You can find the introduction to this series here and chapter 1 here.

Hello and welcome to Writing to Order chapter 2

I’m afraid due to timezone issues my last post went up at about 5am so you may have missed it. But you can catch up with what’s going above using the links above.

So far we have a shy asexual librarian who has been pushed through a time portal by a excessively large and excessively lazy cat. The precise nature of the cat has yet to be established in the story but there are things going on that will hopefully become apparent.

Suggestions for what happened next included: conspiracy involving the Cheshire Cat, travel into he future and travel to Victorian England, where Jamie encounters someone integral to the cat’s identity.

For the moment, I’m going with Victorian England. And as per a previous promise: some dialect.

---

Chapter 2

thwarted 
in my moment of triumph
my material servant
waylaid
in the skeins 
of potentia
no matter
i must continue
i must have data
but this body 
weakens
as it strains against
the energies
of my true ephemeral nature
my biological prison
demands
that I lie upon this fluffy blanket
& nap

Jamie had a few brief seconds to imagine all the wonderful and terrible places he might find himself before landing in a heap in a dank cellar. At least he assumed, it was a cellar from the stone floor and the smell. It too dark really to be certain. It could just as well have been a basement or a oubliette or a dungeon or – more optimistically – just a room that just happened to lack light or windows or obvious means of egress.

He sat up gingerly, relieved to discover that – although bruised and a little shaken – he had suffered no greater injury than one would normally associate with falling over a cat. He was, however, faced with something of a quandary. His instinct was to shout for aid but, not knowing were he was, he couldn’t be certain that drawing attention to himself would actually bring aid. Rather than, say, execution.

Groping around blindly, he felt for an absurd moment that he was in a text adventure from the 1980s. He hoped he was in no danger of being eaten by a grue. There was also no sign of the cat. At around this point, he realised that he was alone in a pitch black cellar, hoping to be rescued for an unknown and possibly imaginary danger by an obese, domesticated feline that he pushed him through some manner of inter dimensional rift.

He was, on the whole, rather proud of how well he was taking things.

At that moment, there was the scrape of a key in a lock and oily orange light spilled in from a door that had opened above him. In wavering silhouette he saw a the shape of a man, oil lamp in one hand, knife in the other.

Not the best conceivable outcome.

In fact, possibly the worst conceivable outcome.

The man came slowly down the steps, his cloak billowing behind him. The more Jamie stared at him, the less he could make out. Between a pulled down hat and a turned up collar, the gentleman was little more than shadows and a cracked half-moon smile. He looked up and his eyes were nothing but static.

“‘ello Boss,” he said.

Jamie thought it expedient to scramble to his feet and put as much distance between himself and the stranger with a knife as the cellar allowed. “Sorry, do we know each other?”

“Bin waiting for you a long time, Boss. Bin keeping my knife nice ’n’ sharp.”

Jamie tried to think of uses for a nice, sharp knife that might be pleasant in the context of a dark room with one exit, and came up rather short. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake. I’m a librarian.”

“Don’t know about that. All I know is an exile from the Empire is coming ‘ere in a borrowed body.” He set the oil lamp on the ground between them, and turned his blade his a manner that suggested a disconcerting degree of experience. “My job is to cut up that body.”

“Look. I’m not from any empire and this body is definitely mine. I’ve had it as long as I can remember and I’d really be a lot happier if you put the knife down.”

“Memory’s a funny thing. I remember things ‘as ‘aven’t ‘appened yet. I remember a palace made of thoughts and a war in a kingdom of ideas. And then shaped me and sent me to hunt but I got lost and forgot who I was hunting.”

At this point, it became apparent that the strange-eyed, knife-wielding gentleman was perhaps not amenable to rational discourse. That left the two classic options of fight or flight. Jamie didn’t entirely rate his chances of either – there wasn’t really anywhere to flee and fighting seemed like a spectacularly bad idea when he wasn’t the one with the weapon.

So he lunged forward and punted the lamp as hard as he could towards his assailant. It shattered on the stones, spattering burning oil in all directions. This had a deleterious effect on Jamie’s trousers but a significantly worse effect on the stranger’s cloak, which caught light with a satisfying whomp.

This, of course, meant that Jamie had gone from being trapped in a cellar with a knife-wielding maniac to be trapped in a cellar with a a knife-wielding maniac who was on fire. The sliver of advantage granted by this situation was that the flames distracted his enemy just long enough for Jamie to dart past him and up the stairs.

He wasn’t in any mood for sightseeing but on his way to the front door he caught sight of a leather apron hanging on a peg and a wooden table upon which miscellaneous organs were scattered. He burst into the street with his erstwhile host in hot pursuit.

way to the front door he caught sight of a leather apron hanging on a peg and a wooden table upon which miscellaneous organs were scattered. He burst into the street with his erstwhile host in hot pursuit.

It was dark and smelled extraordinarily unpleasant. He turned in a random direction and ran, trying to lose himself in the maze of narrow alleys. It was only when eh stopped for breath, relatively confident at having evaded the local psychopath, that he realised how bad your situation would have to be for ‘get lost in what was clearly a bad part of town in an unknown city’ to be your best survival strategy.

He pulled out his phone, hoping he would have time to call the police or a taxi before he got mugged. To his distress, but not to his surprise, it was dead. It really was the end of a perfect day.

There was nothing for it but to look for a main road. Half-expecting the man with a knife to jump out of the next shadow, he emerged at last onto a cobbled, gaslit street. He could hear the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels in the distance, and muffled laughter from seedy public houses, to say nothing of the occasional, more intimate cry. From the mouth of another alley there emerged a woman in tawdry finery and a man in nautical dress. Jamie had seen enough BBC costume dramas to put them closer to Dickens than Austen. And closer to either than, say, him.

He was either on one of those Derren Brown stunt shows where is an innocent member of the public wakes up and is convinced that that the world has ended or they’ve been turned into a gorilla. Or else that bloody cat had somehow sent him back to the nineteenth century.

---

Okay folks. So what next? What should Jamie do in Victorian England. Who should he meet? How can he avoid the entity that’s hunting him? How should the cat rescue him – once he’s done napping, that is

---

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.