As promised all those weeks ago, there now follows an extract from Carnival of Souls.
CARNIVAL OF SOULS
Book One: The Stairway to Heaven | Part One: The Waiting Game
Lupin, so named not because he looked like a wolf but because he liked to masturbate in their ears, sat in his tree playing with a box of Sticklebricks he had stolen from a small child. So far, he had made fourteen different designs for his dream car and had wrecked nearly every brick from chewing the aerodynamics into them. There weren’t many left now and the cars were becoming smaller. Lupin was Mavericks right hand 'man'. With ten of the maps sprawled over his fleshy body and one more to come for bravery in the field, (he had single-handedly taken on an entire platoon of renegade scarecrows earlier in the year), he saw himself soon being able to question Mavericks authority and looked forward to the battle that would come with him because of it.
He stretched his legs out from the top of the tree and stood up. He could see for miles at eighteen feet tall, but still felt a little conspicuous with his height. He used to stoop as he had seen the crows do in a Kia Ora advert until one day, Maverick took the piss out of him so much, his sides had split and four of his ribs had fallen out. Not wanting to upset Maverick before the day of reckoning came, he now made a conscious effort to shrink his legs to a more appropriate length. Mass was still a problem though. Twelve feet of legs shrunk down into two and a half, made for a bad cellulite problem and Lupin could hardly wait for the day he could truly be himself again.
He had been sitting in the tree waiting for the door to come back. While Maverick and Karly had been out collecting, it had been up to Lupin and Shack to keep watch. Lupin felt completely and utterly duped. Maverick and Karly were expert shapeshifters, and although Lupin was a master of war (and wanking in wolves ears), Shacks’ skills lay in shifting time. Lupin felt like he had been on his shift for more than six days now and all he had seen Shack do was sleep and sometimes scratch his armpits.
"Shack, wake up - it’s your turn in the tree."
Shack raised all three of his eyebrows, and looked at him with two of his eyes while the other took in the surroundings.
"Already? You’ve only just gone up the fucking thing Lupe. The shifts are six hours apiece, you turning into a girly?"
"Aww, come on Shack, it’s got to be your turn now. I haven’t seen you up there once yet - I know you’re pulling time on me."
Shack gave a wily grin underneath his excessively hairy face and submitted.
"Okay, I’ll do my stint. You try and get some sleep it’ll be night again soon. Contain yourself if you can."
"Huh?"
"Come on Lupe - you know what I’m talking about. There is no way on the face of this planet that you’re ever going to perform the immaculate conception on a fucking wolf man."
Lupin went suddenly quiet. He hadn’t expected the whole race to accept his explanation for his uncontrollable habit, but they had. It eased the embarrassment so Lupin kept quiet and hoped that one day they would forget about it. Shack climbed the watching tree not without his own problems. He was way out of shape. His weight had ballooned to fifty four stone over the last two years. He couldn’t understand why, it wasn’t that he ate more than anybody else but he did rather suspect that it was something to do with his love of chocolate. He was always the first to volunteer for an overworld trip. None of the other worlds he had been to came quite close to producing the same quality Snickers bars that he could get here. One hundred and seventy seven bars a day had indeed, done wonders for his figure. Still it was better than being a sad sack like Lupin. Shack had a feeling that the door wasn’t going to come for quite some time. In fact he was almost certain it wouldn’t.
He had sped his mind forward in time and had a look.
He knew roughly when it would come and it was still three weeks away. He had told nobody and volunteered for the door watch to catch up on some sleep and eat some more chocolate. With Karly still one map behind Lupin, but a far better choice for entrance into the human world, that made Lupin the other watchman for the duration. That was cool with Shack. Lupin was a bit slow of mind and could be easily fooled. He would never have dared with Maverick or Karly for fear of his life. So in his tree he sat, with his chocolate - watching Lupins’ ears twitch instead of watching for the door.
