You can find the introduction to this series here.

So welcome to the first part of Writing To Order: a serialised story about some stuff I don’t know yet. At the risk of breaking the illusion for readers out there, I should point out that – like all writers – I’m a lot less good when I haven’t been thoroughly edited. Also making this up as I go along very, very literally.

Thank you for all your amazing suggestions. I’m afraid I couldn’t go with all of them but I think I’ve managed to reference a reasonable number. Here’s are some things to keep an eye out for in this particular instalment.

• bookshop (Carolyn / PJ )
• an exceedingly large and lazy cat (Elin) who has special abilities (Anonymous)
• Giles-esque librarian character (Beej / PJ)
• time portal in stock cupboard (Beej)
• character on the ACE spectrum (Caz)
• two slices of Wensleydale with cranberries (Caz)

But I also have plans to work in:

• shy people falling in love (Cassia)
• literature smuggling (Alex Gabriel)
• field trip to Victorian England (KJ)
• a character with an interesting dialect (Sylvia)

And, now, without further ado … we begin!

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I

in my own time
i moved at will
among the streams of knowing
i shaped a world that
long ago
had passed
beyond
material crudity
the data-serfs
scurried
to my every whim
my thoughts
were golems
that toiled without end towards
the perfection and glory
of my ephemeral palace
at the pinnacle of an empire of minds
and now
it has come to this
imprisoned in the past
in physicality
licking my own genitive organs

The day after Aunt Violet’s funeral, Jamie Fassnidge let himself out of the rain and into Elfin Grot, the alternative, spiritualist and new-age bookshop that been his late relative’s pride and joy. He suspected she would not have left it to him had he not been her last living relative and she certainly would not have done so had she known how vehemently he disliked the place.

It was partially a natural aversion to the subject matter since, as a man of science, he had time no time for tarot cards or crystal healing or theories about the Merovingian Dynasty. But it was mainly because, as a child, he had been firmly convinced it was haunted. He was, on some level, aware that these two concerns were mutually incompatible.

Nevertheless, the moment he stepped over the threshold and caught that familiar scent of old paper and cheap incense he was – for a moment – six years old again. He had been in the cellar, leafing through a picture book of Real UFO Sightings while Mr Snuzzlefluff, Aunt’s Violet’s exceedingly fat and exceedingly lazy ginger tom, had slumbered nearby. And then all at once, with terrible clarity, a voice from nowhere had said: harken, material, you are to be of use to me. His response had been a wild scream and a panicked flight upstairs. His mother had told him it must have been his imagination. His Aunt, on the other hand, had insisted he had met one of the friendly fairies who lived in the cellar and protected the shop from evil spirits. His mother had not been happy with this and neither, frankly, had he.

Thankfully, nothing like that happened today and he privately scolded the irrational part of himself that had feared it might. The shop was silent. It was just a shop. A dusty relic of time when the millennium meant the future, rather than the past, and obscure, specialist bookshops were remotely viable businesses.

He closed the door and bent to pick up the post. Bills mostly, by the looks of it.

It was sad in a way. Aunt Violet had put her whole life into this place and Jamie had to come to pack it up, close it down and sell it off. Get back to his real life and his real job in the Bodleian.

Picking his way through rickety little aisles of higgledy-piggledy books (mostly filed under headings like “Arthurian Legend”, “Ghosts”, and “Health & Wellness”) he arrived at the tiny room that passed for the office. It was awash with papers and he couldn’t help wonder how his Aunt had run any kind of business from a room containing three dreamcatchers, two sets of windchimes, a gigantic quartz crystal and no computer.
He sighed. He had always known this was going to be tedious. Now it seemed almost insurmountable.

And it probably didn’t help that the vital documents he would need to get started were currently trapped beneath the body of an enormous orange cat.
The cat in question, who Jamie was sure could not have been the original Mr Snuzzlefluff his aunt had owned two decades previously, cranked open one yellow eye, regarding Jamie with imperious indifference.

He scratched it … him … Mr Snuzzlefluff? … idly behind the ears.

