writing

Dead Until Twelve (Short Story)

~ MKW Publishing ~ 3 Comments

From my book of short stories – A Short Walk

Dead Until Twelve

I didn’t know any different at the time, we had been together for so long it felt normal. Yet it wasn’t.

At first I thought it was just an imaginary friend, that’s what they had told me when I was small. They said I had made her up as company. Being an only child can have that affect they said. Yet I didn’t name her, she did.

Her name was Amelie. My name is Sylvia.

We played together, went to school together, walked and talked. She was even there when I slept. Amelie would tell me about herself, about the toys she had, about her parents too and her life. She had a little brother she talked about all the time too, I sometimes wondered if he was her imaginary friend. It never occurred to me to not want her around, it didn’t seem an option. In fact, Amelie made my childhood and life much easier and happier. I always had someone to talk to, and she seemed to know an awful lot.

She would also sometimes talk of a darkness, tell me there were things out there that weren’t safe. I would feel quite panicked when she spoke of the dark, as if a heavy blanket was being thrown over me. The light fading and breathing became difficult. But only for a moment, Amelie would see my distress and stop talking. An odd detached silence the only thing that would bring us both back to normal.

For a while though while very young, most people found this whole thing quite charming. They thought it adorable I had such an imagination, such an active mind they would say. Even when my grandmother would visit she would always say.

“She makes it seem so real”.

I knew they couldn’t see Amelie, because I couldn’t either, she was just a voice. Yet she was so much more, she was a person, just without being a person. There would have been no way to properly describe that to anyone. I wanted to though, just could never find the words.

School was rather easy for me to a point, I didn’t have many friends and preferred to keep myself to myself. This may have been because I had Amelie with me, I didn’t feel the need for the company of others. And to be honest, she didn’t care for many other people. Sometimes being quite mean with the things she would tell me about them, or things that sounded so outrageous, I could only presume she was making it up. She was great at school work, and so by extension so was I. She gave me all the answers for tests or when asked a question by the teacher. Possibly part of the reason I didn’t have many friends as well, I seemed to be a bit of a swot and always had an answer. Usually the right one, and I worked out quickly that annoyed people, but I just couldn’t help myself.  

My spare time away from school was just myself and Amelie. We would walk into the woods and over the surrounding meadows, listening for the robins and sparrows. Hoping to catch sight of seasonal wildlife. I usually had a pocket full of nuts and seeds hoping to see some squirrels. She always knew the best places to find them, taking me through a dense bit of woodland and crossing a small stream. It snaked its way through the fallen branches and dark moss, giving the most wonderful smell of fresh damp earth. I wasn’t sure why this was her favourite smell, mine was the meadow. When the afternoon sun warmed the many flowers, it gave a hazy golden glow that took my breath away. The perfume of the wild flowers catching on the breeze and making me smile and sigh at the beauty of it all. We loved nature.

One day we had been walking through the fields, making our way to the woods, when Amelie suddenly wanted to go the other end of field we never passed by before. We made our way towards it, away from the worn path, tramping through the higher grasses. As we got there Amelie stopped us and began looking wistfully into the small wooded area. It was the edge of the reservoir and was fully fenced, but used to be as open as the rest of the countryside apparently. She had told me she had gone that way once, before the fences were there. But she couldn’t remember why. No-one was allowed up there now and by the look of it hadn’t for decades. PRIVATE LAND, KEEP OFF signs were posted most prominently.

We were just about to head off on our normal route when suddenly the atmosphere changed. Despite the rays of sunshine splashing onto our face, and the warm summer air, an icy chill ran through me. Followed very closely by what could only be described as fear, heart piercing fear I had never experienced. A shadow lurked behind the fence in the thicket before us. I wanted to turn but instead just stared, transfixed by what must be a trick of the light, shadows didn’t move by themselves.

“Are you ok Sylvia?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin. The voice behind me broke my gaze but did nothing for my heart rate. We never bumped into anyone up here, just their presence was out of place to what we were used to. Although my gaze had been broken, the brightness had not returned, a chill remained and so did the shadow.

“I’ve never seen you up here before, I didn’t think anyone came up here anymore. Are you ok?”

I studied his face before speaking. I had never seen this man before, yet he seemed to know my name. Maybe he was friends with my parents? He must be local to the village or how else would he know my name? There was something extremely familiar about his face but I couldn’t quite place it.

