Black & Deep Desires, chapter 13

“And did she keep on putting Rex in there?” Glenda wanted to drum her fingers on the table in her impatience. 

“Oh, yes. But the funny thing about Alice Guilfoyle was how she wasn’t satisfied with anything for long. After a while, the maze wasn’t enough. That was when she started to put the blindfold on him.” 

Glenda shivered with morbid anticipation. “Blindfold?” 

“A silk scarf. A black silk scarf, it was. Said to belong to her husband. I think it was partly that, the fact that it belonged to his dead father, that got to Rex. She did it to keep her power over him, that’s how I see it. It was hard to know why she did the things she did. But I think as long as she knew the maze and he didn’t, she had control. I can see her now ...” He screwed up his eyes; “I can see her taking him across the lawns. It was her shape that I remember. Like a beast, with those massive shoulders. Like a bear’s shoulders. Sort of hulking. Her head was sunk right down into her body.” His lips drew back from his teeth. “And this little kid trotting along beside her. He didn’t have a choice - she’d hold so hard to his hand and practically drag him. And she moved fast. She could move allright. Not like you or me. She sort of swivelled herself along. Hard to describe. I remember one day the wind blew her skirts up and I saw these great bags of fat hanging over her knees, white as lard, the veins like blue roots in the fat. And him trotting to keep up, half running. I used to see a lot of what went on because I’d follow to find out what she was going to do with him. I was afraid. I remember being afraid for him; I thought if I was there, close by, I could save him. I think I had it in my head that - I don’t know - that one day she’d kill him. 

When she came out of the maze alone, she was like a creature that’s eaten something. Horrible. I tell you, girl, that woman had evil in her.”

You can read more of my lady's thriller here.

Books I'm working on.

This charming graphic from hyperboleandahalf

I've written, half written and 10% written these novels:

Footy  -- about a straight footy player who meets a bloke who becomes his best friend.  Only the bloke he meets and grows to love is gay.
ElvenSword -- the great city of Cappor and its empire is decaying.  The task of those who would save it:  to find Vordath, the Bearer of the Sword of Fanuiloth, out of the millions who make up the empire's population.
DemonThrong  -- the sequel to Elvensword. 
I get no Kick from Champagne -- a laddish troubled boy takes on the armies of evil and becomes a man, in the process finding the love of his life.
Majorca Flats  --- a novel in progress, about the inhabitants of a Victorian terrace in Melbourne.
The Torc  -- a partly written novel set in the ElvenSword world
AngelFire  -- the partly written sequel to DemonThrong
Gift of Dragons  -- SF.  Why did the Urdani's civilization collapse?  Who or what is the living God?  And who's been surreptitiously buying up tactical nuclear weapons on Earth, and why?  About 1/3 written.
The Music of Love  -- a het romance with a gay character, partly written.
Zing went the Strings of my Heart  -- a secret group within Melbourne's police department is fighting a serial killer, whose victims are drawn from the city's non-human population.
The Musketeers --  four guys share a house.  One of them is gay, the other straight.  Well, straight-ish.
The Café Budapest -- a story about a café in a small country town, its owner and the people who come to visit.
Parringo Road -- a man goes back to the country town he grew up in and the boy, now man, he was in love with.
Heaven is a Pair of Wooden Wings -- a stranger turns up at Jake Fribourg's farm, a stranger with a deadly secret.   And Jake loses his heart and finds out too late he shouldn't have.

Plus there's my lady's thriller, Black and Deep Desires.


I'll be posting a chapter from one, or two, or even three of these every week.  I've been too busy to do this over the last couple of weeks, but I hope to start again soon.  I also intend to submit some of them for publication.  Watch this space!

Oh, and my short story set in Cappor, The Wolf, has been accepted for the August issue of Wilde Oats.

