RIFF opening scene

(property of J Leigh)

Draft one

Chapter Ωne


The dead angel lay face down on a ledge of the twelfth story outside a Central London office block. Its violaceous blood pooled around it, staining the marble surface. Smashed remnants of fruit lay about: bits of discarded pineapple, orange peels, peach pits, and an apple core at the base of the angel’s right foot. The other foot dangled off the edge as though the next gust of March wind would topple the body over the side.

The young London investigator stood at the edge surveying the ledges of the buildings around him. The birds had already begun to pick at the fruit scraps including those that had smashed to the pavement twelve stories below. The carnivorous birds hadn’t found the body though. Maybe they didn’t eat angel meat.

The investigator turned his head so that his words could reach the detective clinging to the window pane. “Sure was some party.”

Forty-five year old Detective Harold Truick rubbed the heels of his loafers against the brick of the building to assure himself it was still there. His fingers dug into the concrete lining the large office window. “Pardon?”

The investigator spun around and swaggered around the angel, gesturing to the fruit. “Must have been some party. The gods like fruit, yeah?”

“Maybe if you believe in Mount Olympus.”

The young man dug in his pocket, the tails of his coat flapping in the wind. He pulled out a new pack of cigarettes and attempted to light one, but couldn’t get a spark from his lighter. Giving up, he pulled the cigarette from his lips and used it to point at the body. “Guess this one just had a little too much fun.”

The back of Truick’s brain ached the way it always did when he knew someone was wrong. He clenched his jaw and looked up to the clouds as though expecting an answer from on high, but all he managed was vertigo.

After the divorce, Truick had asked the department to assign him more cases to keep himself occupied, but they had stuck him on the trail of every petty thief and lost cat in London. When he asked the chief for higher profile cases this morning, he had been thrown in a squad car with this investigator who, though green, was not at all shocked to find one of Heaven’s finest bleeding all over one of London’s grungiest. He slowly realized that higher profile meant more responsibility on his part, secret keeping and the like.

Truick, still getting over the initial shock of seeing an angel let alone standing freely 30 meters above the ground, attempted to grasp what the investigator implied. “You figure we should check his blood alcohol level?”

“It’s bleeding wine for chrissake. Don’t need to be a doctor to know it was over the limit.”

Truick knelt down and inched himself away from the side of the building. “You think it was an accident.”

He flicked his cigarette away, irritably. “Of course. Look at the evidence.”

On his hands and knees, Truick reached the angel. “I don’t think that’s wine.”

“All right, so angels bleed magenta. It’s still surrounded by party left-overs.” He glared at the detective. “It fell.”

“Don’t think it was murder?”

The investigator twitched uncomfortably. “Don’t start making up stories, Detective. You’ll get people riled up, make ‘em think the apocalypse is coming.” He strut back to the window and stepped inside the office. “Let’s go so the cleaning crew can clear this mess away.”

Truick gave the angel a last look, a sad admiration for the creature so broken, its arm twisted backward, its skull half crushed from the impact, its wings spattered with sanguine mulberry. He could see in his mind the forensic team trying to crumple those mangled wings into a body bag. He could picture the body on the lab table split from neck to navel, an autonomist hovering above, staring at a lab manual rather than the cadaver he mutilated. And they wouldn’t search for cause of death; Truick knew that. It was all about celestial beings as bio matter, not about their rights.

Truick’s gaze shifted to the fruit littered ledges beyond. “Anyone down below?”

“Course not,” the investigator replied from inside. “Got the whole place roped off in case it happens again. Can you imagine what an apple core would do to your head when impacted at over a hundred kilometers an hour?”

“Yeah,” Truick whispered. “Splat.”

The investigator didn’t have time to stop him.

In desperate attempt to protect the sacredness he saw in this creature, Detective Truick gave the angel a strong shove of his foot, sending the angel into flight for the very last time.

Riff

I’ve got a new story idea! Well, novel, really. It’s five stories combined. Several of these have been bouncing around in my head for a while now, but I just now realized they would melt together to form a really cool book. It’s called RIFF, but the last F on the cover would look like the top line was added later, so it used to be RIFT. It’s a play on words – I’ve heard the technique can be quite effective.

And if you steal my idea, I’ll bite your nose off. Or something equally as painful.

This is what I know so far. There are five separate storylines that weave in and out of each other occasionally. This means seven main characters. I know I know! Jaime, stop writing so many frickin' characters! But they're not all in the same scenes, I promise.

The story is apocalyptic, which is a theme I've been wanting to write about for a while now. Here are the five stories:

1. There is a special guitar riff where if played wrong, will send your soul straight to Hell. But if it's played correctly, your soul will become the envy of every angel and demon, even God and Satan. Janek is a talented musician who takes it upon himself to tattoo the tabs on his body and learn the notes. When he gets the riff right, the world is sent into choas. The keepers of the earth lack in their duties to tend to the balance of the universe and focus their energy on winning Janek's soul.