“Yes, I’m fine. Thank you. I’m just a bit hungry and my mother is expecting me for lunch. Good day”

And with that, before I even knew what was happening, we were running back towards the village and our house. I wasn’t hungry, this I knew for sure. My stomach was in knots and if anything I felt sick. But on we ran, not stopping until we got home. My mother was most surprised to see me, usually we would be out in the woods for hours, not half an hour.

“Are you ok? You look like you’ve seen a ghost?”

I didn’t know what I looked like, belt I felt pale. If that can even be a thing. I felt like my guts had been wrenched out and my very being drained of blood. Seeing that shadow and meeting that man had left an impression.

“I just felt a little sick when I got up to the reservoir fence, I didn’t want to stay out. I met this weird man as well, he knew me by name but I didn’t recognise him. I think I’m going to stay in today”.

She seemed happy with that explanation, although not too happy I was talking to strangers in the countryside. Maybe I shouldn’t play so far out anymore she suggested.

“Oh, and remember to tell me if you want a birthday party before Saturday, you are going to be Twelve. Almost a grown up!”

She added that last bit with a cheery smile, I think she gets more excited about my birthdays that I do. But I hated the idea of a party, she tried every year to get me to want one. Maybe next year I kept saying. Amelie didn’t like parties either, but she loved when it was our birthday, she told me hers was the same day as mine. We celebrated together. Every year she would say things like, ‘well, when I turned eight, or when I turned nine. It was such fun when I turned 11, my brother and went to the zoo’. But this year she hadn’t really been saying anything like that, and we were going to be twelve.

Amelie didn’t want to talk about what happened in the fields, she stayed quiet about it. Nothing ever upset her, so I was very confused about what had happened.

I had always felt safe and confident with Amelie. To avoid embarrassment for my parents and being sent to a psychiatrist, I stopped speaking of her when I was about eight. She had told me that people wouldn’t understand, and my mother didn’t so it seemed best to keep it a secret. As my birthday approached though, it seemed Amelie became quieter and more afraid.

One night two days before, she very quietly said to me ‘I’m afraid Sylvia, I don’t know what it’s like to be twelve’. I didn’t understand what she meant. I was apprehensive too, we would be going to big school and everything would change. She didn’t say anything more about it and I didn’t want to upset her, I had never felt her like this. On the eve of our birthday I tried to be excited but there a heavy feeling about our house, a gloom had settled.

We didn’t talk much that night. She had lost her usual enthusiasm and I didn’t know how to help. Maybe she would feel better in the morning I thought.

I woke to the sun streaming through my bedroom window and my mother opening my door with a hot chocolate and slice of cake! I swear she gets more excited than I do about my birthday. I got hugs and kisses and told my cards and presents are downstairs. It felt nice. The house had lightened since yesterday, I looked around the room and sensed it was all different. Nothing had moved but everything seemed out of place. No my mother had left the room, I was alone. For the first time in my entire life, I was alone.

I looked behind me, I looked under the bed, out of the window, in my drawers, everywhere. I must have looked like a mad person because it was not clear what I was looking for. I felt empty. She wasn’t there. Amelie wasn’t there. My mind was quiet, when I asked a question, just a void of nothing came back. I asked if she was still there, but I knew she wasn’t, I could feel she had gone. I sat on the edge of my bed and cried. My years after that felt incredibly lonely, and life seemed more difficult than it had ever felt. School was suddenly really hard, I didn’t have someone in my head telling me the answers all the time.

I missed her greatly and never quite got the hang of friendships. No one could quite match up to her anyway. It was a personal loss I had to carry on my own, never quite getting over it until years later, although what I later found gave me more questions than answers.

Years later at the Christening of my first child, who I had decided to call Amelie and was born upon the very same day as my birthday, I met a priest. He noted to me.

“How interesting you have called your daughter Amelie, my sister had that name, and the same birthday too. Unfortunately she disappeared when she was a child, but I am so glad her name is still going strong”.

He had a sadness with his smile. I suddenly remembered something she used to tell me about her brother and what she used to say to him, and I couldn’t help but say it.

“You can always turn that frown, upside down…”

He stared at me.

“But, that was decades ago, must have been at least two before you were born, how could you know that?”

I didn’t know what to say, I was now flushed and trying to think quickly. Amelie would have known what to say I thought. It had been a burden for so long, I needed to share it, even after all this time of burying it and trying to forget. He spoke before I had the chance to find any words.

“She went missing on the eve of her twelfth birthday. Used to go walking in the woods and meadow and that day, didn’t come back. We never found her. They say she may have fallen in the reservoir but no evidence. That’s why the fences went up”.

