Teaser 18(i), colonnaded passage – for Rohan Quine’s “The Beasts of Electra Drive”

In the wide pane ahead of him, his own reflected face hangs indistinctly against the backdrop of an urban plaza of fountains and well-heeled vegetation, bounded by the high angles and curves of three glass buildings standing sharp against the dusk sky—one red, one green and one blue. Falling night reveals bright spaces sealed off on many storeys behind these façades. A piano cased in shiny hard ebonite stands high and tight upon the hot marble floor of a lobby, locked shut, under blue glass and silent. A chandelier hangs in the atrium above it, like the seed-head of a giant dandelion. Across the plaza is a space of electric beauty, empty of people, where a light-machine fires strobing flashes through a crisp white space.

Seeping into this, the ease of Evelyn flickers like a toy-town of candle-flame swaying in the echo of her laughter down the glass-and-metal corridors. Her mirth bubbles up from her code, ripples out of Jaymi’s screen, curls around him and pulls him through this whole glazed complex. And fanning out behind her, in her wake, softer things arise: high inside the green building, banks of factory shelves are home to myriads of lettuces, drinking in moisture and breathing all night with a huge susurration in black-green darkness; somewhere in the blue building, circular portraits climb up a stairwell where plaster heads stare out of shell-shaped panels; and underneath the red building, high upon a wall, sprouts an antique horse’s head with tragic blazing eyes.

Evelyn’s laugh runs ahead, pushing out an endless colonnaded passage lined in candles held aloft by disembodied hands whose fingers beckon Jaymi onward. This passageway of candle-light snakes up and swoops down and loops the loop—a tunnel like a dance through a coloured space of night that presses in from above and from below on every side.

For more about "The Beasts of Electra Drive" by Rohan Quine, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/the-beasts-of-electra-drive/

For some great reviews of it, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-beasts-of-electra-drive-reviews-media/

To watch any of the 120 complete mini-chapters of the novel’s video-book format (for which this little video snippet here is just a teaser), see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-b-e-d-video-book/the-beasts-of-electra-drive-part-ii-video-book/

For links to all of these short teasers, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-b-e-d-video-book/short-teasers-for-the-beasts-of-electra-drive-video-book/

And to pick it up from whichever retailer you may prefer, the retailers’ links for the audiobook are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-beasts-of-electra-drive-novel-audiobook/

and for the paperback are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-beasts-of-electra-drive-novel-paperback/

and for the ebook at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-beasts-of-electra-drive-novel-ebook/