Ashes on the Wind

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The protesting screech of the hangar doors shattered the stillness of the winter morning. The man, small, unremarkable, panting with the effort of opening them, slipped inside.

A vast, open space greeted him. A couple of pigeons fluttered nervously up by the rooflights. He threw the power switch.

There, in the middle of an unswept floor, stood his salvation, his escape.
Vapour, in grey tendrils escaped slowly from the snake-like hoses that curled malevolently around the base of a shiny black pod.

That was how he’d always thought of it. The Escape Pod. An escape from the nightmare this world had become. Wars, disease, the Politics of Corruption had the world reeling from a cancer of decay.

He, a humble scientist, with no life outside of his research, had stumbled upon a means of escape. He’d re-routed funds, kept everything secret from his employers. Now he was ready, and not a day too soon. They knew. They were asking questions. There must be no further delay. Today, he would go where they could not follow. He would escape into time itself. Surely the distant future held a better life.

Suddenly, the roar of vehicles, the shouting of men, just beyond the doors!
He ran for the Pod, opening the small hatch and climbing in. Through the vision port he saw them, a team of stormtroopers, guns blazing, advancing on his dream. Panicking, he set the controls with trembling fingers. A tremendous thrummmmm reverberated inside his brain, as the snaking pipes automatically disengaged from the Pod. The soldiers, still firing indiscriminately, advanced closer, and the Pod appeared to shimmer, then with a soft pop of inrushing air, disappeared….

Scant moments later, the man trusted himself to look out of the vision port.
He was surprised. Everything looked….old.
He punched up data on the panel in front of him, scarcely believing he’d miscalculated. His expertise was the product of hundreds of years of Japanese technological superiority, surely nothing could’ve gone wrong.
But the faint green glow of the readout looked back at him accusingly, daring him to disagree;

08:14 August 6th 1945

Realisation dawned on him, like an icy trickle down his back. He looked up from the display panel, and out across the city of Hiroshima, as the clock registered 08:15, and a tremendous flash lit up the morning sky.
Before he could reset and escape into time again, the searing shock wave of the Atomic Blast incinerated any memory of his existence, save for the ashes on the wind.

Room without a View

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I just sat here, thinking a short story might be a good idea for today in The Mighty Pen. I had a comment about one of my poems a while back comparing it, flatteringly, to the style of Poe, and I thought a Poe-inspired tale might be cool, so here it is, written in ten minutes, hot off the press, so to speak...

Room without a View

He watched the condensation forming on the filthy ceiling. Inexorably slowly, the moisture gathering together, re-shaping, forming, until it became a pendulous mass, depending from the roof, gradually surrendering to gravity’s sweet song.
It fell, down, down, growing, though the effect was illusory, as it continued unstoppable through the fetid air of the dimly-lit cellar. For the merest fraction of a second, a dull light shone on its surface…and then it exploded in a thousand tiny droplets on his forehead. He tried to force his tongue up to catch the precious moisture, but it always seemed to be beyond him. His tongue mocked him, immobile.

He had no idea how long he’d been here in this room. He felt numb. He felt…the slightest sense of being, like the brush of a feather or a lover’s tender kiss on the back of your neck, fleeting, ungraspable.

There was a sound in his ears, like a storm, like rushing water, unyielding. It seemed he’d always heard that sound. Then he heard it. Something else. The distant sound of a metal bolt being drawn. Footsteps on cold stone, The creaking of a rotten wooden door.
A face loomed over him, a sallow, corrupted face, wearing medical whites, no longer white, stained, bloodied, some bright red and fresh, others old, brown mute to the horrors they had seen.

The face drew close, smiling, rotting teeth like tombstones arranged in ghastly rows.
He spoke in a harsh whisper, like a death rattle.
“You lasted the longest.” He said, holding a grimy hand mirror up to his captive’s face.
The prisoner glanced at his reflection, wide-eyed and terrified, letting his gaze travel down his face…to the ragged edge of his throat, the hack-sawed remnants of his spine, muscle, fat and nerve endings protruding out from the bloody stump of his severed neck like a dead man’s fingers.
The man lifted the head and threw it into the flaming jaws of the incinerator in the corner, to the sound of a silent scream.

Copyright Kev Moore 2007

Slight Return

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I've been conspicuously absent from The Mighty Pen for some time, dear readers, and I throw myself upon your mercy. I shall not hide behind my extended travel itinerary as an excuse for my pitiful output. I shall merely resume where I left off, putting things that fall a little outside the remit of my diary page. I mentioned in there today that I was taking off at the weekend for a show in Germany, and it got me thinking....The shows themselves are always wonderful, but in fact account for around 70 minutes of my time away. When you drop on a particularly unforgiving itinerary, such as this forthcoming weekend, the show becomes, to quote a friend in the business, "a minor inconvenience." When I begin to think of the 5 a.m. alarm call, the queue at check in, the interminable security procedures, my flight to Hannover my FOUR trains to the eventual location of the gig, an overnight in a hotel, my SIX trains from the gig across Germany to Dusseldorf, it is small wonder that my eyelids grow heavy before I even step on a plane. So I thought I would try and illustrate the thoughts that go through my mind when I leave home on a weekend like this, by using a poem that I wrote sat in Manchester Airport at 5 a.m. on the 17th June last year, waiting to come home. It's called:

5 O'Clock Shadow

Bone-weary
Traversed,the night,
With scant regard for sleep
Appointment with a metal tube to keep

To hurl me through the air
Commune with Gods
To head for home
And weather fair

Oh, Glorious morning
Azure and Turquoise hue
Tired, with days new dawning
But always, coming back to you

Kev Moore 2006