Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28266772-20161108172818/@comment-28060931-20161115173917

Some part of him knew that everything was deeply wrong with the place and as he rolled across the great and terrible dam and away from the monstrous Celú he looked out towards the shimmering waters and felt almost sick at the thought of the village that had been drowned below the waves.

But he would find no reprieve across that road. Yes, the tarmac moved beneath him and the wheels turned but his mind was disconnected and his experience of time shattered. The road was long and crowded by an impenetrable and oblique forest and there were bollards that flashed past his window in a rhythmic beat while the roadside barriers slithered by at high speeds like metallic ribbon. There were no other cars nor did the road ever split or merge with another and as Mitch drove onwards he became increasingly panicked. The rising percussion of the roadside details that whooshed past his window were suffocating(Although not required, I would out a comma here. The first clause connects to the second with the and, while the second connects two words in the same clause: water staing staining his clothes and truck. Thus making it sound wierd. Hope you understand my explanation.) and the stench of the water that stained his clothes and his truck entered his lungs with each heaving breath and permeated upwards into his skull until the world throbbed in the sockets of his eyes like a headache one gets from a terrible smell.

Just as it became unbearable Mitch released his foot from the pedal and leant his head against the steering wheel. He began to cry feebly before glancing up to see he had rolled back onto the dam and was now facing the other way towards Celu(Celú). Looking towards his wing mirror he saw the road behind him. The sun was shining and it(In my opinion, "it" is a fluff(excess) word here.) all appeared normal; the clock read 1423 but he had no clue when he tried to leave so the numbers were meaningless. It could have been minutes, seconds, or even days. He could have been sick, or cursed, or the road behind him could also have been a lie.

Confused and angry Mitch threw into reverse once more. He patted his legs and then the steering wheel. This is real, he thought. This is the real world and that road will take me home. I must be ill. I am suffering from a fever; that is all there is.

Mitch gently eased the truck backwards and began to turn in the road. As he inched the truck around the narrow path it was afforded the residents of Celu(Your first paragraphs says "Celú", so I am assuming it's a mistake.)'''came out from their homes and stood on the glittering shores to watch him intently. Mitch noticed this and it upset him. Finally, with Blue Betty facing the right direction, he swore furiously to himself and began to focus on his wife and child as he slowly drove away. He also thought of the streets of Southampton. There in England he knew a Sikh man who ran a local corner shop. Every Sunday, when he was home, he would leave his wife to cook and go buy some cigarettes for himself and a chocolate bar for himself. The old turban-clad man was as permanent (a) resident of his Sunday routine as his wife or child; they would nod and smile and exchange pleasantries.

He was a good man. It was a good street. It was not paved in gold; there were wrought iron fences that rusted and pigeons who used them to shit on anything below and the pavements were practically paved in flattened blackened chewing gum, but it was still a good place to live. Mitch would walk with that chocolate bar back to his house and sit there with his son and watch his favourite TV show while the smell of roast chicken and gravy would slowly fill the house. Mitch fixated on this thought and used it as a focal point to guide him away from the nightmare of Celu(Celú) and his suspected poisoning.

And yet, once more, Mitch found himself being suddenly thrown forward by the braking of his truck. He was gasping for breath and the burning sun that had hung in the blue sky behind him was now replaced with a dull and listless purple sky in possession of only a few wispy smoky clouds. He eyelids were heavy and his headache had become only worse and the nausea had gotten the better of him. Mitch was still without any sense of reality but he could smell, quite clearly, the stench of vomit that had caked his clothes and chest. He looked at his clock and it read 0148.

He still wasn’t sure what it meant. But he was growing frustrated and he was visibly irritated and angry to the point of upset as he began to reverse the truck once more while swearing furiously as tears welled up in his eyes. He gripped the steering wheel until his hands hurt and his knuckles glowed white. Behind him in his wing mirror he could see a hundred people stood on the shores of Celu(Celú) with handheld torches and lights. Their eyes fell on him and the anxiety it produced felt like a deliberate attempt to unsettle him. He was unwilling to relent and put his foot down once more on the pedal. This time he did not let his mind wander. This time he remained fixated on the road ahead and the details of each and every movement he had to make as the driver. Each shift in gear and gentle turning of the wheel was recorded in his mind; each bump in the road and each peculiar tree was a rigid reminder of his dogged persistence in leaving the village of Celu(I'm going to stop correcting this mistake, if it is a mistake.). As he made his way he became convinced that he was finally overcoming the strange obstacles he had been faced with.

And yet he surely must have been aware that was never really the case.

It was without warning that a small child, clad in a thick and concealing coat of a bright orange colour, ran out into the road and in front of his truck. He was going faster than he needed to be for that specific road but his feet had been guided by anxiety and distress. Mitch could not say what speed he was going at when he actually hit the child but there was a viscous spray which reached from the bottom to the top of his windshield and he barely even felt the child roll under the wheels of his truck.

Mitch slammed on the brakes and looked into his wing mirror. He immediately screamed in a thunderous rage. The child was there in a bloodied crumpled heap but behind him, by no more than ten metres, lay the dam that led to Celu. Mitch was shaking with rage and confusion as he clicked the door open and began to step down onto the road. The wretched heap of muddled flesh concealed beneath the orange parkour began to rumble and roll around. Mitch approached it carefully until he was within a distance of ten feet, and he cried out,

“What is it you want?”

