Petals: Portals of Desire

By Jon Jacks

Round the back of the exclusive Carisian nightclub, you can briefly be as gorgeous as any model.
Inside, see, they have a Petals Portal, bathing everyone in an aura enhancing how you look to Movie Star levels. Obviously, the Petals Glamour seeping outside the club is weakened...
Which makes me wonder – just how amazing could I look if I could afford the entrance fee?
And I’d do anything to find out...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Feb 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005935412

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Petals: Portals of Desire

Jon Jacks

Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks

The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly

The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale

A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)

The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator

Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666

P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque

Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)

Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent

Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak

Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife

Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland

The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens – Cygnet Czarinas

Memesis – April Queen, May Fool – Sick Teen – Thrice Born – Self-Assembled Girl – Love Poison No. 13

Whatever happened to Cinderella’s Slipper? – AmeriChristmas – The Vitch’s Kat in Hollywoodland

Blood of Angels, Wings of Men – Patchwork Quest – The World Turns on A Card – Palace of Lace

The Wailing Ships – The Bad Samaritan – The 13th Month – The Silvered Mare – SpinDell

Swan Moon – The Unicorndoll – Lesser Nefertiti – My Shrieking Skin – Stone in Love

Font of All Lies – The Bared Heart – The Fairy Paintbox – An Angelic Alphabet

Forewarnings and Three Grapes – Death of a Fairytale Princess – The Incurable Caress

The Maid’s Caul – Nu’s Ark – A Disgraced Angel – Wake Me Up When it’s Christmas

God’s Toybox – Aurora Rising

Text copyright© 2021 Jon Jacks

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Chapter 1

There’s a small area around the back of the ultra-exclusive Carisian nightclub where, just for a few, all-too brief moments, you can be as gorgeously entrancing as any model.

Sure, it’s an area that’s not supposed to even exist.

People come close to fighting to be allowed that all too brief experience.

I’m quite sure the owners of the Carisian wouldn’t be exactly overjoyed to discover people (and not the right sort of people at that!) are benefiting for free from the influence of their Petals Portal.

Well, not that, for most of us, it’s exactly free anyway.

Naturally, the local gangs have each laid a claim to the area. Each giving way to other claims only after a series of violent struggles that have landed many of them in hospital.

Once they’ve gained mastery of the slot, the victorious gang will rope the area off, charging an entrance fee.

They control the people lining up, quite viciously too if needs be.

If they’ve got any sense, they also provide full-length mirrors.

If people are being charged to see what they look like in a Petals ‘orb of influence’, then you’ve got to make sure they can admire themselves.

Sure, they can take selfies: but the image is too small, too weirdly altered by perspective.

Glass lies scattered everywhere, crunching under your feet as you draw close to the wall, the remains of mirrors that have been smashed in previous gang wars.

If there’s a particularly long line of people waiting to access the areas, you’ll be forcibly herded on way too soon too.

Even so, once you’ve seen yourself as a Petals Beauty; well, it’s not easy returning to reality, is it?

*

I don’t know what level of Petals device is being used by the Carisian.

As it’s near enough an exclusive club, going by the entrance fees they charge, I would assume it’s one of the later models.

Not the original ‘Rose’ which, going by what I’d enviously read about in the magazines, was gobsmackingly amazing enough when it was first launched.

It’s got to be a ‘Lily’, or maybe even a ‘Magnolia’, right?

Are the effects stronger the closer you stand next to it?

I can’t see how that would be possible, going by how absolutely amazing everyone looks when they stand by the outside wall.

It’s a transformation I wouldn’t believe possible.

An ordinary looking guy suddenly looks like he should be in the movies.

An average girl takes on all the glamour of a Vogue cover.

Even your clothes, your shoes; somehow, in the ‘aura’ (as Petals marketing sometimes describes it), they look like they must