The Stephenson Standard

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Chapter Seven: The Train

Chapter seven is yours, but don’t hesitate: the clock runs out for eight. Get in your reblogs before half past 7 - the total must be at least three by… eleven.

As Rishley flapped down the side of the hill back toward the town, the new, elevated, perspective revealed, tucked behind the backside of the town hall’s hill, a train station. It was the same sepia as the rest of the town, rounded glass ceiling dulled and unreflective. The tracks were obscured entirely by thick reddish-brown bushes and trees, hiding from Rishley the object of his hurried run. He flew past the town hall, the library, the grocery store, and skidded to a stop in front of the station’s large door. Like the rest of the town, it was in ruins; windows were broken, it was covered in an unhealthy layer of dust, and, upon closer inspection, the magnificent glass dome was broken in many places, allowing birds and other elements to drop into the large building. Rishley gave a cursory glance to all of these things, pausing only because he wanted to remember the ambiance for this novel (which was rapidly becoming six or seven novels; after all, such a strange journey could not possibly be described in just one book!) he had decided to write.

It was during this cursory glance that Rishley’s gaze grazed the train tracks. Relatively unremarkable, they seemed dislodged in places, perfect in others, and rather like (what else) a track for a train. He raised his eyes up the track in search of the train that had to be just ahead – and yet, it wasn’t. There was no train, no train whistle, nothing. Rishley was not sure what he expected, really, given that he knew the tracks had been redirected long ago and, save a few very creepy spirits, there was no one left in this town to man the station.

“But that noise!” our young poet said aloud, startling himself (and a chorus of pigeons) with the sound of his own voice.

It was undeniable; there had been a train whistle while Rishley was in the Gildonarette’s house. And yet, there was no train. And, by virtue of the same law that brings us smoke to fire, if there is a train whistle, there must have been a train. It seemed impossible that it could have left so fast for, while flailing and ridiculous looking, Rishley was a pretty fast runner and the hill was not so hilly that rushing down it would mean one missed a train entirely.

Poor poetical Rishley spun around a few times, mirroring his confused action when he first arrived in Addlesbury, and began to speak (I sigh, reader, to share this with you, but it’s fairly important, so … my apologies):

“A curse upon fair town and bare of people hither, fro. Not one remains in secret lair but still a train whistle did blow. A mystery have I found, trapped in this poor town. The path to the house could not have been more cliché and atmospheric if it had been constructed right from Rishley’s rather predictable mind. It was a dark, windy, dirt road (and not of that dusty tan dirt from the town; this dirt was hard, burnt sienna that clumped under Rishley’s footsteps) with huge trees looming into it. Spikes and sticks pressed into Rishley, he had to sidestep several pieces of foliage during his journey, and it suddenly looked as if it might rain (whereas, in the town, Rishley had a passionate desire for a drink of water). He followed this path up, up, up, around and around, until Rishley finally stopped and stared at the house. It looked just as far away as ever and each step he seemed to take only led him distinctly not-closer. Our poet found himself irked; not only was there no train for him to take, this town was entirely dead, and the most interesting thing in said dead-town was a house he could not reach! Rishley stalked on but he was quite stompy the rest of the way. He stomped himself right up that dastardly path and, since there was only one path, it absolutely did lead to the house (just in a terribly roundabout way) and, upon arrival, what Rishley saw stunned him.

The house was completely charred (this was, obviously, not surprising) on the outside – burnt to a crisp. As Rishley stared, a small breeze knocked black pieces of wood from the railings and tossed them about until they disappeared into soot. But the inside, which our hero could see just barely through sheer white curtains, was completely normal. Chairs stood proudly, bright red flowers on white silk, railings shone with polish, paintings adorned oak walls, and everything seemed precisely as it was before the blast of heat snuffed lives. Intrigued, Rishley began to stalk around the house, looking for a safe way (or at the very least, a stairwell that wouldn’t turn to dust under his feet) into the very strange house.

He found it by way of the cellar around at the back of the abode. The doors gave way immediately, blackening Rishley’s hands, and he stepped onto the cold stone stairway, ducking into the basement. It was a bare stone room, a few wine bottles on racks (which Rishley confiscated, disappearing them into his suitcase for future use), and otherwise entirely uninteresting. The writer climbed five steps and then paused, grabbed one more bottle of wine by leaning over the banister, and uncorked it with his teeth. As he continued to head up into the pristine Gildonarette house, Rishley drank their wine, wondering how in the world the bottles didn’t explode during the fire.

He pushed open the basement door and found himself in the kitchen, generally an unremarkable location – save for the large (almost obscene) pot on a very large range.

“I say,” Rishley whispered, swigging more of his wine. “That is quite,” he paused a while, recalling something chilling from his notes, “the pot.”

Slowly, with the sort of gait that one takes when one senses the inevitable and the inevitable is decidedly frightening, Rishley advanced toward the stew pot. He shut one eye, turned away, then opened it and shut the other, his chin held high in the air both to peer into and avoid seeing that pot. He took a long breath, another deep swig of the wine, and leaned forward to see what was in the huge cooking utensil.

His notes did not lie, readers. Mister William Rishley saw exactly what he expected to see – and yet, he had not expected what he saw. You see, he knew (he just felt it; it’s inexplicable) he would find a body, though the state of said body was quite up in the air. Perhaps he would have been less surprised if the cook had been black and burnt like the outside of the house, or maybe if she was decayed into the stew, or really, anything other than what he happened to see. For Rishley did not witness the horrors of death in the expected manner; he witnessed the horrors of a life caught within the web of a death not yet had. The cook was alive, her eyes wide and glassy, skin bubbling with the stew, and almost quite well. Her large face was greasy with gristle, hair stringy with spinach, and as that skin boiled with the stew’s stock, one side of the cook’s face crinkled in a smile not altogether unfriendly.

Rishley screamed. He dropped his bottle of wine (and his poetic mystique) and stumbled backwards right over an assortment of various cooking surfaces. Eventually, he regained his footing and ran loudly out of the kitchen, into an empty dining room, and then through to the sitting room where, as we well know, he encountered three (also half living) beings. Two were in chairs, one at the window. Our poor hero, who has already been subjected to much abuse all in the name of getting to a city, stopped and stared at these ghastly beings, these entities, waiting for them, too, to turn around and scare the daylights out of him.

