Doc Sherwood
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Tears Such as Angels Weep, Chapter Five
Later Neetra and Joe were arm-in-arm again, this time walking through the busy City Centre amid the colourfully-lit fairground rides, delicious-smelling market stalls and glittering fountains at the Town Hall’s base. “You are certain you do not object?” he was saying to her.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Tears Such as Angels Weep, Chapter Four
Neetra felt the unending loop snap and spiral away to nothing in a flurrying cyclone of snow. Somehow our heroine knew the angel was returning safe to her home and loved one in the mortal realm, while Steam’s infant soul remained in the custody of Gala and The Chancellor and was headed elsewhere. Simultaneously, the recollection that Neetra and Jiang Jiang had been observing came to an end. Night, blizzard, rolling drifts and disparate figures all vanished. Once more the two astral girls had only each other for company, in new terrain almost as desolate as the last. A small path wound away before them, much darkened by thickly-tangled brambles and thorns that hung overhead, but just about traversable.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Tears Such as Angels Weep, Chapter Three
They were no longer alone. From the darkness behind them shapes were fast advancing, and it took just one over-the-shoulder glimpse for the boy and his angel guide to start pounding their bare feet into the snow in frenzied desperation to get away. Even Neetra, who had fought enemies of every description and knew these ghosts from the distant past could not harm her, turned tail likewise at the sight of the pursuers. They could barely be made out from the night that surrounded them, and the flashes of gaping red mouths and glittering malicious eyes, though gruesome, were not in themselves reason enough for one of The Four Heroes to flee. However, every instinct our heroine possessed was screaming at her to run, to hide, to escape, for this mass of monstrosities was an evil against which she could not hope to prevail.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Christmas Eve, Chapter Two
An empty shell of a Time-Shifting Device, small enough to carry in the palm of a hand and with rectangular holes on its face where the buttons should have been, hung suspended in mid-air by a mind-boggling tangle of cables and pipes. In the midst of this chaos that rambled the length and breadth of his laboratory at Nottingham Castle, The Chancellor moved swiftly and efficiently, turning dials and triggering relays to transmit much-needed power through the snaking maze of conduits into the tiny machine. This severe moustachioed soldier was a scientist of genius equal to Phoenix’s own, and there was another way in which he and the pretty French-speaking half-Martian girl were alike. It was not so much that he too was busy in solitude this Christmas Eve, isolated from the merrymaking going on all around. The resemblance had more to do with the way The Chancellor and Phoenix were feeling, and the way that both were trying to hide it.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Christmas Eve, Chapter Three
Joe, Neetra and Bret were hastily summoned, and the three members of the Next Four regrouped with the three members of The Four Heroes at the gates to Nottingham Castle. Above them stretched the steep hillside, and atop the cliff’s edge, before a sky of deepest blue in which the first stars were coming out, loomed the fluctuating sphere of luminescence now swelled to gigantic size. All of the great mansion-house was lost in within its radiant ever-changing depths, and still it widened with each minute that passed. It was well on the way to becoming the most spectacular set of illuminations in Nottingham that evening, but the sight of it brought our heroes little Christmas cheer.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Tears Such as Angels Weep, Chapter One
Soon Neetra was gone from the material world too. Leaving her corporeal body asleep in Joe’s arms, our heroine slid onto the astral plane and parted from the group at the castle gate, to soar up the hillside and plunge into the expanding ball of temporo-psionic flux. Locating Steam’s presence gave Neetra no difficulties, and on entering it she found herself engulfed in the whirlwind of thoughts common on the periphery of a consciousness. Speeding by her, flashing and merging and blending were snippets of herself, Steam, The Four Heroes, the Next Four and numerous others, including the dark-browed winged girl Neetra had identified as her friend Carrie. However, she knew these fleeting recollections and impressions were no more than the remotest distant satellites of Steam’s true psyche, and when she searched for that, she found it disturbingly absent. She would never have known it was Steam’s mind she was in, so far from her he was. He had ventured deep, deep down into this stygian pit of time and memory.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Christmas Eve, Chapter One
Nottingham had seen many Christmases, from the snow-swirling first one soon after its creation when he who had tyrannically opposed The Four Heroes and their city met his defeat at last, to the bleak and rainy Christmas of the Martian occupation which the townsfolk had celebrated in subterranean caves hiding out from General Banthal’s patrols. Christmas Eve this year was one of dazzling sunshine streaming from a cloudless blue sky, bringing no heat to dispel the crisp frostiness that tingled on faces, fingers and toes, but setting a-sparkle the snow that lay thickly on the streets. Through the gleaming drifts, the chilly air and the golden beams, all the human-and-otherwise populace of Nottingham tramped and laughed and bustled. It was a vast and glorious jostling mass of people, living life in the safe-haven city for mankind as it was supposed to be lived, walking and shopping and eating and drinking and wishing Season’s Greetings to each other with their breath making white clouds that danced on the air before them.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Thunderous, Chapter Two
Joe's crimson-coloured interplanetary hot-rod was back at the drive-in that night, this time bringing with it Flashtease and Petunia who proceeded to make for themselves a little hollow of familiarity in the square seat-space. Popcorn was never a complete experience without Petunia’s perfume like hot peanut-butter melting on its sweet sticky smell, stuffying-up the nostrils with contentment. Supersized soft drinks were almost too wide to squeeze your fingers round, ice-cubes knocking in the heavy sloshing bag of cool, but once you’d fumbled the straw to your questing pout it started with a slurp and ended in a fizzy explosion blowing your senses out from within. The seats were slid down to full recline, skirts and underskirts were balled up in the small of each respective wearer’s back, and it was a mercy not to have to resettle your pants unless you wanted to. Flashtease felt just fine and Petunia did too, really, though from her restless flittering flounce fanned occasional little disturbances in the happy popcorn-miasma. It was probably going to turn out alright. Two matching pairs of feet in white ankle-socks which bore testament to a day’s wear sat propped-up on the windshield-rim, and beyond these toes the cinema-screen was a monolith of light soaring high into realms of blue.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
Thunderous, Chapter Three
Faithfully Flashthunder followed Cherry’s dark-matter glint, into the unknown, for by now they were speeding through stars he did not recognise. Was this uncharted cosmos, maybe even beyond the borders of the galaxy itself? Time and space and the essence of the universe were streaming past in illusory forms which Flashthunder could comprehend only as kaleidoscopic chaos. Cherry didn’t shout about her own psychic powers, but it was clear enough they were considerable. She could probably cope with this. Flashthunder was glad Cherry had so much faith in his ability to do the same.
By Doc Sherwood5 years ago in Fiction
