Tri-Fiction E-Book

Morné Steenekamp

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Three mysterious tales. Three doors to be traversed. Tri-Fiction Volume One is a journey through the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Jimmy Maxwell is bored of existence, failing school and sleepwalking aimlessly through life until he comes face to face with the mysterious Voice of Chalk. In Seven Echoes, an unnamed man wakes up cold, naked and alone in a strange circular room with eight doors. A grinning madman appears and tells him to pick a weapon... Hiruun wanders endlessly alone through the cold reaches of a harsh terrain. Darkness travels in his wake during his Cursed Years.

Leseprobe

Morné Steenekamp

Tri-Fiction

Volume One

Dedicated to my mother, whose constant hounding made me actually publish something. Also I'd like to thank my girlfriend who proofread and edited all my tense and grammar mistakes.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Voice of Chalk

Voice of Chalk

2nd Period

Jimmy felt a hand on his shoulder. He nearly screamed until he saw that it was only Peter, the guy who sat next to him in math class. His heart was still racing and he struggled to breathe. Seeing Peter’s face took some of the bewilderment away. At the very least Peter was human.

“Whoa, that’s pretty cool man!”

Jimmy looked at where his classmate pointed. The demonic visage had reappeared. His eyes found the blackboard and saw it was filled with normal algebra again. No bloody fingernails covered the wooden floor and he could see no snapped chalk sticks. Another shudder ran through his body. Was it a dream after all? For a moment he felt slightly disappointed. Despite all his nightmarish fear, it had been the most exciting mathematics class ever.

Jimmy saw that everyone was making their way out of the classroom. Math class was finally over. The second period felt almost short. Jim wondered if he had fallen asleep. He could not remember closing his eyes for more than a few seconds.

Jimmy closed his notebook, stashed it in his black single strap shoulder bag and left the room. He really needed a smoke. Chances were he would be late for his next class, but he really did not care. A good solid five minutes of nicotine would calm his nerves. He had to dodge a few students before making his way over to the restrooms, which were right across from the mathematics classroom.

As the door shut behind him he noticed that the toilets were empty. Good. Jimmy went to the middle cubicle of the three. He locked the door behind him and fumbled inside his blazer for his lighter and pack of tens. The box felt rather empty. Jimmy found only two cigarettes inside. That was fine, he only needed one. He hardly ever smoked. It had been about five months since he had bought the box of tens. They were his happy sticks, but Jimmy was usually happy enough and that was why they had lasted so long.

His hand shook uncontrollably as he flicked at the lighter. Jimmy gave a nervous chuckle. Time’s a wasting. He liked being on time, or rather he hated being late.

“Come on man!”

At last the flint snapped up a narrow pathetic excuse for a flame. He would need a new lighter soon. Jimmy was careful not to burn himself as he lowered his face, with the cigarette in his mouth, closer to the flame. He dragged deep and the calm took hold of him almost immediately. He exhaled the blue smoke through his nose and sighed.

As the ring of embers reached the filter Jimmy dropped the cigarette bud into the toilet. It hissed once and then died. He felt a hell of a lot better than he had moments before. His hand reached into the right pocket of his blazer. Jimmy took out his small laminated timetable. Shit. His next class was English and the English teacher, Ms Mathews was a bit of a bitch when it came to tardiness.

Jimmy looked at himself in the mirror before he ran to his next class. He appeared rather normal. His brown hair was neat, perhaps neater than usual. He was clean shaven, but that was not much of an achievement. The bum-fluff that he called a beard had only started showing the year before. There were some dark rings beneath his eyes, but he blamed that on his recent smoke. He smiled and left the hazy restroom behind.

As he had anticipated, Ms Mathews bitched at him for being ten minutes late. Jimmy apologised and blamed it on an upset stomach, which made his classmates spit up a soft chuckle. Despite his rather valid excuse, she still wrote him a demerit slip. He did not bother arguing with her. The woman was difficult under normal circumstances. Jim had seen her hand out up to twenty such detention slips in one go. Five slips were enough for a Friday afternoon’s worth of detention. Four Fridays in a row? No thank you.

He took his usual seat at the centre of the room. Despite the posters and some other minor changes, the English classroom was pretty much identical to the mathematics classroom. Jimmy dug out his English notebook and paged to the back. A smile touched his lips when he saw his last few drawings. It was some sort of merman swimming upwards with bubbles and speed lines all around him. In the left bottom corner he had drawn small rectangular patterns and perpendicular lines. He often drew such things all across the notebooks pages, not only at the back. It trimmed away some of his usual boredom.

Ms Mathews was talking about setwork. Jimmy loved reading, but not books or novels. He enjoyed reading signs or random bits of text in TV guides or similar magazines. Sometimes he would read them out loudly, to show-off and show that he could in fact read, and quite well. Usually his parents ignored him when he did so, or they would look at what he had read and make a comment about that shop or business whose sign he had read aloud.

Their current setwork was some difficult play by Shakespeare. The dated English was horribly confusing. Jim sometimes wished he was in a second language class. The second language students got to read much better books. At least they read books that were still fairly relevant. Not some four hundred year old play about lust and loss.