But the Gildonarettes were not as uncultured (or bubbly) as their cook, so this stranger storming into their living room was not met with an eerie smile. Instead, the mistress of the house, the Pernella Atrina, looked over at Rishley with her disapproving gaze, hair swept into a style long since out of fashion, and scowled.

“Husband,” she said, turning to Pailey Brokenstoff and arching a brow, “There seems to be a man in our home.”

Pailey Brokenstoff Gildonarette peered over at Rishley, “So there is. …Um, man. What is your occupation?”

Rishley, too stunned to do anything but reply, tried to straighten up. He declared, proudly, “I am a writer.”

“Oh, delightful,” Pernella said in a chipper tone (as chipper as any dead woman can, I suppose), “You simply must tell us a story – my daughter loves stories.”

Krysanthe, who had been staring out the window, looked over her shoulder at Rishley and rolled her eyes. Rishley started just slightly; this girl, with her snow-white skin and black ringlets, looked almost precisely like the muse I mentioned (and promised elaboration of – this is not it) several chapters ago. She had long black lashes that covered bright green eyes, a green bow, a white dress with green trim – the image was uncannily familiar. In fact, Rishley swore up and down for years that this child was his muse, but in some sort of space-time vortex that rendered her a child again and he the same age. Most people laughed at him, but there was an almost interesting short story milked from the notion that I had the misfortune of trying to edit.

This girl, muse or not, did not move her body when she looked at Rishley: only her neck. It looked awkward. It was at this moment Rishley realized that none of these people had moved their bodies; they were all quite rigidly stuck to their seats. The poet, considering himself quite the deductive genius, took two steps further into the room to look closely at the trio. His hunch was disturbingly correct; the parents were seared to their chairs and the girl was stuck to the window ledge. Still terrified, but a smidgen less so since they were immobile, Rishley absently muttered a few words of one of his stories, one about a maiden stuck in some tower or something, but just as he was beginning to actually become involved in the telling of his tale (and very probably forgetting that he did not want to be around ghosts for very long), a rather loud whistle came from the town.

“…what the hell was that?” Rishley asked, darting to a window not occupied by a strange little girl with black hair.

What it was was a train. The train that had stopped running through Addlesbury years ago (thus supporting Rishley’s time-travel theory, in his mind at least). It was a low sound, down in the town somewhere, and Rishley about bolted toward the door once his mind recognized what made that sound. The three people in the room all cringed and cried, “No!” with such passion, Rishley stopped dead in his tracks.

“You cannot open that door,” Krysanthe said, voice low and otherworldly. “We all die if you open the door.”

“What? That’s nonsense, you’re already dead!” Rishley replied, curtness now restored in the man.

“The wind carries the death,” the girl said, looking back outside at the charred porch. “The soot and the ash.”

Rishley stared at the three people for a while again, about to argue that, despite their very clear presence in the room, they were all three already dead and opening a door would not make them any more dead than they already were. But that train whistle blew again and Rishley decided he hadn’t the time to debate the philosophy of death with three people who had already knocked on His door, so Rishley simply tipped his non-existent hat and, with one odd look at the girl, ran out of the room, through the dining room, into the kitchen (shuddering involuntarily at the cook’s pot), down the stairs, and out the cellar door. Then he tore off down the hill, path be damned, at breakneck speed, limbs all flailing quite comically.

So wait and see, remember me, and…”

Here, Rishley paused. He seemed to recall something in his notes. Amy, the nanny of that doomed well-to-do Krysanthe, had written a line Rishley could not understand – but fortunately, that last word (which I will share soon) was one that rhymed with ‘me’.

“'I call upon the Left Soul: set free! set free!”

(You see why he had trouble understanding that? It really made no sense at all; Amy, the nanny, was a bit bothered in the head after the cook had her try some pocket pies that had more than a bit too much oregano in them, not knowing that Amy was allergic to oregano. The nanny was almost entirely blind for three days after that, during which time Krysanthe was scheduled to go to the zoo and, never one to shirk her duties, Amy took Krysanthe to said zoo. Needless to say, monkeys are not very understanding to nannies reeking of oregano who blindly wander into their cages. One of them threw a very large banana right at Amy’s poor head and she lost a few marbles that day.)

Strangely enough, by mere coincidence, the line Amy had writ was not entirely gibberish. The nanny had heard the line at a historical convention (avid follower of history); it was rumored to have some sort of magical powers several centuries ago. She had stored it somewhere in the recesses of that addled mind and, years later, it just happened to fall out onto the same page as her note about the fire. (And, I realize that a more proper writer would have set all of this up beforehand; given the reader some clues to both Amy’s insanity and the prophetic line several chapters ago, but I stand by my rather sudden introduction of this plot twist. You see, Rishley did not know chapters ago that Amy’s bizarre line would have the effect it will have in a short moment and summarily dismissed it when he read said line. It was not worth mentioning then. It is worth mentioning now, so now is when I mention it. If you have opinions of the writing style I have adopted, may I suggest you either pick up another book or write your own? Very good then.)

In any event, Amy’s bizarre, cryptic line did have a rather fantastic effect on the train station. There was a harrowing pause, the entire world seemed to stand still for just a moment, then a volatile stirring began. A wind Rishley had never felt before began billowing from above, through the broken glass, and over him. The cold wind eddied through the room, passing over Rishley and chilling him to the bone; and it was the sort of cold a person can’t shake: an otherworldly sort of cold. The wind carried debris, old pieces of wood, dust, and glass on it, picking up and tossing around everything that littered the station’s floor. Rishley struggled to keep the more dangerous pieces of refuse from piercing his pale skin, suitcase held in front of his face, and danced around, walking backwards to escape whatever it was he unwittingly unleashed upon the little town of Addlesbury.

Rishley continued to paw at the airy maelstrom, backpedaling as quickly as he could, desperately trying to reach the exit. But, just as Rishley was about to fall onto the train tracks, the wind stopped; it was as if someone had flicked a switch and God’s great fan turned off. There was absolute silence for three seconds (Rishley counted) then, to his left, a train whistle sounded. And this time, where there was a whistle, there was a train. A grand steam engine made of shiny black iron glistened its way into the station looking wildly out of place considering the gloom and doom to which the town (and station) alluded. It was a proud vehicle, polished from the wheels’ spokes right on up to the locomotive’s steam dome. From one window, a man hung precariously; given the rest of the day’s startling discoveries, Rishley was quite sure that he was dead  and merely being dragged along by the train until the fellow gave a long wave and a slight smile, casting a warmth over the station of Addlesbury that hadn’t been seen in decades. Rishley turned around quickly, figuring that the station was alive and bustling again – he was almost entirely wrong: there was one other person in the train station.

