Barnaby Taylor Author, Fiction, The Eleventh Film, Writing

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

The Eleventh Film XVII

This was the world’s last great expedition. The territory was not uncharted. All was familiar. But it was just no longer feasible.
She reached the Library and spent her days and nights exploring texts, poring over cuneiform – desperately trying to decipher long-lost languages without so much as a phrase book.
She probed and pondered. For a while she was certain of making progress. A letter here. A symbol there. Sometime a sentence promised to offer up a partial truth. Other times that same sentence became devoid of anything.
The process became so arduous that one by one the lexicographer’s party fell prey to unknown ailments.
One person fell asleep awake forever. Another was unable to locate themselves within the cosmos. A third became prone to the kind of doubt that manifested itself as a wasting disease. Someone else became detached from their shadow.
Two men found themselves merging with their past and future selves simultaneously and thereby cancelling themselves out.
One poor soul merged with their surroundings and actually became part of the furniture.
The impossibility of the mission turned another crew-member inside out. They were found pooled beneath a bookshelf.
And then only she was left.
Barnaby Taylor Author, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Horror, The Eleventh Film, Writing

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

tundra

The Eleventh Film XVI

It was a four month voyage and nothing was seen on the way.

The world was as it had always been.

Only it was empty now.

Devoid.

Great swathes of white pinned to the planet’s surface by the heaviest silence the world had ever known.

She passed the time by finding words for the views that she saw.

Gelid.

Hiemal.

Spoliate.

Each entry in her notebook brought her closer to the source.

Unbearing.

Boreal.

Forever.

Unlimited.

She knew that final word from before.

Barnaby Taylor Author, Fiction, Flash Fiction, The Eleventh Film, Writing

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

 

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The Eleventh Film XV

In previous times of doubt and despair the world has always sought solace in the written word, hoping to discern a truth among the millions of symbols and ciphers and syllables.

And so slumberous stories emerged through dreams about a library long-lost to the world. A place where the answers to the world’s final question might still be found.

She was the world’s last lexicographist and so she was chosen to lead the expedition.

The hunt for the site began. There was nothing to lose and there was the possibility, however small, that there still might be a way out of all this.

As the years passed the world lost hope that the library would ever be found. The lexicographer entered her eightieth decade.

A broken office block standing sullen on the edge of a vast ice field coughed-up an old map of the inlands and the library’s resting place was eventually uncovered.

Barnaby Taylor Author, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Horror, The Eleventh Film, Writing

The Eleventh Film – Flash Fiction Serial Parts I & II

The Eleventh Film – A Flash Fiction Serial

Part I

Auguste and Louis Lumière put on the world’s first public film screening. It took place on December 28th 1895 at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. Eleven short films were on the bill that night. Only ten films are listed for posterity. The eleventh film was called The View of Pazuzu returning to the World. It was a desert scene, with a half-buried broken statue and a sandstorm. It ran for five-eighths of a second. It was not noticed by the audience.

Part II

It was actually Georges Méliès who first saw the angels and charted their progress as they moved like sainted bees. And ever since then we have tried to speak to them. But how can you talk to bees? What can you say? How would you even begin? And so we never did and that became the natural way of things and though we were granted a limited purview we were never truly ever given access.