Black & Deep Desires, chapter 11

When he left, she went through a process she’d been following recently. She searched the house systematically from top to bottom. Every cupboard, every curtain, behind every door. She couldn’t rest until it was done. When she’d arrived in Rundall she’d left doors unlocked, windows thrown open. Things were different now. The more she thought about the disk she’d found on her desk, the more she concluded that one of only five people could possibly have had the opportunity to put it there. There was a spare set of keys to her cottage and to the Taylors’ house kept in a drawer in Rose Guilfoyle’s desk. She knew this because the day after she’d arrived she’d locked herself out and Rose had shown her where the spares were kept. The only people who’d have access to that drawer were Rose, Simon and Cordelia Guilfoyle, and Iain and Marguerite Taylor. Any one of them could have taken the key, let themselves into her cottage while she was at work, put the disk with the others, and left without being seen. It was a horrible feeling, not knowing who you could trust; who might, at their leisure, be going through your things. She had felt she could trust Simon, but perhaps she was wrong. She trusted Oates - except that recently he seemed sometimes to lose track and go off into an unreachable world of his own, unnerving her. Richard she trusted, but his feelings for Cordelia were disturbing. Lilian was okay, but Lilian talked at you - you didn’t feel you could confide in her, or even finish a sentence.

The knowledge that someone could get into the cottage at any time scared her. She’d started doing something else; before she went out, she’d tape a piece of black cotton thread across the lower part of both front and back doors. When she came back she wouldn’t go upstairs until she’d checked to see that both threads were intact. She was becoming obsessive, neurotic. She could see it happening, and it frightened her.

You can read chapter 11 of my lady's gripping thriller here.

[Image from here]

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 10

I've just posted chapter 10 of my lady's thriller to my website.  And yes, the picture is apposite.

(The Black and Deep Desires blog page can be found here)

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 9

I have uploaded Chapter 9 of my lady's excellent thriller to my website.

You can access it here.

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 8

After a gap, caused by various minor disasters, here's the next chapter of Black And Deep Desires.

                     Diana was tired; she fell into a deep sleep. She started to dream.  It was the same dream that she had had before, only this time she had reached the dark mass.  She was at the entrance to the maze. It towered above her, the walls of yew as impenetrable as walls of stone.  Behind her, friendly moonlight played across the fields and decorated the leaves of the trees with silver.  Beyond, the portal of the maze was black with shadow.  The high walls allowed no light to penetrate, and to the right and left the passages led into utter gloom.  She trembled from head to foot with terror, even a goddess of the moon would tremble from fear of what lurked deep within these entrails.  No sacrificial maiden she, yet she quaked.  Diana and Pasiphae.  She knew the way through the labyrinth.  She knew the Yew to be the Death Tree of druidical belief.  Double fatal yew ...

             She woke, frightened. Where had she learnt that churchyard yews were believed to spread a root to the mouth of each corpse?  Yew, tomb of leaden grief.

            Quickly, she put the light on and sat up, reaching for her gown.  Paul had believed that night thoughts, those panicky and depressive visions that come to people lying awake at two o’clock in the morning, were a throwback to a darker, primal time.  Early man had to fear the predators of night, darkness then was a time of real and mortal fear.  She knew, as she clutched the gown around her, that she did not want this dream to continue.

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 7

Elm Hill, Norwich

Chapter 7 has been uploaded to my website, here.

“I - was - no - bloody - good - in - bed.   Do you know what that means?”

                        “Yes, I do, and has it ever occurred to you in your self-pity that it might have been Shirley’s fault?  Why do you persist in taking the blame?  You shit me to death with your roll-over-and-take-it attitude.”

                        “Well, from what you’ve told me you’re not so wonderful either in the relationship department.  Slinking out of - where was it? - Essex?  Like a dog with its tail between its legs, and coming up here to hide.”  She slapped him vigorously and resoundingly across the face.  It felt so good that she did it again.  He was too astonished to move.  Then he flung out a hand and gripped her wrist painfully.  For a moment they stared at each other.  And then he began to laugh, bent forward, hand on knee.  He laughed so painfully it sounded like crying.  She gave a hiccuping gasp, covered her mouth with her hand.