For a brief moment, the train was forgot and this new revelation took over Rishley’s entire existence. It was her. That muse I promised to discuss all those pages ago was standing directly behind Rishley! Oh, he couldn’t tell it was her, really, since she had one of those fashionable frilly (and wholly unnecessary) umbrellas shielding her face, but he knew. The way she stood, the shape of her body, it was all entirely familiar to him (she was his muse, after all) and nothing, not even a very grand train, could make Rishley stop drinking in this beautiful creature. She wore a long, fitted dress of green silk, sleeves ending just at her elbow before exploding in a lattice purfle of white lace. At her hips, peplum bloomed in more delightful green silk before the skirt wriggled its way down her legs. From behind that cursed umbrella, Rishley could see a long black curl twirling over her bosom (which was not quite hidden, but still certainly within the realm of chaste dress). This was her: the lone person Rishley could tolerate and he was not entirely certain that he hadn’t just made her up.

As he stared, the train blew another whistle and Rishley was jolted back to what resembled reality, forced to turn around and acknowledge this large black beast behind him. It roared into a stop, pulling right into the station, and blew its whistle again while the dangling fellow hopped off onto the ground and cried for tickets.

Rishley and his muse were the only two people in the station.

The author turned around, desperately searching for anyone selling these tickets, trying to figure out away to get on that train and get out of the damned town – he had a city to culture! Unfortunately, he was met with no one other than the girl in green who headed for the conductor.

“Tickets!” the man shouted, letting the muse step into the locomotive, “Tickets!”

Rishley stroked his chin as he walked, trying to regain a little bit of his calm, uninterested, apathetic worldliness, and stopped just in front of the conductor, “I say, I say, sir, where in the world would I get this ticket from?”

The conductor stared blankly at Rishley for a long while, gaze unfocused and simply bizarre. The conductor was blind. He gave an agreeable nod of his head and said most helpfully, “You’ll need a ticket, my boy. We might very well be sold out, this here is a popular ride.”

Rishley stared at the cryptic conductor for a while and then looked at the ticket booth, which stood in shambles. He held up his finger and said, “Give me a minute,” while darting toward the booth, hopping the counter, and shuffling around.

“You’ve got seven! We head out in seven minutes,” the man called to Rishley before disappearing back into the train.

Rishley flew yellowed papers around, searching and scouring for anything that might be even remotely passable as a ticket. He found a few pieces of tickets, torn up and discarded old ones, and tried to piece them together by licking their edges. This worked very poorly and eventually Rishley abandoned that technique altogether. He began talking to the papers, crying out in agony when they were not tickets, wondering why, o Why, God, could these pieces of processed trees not be what he needed? He found absolutely nothing worth finding, not a single ticket, and was beginning to wonder what life in a ghost town might be like for a budding writer (probably very “author”y, he thought, and perhaps worth pontificating further) when Rishley found a very large record book in a drawer long since shut.

He pulled the tome out, struggling under its hefty weight, and opened it, skimming the first page. It was, rather unsurprisingly (but certainly fortunately!), a ledger of ticket sales. After figuring out how the book was kept (chronologically, by date), Rishley hurried his fingers and shuffled the pages to the last one, staring at the names. As you have surely guessed, one, and one alone, stood out:

Gildonarette.

[stephensonstandard]

Ack, we’ve got a deadline on this one! Reblog now so we can get more!

[akinatorlich]

Chapter Six: Inside and Out

Are you still reading? Another night, another chapter, another quest for reblogs. How many notes will I see tomorrow morning? Enough for the seventh chapter?

The path to the house could not have been more cliché and atmospheric if it had been constructed right from Rishley’s rather predictable mind. It was a dark, windy, dirt road (and not of that dusty tan dirt from the town; this dirt was hard, burnt sienna that clumped under Rishley’s footsteps) with huge trees looming into it. Spikes and sticks pressed into Rishley, he had to sidestep several pieces of foliage during his journey, and it suddenly looked as if it might rain (whereas, in the town, Rishley had a passionate desire for a drink of water). He followed this path up, up, up, around and around, until Rishley finally stopped and stared at the house. It looked just as far away as ever and each step he seemed to take only led him distinctly not-closer. Our poet found himself irked; not only was there no train for him to take, this town was entirely dead, and the most interesting thing in said dead-town was a house he could not reach! Rishley stalked on but he was quite stompy the rest of the way. He stomped himself right up that dastardly path and, since there was only one path, it absolutely did lead to the house (just in a terribly roundabout way) and, upon arrival, what Rishley saw stunned him.

The house was completely charred (this was, obviously, not surprising) on the outside – burnt to a crisp. As Rishley stared, a small breeze knocked black pieces of wood from the railings and tossed them about until they disappeared into soot. But the inside, which our hero could see just barely through sheer white curtains, was completely normal. Chairs stood proudly, bright red flowers on white silk, railings shone with polish, paintings adorned oak walls, and everything seemed precisely as it was before the blast of heat snuffed lives. Intrigued, Rishley began to stalk around the house, looking for a safe way (or at the very least, a stairwell that wouldn’t turn to dust under his feet) into the very strange house.

He found it by way of the cellar around at the back of the abode. The doors gave way immediately, blackening Rishley’s hands, and he stepped onto the cold stone stairway, ducking into the basement. It was a bare stone room, a few wine bottles on racks (which Rishley confiscated, disappearing them into his suitcase for future use), and otherwise entirely uninteresting. The writer climbed five steps and then paused, grabbed one more bottle of wine by leaning over the banister, and uncorked it with his teeth. As he continued to head up into the pristine Gildonarette house, Rishley drank their wine, wondering how in the world the bottles didn’t explode during the fire.

He pushed open the basement door and found himself in the kitchen, generally an unremarkable location – save for the large (almost obscene) pot on a very large range.

“I say,” Rishley whispered, swigging more of his wine. “That is quite,” he paused a while, recalling something chilling from his notes, “the pot.”

Slowly, with the sort of gait that one takes when one senses the inevitable and the inevitable is decidedly frightening, Rishley advanced toward the stew pot. He shut one eye, turned away, then opened it and shut the other, his chin held high in the air both to peer into and avoid seeing that pot. He took a long breath, another deep swig of the wine, and leaned forward to see what was in the huge cooking utensil.

