NaNoWriMo: The End of the Beginning

He stood waited for the moon to hit, until the voice had shaken him from the moon’s sway.

“I’mmmm heeeere, Dusssstinnn…” she moaned.

Dustin had looked down to see curtains hanging on one of the walls; it was the first that he had noticed of them. The silk curtains were worn and frayed, and he could see a fragmented view of someone standing behind them. Caution and eagerness waged a war within his heart as he argued with himself as to whether or not he should be so reckless to go to the figure. A voice in his heart told him that he must, while a voice in his head told him that he would be making a costly mistake. His heart won. He walked over to the curtains and gripped the edges of the curtains with his trembling hands. He ripped them open and stopped the sight that awaited him stopped him in his tracks.

A woman stood over by the balustrade, but she was much more than a woman; a goddess, perhaps. She stood confident and tall as she watched the horizon, and while she had her back to him, Dustin knew that she was surely the sort of beautiful that inspired people to write songs and sonnets. Her shoulder length brown hair swept around in a nonexistent breeze. That airless wind had also tugged at her silver gown, which looked like a thin sheet of fog woven into a fabric form, and seemed to radiate an ethereal aura beneath the moon’s rays. He could have stood there and watched her watching the world, and he would have been nothing less than sublimely happy, yet he needed to talk to her, to know why she called for him.

“I’m here,” he whispered breathlessly.

“I was waiting for you,” she replied.

She started turning her head and Dustin’s ears began to ring. He jammed his eyes shut from the discomfort and clapped his hands over his head.

“Dammit,” he groaned.

Dustin wrenched his eyes open and cast a murderous look at his interfering alarm clock. The voice in his head screamed for retribution at having been denied the victory that it so desperately needed. He chucked a pillow across the room and took out the whole of the table that sat the alarm clock. It was a little bit excessive, but it had the desired effect; glorious silence had once again rung through his bedroom and he drifted off to catch a few last winks before he started the day. His mind ran to the last few moments of the dream and he felt cheated once more.

“Every single time,” he moaned into his pillow.

NaNoWriMo, Episode Six: The Continuation Initiative

“Duuuustiiiiiin…” a ghostly female voice called out in the darkness.

He froze and looked up ahead. Then he looked down the staircase. Finding no one, he looked over the balustrade for a possible hint at the voice’s location.

“Duuuuustiiiiiiin…”

It was definitely coming from up the stairs. It seemed to be drifting in from the topmost door, which already sat ajar, and seemed to be waiting for his arrival. It was such a bad idea; he was sure of it. Even so, the voice called him once more, and his legs knew that she needed to be answered, even if his brain still needed convincing; he continued on up the stairs. Soon, he was running. The voice rang out for a fourth time and it was like a magnet, drawing him closer and closer. He passed several more doors and made countless circles around the staircase, but he kept going until he had finally reached the top.

A shiver of anticipation shook through him, making the hair on his neck stand up and he found himself needing to take a calming breath before he walked through the door. He pushed it completely open with his violently shaking hand and startled by what awaited him. The room appeared to have been the grand sleeping chambers of a castle or a palace. While it might once have been stately and luxuriant, it had become a worn out ruin, decayed and destroyed by the long, steady march of time. The walls were the ceiling was completely gone and the walls had collapsed in several spots. The candle fixtures that clung to what remained of the walls had been eaten and deformed by rust and all the paintings were faded and torn.

There were no candles to light the room, but none were needed. The moon’s blue glow had completely washed over the room and when Dustin really looked to the sky, he received another shock. There was no sky; only the moon, itself. He walked over to where a window would have stood and looked out to find that the moon had gone on as far as the horizon. He might have thought it to be infinite, had he not caught the tiniest sliver of nighttime between the moon and the earth. It was more unsettling to him, by far, than the outer space room had been. With every minute that he kept his eyes fixed on the lunar surface, he had expected it to come crashing down on his head.

