butcher used to hate babies a lot. Now he hated them even more. Because of the wretched baby, he was in a police interrogation room where only a single bulb was fixed on the ceiling and his hands were handcuffed in front of him. There as a cup of coffee in front of him, but it was cold and pathetic machine piss coffee. He hated it too. He sat there for a long time, letting his thoughts go still and he dive inwards into that strange dark place from where dreams took birth. Somewhere in this part of the globe was an old man and he wanted to meet him. 

The sound of the cell door opening and then closing broke his concentration. There was a strange man standing in front of him. He looked less like a police detective but more like an aging rockstar. His white hair was long and he was wearing a faded leather jacket over a black tee and blue jeans. Curiously, there was a guitar case on his back. The butcher gave the man his most murderous and menacing glare but the man just smiled back at him. His smile started from his eyes, that resembled the eyes of an old relative who knew too many stories. He walked up to the table and sat down opposite the butcher. 

"I believe you are here to meet someone," he said as he took out the guitar from its case and started to tune it.

The butcher said nothing. 

"Good you are not speaking. This is no place to talk."

He strummed a chord on his guitar and the room was filled with cheap cigarette smoke, hubbub of conversation and the smell of breakfast in morning. 

The butcher looked at his hands. There was a beer glass in one hand and a cigar in another. 

"This is a place to talk." the old man said.

"Frig me sideways," the butcher muttered. 

The old man sitting in front of him only smiled at him and drank his own beer. 

"Now can we talk business?"

So, they talked business.

While the old man and the butcher talked about their unholy business, Dr. Cin was traveling across the countryside in search of bass. There was only one person who'd be able to read into her dreams. The woman lived in a remote hillside town and she had visited her once before to learn more about some strange dreams she had been having. Those dreams had led her to the pyramids in Egypt and now she needed to find how to open the pyramid. She was not really sure the woman would help her, for it was only the second time in sixteen years that she was visiting her mother. 

In a tower somewhere in middle of a raging sea, X woke up from his dreamless sleep. The sky outside was filled with clouds. It was going to rain again. Rains always made him gloomy and angry. Help was still not here, so he decided to send out another SOS. This one would be heavier than the last one. Even if he had to bleed a bucket for it.

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This is Chapter 7! read the other ones on the blog, archive link in side bar :)

Humans Were Not Meant to Fly

The old man had to get a new guitar. He broke the last one in the village. He was still walking. The new guitar on his back. His shoe heels worn and his shoes patched with pieces of leather he had scraped from the roads he had walked. His long white hair was tied with a length of string and sometimes when wind blew, it picked out strands of hair and plastered them across his brow. He had a long way to go. His thoughts were his only company.

The butcher was fighting a war in his own head. He wanted  to kill something badly. So badly. His hands itched to set something on fire. To take a life. To make nothing out of something. To feel the dark void again. The one second of euphoria when a soul left the confines of a body and went to meet the great unknown. He wanted to free all these beautiful people and send them home. But he was told to behave. The old man had appeared in his dream and told him to behave. To not kill. To not maim people. To act "normal". He was acting normally and sitting in his seat in a plane heading for a small city somewhere in England. 

There were babies on the flight and all of them were crying in unison. At least to the butcher it seemed so. He wanted to throw the babies out of plane. No motherfucking babies on his plane. He gripped the armrest and grit his teeth. It will be over soon, he thought. But he was soon proved wrong. 

There was movement near his leg. Something was tugging at his jeans. He looked down. It was a baby. Somehow the wretched thing had gotten free of its mother's clutches and crawled up to the butcher's seat. Now it was eating his jeans. He tried to shake the baby off, but it stuck to his leg like a determined leech. He reached for the baby and picked it up by the scruff of its neck.

"What the fuck are you?" he looked at the baby and growled.

The baby looked back at the butcher in the mad way that only babies can look at people. 

And then it puked on him. A blue haze took over the butcher's eyes. There were screams. Someone thudded into him and he tasted the rancid carpet floor of the plane.

When the butcher opened his eyes again, he was lying at the back of the plane and his hands were tied behind him. Two policemen were holding him down. The pilot's voice on the PA system was saying that the plane would be landing at its destination, everything was under control and there was nothing to worry about. Someone lifted the butcher bodily and put him in an empty seat. His hands dug painfully in his back but they still strapped a seatbelt on him. He craned his neck to look at the seats in front of him to find some clue to what had happened. He saw the baby's head poke above the headrest of a seat some seats in front of him. The baby lifted its little hand and gave a little middle finger to the butcher and then it started to bawl in the way that only pissed off babies can bawl. 

