Mostly Depressing - Rebecca Laurie (book series for 10 year olds .TXT) 📗

Shall we begin?

WELL MET IN DEATH

A loud ships horn came eerily through the fog, a chilling sound that would have given goosebumps to any who had heard it.
But there was no in inside the ship that was willing to hear, and no person outside as could.
The ship was the Titanic. The ship that set a challenge for the sea, that threw down a gauntlet to the ocean and declared, ‘Dare you try to sink me?!’
Perhaps that’s why there were elephant seals and whales moving an iceberg into the Titanic’s path.
Torapeck grinned in the dark waters, he had picked up the gauntlet, and he was about to win.
Deep beneath the sea, unknown the Titanic and its crew, though not unnoticed by Torapeck, lay a glass dome. Inside it was another dome, built of gold and swirled with hints of silver, with carefully placed holes that let the gold tinged light through into the forbidding waters in which it lay.
Walking in the space between these two domes were those tasked with their upkeep, men who were human, but not quite human at the same time.
Through the reinforced glass that protected the inner dome, keeping out the water and its children, none of them could hear the Titanic’s horn, nor could they hear the constant tapping of the swordfish or the unrelenting ramming of the narwhales.
Neither could they hear the urging of Torapeck.
To anyone who would listen it would have sounded like a pirate ship, from long ago. Malicious beings, hard at a work no honest thing would do, working to an uninviting tune.
Inside the dome, it was simply a large ballroom, filled with people from every era. There were cavemen, dressed in furs, some from so long ago they had no clothes at all, and there were people from a time we haven’t yet reached.
This dome is a timeless place, a place like a faeries ring. Everyone dances, and no one ever stops. No one ever wants to, no one ever thinks to.
Perhaps Torapeck thinks he does them a favour by cracking the glass that protects the golden dome.
Inside the dome, most woke from their dream. They wondered why they were there, how they got there, and how did they get out?
On the Titanic, the crew, previously oblivious to the iceberg now blocking their path, were woken to their surroundings by a loud screeching and intermittent cracks. The iceberg, tearing through the ships hull, popping the rivets.
Most of the passengers had been inside the ballroom. Most of the passengers panicked. Most of the passengers got in lifeboats. Some jumped overboard in desperation. Two continued dancing.
Two men, whose partners had abandoned them after fruitless attempts to get them to come with them.
They were still dancing, dancing as if they still had partners, but there was no one in their arms.
Occasionally, their hands would slip, more often as the Titanic tipped further over, and the illusion would be lost, they would be out of their trance.
But only for a moment. A moment, and the air between their hands would seem to take form, the form of a woman. A woman that the man had dreamt of all his life, but it had been a dream neither had ever managed to remember.
In the dome, two women, both from the same era, from a time of long flowing dresses and corsets, were still dancing. Unlike the men on the Titanic however, they had unknowingly come together to dance.
They danced on, ignoring the water, rushing around them, swirling around the edges of the dome like a whirlpool, a whirlpool of molten gold.
Soon the entire dome cracked under the pressure of the forbidding waves above, but the two women danced through the destruction, not noticing the debris they deftly avoided.
Soon, the ocean reclaimed that part of itself it had lost to the bright dome. The two women continued dancing, not noticing the way the water became less forbidding and more inviting as they slowly and unknowingly drowned. They drifted out of the cracked and broken dome, drifted apart from each other, drifted to the then sunken Titanic, drifted into the waiting arms of the two dancing men.
Torapeck saw this, and smiled. He didn’t grin maliciously as if his evil plan was coming to fruition.
He smiled. He saw the couples, awoken from their trance, and happy where they were, dancing through the corridors of the Titanic, the ruined underwater ballroom, the friendly waters of the Atlantic, drowned as they were, because they wanted to, and he smiled.

~I actually mean it when I say I dreamt it up. It was a weird dream, and there was even music with it. I think it was A Song For Susie by Shooglenifty, but I may be wrong, seeing as it was in a dream. I’m amazed I even remembered it.~

SOMETHING UNDESCRIBABLE
It’s like a thick wall encasing you, a wall of pillars with no physical way to stop you leaving, but you don’t want to, because though you can’t see it, you know there’s nothing out there.
Above you there’s a roof, not like one you might find on a house, but it’s like the sky isn’t as endless as you thought, and it’s come down to protect you.
Then the pillars aren’t marble anymore, the pillars are the trunks of trees, ancient huge trees, and the roof is a wide green leafy canopy when you look up.
The trees seem to move without moving, becoming a long corridor, at the end of which, though you can’t see it, you know there’s something…something truly…something indescribable.