It was heart-breaking, seeing in his face he had always wondered what happened to her. I felt the same about why she left me and wanted to end his pain as well as my own. Now I knew for sure she had been real and that she hadn’t just been my imaginary friend. She had been my best friend. Over the years, wondering now and again if I had made it all up. The sign of a lonely child and all that. But to now know her true fate was unknown and that I had found her brother, something would have to be done.

I knew the place well even though I hadn’t been back since that day. A few days before my twelfth birthday in fact, when I had encountered the shadow and the creepy man. The dark corner she had led me to, I think I probably knew then, but didn’t want to admit it or think about it.

“I’m so sorry this happened to her and you’ve had to live with this for so long, but I think I know where to look for her”…

(c) MKW Publishing

Into Thin Air

~ MKW Publishing ~ 1 Comment

Funny how a saying you have heard or been familiar with all your life, can suddenly lead to a thought.

This one being ‘disappeared into thin air’. Now, the fact that they had disappeared is what clearly took my attention when read, or said in the past, when reading of unsolved mysteries of people, planes or other things disappearing. And the thought then lingers of what and when, and when you get to the how, ideas of the Bermuda Triangle, or magnetic interference gets given time, and people can befall all sorts of incidents which may lead to them perishing. But now I consider the dimensional portal theory idea again.

I gave the opposite idea thought in my article Appearing from Nowhere, of when people or things appear from what would be deemed thin air. But instead of a particular thing or person being the object of interest, it is now the air itself – because I didn’t think about that ‘nowhere’ actually being somewhere after all. So is there a thickness to the air that is beyond what we originally thought? We say the air gets thin the higher you go up, less oxygen making it harder to breath and for life to sustain itself, so the concept is there. But what if dimensional differences are really as thin as air, like a stack of repeating 2D sheets building up to create our 3D world, what we feel and breath and know as air.

Could it be that when air is ‘thin’ it become like a super thin sheet of paper between dimensions, so someone can step through it without even noticing it. And you wouldn’t even know what happened, as with the people left in the place you came from. Like an invisible Portal, not having a fixed position or definable size, yet is always there, maybe along the lines of The Bit In Between which speculated about their being layers of firmament as a container type enclosure. Because I realise now perhaps there are many others layers, a bit closer to the surface than I had first thought…

(c) K Wicks

An Army of the Dead

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There have been a few references here and there to armies of the dead, in ancient mythology, religion and in current times we have them in stories and books, and represented visually in films and TV. I’ll mention a few to give you the full gist of what I mean.

Lord of the Rings (Return of the King) – I have mentioned it before in my article He Who Has An Army, as a convenient saviour when all looks lost. But it was the fact they were all damned, the worst of what humanity had to offer they say and were cursed for being liars, thieves and murderers. And it was only through that curse of time and death that they got to fulfil their true purpose, to fight evil and save the day.

Army of Anubis (The Mummy) – another dead army that rises when the time is right, and to that which they show allegiance calls them forth. Maybe I should have considered this concept in my article Rising, as I now wonder whether it may be something else looking to come up from The Old Underground.

Euphrates legend – this one is rather a big one, and is the ultimate in legends. Especially as it is said that when the Euphrates dries up, and four angels will be discovered and released. Not just any angels though, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse no less, bringing with them war, famine, pestilence and glory. So not exactly an army rising up, but something coming back they say to bring disaster, but written in the new telling of the religion, and interpreted by many along the way, as they weren’t actually specifically mentioned as four horsemen, or their allocated purpose. So, make of that what you will.

I can’t help but wonder though, what if the army of the dead was meant to signify those who were dead on the inside, soulless or void of being what we would call human. Almost perhaps like the modern vision of a zombie, of which I have a number of articles speculating on the ‘undead’, Not Quite In Control is one of them, looking at the idea that people’s minds have been captured and they are no longer themselves. Although, that could be said of us all, since we have all had a conditioned upbringing and have been subject to their systems and procedures for so long, are any of us ourselves anymore?

My article Gen Z looked at that conditioning, and how its effect is now being seen on a scale maybe some us hadn’t quite realised, although had thought was there based on what we were seeing in society. And rather than an army of the dead which would just magically appear and sweep the land of all the evils and wrongs, it’s turned out to be something quite different. Where probably the idea The Walking Dead had, of constant fear, isolation, infection and survival – where it was your own you had to be afraid of, like in The Road, and Book of Eli, where they show you that when it all goes to shit, people turn on their own and end up living a half-life, where it would be better to be dead that try to ‘live’ through the horrific and grim times to come.

