I come to you now from a world draped in cobwebs, festooned with skellingtons and dotted with lanterns both Jack-o and Snanny (it’s a Northern thing, we make them out of turnips.) The night covers the world, and with the setting of the sun comes the return of that which does not belong in our world. The dead stir in their graves and walk upon this earth once again. Ghosts, ghouls, poltergeists and malign spirits slip through the cracks in the fabric of existence and embark upon a mission of mischief, mayhem, madness and all-purpose merry-hell. Obviously the only sensible response to this is to dress up, devour high-calorie sugared snacks and inappropriately add the adjective “sexy” as a prefix to thing which it does not rightly belong. Or if you;re me: turn-off all the lights and pretend you’re not in just so people will go away and stop knocking on your door. But even with all this frivolity, frippery and social cowardice there’s a lingering feeling that there really might be something out there in the cold autumn night. Something hungry, prowling darkened streets and hiding in the bushes. Something on the hunt…
Tag Archives: Submarines
October’s Pictonaut Challenge
Arguments can be made for October being the worst month of the entire year. These arguments tend to hinge of two factors. Firstly there is Halloween. Halloween on its own is perfectly fine and innocuous, at least from a conceptual perspective. What isn’t innocuous is juvenile humanoids cruising the streets, jonesing for a sugar fix and pelting your front door with eggs if you have the temerity to be out when they come a calling. And secondly there’s the clocks changing. While we all sleep, time creeps into our bedrooms and gives us all an extra hour in bed. Now you’re probably thinking “Mister Verbumancer, sir? How is an extra hour in bed a bad thing?” Well for me it’s the equivalent of taking a 3 kilogramme lump of hardened steel, fitting it to a stout wooden support pole and using the resulting contraption to smash the bejeezus out of my careful recalibrated diurnal rhythms. I clutch the shattered and broken corpse of my sleep patterns, cradling it within my arms; I weep and I realise that I have to start all over again. Time is insidious, it takes and takes and whatever gifts it gives are all poisoned. It is callous, unforgiving, relentless and never around when you really, really need it. It hounds us and hunts us our entirely lives and then, in the end, it devours us. Cheery thought isn’t it? And by that extremely tenuous segue we come at last to October’s Pictonaut Challenge Hunting.
The Rogue Verbumancer 