39th Six Sentence Sunday, a Meeting in the Shed

From The Falstaff Vampire Files, Kristin Marlowe meets a strange man, emerging from what had seemed to be an empty crate in the shed beind her ex-lover's house. The huge, deep-voiced man has an unusually hypnotic effect on her. Rather than run, she stays to hear him say:

"Fair mistress, what name shall I call you?" The exotic flavor of the words and his deep rumbling voice somehow didn’t fit with a crate in a garage, yet he seemed perfectly at home.

"I'm Kristin," I managed to say, "and you are?"

He cleared his throat. "Jack Falstaff with my familiars, John with my brothers and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe. At your service, my lady."

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38th Six Sentence Sunday - an unlikely predator

Searching the shed behind Hal's house for a stolen item, Kristin finds herself confronting a man who suddenly rears up out of a crate she had thought empty. Large and rumpled with a white beard and drinker's red cheeks and nose, yet the man is eerily poised and confident,

No shaking from alcohol withdrawal as some drinkers have on arising. No, he was totally still, his eyes sharp and piercing as the eyes of a hawk, but with a most unhawk-like twinkle.

Turn and run, I thought, But I stood frozen, not so much terrified as stunned, like a small mammal suddenly confronted with a large snake.

"You can't be a dream. It's dusk and I'm awake," the man said.

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37th Six Sentence Sunday - Arising at Dusk...With Coughing

From The Falstaff Vampire Files. Kristin Marlowe watches in shock as the crate in the deserted shed...opens and an old man emerges.

He was huge. Tall and broad, with unruly white hair and beard, though his face seemed startlingly pale when paired with the reddened cheeks and nose of a serious drinker. He wore an ancient, old-fashioned long underwear shirt that might have been World War II army surplus. He gave one last wracking cough, then took a deep breath and turned to regard me with eyes that were bleary, but bright blue, not bloodshot.

"A vision of womanliness," he said in a thick, English accent. Even with all my Public Television viewing, I couldn't place its location in the British Isles.

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36th Six Sentence Sunday - The Coffin...Well, the Crate, Opens...

Back in September I posted some sentences from Chapter 1 of The Falstaff Vampire Files where psychologist, Kristin Marlowe, went to her cheating ex-lover's house to retrieve an irreplaceable item he stole. She was advised to stay out of the shed:

The shed in the back yard was the very last remotely possible hiding place. I went down the hall bathed in red light of the sunset. A few minutes later I was standing in the shed under the glare of the electric light bulb, watching the lid rise on a crate that should have been empty.

A pudgy hand, followed by a large, rounded arm appeared in the gap and pushed the lid up. The rest of the man followed it, raising the lid until it rested against the wall. He sat up, still coughing, as I watched, frozen in shock.

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