The Noise

I’m getting very bad at being able to post this every Friday as well as to comment on other people’s contributions, so from now on my 7 month old daughter will just have to wait!!  I’m finding this week’s prompt quite difficult- I have quite a few ideas and am not sure which route I want to go down!!  I best get started and see how it goes.  Next week is good Friday and I’m away for a week so I may post whatever I produce from the prompts but they may be a little bit late or tagged on to the one I complete in a fortnight’s time.  Hope everyone has a lovely Easter by the way!!

‘Shhh…., did you hear that?’

Phoebe quickly turned the lantern towards where the noise had come from.  ’It sounded like somebody digging’.

‘Perhaps it came from up above- perhaps people are walking above the ground?’  But he knew the sound seemed to come from below.  He grabbed hold of Phoebe’s hand and began to pull her further into the tunnel.  ’We can’t go back the way we came, we have to keep going forward.  Come on!’

Phoebe didn’t like to be told what to do, but she knew Arthur was right.  The ground smelt clean and damp and she noticed tiny crystals in the wall.  They sparkled all the colours of the rainbow as the light reflected from them.  Some were purple, some were green, some even bronze, all the colours mixed with the black of the soil, somehow making them shine more brightly.   In the distance colours appeared to be racing towards them, like a ball of dust caught in a vacuum cleaner.  ’Oh no’, she thought, ‘what now?!’

‘This doesn’t look good’, Arthur shouted and his legs froze waiting for the storm to hit.  There was a howl and they first felt a breeze, but then it got louder and deeper.  Something was being carried by the wind and was tumbling faster and faster towards them.  ’What do we do now?’ Phoebe screamed, struggling to stand against the strong winds.   The colours and the dust gathered pace and rushed towards them.  Neither of them knew what it was that was being blown into their path and then suddenly without warning there was quiet.  All they could hear was a dim ringing and a bright purple light shining a few meters from them.  Phoebe looked into these lights and realised they were eyes.  Lilac and light shades of blue staring straight at her.  The creature appeared to have scales; red, blue and green.  The claws at the end of thousands of tiny legs were sharp and probably capable of scratching the pair of them to death.  Then suddenly a screech and it jumped over them spinning off into the distance.

‘Wow!’  Arthur’s heart was racing though he wasn’t sure how to feel.  He was amazed he’d even managed to still be standing after the shock from what he’d seen.  ’We must be getting closer to your family Phoebe!  That was a creature they call ‘Shook’ which only to be found close to the centre of the city’.

‘What?  Why….why didn’t it just eat us?’  Phoebe stood still shocked.

‘It doesn’t eat like us, it feeds from the air.  It will only attack if it needs to, so I guess it didn’t feel threatened by us.  Come on.  We have to keep going.  We really can’t be far now’

Further into the darkness they went.

It’s funny how you don’t really know where a story is going to go until you start to write it.  As I wrote this and other parts to this quest I’ve realised that at the moment I’m just writing the story and some scenes will be important and others won’t.  Now that I have the skeleton of this scene lots will probably change and it will only be included if the scene is important in some way, so I think that perhaps the creature has to leave a message of some kind, or something behind that the 2 characters can take forward with them.  But I wouldn’t have gotten that if I hadn’t started to write this scene in the first place.  The story is so fragmented at the moment but I’m hoping as it develops further certain scenes will start to cement together.

Advertisement