You think we're dancing? ... That's all we've ever done.

 

older/gbook/>>(in case of__)__//before&after ___my youtube__...
My novel 2004.. My novel 2006.. My novel 2008..

(diaryland) November 14, 2009 - 3:31 p.m.

OK. I finished this chapter this morning. Then I got drunk and so far I've written half of another chapter. Also, I'm officially over halfway through this novel.

Chapter the Eleventh

My heart skipped a beat.

I knew that a Nigerian prince might on occasion deign to e-mail me from a blocked address in order to ask me to lend him a bit of money just for a month or two so that he might be able to give me eighty million a bit later on in the year, but a Nigerian prince was unlikely to say,

wtf

That was probably more the style of a certain deceased titular King of France I knew. Even if Dave decided to send something from a blocked address suddenly, I doubted he had the brain power to work with acronyms. He did manage to say, �LOL,� in answer to one of my e-mails though. Well, good on him.

Anyway, even though I was about ninety percent sure that the e-mail in question was from Vaughn Bourbon, it seemed so utterly preposterous that a guy lost within the confines of a magic fountain had access to e-mail that I decided not to write something along the lines of, �Vaughn, how great! You�re alive! You�re alive! Huzzah!� and instead played it cool. I typed with trembling fingers,

Dear Sir/Madam,

Please can you elaborate on your comment,

---
quote

wtf
---

Yours Respectfully,

Anastasia Nemtsova

I expected a reply any second. I guess I was now used to the sickening speed of Dave�s efforts.

Nothing happened. I kept my gmail open, clicked �refresh�, �refresh�, over and over again, even though it updated the inbox to show all the new messages that came through automatically anyway. I did it until my right index finger got very sore. The shadows outside were changing. The day wound on.

I finally tore myself away from the computer. I didn�t turn it off. I went out the front door and sat on the porch. Maybe if I stared hard enough, something would happen. Maybe I could coax an e-mail out of the fountain. That cursed fountain was beginning to look more and more like an ordinary fountain again. Before, even when it wasn�t doing anything naughty, you could still feel ions of supernaturalness hanging in the air or something. But now, that feeling had gone.

Maybe all it had wanted was a human life.

I propped up my chin on my hand. I looked at my statue; the one I�d had a dream about. I was no longer sure whether it had ever moved. A wink could have just been a trick of the light. The way it had looked around at me that day could have just been wishful thinking.

I stared hard at that statue. Boy, did I stare hard. Part of the staring was trying to be piercing as a punishment for being such an arsehole. I wondered whether the statue was the put of all these troubles. The other two parts of the staring were equal measures of confusion and hope. People were always talking about keys in books and movies. �Oh, you�re the key to the Alien Knowledge Portal.� �Hey, that vase is the key to the Secret Antiquities of Limitless Value Chamber.� I still held out hope that my statue was a key to solving the whole fountain thing, not the bad guy.

I intensified the stare. Boy, this was the pointiest stare that had ever happened in the History of the World. I was sure of that.

I may have glanced at the statue�s schlong, but mostly I was directing my attention to its chest. The way the muscles were carved was pretty fucking detailed and realistic, especially considering that the statue was in rather an ambitious pose, holding up the top tier and all. You can get a lot of delicacy out of Parian marble, I guess. One leg was underneath it; the other folded against itself with its foot on a dais which was ordinarily supposed to be covered in water. The head was slightly bowed and was looking away and the arms were tensed. But I was looking at the chest. You could just see the faintest hint of the ribs at the side of the torso, and the slight sinewy detailing between the pectoral muscles was deftly done.

It was just like someone had finely sprayed an infinitely thin layer of shiny plaster onto an ideal guy. If the sun shone right onto it, its arresting outline burned an image right into your retina.

Once I read story on the internet about a sculpture of Apollo that had been dredged up in the Tiber river. It had been lying there, hidden, waiting to be celebrated, for nearly two thousand years, and they only found it because they were going to chuck a bridge there. It would have been blind there in the mud for what seemed like forever. It was a Roman copy of a Greek bronze. Some famous historian once said, �The general effect of copies always tends towards sweetness, and so it is here.� It sounded like my statue.

I kept staring. I watched its right nipple. It was all very cute and little. And, yep, yep, it was moving. Just on the edge of perceptibility. But, it was definitely moving. Well, maybe not definitely, but for sure maybe. It could have just been me that was doing the slight moving. I stopped focussing on the nipple and considered the whole chest area again. Yep, it did look like it was breathing. The statue was possibly breathing; the breath of a very relaxed and self-satisfied person.

The yard was silent.

I got the shivers.

I ran inside and slammed the door.

Yay, I had gotten a new e-mail in the interim. Also from an unknown sender.

It said,

just a sec

I waited a sec. Then thirty minutes. Boy, interdimensional time was different to
Earth time. Presumably.

Then,

yeah you know it�s me. vaughn.

I wrote back immediately, as you do in these sorts of situations.

Oh, my God � are you alive?

Another agonising twenty-minute wait.

can�t see anything. can�t feel anything. unable to type in capitals for some reason. may have

Ten minutes later, in a separate e-mail:

something to do with the fact I don�t know how I�m typing this. fucked up, huh?

I wrote:

Are you OK?

I really couldn�t think of anything else to say in this situation.

I waited an hour and a half for this next one. �Refresh�. �Refresh�. �Refresh�. Ad infinitum.

yeah I think I�m dead actually. spread thin over the whole universe & broken into a trillion meaningless pieces. i�m a god and it hurts so much

ciao

Ciao? Ciao?!?!

I wrote back straight away,

Wait, Vaughn! I need more info! I need to be able to get to you or help you or something! What the fuck am I supposed to do? Just sitting here is killing me!

That was the last I heard of Vaughn. After writing two or three other e-mails along the same lines as the last one, and refreshing the browser a futile amount of times, I gave up. Ciao indeed.

I closed the browser and put my face up to the picture of the unconscious Vaughn on my desktop until all I could see was the pixellation. I wondered, was he more dead there, lying in a pool of his own blood in the grounds of Versailles, or was he more dead now, in my fountain?

Hard to say, really.

I fell asleep, the computer fan humming a monotone, breathy lullaby.

A cold hand lifted my chin up off the desk.

Yep, it was the statue. Apollo.

I was beginning to think it had a copy of the keys to my house.

It stood like an athlete. In my mind, athletes have very good posture. It moved my head up a little bit more, gently, and my desk chair squeaked as it swivelled around a bit. My eyes were at its chest level. Yes, this time for sure, I knew that it was breathing. I could see the slow rise and fall of its chest clearly now. There was slightly more of a flush of pink on its body than last time.

It raised my chin higher so I was looking into its face. It suddenly popped into my mind that I had been observing even lower levels of basic hygiene than usual.

It opened its lascivious lips and talked to me again in that ESP kind of way it preferred.

You looked at me for so long today.

Yes, that I did. I admit it.

The more you watch me, the closer I get.

OK.

Why didn�t you touch me?

I was scared.

[It shifted its weight onto the other leg]

I can breathe a special type of life into you.

Well, I guess I could too, but you really don�t want to smell my breath right now. Trust me.

[It smiled]

I don�t care.

Hey, have you seen my friend Vaughn?

Why don�t you turn your computer off?

I�m waiting for an e-mail.

[My eyelids began to feel really heavy.]

You won�t get one. Please, stay awake.

I�m too tired.

[It let go of my face. My head started to droop back onto the desk. It leaned over me and exhaled. Its air was freezing. That was the last thing I remembered.]




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