The novel you are about to read is a work in progress. What I am posting here is the raw, unedited draft – complete with typos and mistakes… The finished project will be vastly different. I started this project in 2011 and I stopped working on it abruptly to let it cook for a while…
While I’m writing a much better version, you can read the old draft while the new one is being completed. Essentially, you get to read a version free, and if you liked what you read, you can purchase the complete polished version from book retailers everywhere.
I began writing this before I wrote and published my first book. The writing is far from my best… but there’s a story here, kids. The title is a working title. And again, I stress this is a very rough draft, cringeworthy (at least to me) to read in some places, but I thought this would be a fun way for you to read a developing work, and then read a finished product.
Enjoy...
Chapter Seven
Chloe was getting hungry. “I appreciate you stopping by. Honestly, I do.”
“I know I can be a bitch,” Agnes took the hint. She stood up. “It’s just how I am. But I do care, Chloe. And I want you to get better.”
“Thanks.”
Agnes paused in the doorway. “I’ll see you Monday night for sure, maybe sooner.”
“Okay. Bye.”
Agnes left without closing the door. Anyone passing the room would see a teenaged girl lying on her bed, belly down with her legs in the air and an open book on the pillow.
In spite of the body she was living in, she was by no means a teenaged girl. She hadn’t been for a century and a quarter. The first time she’d read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was in the spring of 1885, shortly after its first publication in New Orleans. She had only been newly born into the wondrous state of arrested development. It was important to her maker that her mind did not reside in the same state as her young body; he demanded that she be well read as formal education was forbidden. She hadn’t yet the capacity to understand the world around her, and the applications to slavery in her own body evaded her. Mythology was the only doctrine she knew. There was no sunlight. Human beings were merely sustenance. God was an enemy. Death was damnation. The future was nothing but a chapter suspended in monotonous narration. And while her suspended state of being felt oppressive, it was easier then. It was easier to hide, easier to lie, easier to drift, easier to feed. Science, progress, and human rejection of archaic principles made it difficult to exist in the twentieth century.
They adapted. Prostitution became common. The trade was seldom sexual, though she possessed the capacity for it. The smart ones sold their talents. Scholars, scientists, writers, artists, politicians: they gave their blood for novels and screenplays, accurate transcriptions of history, mathematical equations, policies, theories, art. In the top notch of the upper echelon, it became fashionable to have one about the manor. The mafia exploited them; they became invincible hit men for the inexpensive price of bad blood. Satanists worshiped them, willing to sacrifice their own lives for eternal debauchery in a blazing paradise which they’d never see. The trading post was a fountain of blood at the necks of eager dealers.
