Just who do you turn to if you truly suspect that the country that you live in is being secretly taken over by Nazis? The answer, as I found out, was nobody. In the real world, the one that professed to exist outside the ward, few would pay much attention to such a claim. What a growing number of people would do would be to ascribe such announcements to the general book of lunacy that they believed had been the script for my later life. Nazis were from the dark pages of history. They were a story that some would tell both themselves and their children, a ‘real world’ tale about wizards, goblins, witches and ghouls. It did happen, but that was Once Upon a Time and anyone who believed that it could happen again was too convinced by fairy-tales and should try to sleep more and dream less. I…

Last night the dreams came. I had been sleeping deeply for the weeks previous but then they started to creep in, slipping through the small fissures in night’s oblivion. I don’t always remember them in the detail that I would want – mainly it’s just an imprint, a nagging feeling of something that may have happened. Last night’s was about a big old four-bar gate.

My wife and I were at a younger stage in our lives, before children and well before the light had begun to fade on our optimism. That’s how I see it now, a landscape that was once a canopy of sunlight, faded with the arrival of clouds, my shadow shortening as the problems of a nebulous world drift in from some place else. This dream was one of those that had not yet been affected by cloud-cover. We were…

I thought I would share these two extracts that were written many years apart. My character, Liam Flowers has changed and grown. He still carries the scars of his previous incarnation. Older and wiser, he cannot escape his narrative arc.

From The Piper Book of Hearts

Liam

Since he had moved in with The Leatherman, Liam had grown in understanding. The body in the armchair had fascinated him. Its controlled preservation was nothing short of a miracle that awaited his own coming. During darkness, when only the light from his monitor fell across the room, he felt the eyes, long since turned to dust, watching him, pleading for release. Time would come.

Somewhere along the way, he had mastered many skills that enabled him to quietly contact the others. He established websites that reached out across space and drew in those who also didn’t sleep. Many were young like himself…