His notes did not lie, readers. Mister William Rishley saw exactly what he expected to see – and yet, he had not expected what he saw. You see, he knew (he just felt it; it’s inexplicable) he would find a body, though the state of said body was quite up in the air. Perhaps he would have been less surprised if the cook had been black and burnt like the outside of the house, or maybe if she was decayed into the stew, or really, anything other than what he happened to see. For Rishley did not witness the horrors of death in the expected manner; he witnessed the horrors of a life caught within the web of a death not yet had. The cook was alive, her eyes wide and glassy, skin bubbling with the stew, and almost quite well. Her large face was greasy with gristle, hair stringy with spinach, and as that skin boiled with the stew’s stock, one side of the cook’s face crinkled in a smile not altogether unfriendly.

Rishley screamed. He dropped his bottle of wine (and his poetic mystique) and stumbled backwards right over an assortment of various cooking surfaces. Eventually, he regained his footing and ran loudly out of the kitchen, into an empty dining room, and then through to the sitting room where, as we well know, he encountered three (also half living) beings. Two were in chairs, one at the window. Our poor hero, who has already been subjected to much abuse all in the name of getting to a city, stopped and stared at these ghastly beings, these entities, waiting for them, too, to turn around and scare the daylights out of him.

But the Gildonarettes were not as uncultured (or bubbly) as their cook, so this stranger storming into their living room was not met with an eerie smile. Instead, the mistress of the house, the Pernella Atrina, looked over at Rishley with her disapproving gaze, hair swept into a style long since out of fashion, and scowled.

“Husband,” she said, turning to Pailey Brokenstoff and arching a brow, “There seems to be a man in our home.”

Pailey Brokenstoff Gildonarette peered over at Rishley, “So there is. …Um, man. What is your occupation?”

Rishley, too stunned to do anything but reply, tried to straighten up. He declared, proudly, “I am a writer.”

“Oh, delightful,” Pernella said in a chipper tone (as chipper as any dead woman can, I suppose), “You simply must tell us a story – my daughter loves stories.”

Krysanthe, who had been staring out the window, looked over her shoulder at Rishley and rolled her eyes. Rishley started just slightly; this girl, with her snow-white skin and black ringlets, looked almost precisely like the muse I mentioned (and promised elaboration of – this is not it) several chapters ago. She had long black lashes that covered bright green eyes, a green bow, a white dress with green trim – the image was uncannily familiar. In fact, Rishley swore up and down for years that this child was his muse, but in some sort of space-time vortex that rendered her a child again and he the same age. Most people laughed at him, but there was an almost interesting short story milked from the notion that I had the misfortune of trying to edit.

This girl, muse or not, did not move her body when she looked at Rishley: only her neck. It looked awkward. It was at this moment Rishley realized that none of these people had moved their bodies; they were all quite rigidly stuck to their seats. The poet, considering himself quite the deductive genius, took two steps further into the room to look closely at the trio. His hunch was disturbingly correct; the parents were seared to their chairs and the girl was stuck to the window ledge. Still terrified, but a smidgen less so since they were immobile, Rishley absently muttered a few words of one of his stories, one about a maiden stuck in some tower or something, but just as he was beginning to actually become involved in the telling of his tale (and very probably forgetting that he did not want to be around ghosts for very long), a rather loud whistle came from the town.

“…what the hell was that?” Rishley asked, darting to a window not occupied by a strange little girl with black hair.

What it was was a train. The train that had stopped running through Addlesbury years ago (thus supporting Rishley’s time-travel theory, in his mind at least). It was a low sound, down in the town somewhere, and Rishley about bolted toward the door once his mind recognized what made that sound. The three people in the room all cringed and cried, “No!” with such passion, Rishley stopped dead in his tracks.

“You cannot open that door,” Krysanthe said, voice low and otherworldly. “We all die if you open the door.”

“What? That’s nonsense, you’re already dead!” Rishley replied, curtness now restored in the man.

“The wind carries the death,” the girl said, looking back outside at the charred porch. “The soot and the ash.”

Rishley stared at the three people for a while again, about to argue that, despite their very clear presence in the room, they were all three already dead and opening a door would not make them any more dead than they already were. But that train whistle blew again and Rishley decided he hadn’t the time to debate the philosophy of death with three people who had already knocked on His door, so Rishley simply tipped his non-existent hat and, with one odd look at the girl, ran out of the room, through the dining room, into the kitchen (shuddering involuntarily at the cook’s pot), down the stairs, and out the cellar door. Then he tore off down the hill, path be damned, at breakneck speed, limbs all flailing quite comically.

[akinatorlich]

Chapter Five: And what of the house?

Good job, kiddies. Now how about 12 for 6?

Rishley had his history of the town, but what of that house on the hill? It did not belong to Michael’s parents, they were merely woodcutters, and it was not mentioned at all in any of the accounts he bothered to use. This was heavily inconvenient and forced Rishley to tolerate non-tercets in his investigation. Midway through a ledger recording the comings and goings of the various owners of houses surrounding the town, Rishley paused: he could not remember the last time he had had a cigarette! It had to have been at least a day; his standard of literary standing was coming undone! Rishley quickly reached into his suitcase and took out a leaf of paper, some tobacco, and hurriedly crafted a little white stick. He lit it, smoked it, and gave a slight cough before returning to his work.

Eventually, Rishley learned that the house on the top of the hill was owned by the town’s benefactor. This man, a fellow with an exceedingly pompous name, Mister Pailey Brockenstoff Gildonarette, lived at the top of the hill in the grandest house and funded the town’s wood chopping livelihood (while making his fortune off of its back). His wife, Mistress Pernella Atrina Gildonarette, and their only daughter, Krysanthe Ocarina Gildonarette, also made their home in the house at the top of the hill. Krysanthe was one of the children who said she saw little Michael Peters, but he had not beckoned her toward the train tracks for a demise akin to her peers’. A far more violent, more haunting death was to come for the Gildonarettes in their gilded, glitzy, glamorous home.

After Michael’s death and as the Bloodman’s Curse ripped through the town below, the Gildonarettes were safe and secure in their pretty domicile, keeping holed up and alone in order to stave off death. Pailey Brokenstoff had taken to running figures and calculating costs: every dead townsman meant several live trees. Pernella Atrina was worried that the newest fashions from Paris were not going to reach her secluded doorstep and Krysanthe Ocarina had to content herself with dolls and toys rather than girls and boys.

