Author: Barnaby Taylor

Author and Academic

Terminal Transit – Irish, Apocalyptic, Science Fiction, Horror Novel

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Synopsis

A brilliant research student discovers a plot fulminated by demons from another dimension and kills himself in the process. The fate of the world is left in the hands of an elderly academic and a mysterious orphan.

Using the facts surrounding Ireland’s economic collapse in 2008 as it’s starting point, Terminal Transit is an apocalyptic adventure dealing with death and destruction in a Dublin slowly devastated by demonic intervention.

Can the end of the world be avoided?

Or is this planet simply scheduled for Terminal Transit?

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Terminal Transit,

‘Chapter I ‘The Song of the NotBeSpeak’’

Verse 2.

It was Professor Mac an Bhaird who woke one rainy night from his lonely dreams to hear sobbing in the flat beside him. The professor had been drifting in his sleep, wandering in some half-remembered part of the city that he couldn’t quite place. Sibeal was with him and at first they walked hand in hand but Mac’s eyes were soon drawn to a wooden notice board outside an old newsagents. The board was full of handwritten postcards advertising various wares, offering all manner of services, as well as the usual births, deaths and marriages. He stopped, let go of Sibeal’s hand and began to read each card in turn, marvelling at the huge variety of historical styles, cases and forms -cursive, print, looped, Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift, ascenders, Secretary Hand, descenders, Getty-Dubay, Block, Kurrent, and D’Nealian.

Mac ran his finger tenderly across each postcard in turn, checking for sense and general significance. He marvelled at such an extraordinary discovery on such an ordinary street. The noticeboard was unlocked and with a greedy wipe of his hand, Mac was able to sweep all the cards into his coat pocket. Duly delighted with his haul, Mac carried on walking but it wasn’t until he had found his way back to the Father Matthew Bridge that Mac realised that Sibeal was no longer beside him.

Mac woke with a start, half-expecting, as always, as ever, that Sibeal was asleep beside him. From the day she died until now this was the way it was for Mac. The sound of sobbing was loud and came from the rooms beside his. These rooms had been empty for so long that Mac imagined at first that it was simply a nocturnal illusion but the sobbing was insistent and eventually the old man carefully climbed out of bed, put on his dressing gown, picked up his umbrella and went out into the narrow hallway. The front door was slightly ajar and though he feared the perfectly reasonable fears of anyone who has been woken by unexpected sobbing in the middle of the night, the old man opened the door and stepped inside. In the dimness, a small figure lay crying on a dark and dusty sofa.

‘What is the matter, my child?’ asked Mac softly in the darkness.

‘What can have happened?’

But the small child did not reply.

Knowing that the child was familiar to him but wholly unprepared for such a nocturnal visit, he went to leave.

‘I am next door and will be there when you are ready to speak. My name is Professor Mac an Bhaird but you may call me Mac.’

Later that next morning there was a knock on the door. Mac looked up from his work.

‘Come in,’ he said and the girl stepped inside. Mac cleared a pile of papers from the footstool.

‘Come and sit by the fire, my child.’

He smiled.

‘Or should I say, Inteachán.’

Barnaby Taylor, Terminal Transit – Irish, Apocalyptic, Science Fiction Novel

Synopsis

A brilliant research student discovers a plot fulminated by demons from another dimension and kills himself in the process. The fate of the world is left in the hands of an elderly academic and a mysterious orphan.

Using the facts surrounding Ireland’s economic collapse in 2008 as it’s starting point, Terminal Transit is an apocalyptic adventure dealing with death and destruction in a Dublin slowly devastated by demonic intervention.

Can the end of the world be avoided?

Or is this planet simply scheduled for Terminal Transit?

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Terminal Transit,

‘Chapter I ‘The Song of the NotBeSpeak’’

Verse 1

Professor Amhalgaidh Mac an Bhaird is elderly now, almost ancient. He is an Honorary Fellow and Professor Emeritus of Trinity College and has lived in rooms overlooking Front Square for the last forty-seven years.