The butcher swore he'd deal with the baby.

Somewhere on another plane in another part of the world, Cin was having a mirror opposite experience of butcher's flight. It was a peaceful and comfortable journey. There were no babies on the plane and a cute guy also complemented on her blue hair. The flight was on time and there was leg room on her seat. 

Life was good. 

For now. 

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This is sixth. Bringing in some kind of closure...

The Importance of Names

The DJ rubbed the inside of his right wrist. Old scars. Memories of a drunken fight in a bar. He was still in the tower. Trapped like some princess in an absurd fairy tale. He had sent out an SOS, but help was still not on the way. The old man was gathering his forces, he could feel it. A malignant and evil presence heading his way. He had to leave the tower before that black hole of emotions got to him. 

He sat cross legged on his cot and meditated. His thoughts stilled as he went deeper into the meditative state. His breathing slowed and his heart beat dropped. His third eye focused itself and in the darkness of his mind he saw a source of light. He moved towards that light. The blue light shone with an eerie brilliance. It waved and bobbed in its place. Thin strands of blue light reached out to touch his fingers as he moved his hand towards the light. The light expanded and enveloped his hand. It was neither hot, nor cold, but an even temperature. His hand was soon glowing with the blue nimbus of light and he lifted his hands up above his head for a better look at his surroundings.

A room appeared around him. There were strange symbols on the walls and the walls around him were slanted. There was a single point up above him in darkness where the walls met. He couldn't see it, but he felt it. The room was at the center of a pyramid. There was something else in that place too. Something too close. He smelled the thing before he even felt it. A rank smell of rotting flesh and shit. A claw thumped into his back and he crashed to the floor. 

He woke up back in his room. His meditative state shaken, his mind at more unrest than it had been before meditating. Where was the pyramid? And what was the thing in the darkness. He could not forget the smell. That rank smell. That thing in darkness. He felt afraid. So he did the only thing he could do to stop that  fear. He gave the thing a name. He called it Fluffy McFlufferson. Fluffy. Fluffy who needed a bath, very badly. 

He needed a new name for himself too. The old name was gone with his old life. This was a new game now. He saw the criss crossing stars of scars on his wrist and decided to call himself X.

For now, there was nothing X could do to get out of the tower, till help arrived. So he went to sleep, which is always a good thing to do. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Cin and her kitten Blue, were on their way out of Egypt. Towards a small English town where they needed to talk to an old man.

Blue, for one, liked the experience of flying.

In The Shadow of the Pyramid

Dr. Cin put on her heavy glasses, put her hair in a loose ponytail, picked the kitten she had won in a bet in a Cairo pub and went out to face the pyramid. It was the same glorious morning when somewhere around the world, a mad old man had walked into a village to sing songs to the children. The village was burning now, but Dr. Cin didn't know this. She was still reeling from the unreal effects from her dream in which a wall of bass had hammered her thoughts and the boy in the tower had screamed just one word, "HELP!".

She felt like she knew the boy, but for the life of her she could not remember where she had seen him. 

Sun was making it's way up in the sky and she knew by the time it reached the it's zenith, it'd be too hot to be outside without any shelter. She walked faster to the site where she hoped her assistance would have set up her equipment. She cradled the little kitten in the crook of her arm and it slept soundly against her breast. Her assistance, a French guy named Abdul, was a prompt worker if anything. He had set up the table just as she had shown him and the speakers were in the right spot. Her Macbook was connected to the system and powered on. 

"Hey Abdul," she smiled at him and handed him the kitten. Abdul smiled back nodded and put the kitten on a pillow that was lying on a nearby table. The cat stirred in its sleep, pawed some invisible mice and went back to sleep on its back. 

Dr. Cin checked that the speaker tubes were placed right on the pyramid's sonic points. She powered the microdrive and a 3D scale model of the pyramid started to float in the air. She re-checked the placement of the speakers and made sure everything was in its place. This moment had taken her more than a week of mathematics, sound modulation studies, architectural analysis and lot of praying. The structure of the pyramid made it impossible to use any of the traditional excavation tools that would damage it beyond repair. She was given a grant to test her theories of using soundwaves to break through the pyramid's locks and release the rubble that had collected inside it from past so many centuries. This was a do or die situation for her project and she absolutely didn't afford to fuck it up. 

