The Story Within the Story

Falling is long. Really long.

The original final draft clocked in at a little over 250,000 words. After the last major rewrite, the publication draft you can now download for your reading pleasure contains 264,088 words, and that doesn’t include all the bonus material. No wonder nobody wants to bloody read it.

Now, that doesn’t mean I added stuff rather than (as Stephen King famously espouses) cutting by at least 10 percent of the word count. It’s just a very different beast from the original version with a lot of different material, and a less disciplined version of the same thing might be closer to 300,000. So I was still very ruthless and economical.

But it’s one of the reasons I decided to self publish instead of sending it to publishers. Actually that’s completely self aggrandising – I did send it to a couple of publishers and none of them wanted it.

However, I also knew no publisher in this country and few anywhere else would invest in a novel in a niche genre from an unknown writer containing over a quarter of a million words.

But years before I started to think like a business person, when I was still approaching it like an artiste amusing myself (as all novels should be in the beginning) I realised one of the greatest joys of writing a big story was the opportunity to sneak self-enclosed short stories into it.

You have to be careful doing it. If something is too self contained and complete it can be removed without any detriment to the rest of the book, and if doesn’t add anything to the narrative or drive the story forward, there’s even less reason for it to be there.

You also run the risk of telling too much story (the femme fatale visiting the apartment in the dead of night, having the cab drop her around the corner, going to an all-night market to buy cigarettes, sending a text, slipping upstairs and lightly rapping on the door of apartment 2B where a shadowy figure takes her hand and leads her inside furtively) to cover something that can be conveyed in a single phrase or sentence (the cops realise later the femme fatale knew the killer because they were having an affair).

The biggest example of it in Falling is something I kept changing my mind about. It’s the sequence when Tim, the parapsychologist, goes to a commercial farm property in Sydney’s far west to investigate the paranormal phenomena that’s been reported there.

I loved it as a three act short story from day one and had only really included one motif that connected it to the rest of the novel, so I agonised for ages about whether to keep it. In the end I did more work stitching it to the larger plot and I’m glad it stayed.

Among the other examples of stories within stories in Falling, one of my favourites is the story about the poltergeist at a country NSW farm, an account Vicki is reading from a research paper, and I present it here in its entirety for your consideration

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…during the three months previous to the research, the family reported a series of unexplained happenings.

One evening, Mrs Dowling prepared a sink full of hot water to wash the dinner dishes. She was interrupted by a short phone call, and returned to find the sink filled with blood, confirmed by Orange Base Hospital to be type A+ blood from a routine bout of menstruation. Mrs Dowling and her daughters, 24-year-old Sheree and 15-year-old Natalie, all matched the sample following subsequent testing.

During dinner on several occasions, cook books would suddenly burst from a shelf in the kitchen and launch across the room, damaging crockery on the table and opposite bench. In another phenomenon that always occurred late at night, water and gas pipes in the walls near the main bathroom would vibrate, eventually building to a level where they’d wake the entire household. Inspections by plumbers didn’t reveal anything unusual.

Realising they were dealing with a poltergeist, the research team turned special attention to Natalie, the youngest of the three children and in the middle stages of puberty. The phenomena continued, giving the researchers plenty of material but no clues as to their cause, becoming more frequent and varied as time passed.

Loud, sudden knocks were heard late at night on the walls in the hallway and entry of the house. In front of seven witnesses, the laundry door refused to stay open. When opened over thirty times by those present it simply swung shut again. Kitchen appliances started up at all hours of the day and night, sometimes when they were stored in cupboards and not plugged in.

On one occasion, Mrs Dowling went to her pantry and was assailed by the smell of rotten and stale foodstuffs. Even though the pantry was stocked every week with preserved food, every item was spoiled, the inside of the pantry unbearably hot.

The appearance of blood was a harmless though frightening occurrence around the household and property, and each time it matched that of the women of the family. Tests showed it was occasionally ordinary blood, but mostly it contained secretions consistent with menstrual blood.

It was found smeared across the bedroom and bathroom walls, produced from taps and showers (both the household and the makeshift water tank shower at the western end of the property), in bottles left for collection by the milkman, even dribbling from the back of the living room TV set.

The most inexplicable instance was reported and photographed by Mr Dowling, who arrived at one of the work sheds at the back boundary of the property early one morning.

Beneath the fluorescent tube that lit the eastern wall hung a portrait of Christ, an old family trinket. The picture was slowly seeping blood from the images of the hands and forehead, and had obviously been doing so for a long time, having spilled over the frame and onto the shelves and bench to form a clotted pool below.

The blood was again found to match the womens’ menstrual cycles, and this time tiny strands were found by researchers in the lab to be pubic hair. According to family members, Mr Dowling and several casual farm workers were the only ones ever in or around the shed.

After several fascinating and frustrating days of study and observation, the research team decided to examine the lifestyle and habits of each family member through detached observation and interviews.

The key was found to lay with Natalie. Without her parents’ knowledge, Natalie had become sexually active at the same time the phenomena first appeared. After careful and thorough analysis of her movements and habits over the previous weeks, the source of each phenomenon was revealed.

Every event that occurred throughout the day on weekdays, when Natalie and 18-year-old brother Mark were at school in Gilgandra, was passive and harmless, seeming to indicate the source was absent.

As with most families, the dinner table was the focus of the home social life, and just one of the many topics of conversation was a local boy on whom Natalie had developed a teenaged crush. Why the shelf of cookbooks exhibited the most concentrated of the phenomena was never ascertained, but that particular phenomena occurred only during mealtimes.

During confidential discussion with Natalie alone, she admitted she’d been at a party with school friends the night the phenomena began and lost her virginity to 17-year-old local Danny Kemp.

She also admitted to having started masturbating, but recounted only having done so late at night when she was sure her family wouldn’t hear. Consultation with chronologies confirmed the disturbances with the pipes had occurred at these times. It was subsequently realised the pipes lay in the wall between Natalie’s bedroom and the main bathroom.

The researchers’ findings and conclusions were met with controversy and skepticism at Charles Sturt University and weren’t widely publicised. The researchers were criticised for drawing inconclusive theories from abundant but meaningless evidence. If it were t
rue, they argued, why don’t poltergeists appear in every household in the world when a teenager first becomes sexually active?

The research team, more to save face than prove their point by this stage, theorised that Natalie had become charged with strong but dormant emotions of fear following a fall from a horse that hospitalised her at age 11, a steel pin in her ankle the result. The deep-seated psychology involved wasn’t the research team’s area of expertise, and when follow up psychological analysis revealed no latent PTSD symptoms in Natalie because of the accident, the findings were further ridiculed and largely forgotten.

The original conclusion had been that becoming sexually active had awakened the energy in the girl’s mind to influence her physical proximity. The connections were too obvious; during acts of self arousal such as masturbation, heart rate increases, the social conditioning created by the mind collapses, imagination and emotion spark to extraordinary levels of activity, and the mental condition is ideal for parapsychological kinetic energy.

Fuelled by the exciting emotions of having become sexually aware of herself, the girl became an unequalled source of mental energy…