“Well,” he said. “Looks like it’s just you and me.”

The cat ignored him.

Jamie wished he could return the favour. He didn’t particularly like animals. For that matter, he wasn’t all that keen on humans, finding them loud and frequently intimidating, but at least they could be reasoned with and only rarely went to sleep on important paperwork.

“Look. I’m going to need those.”

The cat ignored him.

“I’m not going to argue about this.”

Oh God. Jamie felt himself growing prickly and hot and anxious. He was losing a confrontation with a corpulent feline.

“Well, fine. If it’s that important to you then … then … fine.”

He claimed the chair and slid his laptop bag off his shoulder. There was plenty for him to be getting on with. At some point the cat would have to move – basic biology dictated that, at some point, the cat would have to move – and then his time would come. Oh yes.

He carefully opened his MacBook and laid it across his lap.

The cat moved.

A substantial and weighty mass of orange fur projected itself across the room at speeds Jamie would not have considered physically possible for a creature that – only moment’s ago – had found opening one eye laborious.

His chair pitched over backwards, his laptop struck the ground with a deeply distressing and expensive-sounding crack, and when Jamie finally scrambled to his feet it was to discover Mr Snuzzlefluff disembowelling his computer with what – in his addled state – looked to Jamie a lot like expert precision.

“Hey!”

The cat caught up a delicate piece of solid state electronics in its mouth and bolted for the door.

“I am not going to chase you.”

There was no response.

“Well bother.”

He tried again. “I am not going to chase you but I am going to come and find you at my own pace and then … and then … do something you will find mildly unpleasant.”

He set off in pursuit.

Mr Snuzzlefluff had left something of a trail of overturned displays and scattered books. With some trepidation Jamie realised the cat had retreated to the cellar. With some trepidation he followed it, turning on all the lights as he went.

The cellar was basically as he remembered. His aunt had used it as a stock cupboard and so it was full of boxes and uncatalogued books. Where it differed, however, from his recollections was the presence of a swirling blue-purple vortex in the middle of the room.

The cat crouched at the base of the portal and appeared to be fitting whatever doodad it had swiped rom Jamie’s MacBook into a bizarre and complex machine which – Jamie assumed – was the source of the whole phenomenon.

Jamie opened his mouth and then realised he had no idea what to say or, indeed, what sorts of things one would say having discovered a domestic animal had created some manner of interdimensional rift using materials they had stolen from one’s personal property.

“Um,” he said. “Now look here. This is very inappropriate.”

i said you would be of use to me, material.

It was the same voice he had heard all those years ago, but greatly magnified.

Jamie’s impulses were much as they had been at six years old. But he was a grown man now and, moreover, he suspected that the presence of an otherworldly voice and a mysterious wibbly portal would seriously damage the resale value of the property. “W-who are you? What’s going on?”

my true name is a symphony your mind cannot encompass. for now, know that i have an empire to reclaim and that you will be the instrument of that reclamation.

Jamie put his hands on his hips. “I don’t know what you are, but I’m taking my cat, and I’m turning that machine off, and then I’m going upstairs for a cup of tea and two slices of Wensleydale with cranberries. I’ve had a very trying morning.”

He strode purposefully forward and seized Mr Snuzzlefluff around the ribs. He realised at once that he had grossly underestimated the creature’s mass. It twisted in his grip, seeming to consist almost entirely of fur and muscle and no bones at all. And then as the struggle grew ever more ungainly, it slammed its full bulk against his shins.

With a startled cry, Jamie lost his balanced, stumbled forward, and tumbled face first into the polychromatic darkness of the portal.

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So guys, where do we go from here? Needless, to say it is a time portal, and Mr Snuzzlefluff does have a reason for building it. But where do we go, who do we meet, what happens. Eagerly awaiting your suggestions.

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Alexis Hall is wastrel with a good hat. You can find him on his website, onTwitter, and occasionally on Facebook, which he doesn’t know how to use. He’ll be at Love Bytes on the 14th of every month, writing something he doesn’t yet know.