She laced her fingers and cracked the joints. 

The sounds she played woke up the little kitten from it's sleep. It looked around confused and bewildered but the noise was coming from everywhere. The pyramid's insides shook slightly. Rubble dislodged from places it had been lodged in for who knows how much time. 

The doctor increased the bass of the music, the pyramid seemed to shake, but it was not enough. A speaker blew itself the Macbook started to emit smoke.

She needed more bass to open the pyramid. She needed the bass she had heard in her dream. She needed to find the DJ.

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Did i go slightly sciency in this one? At least no one died!

The Old Man With a Guitar

The old man had an old name. He had simply forgotten it. But he remembered the important things. He remembered how to tune his guitar. He remembered the lyrics and the tunes. And he remembered that children who made noise needed to be locked away. He had locked such a boy in a tower. But he respected music, so he allowed the boy to make music. But all that the boy made was noise. The boy was beyond redemption. That electronic buggalaboo. The old man hated it, but he endured it. For every noise was music in its own way.

It was a bright morning when he reached the next village. The children found him as they found him in every village he went to. They ran around him and asked him to play songs. Some parents had sent food with the children. 

He gathered them all and went to the big tree near the edge of village pond. First, he ate. There was apple pie and fresh fruit. Then he drank the water from the pond. The children sat in a semicircle around him as he tuned his guitar. He strummed a few sample chords, tweaked the strings some more and started to play. He was old beyond his years, but with a guitar in his hand he was young again. 

So he sang. 

He sang songs about death and honor. About pain and madness. About god and loss of faith. About hard life and harder knocks in life. Then he sang of demons of noise and how the children should not make too much noise, in their home or outside. The afternoon sun slowly turned to dusk as the children sat hypnotized and listened to him play songs. 

A young girl from the group got up and asked the old man if he could sing a religious hymn for her. His fingers strumming the guitar stopped abruptly. He looked at  the little girl, and beckoned her to him.

"Kid, I am going to give you the best advice anyone will ever give you."

The girl nodded enthusiastically and smiled at him.

"Whenever a musician is playing a song," he got up and raised his guitar above his head, "you SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN!"

The guitar swung down in an arc and wood shattered on skin and bone. The children scattered, scared and screaming like sheep from a wolf. 

The old man didn't chase them. He knew there will be time enough to chase them. He had to find the butcher first. He left the broken and bloodied guitar near the tree and started walking. 

To the next village and towards the butcher.

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Hey readers, I hope all this is not making sense. Because these chapters are, but a part of a bigger picture. 

Stick around with me. 

It'll be fun. 

Promise.

The Butcher

The butcher had been married for 24 years before he made himself a widower by putting a pillow on his wife's coughing face. 

He just could not handle the coughing anymore and through some messed up internal logic, he blamed his job for her death. 

He was the bartender in a discotheque, till this evening. He fired himself by setting the discotheque on fire. With all the people still inside it. And the exits locked with a heavy chain.

And from his little two room house, the butcher could hear the sirens of fire trucks as they weaved through the city's traffic and tried to put out the fire he had started. 

He hated the discotheque because they played a new strain of filthy excuse for music. The heavy bass and the mechanical sounds fucked his head up and made him feel murderous on the best of days. He just didn't understand how the people in the discotheque danced to that music. To his ears, it sounded like robots fucking and screaming at the same time. 

To cope with the noise, he was sloshed as fuck behind the bar most of the days. He didn't quit because that job was the only way he could get medicines for his wife, who coughed all day and all night. She slept while he was out on his job and coughed when he was in the house. Sometimes he felt she coughed just to irritate him. 

So, today when he entered his house, high on adrenaline, anger and murder; he heard the dreaded cough again. The pillow was his last option. He said sorry to his wife and put the pillow on her coughing face. She struggled a bit, but he was crying too loud to notice. When she stopped coughing, he felt the silence close in all around him. He had thought he'd find peace but it was only the eerie sound of silence in his ears. That sound soon became a slow pounding beat behind his eyes, it spread all over his skull and seeped into his brain. 

And in that silence, he heard a song. 

