Writer's Journal

(this is an attempt at writing something that is simultaneously believable and vile.  I think I succeeded, for certain values.  It probably needs more description.)

It took him a while to work up to real villainy.

He started by taking scissors with him on the bus, and clipping stranger’s hair and putting tears in their clothing. He was fast enough to avoid being detected. As soon as he could take a clipping from a stranger’s hair in the middle of a crowded bus without being seen, he felt he was ready for the next level.

Cruelty to animals was laughably easy. His neighbors never suspected that he was stuffing their pets down into the storm sewer. He sat on his porch and drank a cup of coffee as they combed the neighborhood for their missing animals.

“Have you seen Fluffy? Persian cat, about yay-big?

He thought for a moment, began to shake his head and then acted as if a revelation hit him, and pointed off down the street:

“I think I saw her over that way.”

He felt a twinge when he put a child in the storm sewer, chloroforming him and stuffing him down. But, when he tried to think of why this should be, why it should make him uncomfortable, why he should care…there was nothing there.

He couldn’t think of why it should bother him at all.

Realizing what he had done, he began on all the stages he had planned to happen before murder. He began robbing people walking alone, holding them at knife-point and taking their wallets. He didn’t spend a cent, though.

Burn the money.

Burn the photographs.

Leave the wallet in the ditch.

Sometimes, he would chloroform someone for the hell of it, leaving them sprawled out on a lawn or park bench. Sometimes he would snip their hair, sometimes he would take their wallet. Sometimes he wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

He began working on his masterstroke.

For a start, he began to sew a unique mask. Something to hide his identity more than the anonymity of the crowd would give him. He kept it in his glovebox and would sometimes work on it during his lunch breaks, if he wasn’t feeling hungry.

He began gathering raw materials. Cleaning supplies. Fireworks. Remotes from radioshack.

He chose a day, and called in sick.

The bank didn’t suspect anything, and everyone was shocked when he shot three hostages at random, without a second thought. They cooperated after that, filling up a large sack with money for him and sending him on his way.

That’s when he hit the power button on the device in his pocket, setting off his bombs.

The explosions weren’t the real danger: he’d built the bombs so that the charges would break the two containers inside: one of bleach, one of ammonia, in large enough quantities that the resulting cloud of ammonia would make people ill.

In the confusion, he escaped with most of his money.

He took the money, and sat on it for a while, letting the trail go cold. He burnt some, and gave the lion’s share to an orphanage in an anonymous donation.

Then he waited.

And waited.

And watched as they built a new wing.

Then, one evening he took a gas can and some chains and secured the building except for one door, and doused the bottom floor with gasoline. He lit it aflame, and sat on the back hood of his car, drinking a bottle of Old Crow and watching as the orphanage went up in flames. When the fire department got there and tried to put out the gasoline fire with water, he laughed.

That was when the police decided to put him in cuffs.

He confessed to everything, and suppressed a grin at their looks of horror and disgust.

“Why? Why would you do those things?”

He blinked twice, and tried to come up with an answer. When none came to him, he just smiled and shrugged.

The Sheriff stood by the side of the flooded quarry, watching as the divers came up, reporting to the deputy that waited by the side of the hole.

Danvers looked up at the sheriff and shook his head.

They’d found the boy’s truck. It had had an open door, but the boy, himself was nowhere to be found. Not at home, not at his girlfriend’s, nowhere.

The divers had been combing through the quarry for signs of him for six hours, now. The bottom of the hole was riddled with caves that were the reason it was filled with water. The mining company had blasted through into a network of caverns filled with brackish muck that had welled up from god knows how deep.

The Sheriff got off of the bumper of his car, and stretched his bad leg.

He waved Danvers on up, and watched as the man edged along the sheer face of the quarry, upward.

When the younger man reached him, the Sheriff pulled off his aviators, and looked him in the eye.

“Danvers, you tell the Divers to pack it on up. I don’t know where he is, but that boy won’t be found down in that hole. Must’ve abandoned his truck and run off.”

Danvers nodded, and headed back down into the quarry.

“You really believe that?” a voice asked from behind the sheriff.

He turned, and looked at the intruder.

Deputy Connors was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, with a canvass jacket that bulged with the shape of his gun on his left breast.

“I thought you’d be lurking around,” the Sheriff said, “How’ve you been?”

“Decent. I’ve been looking into a few things. Investigating.”

The Sheriff looked over at him with serious eyes wreathed in wrinkles.

“You never learned when to leave it alone, or ask for help, did you? If you have, we might have a place for you.”

“Just the opposite. I’ve been discovering things, learning more and more. Been coming here every night to think, and I think I know what happened to your boy.”

The Sheriff slipped his glasses back on.

“Proceed.”

“I was sitting on that log over there, just opposite the road. I like the look of the moon on the water. Sometimes, it’s bright enough to see by. Sometimes, I can see fish down in the quarry.”

“Quarry ain’t got no fish.”

“Pardon me, but it sure as hell does, Sheriff.”

The Sheriff’s mouth quirked, but he didn’t say anything.