Professor Mac an Bhaird has devoted his adult life to the study of what he likes to call the ‘small things that we forget to remember very quickly.’ The Professor’s work is part-chrestomathy, part-analect, and wholly singular in its peculiar ambition. When he wasn’t teaching Professor Mac an Bhaird would spend all his spare time poring over maps and manuscripts and pamphlets and postcards and timetables and booklets and brochures and tickets and notices and newsletters and invitation slips and certificates and all the other truly wonderful ephemera that accumulates when the world isn’t really paying attention.

His wife Sibeal, herself a leading authority on Teutonic textile design during the feudal period, used to joke that the most overlooked thing in all his dealings with the world was undoubtedly her.

‘I fear that one day the only way that you will know that I am still here is when you see my name included on some long-lost list you discover scribbled on a dusty envelope. Only then will you remember to look up and there I’ll be, waiting forlornly in the corner for my turn.’

She slipped her arms around his waist.

‘I love you, Mac.’

‘That will never be the case, my dear,’ said the very-certain scholar as he kissed his wife on the neck.

‘We are simply not fated to end up as forgotten entries in another person’s ledger.’

He pulled her closer.

‘We will fade beautifully towards death together like the most pulchritudinous love letters scribbled on the comeliest of Victorian Christmas cards.’

But Sibeal was taken whilst in labour at 11.03am on September the Sixteenth 1973 and it was at exactly 11.04am that Professor Mac an Bhaird retreated into the deadly safety of scholarly solitude.

That was all those years ago. Now, following a lifetime of lectures and lonely meals in Commons, he sits in his armchair all day indexing his life’s work, Mac an Bhaird’s Miscellanea: Towards the Proposing of a Taxonomy of the Not-Noticed, Oft-Forgotten and Un-Remembered.

Currently standing at over three hundred and thirty-three thousand words Mac an Bhaird’s Miscellanea is a testament to the determination of one man to catalogue, chart, outline, and unravel the seemingly innocuous connections between matters of apparently such little importance as to there being little or no connection between them in the first place. But before we consider a lifetime’s work to be simply pointless and therefore without value we mustn’t forget that generations of academic discourse have depended entirely on exactly the kind of specific pedantry demonstrated here by an elderly Professor. If nothing else this in itself would be a suitably fitting summary of one man’s contribution to the body of knowledge but Mac an Bhaird’s Miscellanea goes much further here because it also exists as a wondrously moving monument to the prodigious properties of paper.

Three hundred and thirty-three thousand words have dutifully wended their way across nearly five hundred and ninety pages and after decades of hermetic handling each page now bears the delicious hallmark of any handwritten document that has aged naturally over time. Many pages are beautifully curled at the corners, as their repeated turning over time now causes them when stacked to fold like the pulpy petals of some ancient, thought-veined bloom. Other pages are torn in places; the longer tears carefully repaired with stamp hinges, now brittle after years of determined gripping. Shorter tears have been left alone for now, borne in mind, or occasionally, overlooked entirely.

All the pages that comprise Mac an Bhaird’s Miscellanea bear the accumulated marks of a lifetime of close attention; stained in some places by the sweat of a thumb; yellowed and coffee-ringed; the sweeping smudge of the back of a hand; ink whirls; curlicues; crossings-out; pencil; ball-point; fountain; wondrous water marks and the arcane collection of proofreading marks unknown to so much of the modern world today – ][, eq #, wc/ww, lc, sp, ||, s/v, first ref., half title, ligature, and stet.

One can read the history of the man in the history of his handwriting and so the bold decisive strokes of a confident young academic gave way to the angry slashes of someone widowed far too soon which then gave way over time to the precise and rigid emphasising of a man obsessed which then give way to the eventually slowed and resigned notation of a dying gentleman battling to complete his life’s work before he passed away.

Yet across the entire length of this turbulent history, one thing had remained a steady constant, Professor Mac an Bhaird’s handwriting was terribly tiny.

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

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The Eleventh Film XVIII

With her comrades gone, the lexicographer felt it was as if the world now hung useless in its orbit.
Not spinning any more.
Limp.
Cernuous.
Nutant.
Forever.
Unlimited.
That final word took her back.
Darkness. She was a child in her father’s car. There was a sign overhead. She saw the word. Then she was too young to understand what the word meant.
Now she knew that the endlessness of this word really was the end.
For thirteen nights she resisted but on the fourteenth morning she suffered a crisis in language and was no longer able to compute. She lay curled on her side as the last of her brain’s charge emptied itself out through her right ear and onto the floor of the ruined building.