But then part of me remembers that all of those things mentioned, imagined and portrayed, are all films, stories and ideas propagated by the media machine that conditions us all. Prepped for Disaster, or Clever Programming? already acknowledges that we create much of what they condition us to, following the breadcrumbs like Hansel and Gretal, which are well placed to lead you to the next marker or crumb, wanting you to fall Down The Rabbit Hole and get lost in the never-ending warren of tunnels and secrets that appear to have been constructed around you. And like in Watership Down, these days it’s starting to feel as though many are stuck in the tunnels, getting crushed and looking for the light and a way to the surface, before they start to fill them in…

(c) K Wicks

It’s A Cover Up

~ MKW Publishing ~ 6 Comments

There could be any number of things I am referring to with that title, where things are covered, concealed, or whitewashed to keep the truth a secret. We all must be familiar with that being the case on rather serious matters over the decades and to this day. We now rush to use the word conspiracy to either explain the situation, or discredit people depending on which side of the fence you fall. But if we go back to the old-fashioned terms, and their real meaning, it might make it easier for some.

But this cover up is not about politics, directly, or aliens, or any actual one piece of information or idea. Although it does stem from an idea, one mentioned a few years ago and seemed as outrageous and controlling as all the others from that same quarter. To cover up the sun. As soon as it was speculated I believed it would either be a lie that they could do it, but it may ‘explain’ an anomalous event that would cover the sun and otherwise not be explainable in the normal sense, so needed a prelude to it. Like the Mayans ‘predicting’ the eclipses to enthral the masses and take control of the earth as apparently they had the heavens. A second thought followed though, and was compounded by remembering the footage from an aircraft in WWII, dropping a blanket of ‘cloud’ which ended up looking like a solid wall, to shield ships from view and from being an obvious target.

I realised then if you could disperse the ‘smoke curtain’ sideways instead of down, then you can easily start to block the sun. Now, why would you want to do that? You might ask, as I did. And with my pessimistic and realistic thought process taking the helm these days, it would seem very stupid to block the life giver to this planet, to withhold vital vitamins and health from the land, plants, animals and humans. Everything here runs on a cycle, and it does seem as if the ones calling the play, want to disrupt, control and change all that revolves around that. Messing with people’s light, their night view, their body times, their functionality, their very sense of self. It is an intrusion and corruption of life that really is unsustainable in the long term. Which keeps begging the question – what is the actual end game here? Are they going for mass depopulation by way of ridiculous regimes and really do want to cut everybody off from being able to grow their own food, raise their own family and just live a content life? The interference is so vast and penetrating, the effects will be far-reaching and long lasting.

And are being felt already. Countries known for consistent good Weather have been feeling it, and ours with its ever changeable and choppy weather has also taken a turn for the worse in some places. Now, you could say it’s just normal weather, and we have been lucky to have what appeared to be a ‘stable period’ and we could get used to seasons and certain temperatures. And, there is no way to say for sure that wasn’t controlled either even way back, as we only think weather modification technology is new and given some of the strange things of the past, I don’t discount it entirely. But as we only have been keeping weather records for around 200 years, and not even everywhere, I realised their predictions are based on a very small set of data, with limited understanding of the bigger model.

And maybe because we think we have perfected growing food hydroponically, and can trick plants into believing a certain light is the sun, maybe people have also been tricked in a similar fashion. I think of the Star Trek film where the inhabitants of a planet are to be tricked with a holodeck recreation of their world, so they can be removed without noticing and putting up any resistance. And I wonder if it’s a Logan’s Run play, to convince lots of people that outside is unsustainable, and to make it appear so as best they can, to herd people away from that last bit of natural living we have and are connected to. The Sky. The Sun. Ra. The Life Grower.

(c) K Wicks

Be Mindful of the Labyrinth

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The thought started with the film from 1986, and of the spell cast by her own words at the beginning, and the final realisation that she alone could break the spell. And although she had to physically speak the words to break it, it was the mental adjustment to understanding that she was pivotal to it, and the root of it, that led to being able to break it.

But what was it she was really breaking, a spell? A hypnotic state, or just a carefully constructed illusion that the mind created and adjusted to. Making it ‘reality’. And the word labyrinth meaning “an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one’s way or to reach the exit“. That could easily be description of thoughts, and ideas and mental pathways rather than physical ones.

