By Rachel Eley
Chapter 1
It is a desolate scene. As the mist rolls over the bleak and darkening moor a solitary raven slowly spirals downwards towards a lightning scarred tree. The raven lands on the deformed branch and is lost to the eye, becoming part of the stark and toneless sculpture. The moor is now still, the only movement is in the half glimpsed shapes created by the mist one moment and dissolved to nothing the next.
Through the mist three dark figures appear on a hill top, voices drift eerily, muffled by the mist.
"I think I just trod in something"
The reply is deadened by the thickening must but as the figures approach a second voice is more easily heard.
"I wish you would stop looming in the mist like that, you are making me nervous. and I don't think you should have worn that skirt, it's hardly practical, nor is that hoover you insist on lugging around with you. I don't know why you are dragging that up here, and you can mind that flex that's the fourth time you've clouted me with the plug."
The taller figure walks on with a surprisingly light step for someone carrying a vacuum cleaner over his shoulder.
"Shut up Sean" he said "just because you were too short to step over that stream doesn't mean you have to take it out on us. You're not that wet"
"I have three gallons of peat bog in my shoes, I have a right to complain, and that humming is giving me a headache.
"What humming?"
"I can hear humming too" the third figure spoke up. He wasn't as tall as the first one nor as short as the one they called Sean. He was somewhere in the middle or 'just right' as some small girl with too much curly blonde hair had said (She had become somewhat of a problem and James (the one in the middle) was currently in the process of having his lawyers file a case of harassment against her. There had been some nasty incident of stalking and unauthorised entering of the hotel rooms they had been staying in on their last trip)
Anyway
"It's just an aeroplane" said Sean "it must be coming into land or something"
The other two looked at him blankly. James said slowly,
"You are dense Sean, dense, we are in the middle of uninhabited moor hundreds of miles from anywhere, where exactly is the plane intending on landing?"
Sean failed to think of an intelligent reply.
As the bickering went on the humming grew louder. It filled their ears and spread to the ground they walked upon. The heather began to tremble and the raven shaped embellishment on the stark sculpture of the opposite hill started cawing.
"Something weird is happening" said James needlessly.
As the ground vibrated it began to glow. The plants were surrounded in an electric blue haze and static leapt from the hair and fingers of the three men. The steel frame of Sean's archaic rucksack glowed brightly.
"Don't panic. I'm sure its just an electrical storm" shouted Nicky, trying to avoid the tethered comet that was the hoover's plug. The other two were not reassured, the blue glow was intensifying around their feet and the ground felt hot through the soles of their shoes.
In the confusion of light and sound James looked up. A cloud of electric blue was descending upon them. Filled with a sense of awe and irony he raised his arms in the manner of an actor from a budget scifi film.
"Nicky, Sean" he called "We are underneath blue skies"
Then with that he succumbed to that unfortunate state of mind that befalls all those who react to bright lights in the sky with cliched scifi poses.
"Take me" he wailed "Take me"
Sean and Nicky looked at him in terror as the cloud engulfed them all.
In the roar they could no longer hear his desperate cries, In the glare they could not see each other. As the static filled their bodies and switched the hoover on to 'deep pile mode' they could not feel the ground. Slowly the electric cloud lifted, taking first Sean, then Nicky and finally, with effort, James into the air....
to be continued!