The night the Gildonarettes would meet their maker was a very cold, snowy evening sometime in February, several months after Michael died. Krysanthe had her face pressed against a windowpane, watching the wind swirl flakes in confusing and unpredictable patterns, dark night making the chilly ice colder and glassier. Her parents, seated by a fire, mildly discussed the need for a new town, one with people, and one without the Bloodman’s Curse (which, notably, they called an acute case of sangreo-naso-hematemesis). Mrs. Gildonarette had, at the encouragement of her husband, purchased the last three tickets for the last train ever scheduled to go in or out of Addlesbury and as she spoke, she waved them around wildly. Eventually, tired of this motion, Pailey Brokenstoff held out his hand for the papers and tucked them away, under his seat. Amy, the nanny, sat near the child, reading or knitting or something of the sort. Krysanthe, black curls tinged with drops of condensation and green eyes fixed completely on the glittering world outside, paid them all little mind.

“Amy,” Mrs. Gildonarette broke from the conversation with her husband, “Go to the kitchen and ask Cook to fix up Miss Krysanthe’s evening fruit, would you?”

Amy gave a quick nod, stood, and passed out of the room. Krysanthe looked over her shoulder at her mother, wrinkled her nose, and asked, “Why can’t I have a tart like a normal child?”

“You are not normal,” came the standard reply from Krysanthe’s father who promptly returned to discussing nothing of note with his wife.

It was then that something happened. No one is entirely sure what, but it seems that the whole house shot up in flames. It wasn’t a slow burn, not in the least; the licks of fire bolted into the snowy sky, ripping and roaring incandescently, burning resplendently. The fire seemed to exude a sort of a callomania, destroying everything it touched, but doing it with a grace, an elegance, and an ethereal sense of doom. Sparks danced in the black night, fancifully making stars among stars, blazing brightly for just a moment then fading into black ash. Then, not three minutes after the fire exploded over the house, the flames began to die down, flicker out, and then perish forever.

Everyone in the house faded with the flames, vapid and unfulfilled lives extinguished. The three people in the drawing room were blackened corpses, the cook in the kitchen fell into her stew as the fire hit her, the maid and the butler were caught in the linen closet (in a horribly compromising position that was rendered rather moot). The only person who worked or lived in that great house on the hill who wasn’t consumed by the strange fire was Amy, the nanny. She had taken the five minutes away from her black-haired charge to step outside the kitchen and meander around the edge of the house’s forest. She saw the blaze from the trees and quickly hurried back, but by the time Amy arrived at the house again, the fire had done its job. Needless to say, Amy, the last inhabitant of Addlesbury, quickly left town.

[akinatorlich]

Chapter Four: Addlesbury

Take a look at chapter four. Share it. I won’t post chapter five without 10 reposts on this. Reposts, not likes.

Some years ago, this town – the town of Addlesbury – was a thriving little town. Nestled deep in the woods with the only train station for many miles, it was a sort of mecca for the various people trying to go from obscure, vast nothingness to a greater, more cultivated city. It was a bustling place, boasting a large library, three parks, homes that reached to the sky, and a few neat little shops. Not a bad place, all in all. Before the birth of the train, Addlesbury had been a prominent provider of wood to the nearest city (which also happened to be Rishley’s destination), thus Addlesbury had been blessed with a train station of its very own. It was populated, happy, and all around a very lively place to live.

Obviously, something disrupted this happy existence to which the people of Addlesbury had grown accustomed. It was the summer right after the train had come to the little lumber jacking town in the woods, bringing flannel and axes while taking away loads of trees. Children played outside, as children do in the summertime, boys running around through daffodils and lilacs as their sisters tried desperately to pick the same said flowers. The newest and most fashionable of games this particular summer was entitled “Dart”. It was a simple game, no rules, really. A few stone’s throws outside town, a group of children would play about and when it was one’s turn, that child would wait for the sound of an oncoming train. Then, the child would dart across the the tracks, the ultimate goal being simply “to get to the other side”. The children, mostly the boys, were absolutely in love with this very dangerous game and did not even consider the possible squishy repercussions, so on they went, darting back and forth over the tracks.

The doomed child (you knew there would be one) went by the name of Michael Peters and had a younger sister who tagged along after him named Elizabeth Peters. Their father was a woodcutter, like many in the town, and they were generally liked children, both blessed with unfailingly good looks. He was no more than ten years old, Elizabeth was about seven – maybe six. On the day in question, Michael had met up with several of his friends and they thought it was a perfect day to play “Dart” down by the tracks so, Michael, his friends, and (unbeknownst to him) Elizabeth all wandered out of Addlesbury and followed the tracks to the favored “Dart”-playing location.

There was a lot of goofing off and Elizabeth probably made herself known at some point and several groans ensued. Eventually, one boy did hear a train and roused the signal. Michael went first, he always went first, and wandered his resolute ten-year-old body toward the tracks. He got up the hill and turned around to beam proudly down at his friends, waving quickly. Blonde curls shimmered in the hot July sun, mimicking Elizabeth’s same blonde hair as she looked up at him; these were two golden children – and not for the sake of a more tragic, poetically linked story. Elizabeth watched her brother quietly, holding a bouquet of flowers firmly in her hands, clutched against her chest, gravely silent. Michael turned around to watch the train begin its approach.

The children had timed this game fairly well – after the first few kids, they figured out that a count to ten from the first sight of the train gave them enough time to both jump and feel the exhilarating whoosh of a train nearly killing them. Michael, however, misjudged. While he had waved, the train came into sight – and he started counting just three seconds too late. The other children knew this was a problem and started shouting at Michael, but trains are extremely loud. He jumped at the wrong time. He jumped, the inevitable happened, and the other children ran to the top of the hill with the idle hope that their friend was still alive.

Elizabeth stayed at the bottom, still holding those daffodils and lilacs close to her small chest. She stared at the spot from where Michael had jumped, frozen and horrified. The other kids, discovering Michael’s body, started shouting and one ran back to town. The game was decidedly over.

Adults ran in, Michael’s body was taken back to town, grief ensued and a funeral was planned. Elizabeth, meanwhile, never let go of those flowers. The night after the funeral for her brother, she slipped into bed, flowers on her pillow and her head right next to them. She was half asleep when a voice jolted her awake. There, standing at the foot of her bed, was Michael. A pristine, perfect, fading wisp of Michael. He smiled charmingly at his sister and gestured for her to follow him.

