the Wakefield Doctrine

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Denise is the host, and informs us, the only hard and fast rule is the total number of sentences. Six.

Blame Ford for (his) recent Sixes, written in the key of creepy, combined with our own penchant for matchcover-academia, which left us spending far too much time reading up on ‘the Unreliable Narrator’. We trust we’ll get it out of our system straight-away and return to ‘the Whitechapel Interlude’ next week.

We think.

(No, the image at the top of this post has nothing, as far as I know, to do with the following Six. It was, just that, when I first came across it yesterday, I was all, “Where have I been, this story, I haven’t heard, already!”)

Prompt word:

ƎVITAИЯƎT⅃A * ALTERNATIVE

(Let’s see, last week we posted the next installment of ‘Anya Claireaux, P.I.‘, that means we need to continue our historical-fantasy serial, Eve’s Étude, how difficult can that be?)

Sister Abbott looked at the mound of homespun blankets, the shape of the body hard to distinguish, the bloodstains impossible; the memory of the terminal whimper of pain, earnest supplication to no avail, brought a smile to her lips. Like the endless subvocal howl of the birth of the cosmos, the echo of momentarily-sated hunger lightened her step and heighten her senses, now moving through the dust-cloaked streets of Tangier, alert for a certain sign on the pisé de terre wall at the dark end of Rue le Jour.

(Wait a minute… where’s the sense of the, hidden-in-plain-sight, atmosphere surrounding Abbott and her cohorts, maybe it’d help to have another caffeine cake and some water; too much time last night with The Rhetoric Book, seeking the secret of the Unreliable Narrator; still, there’s a disturbance in the Force, that makes all this feel…somehow, subversive.)

“Inspector Anselm, fancy meeting you here, in the Medina; we know you have him in one of Scotland Yard’s safe-houses, hand him over now and all concerned will fare better, well, except, of course, for the good Professor Egmont,” Sister Abbott, in an apparent nod to Islamic influences, wore a kirpan hung from a belt of amber beads, cinching the waist of an otherwise flowing robe.

(This is really not going anywhere, and I still haven’t plugged in the Prompt word, better check the dictionary, maybe get some inspiration,

al·ter·na·tive
/ôlˈtərnədiv/

adjective: (of one or more things) available as another possibility

noun: one of two or more available possibilities

…uh oh.)

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

It is hosted by Denise. (She requests we use the week’s prompt word and make the sentence count come out to Six.) (Hence, the name.)

This week we check in with our reflective detective, Ian Devereaux.

Previously, on the Case of the Missing Fig Leaf…

As with virtually all detective agencies, large and small, Ian Devereaux’s cases resolved into one of two categories: those successfully executed leaving a satisfied client or an unhappy client disappointed by the lack of the desired, (and paid for), outcome. To date, none had ended with a dead investigator.

Despite a beginning that included first class travel to Europe, the finest of hotels and interaction with lesser-known aspects of ancient European culture, Ian now found himself on the wrong side of an unmarked doorway, peeling paint-glued to an abandoned storefront, in the Whitechapel district of East London; where he now sat, bruised and battered, most of which merely physical trauma.

Feeling very much the 21st century version of a medieval Knight Marshal, Ian Devereaux stood between Anya Claireaux, easily the most capable woman he’d ever likely encounter and Sister Aclima, a member of a religious Order that, if he chose to believe her, was the best that some of the kids could do after the First Divorce.

Prompt word:

SEASON

“Here,” I held out the phone in Sister Aclima’s direction, the display blanked, only the built-in speaker to make it seem less like a loaded gun ready to go off and kill the wrong person; for the record, I had no idea who that was, as usual, my life, professional and otherwise, was filled with incomplete equations, like the blackboard of a sixth grade math class at 3:01 in June.

From her cellular perch, Anya addressed anyone in range of her voice, “I just gotta say, whatever you’ve done to mask your location and block the video feed, well, between you, me and your local confessor, it’s kinda turning me on, you know what I’m saying?”

Satisfied to have me hold the phone, a deacon with a non-smoking thurible appeasing nameless gods, Sister Aclima replied in a quiet, but not the, ‘Oh, that’s good, she’s not upset,’ kind of quiet, voice, “I seek information, unfortunately Mr. Devereaux has not provided anything useful, so allow me to tell you what I need, after which we can discuss payment, which, as Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, provides in one of the Bible’s genuinely useful insights, to everything there is a season;” I noticed two things about my captor: a wisp of dark brown hair flirting with her eyes, which, in turn, like emerald eyes in pagan idol, made me think of serpents and apples.

Anya laughed, Aclima frowned, and I decided that being a commercial fisherman had a lot going for it; then decided to laugh, figuring when it came time to pick sides, the devil I owe is better than the devil I don’t.

“That you would believe my interest is in your… baubles, tells me you need to get yourself a new staff down in whatever passes for opposition research at your convent or coven or whatever the correct term;” Anya’s laughter subsided, the phone’s display flickered into life, a view clearly from a skyscraper, the vast blue of Lake Michigan made incidental by the intelligence and insatiable Will that raged in her eyes, “Before I let you go, let’s plan to talk again, ’cause despite our differences in motivation, we’re both determined to find the esteemed Dr. Egmont’s Time Mechanism.”