And the clock that features so heavily, with the pendulum of time ticking away, like a watcher of your mortal self, prompting you to try and solve the mystery or get to the conclusion before your time is up. Just as we do in life, giving thought perhaps to the how’s and whys of it all, knowing we have an expiry time and date, just not being privy to what that is. The other noticeable thing about it, was the number of hours, being thirteen, and not the usual twelve we are used to. Because there has been talk of when we used to have thirteen months in the calendar year, and of changes to the timeline, or rearrangement of things past to how we know them today. My article April New Year, Don’t Be Fooled looks at the calendar subject a little more. But the idea that you are trapped in a labyrinth of information is an easy one to imagine, with blocked and hidden doors and opening, just as in the movie. With traps and tricks to deceive and distract you, and a charming, persistent ‘character’ to seemingly encourage you as well as trying to bewitch you to fail.

But what of the other representations we have of them, multiple examples on cathedral floors, topiary of them, they have been drawn, written into stories, and even built in ancient times they say with the mythical Minotaur Maze. It is also said there is a huge lost maze underneath the ground in front of the pyramids in Giza, Egypt, so they are not a new structure or idea by any means. I can’t help but notice that there is a similarity of the round ones to the cerebral structure of the brain, as we are told, with the square ones looking geometric and harsh in comparison. And we do have an abundance of mazes too in the same formats, even using them for various experiments with animals, In A Maze goes into that a bit more. It is starting to seem as though we are trapped in one, whether it be a physical maze, and a mental labyrinth holding us back so we never work it out who can say for sure. Or as if we are playing out this mental existence within the parameters we have been set, as they insinuate in The Matrix, making us believe that the majority were actually comfortable and happy with their constructed and automated ‘lives’ plugged in to the mainframe.

What is it precisely we think we are going to get out of or escape from I wonder? Again, we have many representations of escapes, of freeing humanity or bringing a great evil to an end and stopping ourselves being used for someone else’s ‘greater good’. Why do we have those ideas? Have they placed there like so much else, to make us fight something that isn’t as it seems, creating a thought process of fighting to save what you have, even if that is what holds you down? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate trickery though, to make the people fight to save that which enslaves them, and any who do might start to realise end up getting stuck in the labyrinth, until maybe one day we all come to realise as she did and understand what the words mean “You have no power over me…”

(c) K Wicks

Star Forts

~ MKW Publishing ~ 3 Comments

These are some rather spectacular sites, where fortified structures appear ingrained as part of the landscape, rather than merely sat upon it. Displaying a geometric beauty we do not often find in today’s projects.

They are found all over the world, apparently there 1,734 known sites, over 105 countries. That’s quite a widespread technique, and really does then beg the question, what was their true purpose? Are they just for aesthetics, even though they cannot be observed in their full splendour except from above?

Many have been destroyed, lost to time or simply remodelled or built over, so who know how many there really were. But the interesting tale of why is the usual type of thing, apparently, they were all built for extra strategic defensive purposes. It is said “Star forts, or bastion forts, are a type of fortification that first emerged more than 500 years ago in response to the growing power of cannons on the battlefield, with sloped walls and angled bastions that allowed defenders better coverage above any attackers“.

Now, make of that what you will, and if you read about specific countries, they will tell you that they all starting doing it around the same time, and nearly even bankrupted their countries to do it. So, what was this invading force all over Europe and the world around the 1500’s that required everyone to adopt the same building style – for random forts dotted here and there? Not sure myself, but if you have an idea of what that might have been, please do comment with that. I have already taken a brief look at 1522, because of a social media comment from Jane Goodall saying we need to reduce population to that of 500 years ago to restabilise society. But I found that in that year alone, there really was quite a bit going on, which would not lead me to believe it was stable at all, despite the claimed population number at the time. For example, we had – The Knights’ Revolt in Germany, A terrible plague in Rome, The first major slave revolt in North America occurred, The Battle of Bicocca, a major earthquake in Almeria, Spain, The Treaty of Windsor was signed to name but a few. In one year, so they say. So, to think that it was all smiles, roses and opportunity just because there were less people, is a strange fallacy to hold onto. And as I have mentioned in my article A Working Strategy, it was in 1388 they put laws and acts in place to heavily control and utilise the population in the UK. So, I am again surprised that we had enough people, skills, materials and money to undertake such elaborate projects on a vast scale, keeping in mind cathedrals and churches were also being built around this time as the monasteries fell. Seems there is still much to mull over…

(c) K Wicks