500 words a day

828 words - 22nd august 2009

Since last night he hadn’t dared to look out the back. Something had gone dreadfully wrong, he knew that. The generator had never made that kind of noise before and he had never been unconscious during or after the process before. He didn’t know exactly how long he was out but when he woke up it was 4.00 a.m. and he knew he’d started the experiment around 10.0 last night. The smell was the most worrying thing. He could smell sulphur and he could also feel an intense heat from behind the house. It was safe to some extent because he’d deliberately chosen this remote location. Unless something catastrophic had happened no one should have noticed what he’d done, yet. It was all about creating gold, a fool’s errand some might say but in the last few weeks he’d got incredibly close. Last month he managed to create something which was so close, from just a load of junk he’d thrown in, plus some wood, some rocks and pebbles and an almost impossibly complicated mixture of chemicals. He’d produced something about the size of a large conker, which had the rough appearance of gold, felt as smooth as gold, was the right kind of weight and density, but when he tested it, wasn’t quite right. He knew he would get their soon though. Since he’d found that old book, he’d made amazing progress. He needed to look out the back now though to se what had happened.





The way his lab worked was that all the processing took place in the large warehouse area where he kept all his materials and chemicals and various odd substances like toads tongues and otters tails, stuff like that, he had a huge vat, roughly the size of a small swimming pool which he used to mix and boil or cool or whatever he needed to do. His most recent process produced amazing heat and a load of waste product, so he needed a drain. He couldn’t get anything official obviously so he had to create a tunnel, under the vat which led out the back deep into the ground and at least two miles away from his property towards an old forest that as far as he knew, wasn’t owned by anyone and wouldn’t come to too much harm If it did, no one would know it was him, he figured, as he was so far away; that and the fact that his property just looked like an old cottage. All the lab and the warehouse and anything that vaguely resembled experimental or industrial equipment was hidden underground too. So he was safe, whatever happened, or so he thought. This time though, there had been such a tremendous build up of heat and he remembered noticing the pressure gauge reaching extremely dangerous levels before he blacked out, so he was a little wary of what the hell had been ejected down his makeshift sewer.





Before checking that though he had to find out f it had worked. He approached the vat carefully as it still felt warm and he wasn’t that keen on passing out again. He should have put on a mask but he was too excited. Despite his concerns he was very confident that he might have done it this time. Those incantations which he’d been trying to perfect for 3 years now, he was sure he’d got them right  - it was all about pronunciation and the time he’d spent researching old Norse dialects should have paid off.  He grabbed hold of the tongs, they were huge three feet long and he used them to reach down into the bottom of the now drained vat to feel around. He could see something down there, the usual size, but couldn’t tell until he lifted it out, how close it was. When he got it back to the table under the light he could see it was gold in colour and had the feel and weight he hoped for. Within minutes he’d run the tests and eureka! He’d actually done it. He’d created gold from rocks and rubbish!





Now he knew he could face the mess out the back. Whatever he’d done he’d pay to have it sorted out, he’d have enough money to pay off any snoopers or government people who might try and shut him down.


He opened the back door to see if there were any visible sign of what had happened. He nearly fainted again when he saw the river of orange lava flowing slowly towards the forest. The field which had been lush and green and flat was deeply scoured and melted away into an enormous trench, filled with molten lava. It was moving slowly but had been going al night he guessed. Within an hour or two it would reach the forest and it would be up in flames, hardly something that would go unnoticed and hardly something he could hide or cover up.








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Steve Wybourn





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