An A-Z Story - I

Incredibly, we're approaching the halfway point of the Challenge. Hope everyone's still feeling inspired!

My theme is as follows: each day I will ask for words beginning with that day's letter, which I will randomly select five from to use in a sentence in an ongoing story. That sentence will be posted the next day when I'll ask for words for the next letter. So my Z sentence will appear on May 1st.

Thank you for the impressive selection of H words yesterday, 223 in all. Here are the five which I had to integrate into my story:

Headache (suggested by Scribbles From Jenn)
Harried (suggested by Elizabeth Seckman)
Horrendous (suggested by Mel)
Hilarious (suggested by Jean Davis)
Hemp (suggested by lostinsidethecovers)

So now we have:


Angels had always had a certain ambiguity, being both human and divine, reflected Acatour with an acute sense of malaise as he looked down on the arable fields of medieval England. A bird flew past making a belligerent shriek, unnerved it seemed by a boggart; Acatour descended, thinking it would take a brainiac like him to unravel the poor soul’s beginnings and why it had not reached Heaven.
     York Cathedral hove into view, shrouded in wooden scaffold as part of the local bishop’s campaign of restoration; but before he could challenge a carpenter over whether any of his colleagues had fallen to their doom, his presence was announced by the crawdad he’d eaten back in 20th century New Orleans repeating on him. He wiped dribble from his chin as the remains of the crustacean narrowly missed the workmen to land in the dew of the graveyard, berating himself for his debauched and unangelic behaviour the previous night; why did that dame have to desert him? The effervescent Ella had always been eager for exciting adventures, but when he’d asked her to accompany him on this esoteric time travel mission, she’d called him a crazy drunk and left.
     It did sound rather fabulous, in the true sense of the word, he thought to himself as he descended further before landing on an empty area of scaffold, all the better for making himself visible; next to him was some viscous fluid, making him think that any fall from this precarious structure would surely be a fluke. Stepping away from the gel-like substance, he felt something watching him and turned to see a Gardengoyle on the wall next to a carved bunch of grapes, which caused the gregarious sounds of the workmen to die away as two thoughts rang clearly in his head: what was it doing here, and did he detect guilt in the creature’s eyes?
     That horrendous stare was starting to give Acatour a headache when a workman with a harried expression shimmied up onto the platform via a hemp rope, his arrival causing an apparently hilarious reaction in the Gardengoyle.

I await your inventive I words! You can offer as many as you like, and they can be as obscure and outlandish as you like (feel free to use a dictionary for inspiration). The more words you suggest, the more chance you have of one being picked. It doesn't matter if you suggest the same word as someone else (as I know not everyone always has time to read all the comments); each will count as its own entry.

A couple of people asked yesterday what I planned to do with the story after A-Z has finished. Well, it will probably be a bit short to publish, but I really like Acatour and I'd like to feature him in more stories. I like the idea of a slightly cynical, hard-bitten angel, travelling through history solving crimes, who has very human foibles like alcohol and women. He's probably a renegade from heaven, a maverick angel who wants to do things on his own terms. And he wouldn't have materialised without all your help, so thank you!