10 Days to go!

This will be the last update before launch.  There are now only ten days before WITHOUT REASON is released!

To preorder the book, click HERE.

As promised, here is a sneak preview of the novel.  Behold, the prologue!

PROLOGUE:  A Warm Night in a Cold World

Friday, 12 February, 2021

There are far too many senseless deaths in this world.  A man can go to a bar, get drunk and say something unwise, and next thing you know, murdered.  The quick flash of neon on steel, a splash of red, and… well… and that’s all I suppose.  And those who watch their tongues are no safer, all it takes is a nervous mugger with a weapon or coming home during a robbery.  Heck, even looking askance at some unstable moron tweaking on something heavy can set him on a murderous rampage.  And wasn’t that exactly what they were talking about on the news last night?  What a bleak future fortune holds for this world.

When did we become so desensitized to each other—so numb to life itself—that this kind of aberration became tolerated, even expected?  Why do people still bother locking eyes with their neighbours when all that can be seen is a coloured ring around empty black.  When did we stop looking into each other’s eyes.  Far more honest are those whose shifty gazes slide this way and that, never quite catching your own.  Or those so nervous their eyes barely leave the ground.  The meek truly are worthy of some kind of inheritance for that integrity alone—though certainly not on this Earth.  This cold Earth.  

Yes, neighbours make small talk, friends go to dinners, and even complete strangers will often greet one another on the street, but it’s all empty.  The neighbours are glad to be away, glad to be back in the comfort of their side of the fence, taking refuge behind their own walls.  

The friends may truly care, but pointless fears of conducting oneself in an appropriate manner arbitrarily defined as ‘normal’ far too often prevent any real connection.  Time after time, a once-meaningful friendship is reduced to token phone calls and symbolic outings; nothing more than representative visits paying respects to a friendship long-since dead.  And all the involved parties are too afraid to move on.  Too afraid that this carcass of human connection is the closest they’ll ever come to a real human intimacy again.  

And the strangers are no better.  Sure, fleeting connections are sometimes made, more often in silence than in greeting: just the meeting of two sets of lonely eyes and the strained grasping of two desperate souls reaching for what they know to be a suitable counterpart for human intimacy, any kind of intimacy, only to be gruffly dismissed by a mind too fearful to act on instinct.  More often than not, acknowledging nods or words are offered out of fear alone.  Eyes meet and smiles flash like the baring of fangs: I’m here and you’re here and let’s not hurt one another—but no, let us not be friends either, for I could never trust one who brashly bears fangs and leers at me so.  And just never mind that I’m doing it right back.

Yes, it is a cold, cold world indeed.  Even families, the hallmark of intimacy, are nothing today as they once were.  Fathers too nervous flashing fangs with the neighbour, mothers too busy visiting friendships in hospitals, and by the time any kind of parent realizes the wrongs they have committed on their poor children, they’re already grown.  They are already flashing fangs and paying respects just the same.  Of course, should their kids have kids and the now-grandparents try to become involved, such intervention is resisted as fiercely as the grandparents had resisted their own parents’ help.  And so the cycle is endless. 

No wonder there are so, so many pointless deaths in this world.  In this world where we each think we walk alone.  But reasons are not excuses.  And senseless murders just make everything a little colder.

A bleak, cold world indeed. 

It was a very noble thing then that Steven Yung, so very tired of shivering, did what he could to make his own part of the world just a little bit warmer.  Yes, this murder was far from senseless.

It had been a true friendship—a relationship really—with genuine smiles and real eye contact.  He had seen deep within her eyes during their time together.  How he loved her eyes.  He had continued to look into them until the very end, his sad smile mirrored by her own—still beautiful in its drug-slackened state—even as he opened a matching red grin a few inches below those scarlet lips.  He had truly loved her.

Love is what it takes for a murder to mean something.  To really mean something.

And that it really had meant something was proven repeatedly as he continued to weep while he painted the sigils around her body.  His two fingers busy brushes, dipping in the wound then scraping on the floor.  Wound to floor, wound to floor.  And the weeping only got worse as he moved on to the walls.  This was no graceful shedding of a single tear, nor a poignant stream of them tracking down his cheek, these were ugly, wracking sobs, and his artistry suffered for it.  Tears mixed with the blood causing it to run here, his shaking hand obscuring the mark there.  To his own critical eye, it was truly a mess.  But it was raw, it was real, and that was what mattered.  The symbols were, after all, nothing more than symbols, the true meaning came in what they represented.

Returning to the body of his beloved, Steven calmed himself for the final markings he would make.  He retrieved his knife from where he had left it next to Vanessa’s head, just beyond the blood-painted knotwork that now encircled it.  He cut open her blouse from the bottom, going no higher than modesty would allow—he was a gentleman after all—and began carving into her stomach.  A nine-pointed star with her navel at its centre.  He thought it a far more symmetrical rendering than its counterparts painted on the walls.

Seemingly unable to cry anymore, or perhaps at peace already with the nobility of his mission, he started humming to himself as he moved on to finish the markings on her palms and forearms, her shins and the soles of her feet.