2. Sara Jayne Preston is a rich girl who is in trouble because her father's enemies will use her as a hostage if they can just get their hands on her. He hires her a guardian to watch over her day and night. What she didn't realize is that her father's enemies aren't regular mortals, nor do they care about her father or his money. They are after Sara Jayne specifically, so when they have the chance, they rip her from this world where her guardian can't protect her. Little do they know the extent of Matthew Lace's loyalty to his word. When he finds Sara Jayne's suicide note, he knows it's been staged, and follows her into Hell to bring her home.

3. Wintry Charlse finds out that she has cancer and only has a year left to live. The day she recieves this news, she meets Leonard. At first it appears to be a friendship built out of his sympathy for her condition, but later she discovers he has been her guardian angel her entire life. Before the year is up, Leonard is reassigned because it is against the rules for angels to fall in love with humans. Leonard breaks the rules to stay with Wintry, but is sent to to Hell for his disobedience. Wintry had been planning to live in Heaven with Leonard after the cancer had gotten the better of her, but now she sees no other choice but to plunge into Hell after her angel lover. But in his circle of Hell, Leonard meets a mortal named Matthew Lace and finds his faithfullness to Wintry challenged.

4. Detective Harold Truick is called to the scene of a very private crime scene, twelve stories off the ground. Scattered on the ledges of the buildings are smashed fruit reminants: apple cores, orange peels, etc. Among them is the body of a dead angel. Truick takes it upon himself to get to the bottom of this mystery, even if it means going to Heaven and interrogating the other angels in person, even if it means restoring the balance of the universe to sort out the suspicious death of the angel.

5. Enn gets premonitions. She's always considered it luck to know which side of the street to stand on when a car hits a lamppost or a mugger runs past. However, something stranger is happening just under the detection of the rest of the human race. She picks up strange clues and omens from the weather, animals, and vibes of her fellow humans. She suspects the world is coming to an end, and when order is hanged, she comes to grips with her identity as a character and breaks the conventions of a novel, threatening to break right out of the pages.

And that's all you get for now. I definitely have a feeling I'm ripping off things that have been done before, but I swear I think of these references after I've come up with my ideas. So let me just plug a few things real quick. Neil Gaiman's Murder Mysteries. An episode of Strange Frequency. Dante's Inferno (of The Divine Comedy). And so on.

On a completely unrelated note, I am excited to see Neil Gaiman's new movie STARDUST in August. It has goats in it.

I have no idea what this is

She couldn’t have predicted the toaster oven would make that noise when hitting her boyfriend’s head. It was sort of a metal meets bone explosion with resonance of profanity in the debris. Three years ago, she wouldn’t have been able to foresee herself as the type of girl who threw kitchen appliances at unsuspecting telephone operators, especially ones she’d only known for three weeks, but he’d gone and left the garden door open again, and there was just no excuse for that anymore.

Ever since she’d let him live there, she’d been getting strange animals in the garden. Not just the rabbits that screwed with the tomato plants, but small badgers and mink as well. She’d almost lost a nose when sticking her nose into what she had thought had been a mole hole. This morning, when she saw what looked like a miniature peacock relieving itself on her patio, she grabbed the first shiny metal object within reach.

Her boyfriend had landed on the floor and now lay under the table, cuss words escaping his mouth despite the fact that every other part of his body indicated he was knocked out.

“What do peacocks eat?” she asked. “If it’s marigolds and bluebells, you’re dead, mister.” She grabbed a nearby egg beater and shook it at him.

He rubbed his head and sat up, partially ducking under the table. “Kiwi,” he said.

She lowered her egg beater. “Peacocks can’t eat kiwi. How do they peel it?”

“What?” He crawled out from under the table and picked up the toaster oven. “The bird. The bird is a kiwi. I think I need to go to the hospital.”

“What the hell are we gonna do with a kiwi?”

His muscles tensed and he chucked the toaster oven across the room at her.

She screamed and jumped to the side as the appliance crashed at her feet. She kicked it and stubbed her toe, but wouldn’t admit to it. “Get out of my house and take your bird with you.”

“Not my bird.” He snatched the box of cereal – her cereal – from the kitchen table and stormed out of the room.

She looked down at the dented toaster oven and picked it up, examining it. “Completely unusable,” she concluded, setting it on the counter. She sighed and looked back to the patio door where a kiwi was looking in through the window like a hungry stray kitten.

Her heals clicked on the crappy tile floor as she went to open the patio door. She slid it across the track and the kiwi looked up at her expectantly. “Well?” she asked it. “Come in, then.”