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| This time there would be no witnesses.
This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and the onset of that interminable light drizzle from the northeast by which so many of the world's momentous events seem to be accompanied.
The storms of the day before, and the day before that, and the floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged with rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom was a dreary kind of prickle.
Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.
It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terrible than its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages dead. | Gender | Age | | | Male | 20 | | | Last Active | Profile Views | | 3 days | 6736 times | | | Hometown | | | Oxford | | | | Ben Atkins's URL | | http://www.bebo.com/TheMightyWidge | | | Member Since | | | March 2006 | |
| | The only movement | | was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on, the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground.
But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was not entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering deep within it.
The light was only just visible – except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light. Every few minutes it grew a little stronger and a little brighter and then faded away almost to nothing. At the same time a low keening noise drifted out on to the wind, built up to a kind of wailing climax, and then it too faded, abjectly, away. | | | Time passed, | | and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobile light. It emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuit of the tower, pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and the shadowy figure that could just be discerned carrying it, disappeared inside once more.
An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total. The world seemed dead, the night a blankness.
And then the glow appeared again near the tower’s peak, this time growing in power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak of brightness it had previously attained, and then kept going, increasing, increasing. The keening sound that accompanied it rose in pitch and stridency until it became a wailing scream. The sound screamed on and on till it became a blinding noise and the light a deafening redness. | | | And then, abruptly, both ceased. | | There was a millisecond of silent darkness.
An astonishing new light billowed and bulged from deep within the mud beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mud convulsed, earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a terrible pinkness, a sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained the clouds, and then the light sank and the night at last was deeply, hideously dark. There was no further noise other than the soft tinkle of water. | | | On that night, | | an elite team of the world’s greatest genetic biologists, disgusted by the precognition of Jaco Pastorius’ brutal and untimely death, united in an unholy contract to create a being, a machine, for one purpose: the thing created that night was designed for the sole function of transforming the bass guitar from at state of pure potentiality to a state of pure actuality, in the most sensational sound known to man. | | | They call it | | Ben Atkins, and it walks, like a man, among us, until such time as its task be fulfilled. | | | ... | | It is therefore pure coincidence that I am also so good-looking. | | | Happiest When | | Sleeping, playing bass, playing drums, with Meg, in church, reading Anselm in the Queen's Head. So my ideal scenario would be having a kip during one of my Dad's sermons next to Meg in a church service in which I was playing bass or drums for the band followed by a good chunk of the proslogium and a London Pride. | |
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MY CAM USER NAME IS cutiegirl89 11 ro
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