The Twelfth Rune - a long time coming
I've jumped back into the saddle with my new novel, the follow up to Meditations on Murder. This time Charlie is living the good life down in Cornwall, but little does he know what fate has in store for him.
Here's an early excerpt.
Chapter 1
I once saved the world.
Saved all of you actually, dear readers, using a hypersphere; which was a machine from back in the mists of time utilising the seven-ness of the universe and given to me by a ghost called Nye. Howling dervishes wanted to murder me most nastily, and I'd opened portals to suck them into the screaming, black nothingness of other dimensions.
Honest––I did.
Once they finished with me, then you, all of you, would have been nothing more than soggy blood soaked seconds for the Red Caps - murderous dwarves who roamed the Scottish borders. Never in my wildest dreams, or nightmares did I think I would have to do it all over again.
But who would know twelve is the unluckiest number?
It starts with an innocent walk in rural Cornwall.
I take Sunday off. It’s no big deal; I can’t say I work too hard during the week because I’m a writer. I live off family money and just try to write on a daily basis. You are probably more interested in how I saved the world than my attempts at being a best selling novelist. Here’s the rub, I’m basically a reinvented office clone, by the name of Charlie Simpson. I would describe myself as a fortyish, pasty, sandy haired, plumpish, non-descript, floppy-fringed posh ex-city boy. After a short and failed career at being a murderer, (a long story) I got a distinctive new look. Skinhead, big boots, black clothes and I’ve sort of kept that style. It fits the new me, the saviour of the world, as it were.
I know I saved the world––really, I did. There is footage taken on my GoPro camera only I don’t watch it much. Only once in fact, and now the film is on a USB stick stored somewhere safe so no one else gets to see it. Maybe there will be a time when I’ll upload it to YouTube… or maybe not.
Horrible bastards.
I got rid of them all on my own.
Okay, Nye helped, a bit.
A ghost from the Twelfth century––did I already tell you that? Sometimes my memory is a bit messed up. Nye, a real ghost from the Twelfth century, came into my life. I’m not making it up. Scottish, too, with an accent so thick I could barely understood her when she was haunting me.
And she helped me out with some terrible goings on in London Town.
Sometimes when I wonder what happened in London, I get brain freeze. It’s as if I’d just taken a huge spoonful of my favourite Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Cherry Garcia. So I’d stopped thinking about it and got on with life in sunny Cornwall with Annie, who, fortuitously, I’d also saved from being murdered. Okay, I admit it was mainly Nye who saved Annie, but I did have a major part in that little adventure.
Life was good. We found a nice cottage overlooking the sea in Marazion, Cornwall. From the huge bay window of our cottage we could see St. Michael’s Mount. One couldn’t get much further away from London without the aid of a boat and that suited both Annie and I.
The cottage we found felt special right from the beginning. It had an extraordinary feeling about it. Even some sort of vibration,it was just right,it gave us a buzz; we were happy there. Annie is a good artist and jewellery maker. She runs a little gallery in the main street. It caters mainly to the tourists, of course, but it gives the local colony of artists, artisans and makers somewhere to exhibit their art or goods to make a few quid. Being an artist in the South West is tough.
But on a weekend we like to go exploring around the hills and moors of Cornwall and it was on one of our walks we fell into it all again. This particular Sunday we wanted to visit what we jocularly called the Cornish Alps. The China Clay industry in St. Austell and the edges of Bodmin Moor had, over the last four hundred years or so, thrown up massive amounts of waste. These “mountains” gleamed white above the flat moor, the kaolin-stained rocks evoking the vistas of alpine France or Italy. As we drive up the A30 in our ratty old Land Rover Discovery, we look forward to the moment when they appear on the horizon.
The reason for this Sunday outing was to search for amethysts amongst the mine waste. Annie uses the gemstones for her jewellery.
Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for.