NaNoWriMo the Fifth...

This time, he made no disgruntled comments about rude the occupants of that room had been to him, nor did he immediately wander ahead, driven by an unexplainable sense of impending doom. Instead, he continued to lie sprawled out on the steps, staring up at the moon peering through the skylight and wondering if that, too, was about to get sucked through a giant celestial maelstrom of death. After the moon had sat in its place for a sufficient amount of time, he had decided that it was there to stay. He allowed for another minute to properly collect himself and then he soldiered on, in his exploration of the insane building.

He felt like he had been walking up the spiraling staircase for hours, before another door had finally presented itself. Behind it, Dustin could hear growling, followed closely by some sort of groaning. He was certain that it had been some sort of animal and it sounded like it could have been in pain. Two thoughts immediately ran through his head; he could open it and potentially have his face eaten by whatever lurked on the other side, or he could open it up and aid a wounded and suffering creature; the idea of leaving the door closed, however, had not begun to circulate through his mind.

He eased the door open and peeked through. Two towering creatures, covered in shaggy, matted white fur, were in what seemed to be a barn, locked in each other’s vice like grips as they tussled around as though locked in mortal combat. One creature threw the other into a pile of hay and climbed on top of it while the other creature, clearly struggling, clawed at the dominating creature’s back. Dustin knew that they were yetis, though he had no idea why he knew that, but he was amazed by the savagery, with which, these two yetis bit and clawed into each other. As he watched the top yeti flip the bottom yeti over, he knew that the bottom one would surely be the loser in this battle. It was clearly indicative by the pounding that the top yeti was giving to-

“Oh my god!” a horrified Dustin abruptly exclaimed.

The moment that comprehension had dawned on him, he wanted more than anything to be somewhere else. The yetis were both surprised by the sudden outburst and the one on the bottom immediately squirmed onto its knees and tried to hide itself behind the other.

“Don’t come in here, you sick bastard,” the irate male yeti roared.

“Eww! Quit lookin’ at me, you perv!” shrieked the embarrassed female yeti from behind him.

“Oh… wow… I am so… wow… sorry, I mean… wow…” a flustered Dustin sputtered, grasping for the door handle.

As he pulled the door shut, Dustin could have sworn that the male yeti had flashed him a brief grin and had given him a subtle thumbs up. That had been the last straw. It was more than enough to convince him that turning around and going back downstairs was course of action. He had been crazy to think that climbing the stairs was a good idea and he had been downright idiotic to open any of the doors. He shook his head, as though trying to shake the stupid out of it, and started marching back down, though he had only taken three steps when it happened.

My Thrilling Forth NaNoWriMo Installment.

He could see the stars from where he stood; nothing but stars. A pale red planet with dazzling porcelain rings drifted past the doorway, as if it were close enough for him to reach over and touch. Dustin stepped closer to the threshold, completely awed by the overwhelming splendor of the infinite chasm that stood before him. A deeply sapphire world had also floated past at such a distance that it looked like it might have been a marble. Further, still, he noticed specks of what looked like dust, traveling in a stream and knew that it had to be an asteroid belt. He leaned his head in for a closer look and had actually gotten inside the room.

Blinding tangerine light had briefly disoriented him and he realized that the door was located in the side of a sun. The sun’s gasses burned all around the opening, but the intensity of its light was ever present, the sun’s heat was nowhere to be found. The wonder reflected in Dustin’s eyes as brilliantly as the sun’s fire as he gaped at its vast surfaces. Without even thinking, he reached over and touched the surface. It felt like a marshmallow, just having been briefly nuked in a microwave; it was hot, but not scolding, and it was soft and pillowy to the touch. As he ran his hand over it, warm bliss had sprung up inside of him, along with an insatiable urge to go out there and lie on it; it must have been extremely comfortable.

