// THE IMAGINATION THIEF — Literary Fiction with a touch of Magical Realism and a dusting of Horror.

Transcription of Part VII’s Film “PIPPA 50” within the novel The Imagination Thief by Rohan Quine

Transcription of Part VII’s Film “PIPPA 50”
within the novel The Imagination Thief by Rohan Quine

 

Below is the text of Part VII’s Film “PIPPA 50”, which is taken from The Imagination Thief’s mini-chapter 50 “Unnerving things in Pippa’s bedroom”. This Film is one lens’s suggestion of Pippa Vail.

Click here to view Part VII’s Film “PIPPA 50”.

 Rohan Quine - 'The Imagination Thief' - Film 'PIPPA 50'

… and I find you, Pippa, naked in your big double bed in your depressing, cluttered bedroom, with your eyes wide and glassy. Just your presence in this bedroom gobbles half the room’s space, for even when you’re out, your emotional machinery remains here—parked across the end wall, complex and heavy as an outsized organ, with struts and pipes and pedals and a rack of tubes and valves, half atrophied. It’s too bulky to move and would probably not survive disassembly and reassembly elsewhere, so here it stays, playing soft and sad to itself, never stopping, like a haunted organ playing in an empty red theatre that’s been locked for years.

The only illumination in the room is the dim bedside light, but I notice there’s a book lying open on each of the two bedside tables. Your bedroom door is closed, so from your current vantage point I cannot see your hallway or that other, narrow door; but I cast around inside what I can see of the boarded-up warehouse of your mind, in search of anything relating to this … in vain, for now. A thousand faces flick across your bedroom’s television screen, muted, from that other world outside you. Some of these faces stare right at you here in bed, craning their heads in to peer through the glass screen as if through a window in the corner of your bedroom, mouthing things you cannot understand.

Your ears push five slim pale-brown fingers out, one by one, into the dim room: you feel each finger squeeze out its girth with a pop, wriggle off across the pillow, then halt at the pillow’s end and sniff the air, scratching and stroking at the cotton with its long crimson nail. The fingers melt to snails’ horns, twirling at the pillow corners, each one freezing as it sees the people pouring through your bedroom from the TV screen: a cavalcade of bones and air and dust beneath the glamour of their chatter and their flesh; celebrities twitching in the back seats of limousines, pretty little skeletons, brittle dry voices… Their teeth gibber words out, which hang upon the silence pressing in from behind.

A sound-stream you’ve heard across the years rushes past you: an actor bites an apple in a spotlight while a pre-recorded crunch booms out from hidden speakers; the empty bus at night hums and wheezes through the empty square; a buzz of hornets cuts the air, and artificial bird-song warbles and trills above the manufactured sound of a fresh, moist meadow. A grand noise of yearning beauty swells, then inside it in the distance is the sound of children playing in that wasteland between the Arverne projects where you grew up. You think you hear your own childish speech among these voices, and the five-year-old buried in you stirs. Again behind the stillness you can hear the greater silence, and the even greater darkness behind what’s visible. Mercifully at last, a cone of black descends, and sleep.

…But while you sleep, the hits just keep on coming, Pippa Vail! You raise your heavy skull up off the pillow and you peer out from inside, from just behind the eyes—watchful for meaty furry spiders on the walls behind your angel statuettes, where they often crouch, flexing their hairy thighs and picking at their teeth. Before they can beckon you to lick them, as you usually must, you’re startled to notice that your television’s on. Did you leave it on, at lights-out? Surely you wouldn’t have. It shows, furthermore, a thing it’s never shown before, in all these years: a simple, plastic, old-fashioned wall-clock, in black and white, mounted prosaically upon an institution wall, its second-hand sweeping round behind the window-bars… The picture cuts to you, where you clutch at your fire-escape railings, in the sky. Around you are long, bendy, lighted candles swaying in a faint breeze. A dry nose pushes from your left, and inside you the fossils of your lust stir a second, but it’s obvious from the space in your eyes that for you the sky’s gone out: your face has grown blind as the face of the moon. You see no further out than the colours on the inside surface of your skull—brown, black and purple. You hurry up the steps of your fire-escape, swilling and pushing along within your coat of flesh; the handrail is worn thin and limp by the touch of many dead hands. You see your goal ahead: a brittle husk, frail and translucent, hung aloft against the blackness of the cavern of your head. And the stairs up inside you end in death, with a stabbing scent of cheeseflesh and blood-lemon streaming away from your ears like the memory of a dream at dawn.

Soon it will be dawn and the end of this night. And within you as you sleep, the thing that never had the strength to birth itself, thus remaining trapped there and leaving you intact, stirs now, pressing slowly and carefully at the inside of your abdomen. Thin skin seals its eyes; webbing coats its teeth and joins its fingers. You stir with the thing inside, and underneath the curve of your sweet little snub-nose, your mouth grins wetly in the dark.

(This Film is also on Vimeo and YouTube and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).)

 

The Imagination Thief by Rohan Quine is about a web of secrets, triggered by the stealing and copying of people’s imaginations and memories. It’s about the magic that can be conjured up by images of people, in imagination or on film; the split between beauty and happiness in the world; and the allure of various kinds of power. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021, it celebrates some of the most extreme possibilities of human imagination, personality and language, exploring the darkest and brightest flavours of beauty living in our minds.

Buy The Imagination Thief in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

Rohan Quine - The Imagination Thief - ebook cover (literary fiction, magical realism, horror)

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Rohan Quine's "The Imagination Thief" approved at Awesome Indies - badgeNYC Big Book Award 2021 - Rohan Quine's "The Imagination Thief" as Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction category

Buy The Imagination Thief in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

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Rohan Quine, The Imagination Thief, literary fiction, litfic, magical realism, horror, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, contemporary, science fiction, gay, transgender, LGBTQ+, visionary, spectacular, Asbury Park, New Jersey, New York, small town, psychic, broadcast, enhanced ebook

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