                        “Jesus, Oates, I’m sorry.”  She put a tentative hand out to touch his inflamed cheek.  Then she, too, began to laugh, and within moments they were hysterical, howling, bent double.

                        Outside in the unlit night, the watcher stood.  Behind a veil of beech leaves the watcher stood and saw them silently speaking and moving and gesticulating in the bright frame of the window.  Saw her hand come silently up to Oates’s face.  A light wind riffled through the leaves and swayed the branches.  When the tree was still again, there was no-one there.

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 6

Chapter 6 uploaded to my website.

"I had an old-fashioned upbringing, Inspector.  My father ran a tea plantation in Nairobi.  I grew up in East Africa.  Africa is a savage land.  The British community was small and closed, and my parents struggled to maintain the sort of standards we were accustomed to.  And of course in many ways it was a wonderful, exciting life.  I was sheltered and protected, but still, inevitably, I was exposed to things no English schoolgirl would dream about.  You’ve heard of suicide season?  For weeks and weeks, the weather is hot and suffocating.  The air is still, it’s like a blanket pressed to your face.  You can’t breathe.  The clouds do not move.  Like a ceiling of dullness bearing down on you.  Feelings start to ferment.  It becomes unbearable.  People behave in irrational ways.  The code of behaviour for us was rigid and unbending - it had to be.”  Her face became reminiscent; “I’ll never forget.  When the rains started, you’d know.  There’d be wind, a strange, empty, restless, dusty wind.  Then you’d smell it.  Long before you could see or feel it.  That smell of water on dry, caked earth.  We’d run outside, and you could see it coming - like a wall, like a great curtain, moving towards you from the far, far away horizon.  Then you’d hear it.  Like a roar, a rush of sound.  We’d dance in it, my Ayah and I.  We’d laugh and shriek like mad things.  My mother was too dignified, of course, although she’d have loved to dance too.  She and my father would stand on the verandah and watch us, smiling.  My father was such a gentleman, Inspector.  Such a gentleman.”  She smiled; “The rain was like a hail of bullets, it hurt your head, your back, your shoulders, it was so hard.  And so exhilarating.”  She sighed; “When the first stirring of the Mau Mau uprising began to be felt, my mother was so strong.  Inspector, our own loved and trusted servants, practically part of the family, were hiding pangas in the linen-cupboard!  Our linen-cupboard!  No doubt they’d had pressure put upon them.  We saw and lived through terrible things.  Eventually my father decided we couldn’t stay.  He sent us back to England, meaning to follow later.  He was killed the day before he was due to fly out.  Slashed to ribbons, we were told.  On the floor of his own study.”  Her face was fine and resolute; “I’ve put it all behind me, but I remember the lesson.”  She reached for the teapot and filled three cups.  Her movements were graceful and controlled.  “Life goes on.  Please, Inspector, let us have the people of the village here.  Let me show them that I can hold my head up, that I can survive this dreadful blow and carry on with my life.  Please, please, close the case on this sad little infant, and give it a Christian burial.” 

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 5

Chapter five of Black and Deep Desires has been uploaded to my website.

One day, the day before his sixth birthday, he realised that he knew the way out of the maze.  But he stayed where he was, blindly sitting on the cold stone bench at its heart, his feet some inches from the ground.  The maze was fear.  The fear was within him.  The maze was a dark, tangled place deep down inside his mind.  His thoughts followed the paths as they twisted and turned, doubled back on themselves, led nowhere, led everywhere.  At first the fear had been in the thought of never getting out.  Now, the fear was central to his existence; so close that it seemed more familiar to him than any other place in his mind.  Sometimes he could play with the fear, turn his back on it, push it away, let it approach, stare into it, feel stronger than it, and always be squeezed breathless within the blackness of it, be swallowed whole by it.  And being the only one who knew the dark place, the place where fear lived, silent and lightless, even as he trembled, even though he knew the maze would be his death-place, he knew himself to be king.

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 4

Chapter 4 of Black and Deep Desires has been posted.