Before he could act on his impulse, however, Dustin had noticed something out of the corner of his eye, to captivate his attention. In a corner of the velvety blackness of space, he had noticed a spot; a pinprick, darker than the space around it. He might not have given it a second glance, except that everything else had abruptly begun to drift toward it and the closer things got, the larger that whole seemed go grow. Soon, it had grown from a pinprick to a dime, and then a nickel; a quarter; a Frisbee; a pizza pan… it just kept growing and growing, while everything around it seemed to be shrinking and disappearing.

The moment Dustin realized that he was staring at the swirling vortex of a growing black whole was the moment that he had been ripped off of his feet and sucked through the door. He had only just managed to reach the door handle and cling to it for dear life, before he too, could be yanked painfully down the cosmic drain. As he tried to claw his way along the door, he heard it buckle and groan under the stress of gravity’s unbearable pull. He knew that he had less than seconds to make it of the door, or else he would be irreparably thinner, so he gave it his all and threw himself out onto the stairwell. Again, the door was slammed shut.

“Hooo-oo-oly shit,” he shuddered, lying on the cold stone.

A Little More NaNoWriMo

Dustin hastily leapt ahead by five or six steps, not knowing that he could jump that far. Though the stairs above the door seemed stable, he was not about to take any chances. He walked onward, with much greater urgency, though was not yet to the point of running. On multiple occasions, Dustin had looked back to make sure that the dissolving steps were not closing in on him; he had an indescribable feeling that that would be a possibility. However, the steps the he had passed had all remained precisely where he had left them, and it was only when he had reached a second door that he had given the matter another thought.

This door looked just like the first and he was hesitant to so much as touch it. He stared intently at it as though trying to see through the door, so opening it would be unnecessary. He continued staring until he realized that he had no superpowers, and by then, his curiosity had gotten the better of him. Anxiously, he took the handle of the door and tried to open it. It had worked and the stairs were still where they were meant to be, so Dustin breathed a sigh of relief and shoved the door open. A giant eyeball, wide as a tractor tire, floated within what looked like a salmon-colored cloud. It was terribly bloodshot with a sickly brown iris and it glared at him with the utmost annoyance.

“What do you think you’re looking at?” a haughty disembodied voice exclaimed from within the cloud.

“Oh… um… I was just…” Dustin stammered.

“Go the hell away!” The voice spat and the door slammed hostilely in Dustin’s face.

He felt both disturbed and embarrassed, as he tried to wrap his mind around what had just happened.

“What the hell…” he muttered to himself. “…such an ass.”

A little more indignantly, he had ventured on up the stairs. He was now stomping more than he was walking, while fumed about the atrocious manners of floating eyeballs hidden behind the closed doors of creepy, ancient-looking castles. Lost in his own wandering mind, he had only just decided that perhaps it might have been more appropriate to knock first, when he realized that he had overshot the next door by twelve or thirteen steps. Looking back and seeing it, he doubled back down. He stopped in front of this door and had a moment’s hesitation before he finally knocked. There was no response so he decided it to be safe to open, but before he had even taken the handle, the door had swung open with a heavy jerk.

NaNoWriMo... The Continuation

As he put his first foot onto the bottom step of the staircase, a piece of the stair crumpled beneath Dustin and he felt the unmistakable lurching in the pit of his stomach that comes with a swift drop. Yet, he had only stumbled and hardly at all. Still, something felt completely off about the staircase; as if he was certain that he would melt into the steps as soon as he might begin the climb. His back foot was his anchor and he refused to take it off the reassuring comfort of the solid floor until he was certain of what he was about to step onto. He closed his eyes and took a breath, waiting as if for the proper moment to reveal itself.

However, a small voice inside his head told him that time was quickly dwindling away and the minutes were too few to waste in meaningless waiting. He gripped the balustrade for support and, closing his eyes and saying a brief prayer, he shifted his weight to his front foot. While the stone step seemed to crack and shift with his growing weight, it seemed solid all the same. Dustin walked up the steps as though they were covered in eggshells, while gripping the balustrade hard enough to feel it pinching his fingertips. His mouth became dry and his breathing, forced, as he slowly took one step at a time, waiting for an inexplicably certain doom to befall him.