After several minutes, with his preparations finally complete, he knelt at the feet of his lover to pray.

‘For love and for peace I have offered this sacrifice.  For intimacy and humanity this blood is Yours.  All friendships pale before the One True Friend; all loves lie at the feet of the First Love.  My Friend, my Lover, my Companion.’

He then dipped the first two fingers of his right hand in the blood pooled at his victim’s feet, and on his own forehead traced a nine-pointed star, accentuating each line with a phrase.  ‘My eyes.  My ears.  My lips.  My touch.  My heart.  All are with You.  All are for You.  All are Yours to take.  What’s mine is your own.’  He marked a circle where the nine points met, closing his prayer with the words, ‘together we are one.’

It was nearly midnight by the time he was finished.  He took off his garbage-bag vest, the clothes underneath, and his gloves, throwing them all unceremoniously into a corner of the room.  He dug a set of what would pass as janitorial clothing from his duffle and quickly changed.  He then threw the duffle into the corner with the rest of his discarded clothes, took one last look around, and made for the door.

As he switched off the lights in the auditorium, the projection of rotating constellations became visible once more.  It was breathtaking in its beauty.  Oh how my Nessie loved to sleep under the stars!  He opened the door and blew her a kiss as he stepped out into the corridor where his custodial cart awaited.  The automatic lights took a moment to flicker on, comforting him with the promise of the building’s emptiness.

‘Goodnight, my sweet Nessie,’ Steven whispered as he closed the door gently behind him, blowing one last kiss just before it shut.

Steven stopped in a bathroom to wash off the blood from his arms and face.  He departed without worrying about the stains left on the mirror and in the sink.  He noted with a slight amusement that it was the women’s washroom—that might stump the authorities for a bit.  There was still plenty of blood caked into his hair, some had stained his sleeves in washing, and he was certain the tone of his hands had not been that ruddy before, but it was dark out and he did not expect to see many people on his way home.  And if he did, well, the Friend would protect him.  So with a sigh Steven left the bathroom, took the elevator down to the first floor—abandoning the custodial cart inside and sending it back up to the fourth floor as he left—and set out across the university campus towards home.

Outside all was silent but for the wind and Steven’s jovial whistling.  Peculiar for a university campus barely a month into the term.  Just a quiet Friday night where so many students had suddenly found themselves feeling like staying in.

Such was the power of his god.

And how beautiful the stars above are shining, seemingly impervious to the city’s light pollution on this particular night.  Is this the Friend’s personal thanks for my devotion?  A display of Your awesome power to reaffirm my faith?  Or is it the stars themselves, whose alignment tonight is so special.  Lust and Comfort, Honesty, Fidelity, Empathy, Devotion, Generosity, Gratitude, and Cooperation, the nine virtues of friendship as embodied by the Friend’s constellation.  A nexus of stars wherein it is said my god sits, as if atop a celestial throne.  Each of those stars now equidistant from the central star representing Love.  

Or rather, a central cluster of stars, as Vanessa had shown him earlier in that auditorium.  He knew some of his brothers and sisters would not be happy to learn that, but the symbolism was nothing more than empty images to make devotion easier for the weak of faith.  Besides, he had always thought their nine-pointed star constellation looked more like a wheel anyway.

Nine spokes of equal support round a central hub representing nothing less than the greatest virtue of all: love.  Sure a star shines bright, and light is perhaps representative enough for disciples of weaker gods, but a wheel rolls over obstructions in its path.  And my god is no small wheel.

But for all the power of that god, his walk home was not completely uneventful.  At the very edge of campus, as he whistled his way past a large building, its well-lit interior making it possible to see into the tinted windows, Steven Yung noticed two young girls.  Seeing them running about and waving frantically, his breath caught for a moment, thinking they had seen him and noticed the blood from afar.  As he got closer however, squinting to see through the partially obstructed windows, he saw that they were not waving at him, but were dancing.

The campus’s actual janitors, apparently: two young women, one mopping the floor, the other wiping tables, and both dancing as if without a care for the security cameras or possible passers-by.  Steven could hear the music and their laughter faintly from outside the windowed wall, and though he attempted to pass the building unnoticed, it was evidently bright enough outside for them to see him as well.  At catching sight of him the two girls froze and looked to each other, mouths open in surprise.  Steven turned away and kept walking, a nervous sweat beginning to warm his forehead.

Both girls then broke into convulsions of laughter and, apparently unaware the man they looked at was covered in blood, offered him a friendly wave.  Muttering a silent thanks to his god, Steven returned the wave with a smile and continued on his way.

Friend embrace me!  Did you see it in their gazes?  When they looked at each other before resuming their hysterics?  There was warmth in that look.  A life to it.  Yes, my god sends me a sign.  Intimacy is returning!  Humanity can be saved!

It is a warm night indeed!

And with a new spring in his step, Steven Yung smiled the whole way home, fangs bared and glistening eyes leering at every shadow that moved.