Nipper – NIGHTMARE, MONSTER, HORROR, SURVIVAL SERIES – Book One

Once a week the monsters come.

They hunt all night.

In the morning they’re gone.

That gives me six days to get ready.

Then they come back again.

Hi Everyone

Here’s the opening chapter of the first book in my latest series.

Nipper tells the story of a girl and her dad who have to defend their house from a weekly invasion of monsters. When her dad is badly injured, Nipper has to try and get him to safety before it’s too late.

If you like what you read then why not download Nipper from Amazon?

The links are here and here.

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Scream

The first thing you hear is the scream. One of them starts and the rest join in. They get louder and louder. It sounds like the night is crying angry tears of pain.

It. Is. Deafening.

I hate the sound. My tummy feels sick when I hear it. I know what it means for me and Dad. I always put my hands over my ears but that never works.

The monsters scream like they are dying. Like they are in the most pain that anyone could ever feel. It must be because they are monsters. It must be agony.

But I don’t feel sorry for them.

How could I? They are monsters.

We are the only people left in our town. Everyone else is dead. They were killed by the monsters when they attacked for the first time.

Me and Dad hid in the attic. The monsters were in our house. They looked everywhere. We kept very still. I heard them sniffing. We were lucky. They didn’t find us.

In the morning they were gone.

Dad went to look. They were definitely gone. But we stayed indoors for rest of the week. We didn’t know what else to do.

We barricaded the doors and windows. We used all the wood we could find. We put chairs and tables against the front door. We blocked a window with the sofa.

It was all we could do.

I was so tense. I thought the monsters would come back at any minute.

The nights were when we got really scared. We slept in the attic. The ladder was pulled up. I tried to sleep. Dad stayed awake. He was listening for them. We did this every night for six days.

And then the monsters came back.

We heard them outside. They were hunting for us. I hid in my sleeping bag. Dad was holding a kitchen knife. He was ready to stab the monsters. But they didn’t find us.

In the morning they were gone again.

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

The Eleventh Film XVII

This was the world’s last great expedition. The territory was not uncharted. All was familiar. But it was just no longer feasible.
She reached the Library and spent her days and nights exploring texts, poring over cuneiform – desperately trying to decipher long-lost languages without so much as a phrase book.
She probed and pondered. For a while she was certain of making progress. A letter here. A symbol there. Sometime a sentence promised to offer up a partial truth. Other times that same sentence became devoid of anything.
The process became so arduous that one by one the lexicographer’s party fell prey to unknown ailments.
One person fell asleep awake forever. Another was unable to locate themselves within the cosmos. A third became prone to the kind of doubt that manifested itself as a wasting disease. Someone else became detached from their shadow.
Two men found themselves merging with their past and future selves simultaneously and thereby cancelling themselves out.
One poor soul merged with their surroundings and actually became part of the furniture.
The impossibility of the mission turned another crew-member inside out. They were found pooled beneath a bookshelf.
And then only she was left.

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

tundra

The Eleventh Film XVI

It was a four month voyage and nothing was seen on the way.

The world was as it had always been.

Only it was empty now.

Devoid.

Great swathes of white pinned to the planet’s surface by the heaviest silence the world had ever known.

She passed the time by finding words for the views that she saw.

Gelid.

Hiemal.

Spoliate.

Each entry in her notebook brought her closer to the source.

Unbearing.

Boreal.

Forever.

Unlimited.

She knew that final word from before.

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

 

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The Eleventh Film XV

In previous times of doubt and despair the world has always sought solace in the written word, hoping to discern a truth among the millions of symbols and ciphers and syllables.

And so slumberous stories emerged through dreams about a library long-lost to the world. A place where the answers to the world’s final question might still be found.

She was the world’s last lexicographist and so she was chosen to lead the expedition.

The hunt for the site began. There was nothing to lose and there was the possibility, however small, that there still might be a way out of all this.

As the years passed the world lost hope that the library would ever be found. The lexicographer entered her eightieth decade.

A broken office block standing sullen on the edge of a vast ice field coughed-up an old map of the inlands and the library’s resting place was eventually uncovered.