“Come on, Liz,” he said quietly, “Don’t wake them up, come on.”

Elizabeth rose, flowers in her hands, and dutifully followed her brother out of her room, down the stairs, and out of the house. He led her through the town and toward the tracks, to where the train ran over him. Michael pointed to the ground, still stained with his blood, and told his sister to lay down. She obeyed. Trains do not stop when the sun falls or to conveniently save a girl in a story. Elizabeth also died on those tracks.

It was here the accounts dwindle; the children wrote in their various journals and diaries of seeing Michael Peters’ ghost but the adults left no word one way or another on these sorts of accounts. There were a few more tales of dead children on those tracks, the same spot each occurrence, and as time wore on and deaths kept happening, people moved. They petitioned a few years after Elizabeth perished for the train to stop running through their town, but it was really rather moot; within ten years of Michael’s death, there was not a soul left in the town. There were a few letters about a disease (Bloodman’s Curse, they called it, giving a rather harrowing name to a rather harrowing disease in which blood simply coursed out of the unhappy victim’s mouth and nose until he or she was entirely drained dry) ripping through the remaining townsmen hurriedly, but it seemed that, by and large, people left of their own accord.

(In his notes here, Rishley decided to link the Bloodman’s Curse and poor Michael’s demise, naming Michael the Bloodman and his curse was upon the entire town and so on and so forth, which is all very interesting in terms of Rishley’s remarkable imagination, but not quite true, so I have taken the liberty of readjusting this particular part of his tale for the sake of a modicum of reality. And, honestly, to spare us a very melodramatic scene in which Michael returns from the dead to proclaim he is the Bloodman, always has been, and sucks his life from the children he ran over with his ghost train then needed more hosts or some such and laid his curse upon the town. Very silly stuff, really.)

And so, the train having taken care of the majority of the townspeople and the Bloodman’s Curse eliminating the rest quite efficiently, Addlesbury was left a veritable ghost town. When the train stopped running through Addlesbury, people stopped bothering to remember it and, slowly, the happy little town faded into drab oblivion. If people bothered to remember it at all, they merely thought of Addlesbury as the place with the train and carried on their little lives. With transportation now broken to those towns in the woods, communication also ceased and people reverted to their pre-train existences in the towns around the now-decrepit Addlesbury.

[akinatorlich]

Chapter Three: A Quiet Town

(Keep sharing. I’ll do the same) There was an awful lot of walking that we will just gloss over; I assume you know what movement through towns is like and there is no reason to subject ourselves to that sort of monotony. It was a long journey, there were a lot of (Rishley thought) aggravating people, and a few truly awful poems composed out of it all, but on the whole, there was nothing very remarkable. Rishley very wisely decided to save his money (his great-grandfather or grand-uncle had managed to acquire a good sum at some point after the notorious bet had been forgotten) for whenever he reached the city and slept, mostly, under the stars. He figured that this was not only practical but also extremely authorial of him and spent many nights patting himself on the back before bed. Such evenings outside gave birth to fine, quality literary pieces such as One Star Do I See and An Evening Too Short, the former of which I have taken the liberty of adding below: A time, in short, of one little glow but what, oh what, is it I know? A wish I shall make, a candle shall blow under the wing of that great Mother Sky. Never, oh never, will I let you die tucked under my soul, little star, as I lie One Star do I see, fly on star, fly. Rishley would very carefully cart this poem around with him until the day he perished, to serve as a reminder of all that he had seen and done. He told no one, but I think he may have thought One Star Do I See was his crowning literary achievement. But I digress. After having walked, in his words “one-hundred-and-seventy-four-and-a-half! miles, no less, maybe more!”, Rishley finally entered the town with the fabled train. It was a quiet town; there were no colors to offend Rishley’s senses. In fact, the entire burg seemed bathed in an uninteresting sepia tone. A single dirt road stretched up and over a hill, its length dotted with dilapidated buildings in varying shades of brown. As Rishley’s eyes wandered from the buildings on the left to the buildings on the right, a light burst of wind shuffled him forward and picked up the dust of the road, blowing it over his remarkably pristine (for, somehow, Rishley had always managed to stop and practice good hygiene every day) ensemble. Disturbed by the imperfection, Rishley darted to one side of the street, taking cover under the buildings’ brown awnings. He stalked down the street in an attempt to find a ticket office or the train station – or even the train, his tall frame pitching forward with each step, and then stopped. None of these buildings proclaimed what they housed! Peeking in windows did not seem to help either, so Rishley walked back out to the middle of the empty street, rubbed his neck, and turned in three perfect circles. A few structures were identifiable, once the poet stopped spinning around. There was a town hall at the top of the hill, banners torn and lightly fluttering in the dust-ridden wind. In the valley, a library – books left on their rotting shelves. Some sort of empty general store stood in the middle of the square (which was really more of an asterisk), and, just beyond the town, on a hill of its own, stood the proverbial haunted house. It was, far and away, the most interesting thing in the town. From where Rishley stood, he could not see anything but the dark frame of a very clearly empty house. It was an interesting shape, full of spikes and points, but rather dissatisfying from his angle. Rishley pondered this bizarre town, clearly empty, and said aloud, “What in the name of the Muse,” he had a muse, you see, but more on her later, “could have possibly happened here!” I would imagine you assumed Rishley would stalk right to the house (which we have rather unfairly deemed haunted without much proof) and open it up, perhaps find a goblin or a ghoul or fall through the floor and that would be that. Or, maybe, since he is our protagonist, he would stalk to the house and open it up and solve whatever great mystery it possessed, obtain a new muse (after all, why would I have mentioned her otherwise?), and then continue forward to the city. Well, quite frankly, you would be wrong. You do Rishley a disservice to assume he would act so brashly. Remember, reader, that he is, first and foremost, a writer. No, he did not head right for the house; he went to the library. It is a reasonable assumption that a town of this size, in this time, would keep records of itself and, realistically, there were only two places those would go: the city hall with its frayed banners at the top of the hill or the library, in the valley and infinitely easier for Rishley to reach. So, motivated both by a sense of brilliant camaraderie and a whole lot of laziness, Rishley walked to the library. (It was pointed out to me that it was, perhaps, callous of me to deem Rishley’s decision lazy; after all, the man had just walked many miles (if not one-hundred-and-seventy-four-and-a-half) and his tiredness is wholly justified. My apologies, Mister William Rishley. You simply took the easiest path, which is actually commendable, given that philosophers, physics majors, and mathematicians everywhere would argue that the easiest path is likely the best one.) I would not lie to you, reader, the library was quite a spooky one. When Rishley opened the door, it quite unceremoniously fell off its hinges and right into a very surprised Mister William Rishley’s hands. He struggled a moment to place the cobweb-ridden piece of wood aside then, swiping his hands over his black wool, he walked into the dusty, deserted library. It was entirely dark, slivers of light littered with swirling pieces of dust daring to eke into the grandiose room, illuminating floorboards and shelves eerily. The sparse lighting was, Rishley eventually deduced, due to long dark, thick, curtains and an occasional two-by-four nailed resolutely into the window. The curtains, black velvet, looked almost new – not a single tatter or dust mite tinged their perfection. Rishley continued to look around and decided to embrace the muted, sinister tone of the room rather than rip the curtains down; it was more poetic that way. He took a step forward, thick sound of his heel echoing through the library, bouncing off books and lifting to the ceiling. Despite the dust, the clear lack of inhabitants, and the overwhelming sense of foreboding doom, the library was in perfect order, shelves still arranged neatly (they had not rotted through yet; that would happen ten years and a week from when our Rishley discovered the strange town). After procuring a pen from behind a librarian’s desk, Rishley began to skulk up and down aisles, silently browsing the literary works. He was, admittedly, distracted by a few philosophy books and a rare collection of poetry, but eventually, and after whispering several new poems of a decidedly darker tone than One Star Do I See, Rishley found his way to the necessary area of the library. His hunch had been correct; the town stored its documents, its deeds and its histories, in the library. Mister Rishley put his suitcase on the floor to liberate his hands, flexing his fingers and curling them up as he dawdled over the many shelves of material. Slowly, Rishley poured over the titles of various ledgers, the curling scripts on books’ spines, and every so often, he tugged one down from its home on the shelf and set it delicately beside his suitcase. When nearly all of the books and papers that had previously made their residence on the shelves had been sent on holiday to the floor, Rishley sat beside them, took out his papers and that pen he had borrowed, and systematically began to read. His gestures, as always, were probably larger than any normal person may have bothered to make while investigating, or even just reading. As he read, some lines were spoken aloud (in case they might sound delicious for his next novel or poem; he was an unashamed plagiarist, a firm believer that nothing written was truly unique anymore, so why not piece lovely sounding prose together for a better work?) and every so often, Rishley would mark down this or that. In one remarkable stroke of genius, Rishley penned, and I quote directly: “'It was then I realized how very like a detective I was; the author, it seems, was nothing less than a sleuth! I would uncover the mystery piece by piece and, as I did, it would find its way into my newest novel’ – for, perhaps, a murder mystery? with a dragon!” The collection of who-owned-what was remarkably uninteresting and Rishley set that aside fairly promptly, giving it a cursory gloss for names rather than places. There were diaries, newspapers, letters… on and on and on. To an experienced historical researcher, each piece of invaluable reference would have been gold; to Rishley, they were either useful or useless. He cast aside anything unpoetical or without a sense of prose (he had, also, at that time, a particular love of the tercet, so anything without it (or if he was unable to create one in his own mind) wound up cast aside in the worthless pile). Rishley worked long into the night, pouring over those selected documents and diaries and crafting from them a very interesting tale that he scribbled down on his papers. The story he contrived, fleshed out a little more (and painful literary devices removed) for the sake of a narrative, was this:

[akinatorlich]

Chapter Two: Poisoned Food!

Suitcase in hand, our reluctant hero walked away from his previously quiet home. He did not look over his shoulder, he did not indulge in any overflowing prose of heartbreak and dire pain. It seemed, for a moment, that the uprooting of his very existence pushed Rishley from unfailingly poetic to naturally pragmatic. He pondered what he would do, where he would go, what he would eat, who he knew, and discovered that he had no answers at all. He walked absently, steps jagged and rather drunken, with an idle disinterest in the chirping birds and lively greenery that cut into the path he followed. His tall frame bordered on alluringly comical, gangly limbs and large ears rather prominent (especially without a hat, which really was the fashion of the day), but his face was nothing sort of calamitous.

Rishley had started walking toward the town simply out of habit – he never went anywhere else – and by the time he got there, his stomach was rumbling. For the first time in many, many years, Rishley dined out. There was a little corner inn, bistro, restaurant, whatever you want to call it, with a funny little red-and-white awning and a skinny girl of no more than fifteen or so at the front. Rishley wandered toward the kitschy place, eying the girl as he had eyed the mosquito.

“And a girl, so thin, stood in front of the food I was to eat; I wondered if, perhaps, there was something more notorious, more dangerous, in this little town than it let on. After all, if their food was good, would she not eat it? Perhaps they are on to my investigation, this town, and they have set out to poison me…” Rishley whispered to himself as he crossed toward the girl. Once there, he said in a gravely tone just under his breath, “One.”

The girl, who knew Rishley only by reputation as the strange man who lived alone in the woods (a standard in childhood lore), was moderately startled to see him in person – and to discover that he was not nearly as disturbingly ugly as the other children would have led her to believe. With a shy smile and a quick check of her hair, she showed him to a lonely table of infinitely better quality than his old lawn chair, and ran back inside to dig out some bread for him.

Rishley, safe in his seat, continued to write his newest novel, muttering to himself. He dug through his suitcase for a piece of paper and a quill (his favorite one, of course, with the elaborate swirl, for this was a budding work of genius). Obviously, Rishley carried no ink in his suitcase (those crisp white shirts!) and he had to wait for the girl to return, bread in hand, to bark out the word to her. She gladly obliged.

And so, one piece of bread in hand and a stew on the way, Rishley wrote. He paused. He crossed out. He wrote more. On and on this went until, finally, the girl (who had been standing just to the side, watching Rishley as if he were a sideshow from the very circus he just left) dared to speak.

“Whassat you’re writin’?” she said quietly, voice so soft it made up for her rather poor grammatical instruction.

“I am writing a novel,” Rishley said, looking over at the girl in irritation. This was the third time today he had to speak to someone he did not know and he was a little tired of people in general.

“A novel?” she continued, despite Rishley’s obvious tone, “I really only read the Bible.”

