AUTHOR'S OTHER TITLES (25) A Capital Fart (Short Stories) The redundant London underground is pressed into service to win a world farting contest. [736 words] [Humor] A Wrong Turn Somewhere (Short Stories) Somewhere near Birmingham a driver takes a wrong turn and loses everything. [492 words] [Mystical] Amnesty (Short Stories) A gun amnesty in a rough borough of London goes idiotically wrong. [561 words] [Comedy] Arnie (Short Stories) A little labourer has a terminator approach to his work. [646 words] [Humor] Back To The Garden (Short Stories) Depressing the extent to which everything is being dumbed down these days. Poor state education? Is that all it is? [527 words] [Mind] Changing To Go Out (Short Stories) In the aftermath of the genetic bomb, a simple night at the pictures with the missus is no easy task. [444 words] [Humor] God's Trainees (Short Stories) Him upstairs is thinking of retiring, all he needs to do is train up some suitable replacements. Easier said than done. They just don't make deities the way the used to. [1,570 words] [Humor] Mementoes Of Treasured Occasions (Short Stories) A struggling photographer finds a rich new source of business. [496 words] [Humor] Providing For Sarah (Short Stories) A desolate man finds comfort in an imaginary (?) companion. But who will care for her when he's gone? [883 words] [Mind] Sex Life Of The Amoeba (Short Stories) A serious paper on cellular mytosis in a well known eukarytic organism. The dirty little... [1,108 words] [Humor] Soup (Short Stories) A soup manufacturer ends life on Earth. [514 words] [Comedy] The Adventures Of Archie 2 - The Little Demon's Tale (Short Stories) A hell spawned satanic creature identifies too much with men and falls to their level. [901 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 3 - The Spider Catcher's Tale. (Short Stories) Archie escapes from the paralysing purple and find himself in a world where an avoidable infestation has eaten all the perspective. There he meets the spider catcher and learns why ballroom dancing i... [1,313 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 4a - The Great Regurgitato (Short Stories) Achie learns of the greats of bodily functions and meets the greatest of them all. [781 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 4b - The Great Regurgitato's Tale (Short Stories) Continued. [823 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 5a - The Army Surplus Salesman (Short Stories) Archie learns the truth they try and keep from us, that being disembowelled is fun, meets a descendant of the Piltdown man and travels to the army surplus fair to find Little Boy is no bargain. [913 words] The Adventures Of Archie 6 - A Peaceful Solution (Short Stories) Following a Little Boy explosion Archie find himself on a desolate plain and meets two tribes who are too stupid to realise that war and bloodshed are by far the most efficient means of resolving disp... [1,271 words] [Humor] The Adventures Of Archie 7 - The Puzzleman's Tale (Short Stories) Archie finds he is not alone in the valley. He shares it with a man in a very strange prison. You have to endure a little homily on man's inhumanity to decorating materials first. [2,988 words] [Humor] The Adventuresof Archie 5b - The Army Surplus Salesman's Tale (Short Stories) Continued. [1,116 words] The Fly And... (Short Stories) That Geoff Goldblum had it easy! One fly?? I should have been so lucky! [483 words] [Humor] The Horrid Tale Of Evil Worm (Short Stories) A rare accident in the vegetable patch transforms a humble earthworm into a satanic being. [1,158 words] The Several Voyages Of Fat Tony (Short Stories) Foul deeds on the dead sea coast get their richly deserved comeuppance. [1,377 words] The Two Bills (Short Stories) William Shakespeare fails to get to grips with Microsoft Word. [777 words] Vomiting On Tony (Short Stories) The Mad Messiah (AKA Tony Blair) gets what he thoroughly deserves. [499 words] [Humor] Your Little God Is Pooh And Creepy Too (Short Stories) Only the innocent find salvation. In the run up to the revelation the kids of St Crispin's Middle School are introduced to their own little salvations. PS I know Buddha was not a god, it's creative l... [1,442 words] [Humor]
The Adventures Of Archie 1 - The Great Escape Xoggoth
The Rabbit's tale with recursion
He stood there, holding the door of the hutch and gazing around the shed as if his elderly rabbit, Archie, might be perched on one of the shelves among the old paint tins planning a spot of redecorating. He could have sworn he had closed and latched it securely last night when he had changed Archie's water, but this morning it was wide open and Archie was gone.
Archie was 1500 feet below, pulling himself down with both hands on the thin blue nylon cord that stretched away to the centre of the Earth and beyond. It was hard work fighting the buoyancy trying to drag him back to his caged existence. All around him other men and animals (there is no difference except in name) were doing the same; all pulling themselves in diverse directions according to what they were escaping from and on cords of different hues determined by why they were doing it. Some like him hauled on blue cords of powerless imprisonment, others on red cords of lost love or the yellow cords of unendurable pain.
A hugely fat wheezing Chinaman was hauling himself along at right angles to Archie; his sweating palms slithering on a purple cord of self inflicted failure. Just a few feet from Archie he lost his grip and fell slowly in a spiral path, his limbs changing to gazelle form and sawing the air as he faded out. What was his fate? Not necessarily the one he had fled from, for in the abyss all directions lead to all others and they all lead nowhere.
Meanwhile, the office workers in the glass apartments totally surrounding the void, which had no boundaries, photocopied and typed and occasionally gazed impassively from the windows drinking time from their plastic coffee cups, the emptiness resonating and pulsing with every sip.
It took Archie fifty years to make his journey through the central void. His master had been dead two hundred. The shed and its paint tins long since vanished. That part of his life was over for good until the next time, for everything comes again eventually, although, as we have already noted, it would not necessarily come to him.
He fell into woodland of immense oak trees, quite devoid of any other truly living thing. The canopy hundreds of feet above cast unbroken twilight below. Across the whole surface of the barren black earth the twisted roots snarled and tangled, raising themselves in huge vaults and arches and creating lightless caves beneath. There was no sound in those woods, except the sigh of the wind and far off, something else that, when he strained to hear, was silent. He knew from this that it too was listening. Between and during and before and after, and for all we know on top of, each listening it moved closer.
READER'S REVIEWS (1) DISCLAIMER: STORYMANIA DOES NOT PROVIDE AND IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR REVIEWS. ALL REVIEWS ARE PROVIDED BY NON-ASSOCIATED VISITORS, REGARDLESS OF THE WAY THEY CALL THEMSELVES.
"Creative! Very well written but I didn't like the term Chinaman because it was used to degrade the chinese. Other then that I liked the story and will continue reading the others." -- e. rocco caldwell.
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