|
Monday, September 14, 2009
 |
Category: Blogging
So, Ben Eads persuaded me to host this.
The basic premise is that I start off the proceedings with this 275-word fragment and everyone else piles in with their take on where it goes. The rules, as stolen from Ben, are as follows:
1. To ensure as many people as possible can contribute, YOU MUST FIRST ADD A COMMENT IN THIS BLOG POST ITSELF RESERVING YOUR SPOT! This is to ensure only one person is working on the next installment of this story at a time. I have removed "Require approval before comments are posted" to ensure everyone is able to reserve their spot. After you have reserved your spot, you have five days to contribute by messaging me your installment.
2. Again, to ensure as many people as possible can join in, the word count limit is around 275 words. Yes, you may go over this a little if you absolutely have to. But, around 275 is the limit.
3. When the story is done, everyone gets to vote on the title.
4. Have fun!
And 5. An extra wrinkle I've added in is that the story alternates between description and dialogue segments. I've done an easy one and went for description in the first part. The next part will have mostly dialogue. If you can manage completely dialogue, great, but it's not a concrete requirement.
And that should be about it. Anyone feels the need, post a comment and get stuck in. Here's the first part:
Untitled by William Couper
Here I am, sitting on the side of the canal, the cold gripping at me and the wind trying to force its unwanted fingers inside my shirt. I’m aware of the chill, but I can’t bring myself to react.
The water below me glitters grey, reflecting the low overcast and the feeling in my chest and gut. I want to vomit, but can’t. I want to scream, but the sound I want to create isn’t within me anymore. Like so much else, it’s been taken from me, sucked away by a wild gale I don’t understand and torn apart, never to be recreated.
It’s out there. I can feel it slinking through the bushes, watching me in my misery and feeding on the horror and revulsion I felt for myself. It’s just the beginning of what it wants from me.
If only it wanted to kill me – that would be something I could understand. It doesn’t want my death, or to feed on my burst corpse. Those would deprive it of something. Something even more fundamental than simply the ending of my life.
A week ago I had a normal life. Perhaps I wasn’t happy, but I understood what was happening and I had friends and family. Thinking about it is like looking at it through the lens of a camera: it’s not mine and never was.
There’s no great mystery about when it started. Harry came up to me while I was working on this old car and he started chattering like I’d never heard him. Normally it was a task to get two words out of him, but that day he was eager to talk.
Part two by Chris Bartholomew:
"Bill, did you see it? I mean DID YOU SEE IT? That monster, that thing, we're all done for I tell you, done for."
"Wait a second Harry; let me get this straight, you're buying into the monster thing? I think more along the lines of the government and a virus that's going to get us Harry, not a monster in the night."
"Hold on a sec now Bill. I saw that thing and you and no one else are gonna say I didn't. It was about thirteen feet tall, black, and it lives in the canal. Always has, always will, no one ever got rid of it did they? No, it's out there watching for a time when it can get its claws around your neck and teeth into your brain. Oh, it's there alright."
"Harry, ever actually seen it? I don't mean imagined it, or seen something dark in a corner, but really man, ever really seen a monster up close? Anywhere? You are talking out of nightmares, not reality. The government would love for you to believe there's something in the canal, it'll keep you from working, and you can't fish, because of the paralyzing fear. Get hold of yourself."
Part three by Shells:
“No, Bill, I know I saw that thing. The government may try things at times but this was for real.” Harry paced, hanging his head down, droplets of sweat forming on his forehead.
“Listen, you need to take a break from things. You’re starting to see delusions, probably from being overworked.” Harry took a wrench and tweaked something on the car.
Harry shook his head. He looked over at Bill’s house and back at Bill.
“No, we need to get out of here. I mean get out of here.” Harry started to shake.
Bill looked up from the car.
“Listen, do you want me to come with you to see it?” Bill was certain that would ease Harry’s mind.
“No, I want you, I want you to tell everyone about it. They need to get out of here.” Harry was now looking everywhere; his eyes darting back and forth. Bill placed his hand on Harry’s shoulder.
“You need to calm down. Now if this thing is real and I mean if, we should try and plan this out. You know, what we should do.” Bill’s eyes softened as he tried to calm Harry down. Harry nodded.
“Now you said this monster was large? Well, first you need to show me it so we have an idea on what to do. Then we can move forward, sound okay?” Bill waited on Harry to respond. He watched as Harry calmed down for a moment, then started to pace around the car, his hands on his head.
“It was so large, Bill, it was so large.” Bill’s words were getting jumbled.