***
Lupin slept with his back against the gnarly trunk of the watching tree. His eyes were closed and he was in some kind of sleep mode, but his ears swivelled around to every sound that came drifting through the woods. Shack watched him from up in the tree, almost asleep himself. As he lay with his head on a branch, his eyes began to close and a long string of drool started to sneak it’s way out of his mouth. The lace of animated elastic didn’t take long to reach a point where it was too heavy to be attached to Shacks’ mouth anymore. It snapped at around four foot long and helicoptered its’ way down to Lupins face, where it splashed and drooled with a life of its own into Lupins mouth. A huge grin split Shacks face in half as he wondered what Lupin thought it was - maybe he was dreaming of giving a wolf a blow job. The thought raised Shacks eyes just one last time before his own eyes gave up the ghost and he too fell asleep.
A little deeper into the forest, the wolves were stirring. There were four adults in the pack and six cubs. The adults consisted of two males and two females. It was a homely pack. They each watched out for the cubs in turn and spent the majority of their time hunting food for the little ones. The two adult males had drawn straws for which one of them would have to venture into the night to chase rabbits. Xana, the bigger of the two female wolves had gotten so fed up with their arguing that she eventually volunteered to go herself. Samantha, on the other hand, was quite content with letting the three of them get on with it. She had found herself and the cubs a warm corner in the cave and was more than happy with her lot. The two males, Halo and Lament, sat in different corners, sulking and casting penetrative looks at each other. They had become very protective over the females, and although Samantha and Xana could take care of themselves, the dogs came from the old wolf school, where it was the males job to do those sorts of things. Hence, after two years of living together in this way, an inevitable love square had been formed. Lament and Xana had paired off initially, with Samantha and Halo resigning themselves to each other on the basis that there were no other wolves in the forest.
Xana shook herself down, readying herself for the trip into the night. Outside the cave, she rubbed her shoulders against the rock were the males had been pissing. There may not have been any other wolves in the forest, but these were strange days one never knew what was lurking behind a tree.
Lupin stirred from his sleep wondering how he had managed to drool on his own eyebrows. He was about to turn over and go back to sleep, when his nose began to twitch. Wolves! He stood up and was about to call up to Shack but a sly grin beat his mouth to it. So excited was he about the smell of wolves, he forgot to be angry that Shack was asleep when he should have been watching out for the door. They would have words later.
Scratching his balls, he stood up and stuck his nose into the air. Making his nostrils twice as big as they needed to be, he picked up the scent and went in search of his hearts desire. Xana too had picked up on Lupins scent. Not recognising it as being anything like she had smelt before, she frowned a wolfs frown and cocked her head to one side. To investigate or not. A part of her said it could be something they could all feed on for the next couple of days, a bigger part of her told her to get on with what she was doing. Warily she opted for both and went searching for rabbits in the general direction of the strange new smell. The moon shone full from behind it’s disguise of clouds. It cast a shadow through the forest like the sun never could. Xana liked the night for this reason alone. It was so quiet and peaceful. Something she could never get enough of in the cave, what with all that squabbling all the time. She sat down in a small clearing. How long had she been gone now? An hour? Maybe longer. There had not been so much as a sniff of rabbit all night. Something peculiar was going on and the female in her demanded to know exactly what it was and why. Picking the strange scent up out of the air, she followed it down a track and into a muddy square of land. The scent led to a tree, but didn’t stop there – the scent had become all consuming and was all around her at any one time. As far as she could tell, the mud around the tree had been caused by too much tooing and froing. Somebody had been feeling restless.
From a hedge not six feet away from Xana, Lupin sat downwind of her and hoped for the best. With a little stealth, it was quite conceivable that he could sneak up behind her and get the job done without too much fuss. It was a little too much to hope that she wouldn’t notice, but Lupin figured he’s give it a try anyway...
That's all folks. Picked entirely at random from chapter two and squared off for continuity purposes. Unedited with only the briefest of spell-checking, I shall apologise now for typos made in my haste to lay the words on the page. I'll post another in a few weeks - let me know what you think.
...and yes, the other two books in the series are indeed called Book Two: The Highway to Hell and Book Three: Knocking on Heavens Door. I'm just a pop culture whore damn it.
