Upcoming Novella Extract - The Spider from the Well
The below is an extract of my upcoming novella, entitled 'The Spider from the Well' - inspired by William Hope Hodgson's 'The House on the Borderland'. Enjoy!
Sometime after midnight I awoke, feeling light of body and mind. When I looked down, I saw why. I floated above the bed, staring at my sleeping form. The walls of my house were invitingly transparent. At that point I had no immediate feeling of fear, just an acute sense of displacement, as if I’d left all earthly worries in my slumbering shell. It was a strange, but not altogether unpleasant sensation.
So, serene, I let myself float out of the house and into the garden, aware that I was a drifting through a dream.
At first, my gaze was directed toward the ground. Nothing seemed untoward. The grasses were a normal length. There were no shadows, and even the well looked unthreatening. Moonlight pitted everything in a bright-blue sheen. No detail was hidden. Everything blazed with a touch of the divine. I floated, drinking in the landscape as I rose higher, away from the confines of my house. A thought came to mind, unheeded, that I looked down at a building alone in the world. It was a building situated so that it was special in some unique way. The moon seemed to shine only on my home. The surrounding fields were darkened and forgotten.
That sensation intensified as I left it behind, working my way into the sky, so that the last I saw of my home was a blue dot, like a star. Then I swivelled and was once again faced by the enormity of space. Again, time and distance vanished. All was darkness intersected by pinpricks of light—stars. I saw the sun, a huge orange ball, and also Mars and the moon. Both were smooth discs that looked strangely flat. They seemed dull and uninteresting compared to something else that caught my eye, and held it through dreadful majesty.
The green star.
Sometime after midnight I awoke, feeling light of body and mind. When I looked down, I saw why. I floated above the bed, staring at my sleeping form. The walls of my house were invitingly transparent. At that point I had no immediate feeling of fear, just an acute sense of displacement, as if I’d left all earthly worries in my slumbering shell. It was a strange, but not altogether unpleasant sensation.
So, serene, I let myself float out of the house and into the garden, aware that I was a drifting through a dream.
At first, my gaze was directed toward the ground. Nothing seemed untoward. The grasses were a normal length. There were no shadows, and even the well looked unthreatening. Moonlight pitted everything in a bright-blue sheen. No detail was hidden. Everything blazed with a touch of the divine. I floated, drinking in the landscape as I rose higher, away from the confines of my house. A thought came to mind, unheeded, that I looked down at a building alone in the world. It was a building situated so that it was special in some unique way. The moon seemed to shine only on my home. The surrounding fields were darkened and forgotten.
That sensation intensified as I left it behind, working my way into the sky, so that the last I saw of my home was a blue dot, like a star. Then I swivelled and was once again faced by the enormity of space. Again, time and distance vanished. All was darkness intersected by pinpricks of light—stars. I saw the sun, a huge orange ball, and also Mars and the moon. Both were smooth discs that looked strangely flat. They seemed dull and uninteresting compared to something else that caught my eye, and held it through dreadful majesty.
The green star.
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