Part four by Ben Eads
"Okay, now that's a start... it's large. We'll have to mind that. " Harry grasped Bill's massive shoulders and shook him like a rag-doll.
"It has Annabelle, Bill. It has her!" Like a brutal storm changing behavior so was the sudden crippling of the man Bill once knew as Harry.
"It has my baby, Bill... please help me?" He managed through chest heaving sobs. Bill could swear he heard Harry's tear drops on the concrete floor. Bill's ears picked something else up traveling through the wind. It was a child's voice. Daddy!
"Oh my, God." Bill's jaw went slack.
"All last night... it's coming from the canal. I don't know what-"
"Have you called the police?" Harry stared at Bill as if he fell out of an elephant's ass. Bill realized why.
"Alright. Let's walk and talk, okay?" Harry nodded. Bill motioned at his co-worker, signaling his departure. They headed for Bill's house.
"When did Annabelle go missing?"
Harry talked and Bill listened. Harry told him about the sounds last night, and how terrified his wife was. He tried to picture the gale blowing the front door down, a form with a phosphorescent glow, seeking, until it found what it came for. A train off its tracks, destroying everything in its path. Why?
They crossed the street and stood in Bill's front yard. Like a magnet, they were pulled to the canal beyond. What Bill thought at first was early fall in the air spun about them, it's icy tendrils feeling for sweet spots of flesh. Even the wind served the malevolence that held sway over the town from the dark recesses by the canal. A place his father described being not of this world. A big hole in the ground-a vast maw into the oldest, darkest depths of earth's secrets. That was their destination.
Part Five by Cairol Dawson
They approached their earthly decent into the canal as if beckoned by some evil twill, twisting beyond their imaginable comprehension. Enveloped in darkness the stench became apparent and repulsive, tearing at their human senses. They covered their mouths immediately with their shirttails, gagging and trying to hold the involuntary hurls back.
“Daddy, daddy, I want my daddy,” Annabelle screamed and cried in one long breath followed by a deafening silence. Harry looked at Bill then almost collapsed as they walked forward in the direction of her voice. Her blood soaked yellow cotton pajamas lie on the muddy floor of the canal. Harry fell to his knees on the verge of emotional collapse when a hissing noise commenced. It seemed on them, like a surround sound. No way to tell where it came from.
“Harry we have to go, get up Harry, now,” Bill desperately pleaded. Something was coming down the canal from both ends. The hissing began again only this time it resembled the sound of beetle wings make, or locust. They were trapped. They pushed their way down the side of the canal descending further out onto the edge of an abyss. Above them a bat laden cavern hovering a bottomless hole. They stood paralyzed on the edge fighting a smell so intrusive they could barely see through the tears.
“Daddy? Is that you?”
Harry heard her voice coming at him in every direction. “Annabelle? Daddy’s here honey. Over here.” Harry leaned forward but when he did, she lunged at him and Bill pulled him back in time. Harry stood in awe of his little girl wearing a grimaced torn face of torment and death.
Part Six by Stephen W. Roberts
Harry quickly stripped his shirt from his body and scooped up his blood stained little girl, wrapping her tattered body in warmth and preservation. He couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing amongst this beast, nor how such a small girl survived such mass danger, though Annabelle seemed to shiver less and less by the moment as he squeezed her tightly. Perhaps it was his smell upon the shirt that seemed to somehow smother the stench or death.
“Harry, we must go now.” Bill said, scanning the area for oncoming danger. “Harry, Now!”
As if trapped within a trance as he held Annabelle, Harry stroked her blood-stained blonde hair and whispered words of comfort to her as she buried her face in his chest. Though he understood Bill’s urgency, it took Harry a moment before he was jerked back into consciousness with Bill’s plea.
“Harry, let’s go now.” Bill demanded, gesturing for Harry to follow.
Both men burst into a sprint toward the way they came, though with some quick thinking Bill tugged Harry as he jumped behind some rocks as the edge of the chasm. He was frightened by the echoing screech of the beast that made this hollow abyss, which grew louder by the second like an approaching freight train at top speed.
“Whisper.” Bill said, raising a finger to his lips.
The concept suddenly seemed stupid to Bill what with the growing sound of death itself, steadily approaching and sniffing out its next meal.
“Bill, what now, what do we do now?”
“Just stay with your little girl, I’m taking a look.”
Bill peered over the large rocks as to catch a glimpse of the oncoming beast, though the sight of what laid before him was much more than he ever anticipated.
18:02
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|