Emerald shimmered in the corners of his eyes and he became aware of the candles on the wall. They ran along every fifteen stairs and their alluring green flames swayed hypnotically in an enticing dance that had made Dustin stop and lose himself in watching, at least three times. He kept one hand on the rail and one eye on the rippling candles as he continued onward, and he had only stopped doing either of them when he had come across the first door. It was a heavy wooden door, much like the last that he had passed through, and it had popped up some one hundred and twelve steps up.

There was no landing or leveling off of any kind at the foot of this door. It had simply just seemed to be a natural part of the wall, almost beyond notice; Dustin certainly nearly missed it. He grabbed the door’s handle and tried to push it open but the door wouldn’t budge. He put his shoulder into it and the door still remained firmly in place. The door started to feel less like wood and more like solid stone, just like the walls around it, so Dustin had nearly chocked it up to being a figment of his own imagination. However, thick ooze seeped out from beneath the door that had not been really there; it had the dark crimson appearance of blood, yet it reeked of gasoline, and as it ran down onto the steps below him, the steps had dissolved away into blowing sand.

NaNoWriMo ... The First Five Hundred

Here is the opening five hundred plus words of my NaNoWriMo project. This will give you the opportunity to see my work in the early stages (roughly a stage and a half before it would usually appear here). I plan on posting more sections throughout the month, so I hope you find them to be worth the read. Thanks!

             As Dustin glanced around the dimly lit entrance hall, many questions repeated in his mind. Why am I here? Haven’t I been here before? Where is everybody? He kept his senses alert for signs of any movement around the room, but he didn’t get his hopes up. The room was about sixty feet across and forty feet wide, completely made of stone, and with the limited light that the flickering torches had offered him, he was certain that he was completely alone. Still, he was unable to shake the feeling that he was being watched and so he proceeded with the utmost caution.

The dust was so heavy in the air that it seemed to be floating, and as he crossed the room, he seemed to carve a path through it that lingered long after he had passed. It was nothing compared to the inches of dust that layered the floor and was as of a dry patch of soft snow beneath his feet. Cobwebs were spun over the six or seven time-worn painting that hung on the walls and a mirror that hung to his right was so tarnished that it no longer offered a reflection. Combined with the dimness of the torches and the noticeable chill in the air, Dustin was confident that this building, wherever it was, had not known any habitation in decades, maybe longer.

Every step eternally echoed off the stone bricks, making Dustin’s ears weary and sore. As strong as the echoes were, however, they were not quite capable of drowning out the bass drum that was his anxiously pounding heart. In fact, he was so unsettled by his surroundings that when he had finally reached the door on the other side of the room, a little voice inside his head was praying to anyone who would listen, hoping that the door was unable to open. As he stood before the door, he almost stopped himself from reaching out and taking the handle.

To his great disappointment, Dustin had finally grabbed the door’s handle and found that it did open without any complications, whatsoever. He pushed the door open gingerly, uncertain of what had waited on the other side and ready for any horrors that he might face. He peered through the first sliver of space between the door and its frame and saw nothing but a faint blue glow. As the gap enlarged, he had taken a breath of relief and courageously dared to believe that there was nothing in the next room, so he gave the door one last shove to get it out of his way.

Dustin felt his sudden rush of courage falter and he poked his head through the door with the utmost caution. The door led into a great circular chamber, easily five times wider than the room he had just left, and the walls were lined with a large spiral staircase that almost seemed to go on for miles, before it had finally reached the ceiling. It had shocked him to learn that the eerie blue glow as that of the moon. Its light shone down from an enormous skylight that took up most of the ceiling and the moon beyond it seemed gigantic to the eye as it took up the whole of the skylight.