~Waking dreams. Gotta love ‘em. And wow that's a lot smaller than I thought it would be.~

AIR RAID

It was a wonderful, sunny day, and I was sitting on top of our Anderson Shelter, planting carrots. Nothing awful had happened. Yet.
I have 3 little sisters, 4 little brothers, and an older brother, but he was conscripted for the war along with our father. Our mother is a nurse, so she is often away, doing her bit for the war, so I am left looking after the family. I began walking to the house.
-LOUD NOISE-! A deafeningly loud siren sounded. I stopped dead in my tracks. I knew what that siren stood for. It meant that an air raid was beginning, well we all knew that something like this had to happen sometime or another. I looked up, and just like I knew they would, there were the Luftwaffe, looking for a suitable place to bomb no doubt. I ran inside and saw my mother coming down the stairs holding Max and Christine, with Lucy clinging to her legs as she tried to get down the stairs. Anne Sam and Josh were running around the place like mad, while James was huddled into a corner. Crying.
I gathered our gas masks from the cupboard in the hall, and started to try to herd them into the Anderson shelter, with little success. Christine, Max and Lucy were only in the shelter because they were clinging onto mum. I picked up James, still crying, and carried him into the shelter. Here comes the hard part. Eventually I ended up picking them up and carrying them kicking and screaming into the Anderson shelter.
We were all in the shelter with our gas masks on. It was cold, damp and dark in the shelter. Or at least it was until mum found the light switch. The siren was drowned out by loud bangs as bombs fell, and screams as people were killed or injured.
Every single one of the younger ones were crying, from Max the youngest, to Sam the oldest. Mum was holding Max and Christine, desperately trying stop them crying, whilst trying not to cry herself.
That night we went to sleep with bombs going off in our heads, and screams echoing round our skulls…

~My excuse is I was forced to do it. Well, I didn't have the pencil tied to my fingers and a hand moving my own, but you may, or may not, get my point. I worry for you if you don't.~

ITS MAGIC

It was a foggy night, and the trees grew tall and straight in never ending rows. Each and everyone of them identical.
Everything was quiet. Too quiet. Nothing moved, nothing even dared to breath in the oppressive silence, even me.
I would have to breath soon though, no matter how much the thought scared me. It was ridiculous to be scared, but I still was.
Eventually my body took over and I sucked in a loud, wheezing breath. Now anything in here would hear me. Next I’ll step on a twig and start hyperventilating.
It was a terrible, terrible, terrible, horrible, terrible idea to come in here.
The reason why people never come out of here is because EVERYTHING’S THE SAME! EVEN THE FOG’S THE SAME! I wonder what happened to them then.
GARFUNKEL! I found out what happened to them. Or, one of them at least.
That’s actually a pretty cosy looking tree house. And I already know the owner wont be coming back.
Oh scrap that, I am not staying in a tree house a fucking skeleton has fallen out of! What I will do is run. Preferably screaming.
~this was also written unwillingly. My defiance came in the form of doing it badly.~

FLOOD
I was sitting on my bed, attempting to get through Lord of the Rings. It’s a hard task at any time, but it’s even harder with my dad downstairs in the garage putting his ‘finishing touches’ on his newest pet project.
He’s been putting these supposed finishing touches on it for over a fortnight now. Every morning he says ‘It’ll be finished today’ and every evening, when dinner’s on the table, and the rest of the family, my mum, my gran, my granda, my aunt and my uncle, are all just beginning to eat, he’ll trudge back in, smelling of the garage, mumbling about something or other that hasn’t quite worked out for him.
If I’m going to continue being frank, none f us even knows what this mysterious thing is, except that whatever it is, is ‘almost finished’ and altogether, costs a lot. That, and there is, as well as lots of hammering and sawing, but also a lot of swearing coming from the garage, which is unfortunately connected to the main part of the house, where we all live.
Personally, I say that was bad planning.
Something hit me just then, something that reminded me my window was open. It was a great big drop of water. It’s been raining since about a week before dad started his project. I remember when he decided to start it.
We had been watching the news, a daily thing that I’d always hated, especially the weather, which we were watching at that point. The weatherman eventually droned out that there was possibly going to be a flood in our future. He just took a lot longer to say it than I did. There was a whole lengthy explanation with it.
Then suddenly, for dad anyway since it took a while for him to manoeuvre