Lemming - The Curse of Jaxx: SS

The Curse of Jaxx

(A Novella of Dystopian Horror)

By Jay Lemming

Receive the first scene from Jay Lemmings upcoming novel, Green Bay Outsiders , by clicking the link below the image.

What do you do when you've graduated college, have a promising new job, a woman in love with you and a close-knit group of friends, and all you can think of is throwing it all away? 22-year-old Carl Daniels is about to start making some hard choices. Click here to download the first free scene from Green Bay Outsiders and learn how things for Carl first started going wrong.

BOOKS BY JAY LEMMING

The Curse of Jaxx is a novella written by the author shortly after reading a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.

Jay Lemming also is the author of the Border Patrol novel Billy Maddox Takes His Shot , which is available on Amazon . Billy Maddox Takes His Shot is the first work of fiction in an upcoming series entitled the Maddox Men book series , which spans several generations of the Maddox family during the 20th century. Jay will publish another novel, Green Bay Outsiders, in early 2018.

Coming later that year is Wichita Snake , the next installation in the above-mentioned Maddox Men book series. It takes place in 1907 and tells the story of Glen Marshall, a miner who escapes a Monongah, West Virginia mining disaster that kills more than 150 men and boys, only to find even greater danger in the western outpost of Wichita, Kansas.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2016 by Jay Lemming

All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For permission requests, contact the author at http://jaylemming-author.com .

PART I - THE CURSE

During the years before I discovered his severed head in the shadow-cloaked corner of his hovel, his body still in calm repose in bed, Old Darius had been the great instructor of our remote community. His wisdom was such that he alone could interpret the hieroglyphic writings chiseled scar-like into the stones of our castle walls untold ages ago.

Some hieroglyphics required no interpretation. A series of pictograms, painted with a black as dark as night, sketched out the labors of many masons, stone cutters and lime-makers for mortar. Thy told of craftsmen winding creepers and long limbs from the gnarled forest beyond our castle into a scaffolding that allowed the masons to work at great heights and lay walls clearing eight meters. Unsettling images showed the grueling reality of unskilled men and women (and some children) moving great stones from the forest-side quarry to spots where they were hoisted by engineered contraptions into the sky. It was terrible to contemplate how our home had been built upon the backs, blood and suffering of fettered slaves.

Those pictograms told little elsecertainly nothing of hopeand the rest of the hieroglyphics were incomprehensible. Our Elders long ago had insisted that writing be forbidden. No documented narrative apart from the walls of hieroglyphics, as far as I knew, existed.

Those mysteriously adorned walls faced the great bailey through which our 500 or so citizens walked and congregated, and in which Old Darius led his learning sessions. The hieroglyphics told the tale, he explained, of a great offense committed by our forebears some time ago. Following that offense, the dull-seeming sun slipped behind a perpetual veil of cloud, and the breezy rain, which we experienced daily, began.

At least the conditions that sprang from this curse, as Martin named it, did not prevent us from capturing potable water in the cisterns we built above our hewn-stone hovels. Martin alone of the castles denizens had sufficient courage to interrupt one of the teachers learning sessions.

The curse, Old Darius continued with a nod toward Martins interjection, also inspired the bleak feeling that descended upon this coastline where the castle had been built shortly following the great and terrible offense. As Old Dariusan aged figured with lengths of graying hair bound by a leather twisttraced his fingers within the carvings and told us what he understood, he also explained that while details about the offense had not been inscribed, their consequence was that we, the offenders descendants, were to suffer perpetual exile at this outpost in an otherwise dead and godless world.

Martin once confided in me that he suspected Darius understood more than what he told us.

Old Darius was an eccentric. He had no family and inspired discomfort in others. Yet we tolerated him as we tolerated each other. Our community knew no rancor. A deep psyche of hopelessnessDarius bleak feelingkept us enervated and withdrawn. I sensed, indeed, that any bold action on anyones part within the community might somehow unleash reprisal from the great unknowable force that had authored the hieroglyphics. I was not alone in believing some great presence, as yet unseen to those within the castle, inhabited our space.

Darius consulted with the community Eldersall seemingly wizened beyond the acceptable bounds of lifein the great hall beneath the castle keep. Yet to the rest of us, in the bailey beside the gatehouse, he taught of the courage we must maintain, of the humility with which we must live and of the contemplation we must make of the offense that had concluded in our present condition. No one dared ask of an existence before the castle nor of conditions sensed in our souls that we believed must exist: a place where the radiant sun flashed unsullied by cloud, where people laughed and where appetites were sated by something other than the near-rancid meat of foul beasts hunted by our sentries in the forests beyond the walls.

Our children harbored no reservation when inquiring about our confinement. They asked questions. But they also did not participate in Darius learning sessions. Tradition was that by an annual torch-lit rite within the great hall, our young people became adults. One role appointed to several members of our community was that of confessor, and it was a role granted to those whose tongues were honest and brave. I was one. To our confessors fell the responsibility of sharing the breadth of our stories and of our history to those anointed. By storytelling were adults molded from our young onesby the imparting of the full knowledge they had long sought with their spontaneous questions and which they now learned about but wished away.

At the edge of the forest beyond our castle, and discernible from the crenellated battlements and through the grid of portcullis bars that dropped between the gateway and moat, lay the great quarry from which stones had been drawn for the curtain walls and the keep long ago. The quarry was a scar in the earth that cut into and was absorbed by the surrounding gnarled and creeper-laden trees. Its presence marked something more than just the source of slave- drawn stones. It represented that perpetual anxiety with which we were so strangely afflicted. Few within our community could muster the courage to pass outside the castle and so the quarry was as something distant rather than near. Only our sentries regularly called for the raising of that old, creaking portcullis and the lowering by rope and winches of the great wood-plank bridge across the moat so that they might delve into the black forest and hunt porcine beasts whose bad-tasting, roasted carcasses made our diet (in addition to withered vegetables from small garden plots). In the sentries hands and their ability to return with meat was the means of our survival. And yet the number of denizens within our community continued to grow as food grew ever harder to come by. Growing hunger, a swelling population and passing time told that we could not live perpetually in this condition though no recourse existed.