Here's a snippet.

A real man would have stood up to his father. A real man would have stopped his father’s passage of destruction. A real man would have done something years ago, before it all began. You, of course, did nothing. You just stood back, closed your eyes and let it all happen. Infirm of purpose!

Excuse for a man!

With the black acid of jealousy corroding his guts, Jack Molloy opened the letter addressed to Simon Guilfoyle. He’d been lying on his back on the sitting room floor, drowsing and thinking about Simon, but without desire, when he heard it fall through the letter flap. He stumbled, naked, down the passage to the front door. The envelope had no stamp. He wrenched the door open, but the stairs were empty.

He turned it over and over in his square hands. The name was typed. Would he have recognised the writing? A letter from someone who bothered to hand deliver it. The pain was stronger than his scruples - he tore it open. While he read, the sweat of rage prickling his upper lip, his armpits, he was glad, unbelievably thankful, that he had seen it first. Simon would never have to read it. But he had a cooler head than Diana Gray; he didn’t burn it or shred it; he folded it into a tiny square and pushed it under the flap beside the credit cards in his wallet. Simon was too decent to look in other people’s things. Or open other people’s mail, a voice shouted in his head.

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 3

You can now read chapter three here:

The man who opened the door had the sort of face that looks out of men’s leisure fashion catalogues. But the slitted eyes, Inspector Tuckett surmised, had less to do with attitude than with what had been consumed, imbibed or inhaled, one way and another, the night before. His shoulders filled the doorframe. His white t-shirt looked as though it had been airbrushed onto him. He ran a meaty brown hand through hair as short, stiff and black as a shoebrush. It sprang back into place. All that was missing was the Calvin Klein log cabin backdrop.

“Yes?” The voice was not friendly. The unmoving stare would have daunted a lesser man than Tuckett.

“Chief Inspector Tuckett, Norwich CID. I’d like to speak to Simon Guilfoyle, please.”

“You can’t. He’s not here.” Australian, thought Tuckett, probably east coast. Almost at once they heard Simon’s sharp voice.

“Let them in, Jack. There’s no point.” After an unnecessarily protracted interval, Jack peeled himself away from the doorframe.

“Well. You better come in, then.” He moved down the hall with a swagger, hips insolent in jeans ripped across the left buttock, a glimpse of black satin boxers revealed.

I can't think where my lady got the idea about ripped jeans with satin boxers from.

Black And Deep Desires, chapter 2

I've just posted it to my website. You can read it here.

I've been rereading my lady's novel as I post it. It's really very good.

Black and Deep Desires

Years ago, my lady wrote an absolutely gripping thriller, entitled Black and Deep Desires. It was set in the village we used to live in in England. She tried hard to get it published, but no one was interested, which was sad, because she's a really good writer and being unable to publish her stuff made her very discouraged, so she gave up writing.

Anyway, you can start reading the thriller here. I'll be posting a chapter a week.

P.S. There are two gay characters in it!

The Rejecter

The Rejecter

Interesting.

My lady wrote a marvellous thriller, sent off an excellent query letter, had a couple of nibbles, then nothing. In the end, she gave up, and we published the story in a Yahoo group. I'm not biassed, I think, but I thought the novel was as good as P.D James or Minette Walters. We're a family of writers -- sons, daughter, father-in-law -- and spend a lot of time discussing our stories and what constitutes "good" writing. She was so discouraged by the experience that she gave up writing, and I -- whose writing is not nearly so polished as hers, and in an even more unpromising genre (romantic m2m) -- never even bothered to try. If *she* can't succeed, what chance do I have?

I'm still writing. I can't *not* write, or I get deeply depressed. I love the difficulties and intricacies of balancing plot, character and character development, description, and dialogue, and I find it immensely satisfying when, after all that, my readers are moved to tears or laughter by my creations.

Who needs publication, already :-)

Nigel

Update (posted 27/11/10):

I've started posting Black & Deep Desires to my website.  You can read the prologue here.