“So, last night, this Ford truck…an old one…eighties, I’d bet…barrels off the highway over there, ramps up the hill, and shoots off at an angle–” Connors pointed an arc across the giant hole “–before hitting the water, and beginning to sink.”

Connors stepped back a few steps, until he could see the route Danvers took down to the side of the hole.

“I saw the boy struggling, trying to get out, and I began to head down to the hole. I edged along the side of the quarry, facing out.”

Connors looked back towards the Sheriff.

“He got out of the truck just fine, Sheriff.”

“So what happened to him?”

“I was going to help him out, but he never made it close enough to the side of the hole. He never got out of the water. There was this…thing…this giant fish.”

Connors looked down at his feet, a manic light in his eyes.

“It was like a catfish, but all pale and milky-eyed. Must’ve been ten feet long. It came up from below and swallowed him whole, before swimming back down.”

“Bullshit,” the Sheriff declared, “there aren’t any fish in that hole, and we would’ve seen something that big.”

“I remember hearing about this quarry, Sheriff. No one knows where the water comes from, it wells up from way down deep. Why shouldn’t there be fish in those rivers? Just because they’ve never seen the light of day doesn’t mean they aren’t down there, miles and miles below our feet.

“Then, one day, some dynamite blows the roof off one of those rivers…well, it makes sense that something would swim up, at some point.”

“Well, what am I supposed to put on the death certificate? ‘Eaten by catfish from hell?’”

Connors shook his head.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you, Sheriff. Don’t you have a whole stack of forms with ‘missing, presumed dead’ already printed on them?”

More exposition.  Of a sort.

Cicatriz Episode 3×04

For your reading pleasure(?)

Cicatriz Episode 3×03

He was downwind of the road, crouched at the top of a ridge, watching the pack of berserkers run down the highway.  There had to be almost a dozen, running between the cars, bounding onto and across the hoods of abandoned cars.

Their manic laugher was audible, even up here.  Half giggling, half panting.

The man shivered and lay his head down.

He kept his ears pealed, listening for sounds of them doubling back.  When it seemed like they hadn’t, he went down the side of the ridge and began to search the cars.  He walked away with a pack of cigarettes in his pocket, five beers, a bottle of water, and a bag of chips.

Not many people scavenged along the interstates.  They all fed from and fed into the cities, which were giant death traps.  But he’d worked out a system.

He opened the trunk of every car he’d looted, until he found one with an internal latch to pull, and just in time, because the man soon heard distant laughter.  He climbed in the trunk and closed it around him before opening one of the beers.

It wasn’t until morning that he discovered that the latch was broken, and wouldn’t let him out.

Well, here’s the new one.  A little short, and a little late, but I like to think that certain things begin to become clearer–or at least more compelling–in this episode.

Cicatriz Episode 3×02

Also, Jave was correct in the comment on the backmatter for the last bit.  The quote does come from Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger.  The reason for that should be made clear in this chapter.

I uploaded these the past two fridays:

Acting as a Wave 1

Acting as a Wave 2

Now, I present the third and final installment of the interlude:

Acting as a Wave 3

I’m going out of town next Thursday, but I will do my damndest to have Cicatriz 3×01 up for your reading enjoyment.

(Not quite where I want it to be.  This might be a bit more interesting if the characters were more concrete.  Unfortunately, I didn’t.  I need to remember that for the future.)

The earth shook as if in the grip of a seizure. Something vast and living was moving down beneath the ground.

The seven insurgents sought refuge under a theatre marquee, as they watched a pair of horse-sized insects dogfight with an F-15 high above. The giant bugs had heads that terminated in a mass of tendrils and cilia; every now and then, they would get close enough to the jet and vomit forth a stream of white fluid that scoured the fuselage.

The insurgents—because it’s impossible to be an army with no command—waited. The sound of cracking asphalt and collapsing buildings told them that the burrower was coming to the surface.

One of their number came forward, and raised up the RPG launcher that he’d been carrying for this purpose. Originally, he’d had eight shots. Now, a mere three remained.

The burrower burst from the ground, three blocks away, like a living skyscraper. Its great, dark bulk reared up into the sky, and it snatched at the jet with its tentacular head, only managing to snare and devour one of the insects.

It had four rows of jointed legs, placed equidistant around its body, and the white, basic substance that the bugs vomited dripped from its head.

“Now!” the lieutenant shouted.

The soldier pulled the trigger, and the grenade streaked toward the burrower, striking it in the gap between two plates. A gout of black blood spurted from the wound, the oily substance hissing and burning when it struck concrete.

Immediately, the thing began to withdraw, pulling back underground. It rotated as it descended, spreading its blood in a ring around the opening of the hole, melting the asphalt, concrete, metal and plastic into a plug.

The insurgents breathed a sigh of relief, and their lieutenant growled.

“Stay on your toes. We aren’t in Long Island, yet.”

No reliable internet access, lately.  So…

Acting as a Wave 2

Fun little pulp story I’ve been tinkering with a bit.  It’ll make a fine interlude while I’m working on Cicatriz 3×0

Acting as a Wave 1