Slowly the hood turned towards him and revealed a mass of knotted muscle and sinew that was wrapped around clicking gears and hissing pipes. Slowly from within the tangled knot of dripping flesh emerged rancorous spindles that stretched onwards, slowly, like the deliberate legs of a hunting spider. From the orange bundle came dozens of these needle like protrusions which dug into the road below and slowly lifted the broken child up. It clambered towards him and lowered the child to Mitch’s eye level.

“You are to return,” it said in a strange tinny, childish, voice.

“I’m trying to,” Mitch sobbed.

“You are to return to Celu,” it replied.

“No,” Mitch shook his head. “I live in England.”

“Maybe so,” the child shrugged, “but you came from Celu.”

“My wife…” he stuttered.

“Maybe so,” the child repeated, “but you came from Celu many years ago. This was not a holiday. You had a job and you completed it. Celu no longer needs deliveries. Celu will move onto the next stage. You are to return to Celu.” The child pointed towards the lake with its broken and cracked arm.

“No no no,” Mitch cried. “I have a life, and a child, and a home.”

“Maybe so,” the child said once more before tapping Mitch quietly in the chest with one of its spindly legs. Mitch began to heave violently and he clasped at his throat as he choked. “But you came from Celu, many years ago. Now,” the child raised its leg to point off towards the waters of Celu once more, “you must return. Or, you can choke to death here and Celu will recycle.” (It said, Mitch sobbed, it replied, Mitch shook his head, the child shrugged, he stuttered, the child repeated, Mith cried, etc. These are all the ends of dialogue; it is genarally advised agains't over-using these. I'd have no problem with them if they proceeded long paragraphs of dialogue, but these mostly come after two or three clauses, some phrases even.) Slowly the mechanical spider, with the limp outline of a dead child stuffed into clothing hanging between its legs, began to shuffle back towards the coastline of Celu. It motioned with one of its legs and all of the inhabitants who had intensely(intensified?) Mitch’s furious attempts to escape were ordered to return to work. Some wandered aimlessly back into the buildings that lay above the water but most of them began to return to the real Celu beneath the water with its sunken Tudor homes. Mitch made his choice and lay there as his tongue began to swell and his eyes dried and he faded out of existence.

Or so he hoped.

Suddenly Mitch was thrown forward. He took a deep and clear breath. He looked around. The streets of Celu were hanging over him. The mottled green water obscured the sky above him. The cobblestone roads had been covered with a rank and feral growth and in the distance was a glow. He looked down at his hands before touching his face and he began to walk forwards through the riddled streets of the great and terrible Celu. It was not long before he saw another brittle soul. Their eyes were sunken grey and laboured beneath a low hanging brow. Their walk was slow and lumbering but there was a deliberateness to their gait.

Finally Mitch emerged on the edge of the town surrounded by hundreds of twisted shapes. He glanced over to them and saw that many were far from having ever been human but he paid them little attention. Off in the distance was a tremendous gorge; it was clearly an artificial crack in the Earth that had been drilled in the lake bed for it was a great stepped valley that lowered further into the soil and rock and crust than any other place on Earth. It was dark and terrible to look down into that abyss but from it emerged great and heavy chains. And far away on either side of the gorge’s walls, near the edge of the first steep cliff face Mitch could see thousands of distant figures heaving on the links of each chain that were no smaller than a car.

And just poking out from the depths of that inky black water was the tip of a great and jagged needle.

-

Mitch had not lied, nor was he delusional. He did in fact have a wife and son. They were informed, with some great sadness, that their loved one’s vehicle had been found wrecked and abandoned in the mountains of the Alsace. No one could say for sure what had happened to the driver—their beloved—but the police were sure that the truck had been submerged under water for some time. They asked Mrs.Webb—Mitchell’s wife—if she were at all aware that Mitch’s records of employment had been falsified, but she was unaware of any foul play.

It was just that the police were awfully confused as to why a self-employed man had felt the need to slowly, but deliberately, deliver thousands and thousands of pounds of sugar and fertiliser to a sleepy village called Celu. Mrs.Webb could only shudder at the mention of the name although she knew not why. She asked the police if this was really the best of use (the best use of threir time...)their time given the recent civil unrest in mainland Europe but the police reassured her it was important since a nearby dam had been devastated by a recent series of explosions. They would later confiscate all of Mitch’s belongings under concerns of terrorism.

Meanwhile Mitch continued to labour for the bountiful God of the Jagged Nail and The Eternal Engine. He did not know sleep, nor much else for that matter. But as time went on he slowly became thankful for two things. First, that his great and benevolent Lord had granted him time above the waters so that he might live as a real man and not just as a dreamt outline of a man. And second, that it would not be long before it called out once more like it had millions of years before to ocean life, and soon all men would find themselves in its service. From that day on he would be reunited with his wife and child even if only as fragments of The Great and Terrible Jagged Nail.

I liked this draft much more. The ending was much more clear and creepy. I, again, am sorry for the lacking notes. I can't offer much more feedback exept maybe that the story was a bit... "Jumpy". It has a concise plot, but jumps around a lot. Though you can blame that on me. When reviewing stories, I first skim through the story to get the plot; then I bust out the coffee and read through with a fine toothed comb, looking for errors and the like. So it's likely that I was just mixed up when editing.

Anyway, good luck with this, it's a great story.