A motivational poster with Shakespeare’s creepy head on it was stuck in-between those of several other deceased writers and their famous quotes. There was one by Charles Dickens and another by Oscar Wilde. The Shakespeare one read:

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”

He did not know what that actually meant, but it stood out among the rest.

Jimmy’s attention was drawn away from the posters by Ms Mathews’ tapping on the blackboard. She was writing something about their current setwork book. The taps and squeaks brought back memories of the mathematics class. As if a valve at the back of his mind had been opened, he began to hear the bleating again. It was soft but rapidly growing.

Jim’s eyes swooped across the room. All his classmates were once more giving him unblinking stares. No. The teacher’s chalkstrokes grew louder and more aggressive. It was happening all over again. No, no, no! Despite his pleas the bleating continued. On the blackboard, written in thick capitals was:

2B or not 2B

It was repeated over and over and over again. A sheep bleated into his ear loudly. Jimmy gasped and jumped out of his chair.

“Where are you going Jimmy!?”

He ignored the teacher, whose voice was now terribly deep and demonic. Jim looked across the room and out the windows. A strange darkness had enveloped the day outside. The sheep-headed hybrid students all rose from their chairs. They looked and moved like zombies. Jimmy turned and ran, taking care not to get trapped.

“Jimmy? Jimmy!? Jimmy!?”

His teacher’s voice was cut off as he slammed the door behind him. Jimmy ran.

The hallways were empty. As he ran Jim realised that he was no longer in school. The corridor was straight, very long and strangely dark. There was enough light to see, but where the light came from he could not say. There were no lockers and Jimmy could see no other classrooms, or doors. As he looked back he noticed that the doorway he had run out of had also vanished. The ceiling was chequered with black and white squares, very much like a chessboard. The walls were dark. Jimmy began to slow and after several moments he finally stopped. The corridor felt infinite. Time is infinite.

It took some time before he stopped gasping for air. Jimmy then noticed that the walls were made of blackboard material. All along the bottom of this infinite chalkboard ran the metallic sill which many pieces of chalk and chalk dusters called home. An identical blackboard wall sat opposite the first one. Jimmy looked back at where he had come from and then further down the passageway. Both sides led to what seemed to be an infinite amount of nothingness. The sight grabbed at his heart and squeezed. He felt trapped. Stuck in a loop. Was it a dream? No. He no longer thought so. It felt far too real to be as simple as that.

His eyes searched across the wall of green. It was very clean. He could see no dust or marks. There was not even a scratch. The same could be said for the chalk tray. It was shiny and looked very new, scratchless. His eyes found a single piece of white chalk resting neatly within the metal groove.

Jimmy walked closer to this chalk stick. That it was a brand new piece of chalk, he had little doubt. There were no visible finger-marks on it and the edges were crisp and sharp. It was the quintessential perfect piece of white chalk.

Jimmy took hold of the chalk and without thinking about it began to write:

“What is going on?”

3rd Period

Jimmy caught himself near the end and looked at what he had written down. What is going on? There was a blank spot in his mind where he could not remember picking up the chalk stick. Yet, when he looked at the piece of perfect chalk clutched between his fingers, he clearly remembered thinking that it had looked new and unused.

Despite the gap in his memory Jimmy agreed with what he had written down. He wanted to know what the hell was going on. It was not every day that your fellow student body turned into sheep-headed mongrels and your teachers lost their minds before your eyes. A screeching sound came from the board wall right in front of him. Several clicks and more screeches followed. Slowly from right to left white chalk letters appeared across the board. The letters were in reverse and it took him some time to read them.

Draw a picture for us.

The command did little to sate Jimmy’s growing confusion. He reached over and wrote another question.

Who are you?

Jimmy waited patiently. A strange sense of calm had shrouded over him. Curiosity had gotten the better of him.

We are the voice of chalk.

Care to explain?

Draw us a picture. A portrait would be best.

Jim took a deep breath and swallowed. He felt slightly frustrated. What in the hells was “the voice of chalk”? His hand began moving across the board before he knew what he was doing. Click, click, click. Chalk crumbs showered down and bounced onto the silver metallic shelf. Jimmy dipped his fingers into the heaps of chalk dust and used them for shading. Slowly a replica of his demonic visage drawing appeared onto the wall. It was much bigger than the one in the back of his notebook. The top of the drawing was about two meters from the ground, while the bottom was about a meter from the same ground.

As Jimmy came to the end of his drawing his hand pulled away and he took a few steps back to admire his work. Just as he came to a stop the demon head’s pupils began to move and its face began to push out from the wall. It became a chalk relief of sorts. Jim only stared in amazement. His personal opinion was that the muttonheads had been far more terrifying. The head began to cough and puffs of chalk dust blew out from its nose making a white mess on the floor. As the demon’s coughing fit came to an end, its eyes opened again and looked at Jim.

“We thank you for this window.”

The voice was deep and he recognised it. It was the demonic voice Ms Mathews had used when Jimmy had fled from her classroom. 2B or not 2B? He remembered the words scrawled all across her blackboard. Jim cleared his throat.

“You were the hand on the other side?”