But sometimes I like to take a break from all of that and write something just for the fun of it. I love pulp fiction because it’s quick and engaging. It doesn’t require a lot of brain power to read, which is an added bonus when it’s two-thousand degrees celsius outside and the most you are capable of concentrating on is lifting a glass of water to your lips one sip at a time.

This morning I wrote a story about vampires. It’s not a topic I visit as often as you might think, so I enjoyed doing it. And rather than let my words fester on some hard-drive, I thought that I may as well take the opportunity to share it here for your reading pleasure.

From Born To Die. More after the jump if your bandwidth can hande it.

More birds now, stirred into action by the baleful cries of a crow as it swooped over them. I try to drink from my mug of instant coffee, but it’s too hot. It might also be too strong, judging by the smell of it. But then, it is Sunday morning.

No, not too strong. Well, maybe a little strong. But like I said, it’s Sunday morning. I need something to wake me up, something to drag me out of the remnants of Saturday night that cling to me like treacle.

Sunday. The last day of the week, or the first, depending on your perspective. I once steadfastly defended the idea that Sunday was at the start of the week, but now… I’m not so sure.

It seems to make more sense that Sunday is an ending–a punctuation point before each Monday. The end of a sentence that’s never been written before. Until now. Until today.

And then: tomorrow.

This one is from some enhanced time-lapse footage that was taken onboard the International Space Station. You can watch the original video here.

On the surface, there wouldn’t seem to be anything creepy about them or the optimistic world-view they propose. But when I cast my mind back, I can’t help but find something unsettling about my memories of those books… something that goes beyond the stains on the pages and that weird smell they had.

I used to read a lot of books about space. About NASA and the space shuttles. I remember poring through pages filled with brightly coloured drawings of Cape Canaveral, diagrams of the solar system (pluto included) and an assortment of astronaut apparatus: helmets, gloves, phazers, moon buggies.

But then, eventually, I’d turn the page and see something else. Maybe, first, a diagram I couldn’t understand. And beside that something else. A photograph taken on the moon.

A photograph of empty grey nothing.

And attributed so much importance! There were even whole books about this desolate grey space rock, tethered to our planet by gravity, swinging around and around it.

Of course, I thought it was great. What eight-year-old wouldn’t want to stand on the moon and hit golf balls into space? But that’s not to say that I understood it.

I didn’t know, for example, that the “space race” was fuelled by nuclear tensions between the United States and Russia. I’m sure some of the books mentioned it, but I wouldn’t have understood. Not really. The best I could have hoped for was to have seen the Russians as cartoon villains: Boris and Natasha infiltrating NASA.

But the concept of nuclear war to an eight-year-old? A complex tapestry of political tensions set against the backdrop of another barely-understood war in which the villains also starred in Indiana Jones movies?

I barely even understand that stuff now.

But maybe the books weren’t actually creepy at the time. In fact, I think a lot of things might seem creepier when later viewed through the mechanical lens of a Retrospekt (they go whirr-tick-whirrr).

Perhaps it’s more about what the books didn’t have in them. The story behind the story: the reality behind it. But it’s not just that, because I still can’t shake this feeling that there is something about those books that’s inherently creepy, something seperate from any context involving nuclear wars or Martians or Bigfoot or Nazis.

Or, maybe, something involving all of them, together, like those drawings in books about “dinosaur times” that show dozens of different species clamouring for space on the page.

What where all those dinosaurs even doing there at the same time? Were they meeting up? It is understood that many dinosaurs actually preferred to eat each other, rather than stand around all day waiting for photo-ops.

I guess it’s all down to Gamblen and Gamblen or some other fictional book publisher that I just made up to explain themselves.

Want to try out the Retrospekt while we wait?

Every reflection is unique, granted its own version of events by the particular character of the reflective surface that you are looking into; whether it’s the polished shop window of a fashionable boutique, a cobwebbed mirror left neglected in a back room, or the reflection of yourself in the polarised sunglasses of a passing stranger from the future.

And so, I guess that’s what the Shrine is about. Not self-reflection, although I do my fair share of that, but a reflection of the universe at large, filtered through me. I’m not sure what good that is to anyone, but it’s the closest thing I can come up with to a conclusive answer.

These words have power. Reading them is like time travel, or telepathy. I write, you read and in doing so we exchange brain stuff. It is like a merging of minds.

Except that I remain safely on this side of the computer monitor. The far side. Detached and scribbling (or if not scribbling, then at least typing haphazardly enough that every few words looks like thsi).

I create this stuff, these words, this conversation (as one-sided as it may seem, you can always comment) out of the sheer “nothingness” of my own thoughts. But, of course, thoughts aren’t actually “nothing”, despite the fact that we can’t catch them in a jar.

Or can we?

I think maybe I just did.

Every time I build a new Shrine it feels kind of like that.

Welcome back!