Rishley looked up sharply, “The Bible? That is all you read?” he asked, alarmed into interaction. “Why, that is a sin in and of itself! Not to experience the poems of lonely paths to lonely ponds or stories of a bird-less wood or tragedies of a dead rabbit in a pool of water…” And Rishley went on, subjecting the poor girl to his own dreadful poems, stories, and tales until she finally said bluntly:

“No'ne ‘ere reads those thin’s.”

“You mean to tell me, girl, that everyone here merely reads the Bible? You have never heard On Winter’s Wings I Pray Thee,” again, reader, do not feel bad: that was one of Rishley’s early works, “or Half Doth Mine Eyes?”

“Maybe in the ci-y, but not 'ere,” the skinny girl replied, feeling rather belittled, “God’s all we need 'ere.”

Rishley began to ignore the girl, who was so clearly of inferior intellect, and pondered then how, exactly, he might get to this city where people must have (surely!) heard of him, or at the very least, know more than simply the Bible. He shoved his paper and quill into his bag again and stood up, chair ripping across the ground, while resolutely looking from left to right. It was at this point Rishley realized he had no idea where the city was, nor how to get there. Fortunately, the girl was still there, eying this oddity that had fallen into her family’s inn.

“How,” he commanded, still irked that he was speaking – that mystique! “do I get to the city?”

The girl pointed off toward the edge of town, “Three towns o'er, they 'ave a train. Issa long walk, though. You’d really be be'er off wit a 'orse.”

A horse. Which Rishley distinctly did not have. This was of no matter, though, for Rishley merely scoffed at the idea of taking the recommended route to anywhere.

[akinatorlich]

Chapter One: The Disruption

Reblog & I’ll post more.

Mister William Rishley was of no interesting birth, a good name, perhaps, due simply to time, but little else. Until recently, he had led a solitary life in a home deep inside a wood, feigning an apathetic distance from the town just a mile away. He fancied himself a writer (though he was, admittedly, a rather poor one and several of his poems waxed and waned on the topic of the fruitless, deadened path he carved from his lonely house to the well outside it) and made no effort to tidy his appearance on any day; he

wore his ink stains and mopish brown hair like some badge of honor while waving his hands and arms about dramatically as he spoke to his chairs. To Mister William Rishley, the admittance of anyone into his three-roomed world would be nothing short un-authorial, a mortal sin to the Gods of Poets. And so, he lived in his cottage in the woods, shouting story ideas at chairs, banging pots when he had a literary breakthrough, and calling to his dead path in archaic and unnecessary terms. That is, as I said, until recently.

It was an unfortunate turn of events that not even Mister William Rishley’s perhaps-good-name could alter that found this same said Rishley no longer living in his cottage or near his path. The day in question was a simply lovely day, not a cloud in the sky, and Rishley had fixed his morning’s helping of both tea and coffee (for, you see, as a serious writer, Rishley could never figure which he should drink, tea or coffee, and so he was forced to have both), which rested on a tray filled with a box of tobacco and thin papers. He carried these accessories to his broken, battered garden where he sat upon a broken, battered lawn chair and stared into his murky, ashen pond while thinking of what life, if any, might lie under the surface – and immediately, Rishley’s mind sped into the space it filled whenever he thought he had a brilliant idea for a work of literary art. Alternating sips of coffee and tea, Rishley continued to sit, ponder, and brood until a mosquito landed on his arm, piercing the fair skin just under his rolled-up white sleeve. Rishley moved his hand quickly, preparing to slap the insect, but suddenly thought better of it and paused, hovering over the blood-sucking vermin.

“Aha,” Rishley whispered, smile creeping onto his face and green eyes shimmering. “Aha! ‘Upon the marbled flesh, I wait… lapsing… lapsing into a dignatory (…that is a word?) state! A tumbled muss of hair and bone, but I care not – I’m not alone!'” Rishley leapt from his chair, creating quite a racket, and laughed brilliantly at his own genius, proud of his creative prowess.

The mosquito, however, had quite flown away and when Rishley looked back at his arm for further inspiration, he was met with a small red welt that had started to tingle. Just as Rishley began to reach for his sleeve to pull it over the offensive red hue to a perfectly pale arm, the house emitted a noise it had never given before:

There was a knock.

[stephensonstandard]

Henning Mankell's 'memoir of sorts' due out next year

Quicksand, to be published in February 2016, comprises a series of autobiographical essays ‘about what it means to be human’

Ooh! Can’t wait.

[betterbooktitles]

Happy Birthday, Roland Barthes!

A better book title for A Lover’s Discourse

[mysharona1987]

[prichardmedia]

Prichard Media Group Completes Filagree Acquisition

NEW YORK, NY - Prichard Media Group today completed its acquisition of multinational media conglomerate Filagree, cementing its position as the premier advertising and marketing provider for elite clients. Prichard Media Group and Filagree entered negotiations in early 2015, and final transactions closed on April 27. Filagree, founded as an advertising agency in 1947, expanded into all fields of media over the following decades. In addition to its advertising offices in Chicago, New York, and London, Filagree’s holdings range across new media, publishing, and more. Filagree’s publishing branch, including Crestview Books and Blue Banana Books for Young Readers, boasts a distinguished roster of authors including Jason Gallagher, Gregory Bramhall, and Maria Ruggiero, as well as several popular series of media tie-in books for children. Jonathan Prichard, CEO of Prichard Media Group, issued a statement: “We are happy to announce this expansion of Prichard Media Group’s holdings in the media and publishing world, and to welcome Filagree to the Prichard Media Group family. I have high hopes for the expansion and development of Filagree and all of its holdings.”

[stephensonstandard]

I've been telling you this was in the works since January, and now it's official. Filagree barely cared about the literary side as it was, but PMG REALLY isn't a publisher... So what does this mean for Crestview? For us as readers? For the future of literature?

[literarystarbucks]

Knausgaard

For Karl Ove Knausgaard, coffee is simple: you drink for as long as you can. Then you stop. Sooner or later, one day, the brewing will cease, and the baristas will begin to hang their aprons by the door, where they will collect in a small pile, visible from our side of the counter as a large, green hill on ever dirtier floor tiles, as the crowd thins, the coffee filters stiffen and the final cups are drained.  These changes in the closing hours occur so slowly and take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic about them, as though Starbucks capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of union agreement to which the custodial staff also adhere, inasmuch as they always wait until the customers have retreated before they launch their invasion of the familiar landscape.

[the-best-books-blog]

[stephensonstandard]

I want to go there please.