novellas

The Detectorate 7/6c (Part Three)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 46 minutes)

It was awfully quiet for a place where so much money changed hands.  There were tons of poker players there that night; as a crowd they tended to know how to keep their eyes down and their mouths shut.  Half of them wore sunglasses even though it was the middle of the night.  The other half had toothpicks in their mouths, just enough of a disturbance to make their tiniest smiles or frowns undetectable.

It was a private apartment, high above the streets of Midway, so excessive noise wouldn’t have helped anyway.  Still, it didn’t feel like much of a party.  The loudest noises were the clinking of glasses and the brief scrapes of USB drives docking and undocking from various ports.  Every dealer had a box next to them with at least four ports, perfect repositories for the digital currency while the guests gambled.  Should the police burst in the boxes would automatically cancel everything they held and wipe their own memories. Continue reading →

The Detectorate 7/6c (Part Two)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 47 minutes)

(Scene Change)

Eirene wondered if her father had more of a literary talent than she had initially thought, because the two houses that made up the Odeck family compound did appear to be stitched together, like the arguing children of a mad scientist.  They were bound by a tunnel of unpainted wood, with nearly every board having come from a different source.  There was one window on the tunnel, its frame an actual picture frame.

It was a nightmarish playhouse already, but the image was further enhanced by the entertainment and sport debris littered all over the yard and in the branches of a giant twisted elm tree, the roots of which crawled into the gray asphalt driveway and broke it into chunks like lava rock. Continue reading →

The Detectorate 7/6c (Part One)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(blurb)

Police work has been the subject of fiction for an age, but what about television police work?  Dive into this quirky novella that blends the twists and turns of a murder conspiracy with the trappings of hokey law dramas, complete with time slots, character tropes, crossovers, and commercial breaks!

(reading time: 46 minutes) (reading for entire novella: 3 hours, 16 minutes)

The Detectorate 7/6c

by

Blaine Arcade

This program is a work of fiction.  Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

Intro Narration: Law enforcement is taken seriously in the township of Little Pond, Massachusetts.  A new crime wave, worsened by local corruption, has convinced its people that elections are now necessary for its detectives as well as its sheriff.  The first two candidates for this experimental program, called the Detectorate, are Eirene Amstead and Cincinattus Golfort.  These stories are the evidence of their efforts, conviction, and dedication to their constituents.

Intro theme tune by Zizi Caraway

Produced by Heath Moose

Episode 17: By the Horns Continue reading →

Manifest of the West (Finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

(reading time: 41 minutes)

The Legend of Broadside Barnaby

Old Thresher the card shark.  Remember him?  I bested his challenge more than a hundred times over and it were way past due for him to give up the location of Broadside Barnaby.  He were the last name left.  With him collected the Manifest would be complete, everyone accounted for in myth, and I could have my pa back.  My family could have the eventual peace that I worked so hard to disrupt. Continue reading →

Manifest of the West (Part Three)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 1 hour, 2 minutes)

That were the story I told my pocket twister.  It weren’t the most heartening, but I think confiding in him gave him some strength.  He shook off most of that water and started looking more like his old self and less like a cloud constipated with rain.

Now you know whose soul I were collecting all them names for.  I knew Pa weren’t at peace.  He were still kept from Heaven and Hell in the ropes of Knot-eye, and the only way to get him back or get him to my mother were to obey the will of the Laudgod and eventually be rewarded.  I had to be the man he told me to be, to conquer and dominate the West so thoroughly that nothing could stop me.  Continue reading →

Manifest of the West (Part Two)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(reading time: 50 minutes)

The Tangent of Sara’s Sewing Spiders

I told you about my mother’s dress shop.  I didn’t tell you it were driven out of business by the peculiarest of competitors.  My mother, bless her glorious soul in Heaven, were even kind enough to bring the woman who owned the venture a pie as a welcoming gift.  Sure it were blackberry pie, not her finest pie by miles, but you can’t expect saintly behavior from a shrewd businesswoman such as her. Continue reading →

Manifest of the West (Part One)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

(blurb)

There’s a version of the wild west where the land in the westward direction just never stopped stretching, where magic seeped out of the canyons and rode the whirlwinds.  That’s where Lionel Worthett lives, and it’s where he would’ve died if the almighty Laudgod had just let him.

Instead he was given a task and a document called the Manifest of the West.  All he has to do is get the most powerful miscreants, villains, and varmints to sign their names so they can be turned into legends that won’t get any more astonishing, and then he can have his reward, one soul returned from the hereafter, back to the infinite west.

(reading time: 52 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 25 minutes)

Manifest of the West

by

Blaine Arcade

The Hellmouth

There I were, standing before the open mouth of the grand devil’s kingdom… one of its mouths anyway.  A hot breath full of ashes descended on me.  It were the first one I’d ever set my own eyes on and it weren’t what I expected.  The mouth part of the name were supposed to be figurative.  It were a disgusting word representing a gate so people would think even less of it than they already did.  Except it weren’t so figurative. Continue reading →

The Public Domain (Finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 36 minutes)

A House-boat on the Styx

A protest raged outside the home of Bill Smithers.  A hundred boots stomped up and down on the sidewalk in rhythm.  Bottles, eggs, and fruit sailed over the hedges.  The crowd would’ve preferred rotten fruit, but when there’s an apple or a pear on your page it usually came out looking ready to sit in a bowl for a portrait instead of mushy and covered in maggots.  Cardboard signs waved in the air or hung around the neck by rope, their messages written sloppily in big splotchy swipes, which made it impossible to tell if they were written in haste or written with the ink from an open wound.  Everyone shouted the same sorts of things on the signs. Continue reading →

The Public Domain (Part Three)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 1 hour, 3 minutes)

The Ticking Tunnel

Tick tock tick tuck tick teck tick tick tick tick tack.  Every other tick sounded a little bit different.  She was starting to hear variation in something mechanically identical and she knew it probably wasn’t the best sign for her sanity.  Tai Chen forced her eyes open.  She still couldn’t see anything.  Tickticktickticktickticktickticktick.  She hopped to her feet, banging her knees on a groaning pipe in the process.  Something fluttered against her nose.  She smacked herself in the face to stop it and came away with a note written on lined paper. Continue reading →

The Public Domain (Part Two)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(reading time: 46 minutes)

The Ambulance Taxi

Carlo’s hospital was a small building combined with the local doctor’s office.  It had only three operating rooms.  People in Carlo, when they got sick, usually stayed home and let the webs take them over instead of troubling anyone for an aspirin.  There was no doctor on duty that day, just the nurse.  Even she was absent when Tai Chen awoke. Continue reading →