Nine Stories private writing project group · Google collaboration platform
Nine Stories, Season Six: Prologue
The Witch Doctor
The room had plainly been left untouched for a very long time. It was tiny, containing only a bed one and a half meters wide and a cheap computer desk of the sort one could buy for fifty yuan. The gap between them was so narrow that only a person weighing sixty kilos could turn around in it. A thick layer of dust lay over the desk, marked by the tracks of beetles that had crawled across it. The computer itself was gone, leaving only the pale square where a CRT monitor had once sat for years. Above the bed was a round window half a meter across. At first glance it seemed to have been sealed over with black paper. Only when I shone my flashlight on it did I see that it was actually covered by a layer of black, furry vine.
The mattress, too, was thick with dust. There was no bedding, only a sweat-stained pillow with the hollow of a sleeping head still pressed into it. I measured the indentation with a tape: twenty-eight centimeters wide. It had been left by a thin bald man with a sharply pointed skull. Beside the bed lay three books: Ancient Chinese Sorcery, Youyang Zazu, and A Study of Famous Chinese Things. They were probably what he had been reading most recently. Ancient Chinese Sorcery lay open, face-down, across Youyang Zazu. I lifted it carefully. The open page concerned “sorcery for controlling human behavior and emotion: the making and efficacy of specialized love potions.” The margins were filled with neat annotations in red ink. Two entries had been circled heavily: “grass that sways though there is no wind” and “peach-vermilion arts.”
I pulled out my Nokia E71 and dialed a short number.
“Well? Find anything?” The man on the other end asked in an anxious voice.
“Damn it,” I said. “This guy was a witch doctor.”
Rules
Include the following sentence somewhere in your story. The blanks may be filled with whatever book titles you like, preferably from books you have actually read, though invented titles are also allowed.
Beside the bed lay three books: __, __, and __.
No word limit. No genre restrictions.
Post it to the Nine Stories group, publish it on your own blog, and add links to the other participants’ entries.
Deadline: March 15.
Prize for this season: several portions of Chengdu specialty pickled chicken feet, reserved for those who hand in their work on time.