It was a man's voice and he sang like an angel. It was a nice song and he wanted to do what the song was saying. He wanted to travel. To a tower in the sea. And climb the tower, reach through the window and kill the boy inside it. 

The boy had been making noise all night. And oh, how he hated noise. 

He kissed his dead wife goodbye and left home. 

On his way out he opened the valve of a cooking gas cylinder. The house was full of gas by the time he was two blocks away. The gas found a spark under the fridge, kissed it and birthed a fireball that engulfed the small two room flat and other flats near it. 

The butcher didn't even look back.

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More tomorrow :)

A Signal From The Sea

The sea was angry.

The waves, black in the dark night, crashed upon the rock with a furious energy. The DJ stood in his prison window, on top of the tower that was built on the rocks that rose out of the sea. 

He looked at the sea and sighed. 

Turning away from the window, he hit a switch by the wall and the room was enveloped in darkness. Only a dull blue glow from a console provided illumination. He stepped up to the console and flipped a switch. A dull beat started to thrum from the speakers placed in the room. He pushed a slider up to 11, turned a knob and the beat took on texture. 

Then, he added layers of music to the beat. The sound built and built till the walls reverberated and the sound of angry sea outside the window was nothing but a whisper in the background. 

The DJ's fingers moved on the console like snakes to the beat of music, tweaking the tune till it reached that perfect pitch, the precipice, crest of a wave of love and hate. And he turned it down, all the way. 

Silence dawned, the sea roared.

Then, the bass dropped. 

The noise was maddening. Waves shrank away from the tower as if pushed by a might hand. And the noise kept on rising, driving back the sea.

The sea crawled back into its shell as the tower's window flashed with brilliant colors, sucking up light and throwing out signals of a specific frequency, for the one somewhere out in the world. 

By the time the console's lights dimmed again, the DJ's fingers were bleeding. A nosebleed had painted his upper lip red, but he was happy. His message was out there. Help would come soon.

At least he hoped it will. 

The sound from the tower spread out into the world seeking the person it was meant for. It shuffled through dreams of people all over the world till it found the receiver.

And in a tiny room at the base of a pyramid by the river Nile, a girl with electric blue hair screamed and woke up from her dream.

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More?

The Princess and the Thief - Part 2

(Read Part 1 here)

One summer night when the thief saw the princess leave for one of her parties, he entered her house through a window that he opened with the tools of his trade. 

As he stepped into her room, he knowingly tripped an infra-red sensor that the princess had installed to prevent the theft of her heart. Unlike other stupid princesses who had their hearts stolen with an alarming regularity, our princess was a fucking genius who had her Plan B already in place. 

Unfortunately, the thief knew about this. 

As the computer connected to the infra-red sensor sent an SMS to her phone, it instantly started to show a live feed through the cameras installed in various nooks and crannies of her house. The thief, passed calmly in front of the cameras and made his way to the sink under which the box containing the heart was kept. He freed the box from the sink's grasp and opened it. The pale red heart inside beat with a steady rhythm in the box. 

A smile crawled up to the thief's face and vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He put his hand in the box and picked up the heart. It started to beat harder in his hand. He heard the sound of a door opening from the house and without turning around he knew that the princess had reached. He turned around and there she was, with a shotgun in her hand, pointed at him. 

"Put my heart back in the box."

The thief nodded and slowly moved his hand to put the fast beating heart back in the box. The shotgun never wavered. 

The heart touched the bottom of the box and the thief released it from his fingers. He let the lid of the box drop slowly and in the moment it snapped shut, in the sound of the click, many things happened at once. 

The thief threw a small knife, which was concealed in his glove, at the princess. The princess pulled the trigger, but the shotgun shell went haywire and in that second, the thief was on her. 

His lips pressed to hers. 

The kiss, deeper than oceans, popped her ears and set steam rising from her skin. 

They laid on the floor, the shotgun and the heart forgotten, their lips joined, their fingers intertwined, hungry mouths feeding on each other. 

They resurfaced to breathe and she took her first close look at him. 

She took him. 

Later, as they both leaned out of her window, looking at the moon, sharing one cigarette, she slit his throat with the knife he had thrown at her. She pushed his convulsing body out of the window where it smacked into the pavement with a dull thud. 

This was her Plan C. Besides, she didn't want to get any blood on the curtains.

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Thanks for reading. 

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