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

A working title. I have gone for an alternate structure that's more... weird. I am concerned about a few things with this story. I made a great deal of effort to learn and create a sense of place (I read a shitload about Alsace architecture and the terms that field of study encompasses). I'm... a little uncertain about the fruits of my effort. Let me know what you guys think.

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Celú was once a small village near the Alsace region in France. Its buildings were of an old Germanic style with off-white walls crisscrossed by tar-black beams. These tremendous wooden struts acted as cantilevers and supports for the double-jettied structures that were responsible for the buildings’ top-heavy appearances. Huddled together on the narrow crease that was Celú’s great valley these buildings and their lumbering frames often had at least two flag poles jutting out at strange angles flying both French and German national colours; and above them were the classical thatch rooves almost always punctuated with at least two dormers.

It was often joked that one must consult a neighbour before opening their upper windows for the roads that wound up and down the hilly foundations of this small village were notoriously narrow. The windows of one house often opened directly onto another, or would be left impotently stumped against the slanting roof of another nearby home for the houses in Celú were not built parallel to one another. The whole village seemed to be constructed in a way that was deliberately off-setting to those who visited; the roads were difficult to navigate and on occasion would taper down to an impassable point no wider than an inch with no warning and for no good reason.

This was the memory of Celú. A quaint and strange place with no rhyme or reason. A place neither Germany nor France seemed to want. A place that was recorded throughout history as alienating and uncomfortable. A place that birthed no one of merit or eminence. A place that did no trade and had no economy but somehow remained a place nonetheless.

No one really knew the history of Celú but it was felt in the bones of those who visited. Mitch slowly rolled his sky-blue Volvo truck along the road of a tremendous and he looked out across the lake that shimmered beneath the moon and which reflected the great cyclopean peaks of distant mountains. Beneath those waters laid Celú for at one point after the war, or perhaps during it, the original village of Celú had been sacrificed for the construction of the very dam that Mitch drove upon. Those old medieval homes and cobblestone roads had been lost under two leagues of water. Mitch glared out at the lake; he felt a sense of anxiety at the thought of a whole village resting beneath it before turning back to face the strange and drab prefab homes of Celú number two. This newer village had been flung haphazardly against the slanted edge of the nearest mountain and it could only be described as the effluence of bureaucracy.

It had to be assumed that those who insisted on remaining after the construction of the dam had been provided with sub-par houses as part of a poorly-funded estate. The greying roughcast pebble-dashed walls had been left to accumulate grime and filth that stained around each crease, sill, and PVC frame that punctuated the plain square face of every home. Many of the buildings showed signs of infestation by pitiful outgrowths of proliferating vines poking out from the gutters that lined the Skillion rooves, behind which lay the moss-ridden fences that enclosed each home’s garden. As Mitch drove on he noticed smashed windows repaired with flapping bin-liners, crisp packets floating through the wind, and plastic furniture being slowly consumed by unmanaged lawns no larger than a desk. What cars he saw were of makes and brands he could not recognise and many had flattened tyres or were left elevated on piles of bricks with no tyres whatsoever.

And not even these homes had been built in parallel. Mitch’s truck struggled to ease its way around the hobbled complex of confused buildings in the sepia lighting of Celú’s flickering lamps. The pavements were distinctly modern but lacked any sense of direction with inelegant and broken turns that culminated in the road in front of Mitch being suddenly bisected by a curb that led nowhere. Ahead of him he could see his destination which appeared on the very edge of the town near some fields. There Mitch could see several portacabins and shipping containers placed there by Cantra Inc. for the purposes of housing construction equipment that would be used to build tourist-friendly hotels. But the portacabins were at the end of a road that had no junctions or means of access bar the one Mitch was on at the moment, and yet the pavement that ran across it appeared to prevent access for a lorry as large as his. Mitch knew there had to be a solution for the portacabins had been dropped off by someone, he just had to do what they did to get there.

Mitch was ready to reverse the truck away and try to find another route when he noticed some children off in the distance. It was late—after midnight—but he hoped the children may help. Zipping up his jacket and leaving his truck Mitch soon felt the cold and biting Autumnal air of France rush through the cab and prick his cheeks. Stepping down onto the floor he left the truck idle quietly behind him while he walked forward, by about a metre, and squinted towards the darkness where the children played. They were running up and through the gaps of each container but he could see little of them besides brightly coloured coats and hats that disappeared around corners and were obscured by the lengthy and skewed shadows cast by his truck’s lights.

“Uh, bonsoir!” Mitch cried out hoping to catch their attention. “Vous ne devriez pas y jouer. Ils ne vous appartiennent pas. Ils sont privés!” The children stopped quite suddenly as he cried out but he still could not see their faces. They remained hidden between the rows of each metal container and their torsos and shoulders were entirely obscured by the oblique shadows those metal cuboids cast. Mitch nervously glanced over to the windows of the nearest house in the hopes that he might notice someone who could assist but not even his shouting appeared to rouse interest from the residents. All the windows were black. “Uh,” Mitch groaned audibly before crying out, “Savez… Savez-vous comment je peux atteindre ces cabines?”

“Demande à quelqu'un!” one of them cried out.

“Ask someone? I’m asking you, you little shit,” Mitch muttered to himself in frustration.

“N'importe qui!” another child cried out, their voice appearing to be muffled or obstructed in some manner. Mitch imagined a scarf, or perhaps a hood, as was typical for teenagers. Nonetheless he remained utterly perplexed before glancing over to the nearest house which was suddenly in possession of a single illuminated room on the ground floor.

“Go on!” one child cried. “Cette maison! Knock that house there. Someone will help.”

Mitch hesitantly began to step back and noticed that the children walked forward as well. For a moment, he felt entranced by the ominous silence and hidden intent of the children that loomed over him as he stumbled backwards. But when he stumbled too far and knocked himself against the front of his truck he was startled to a point of terror. It took only a moment for him to catch his breath and chuckle to himself as he secretly felt relief that the tension had dissipated. He looked back to the children and laughed at his own nervousness before slamming shut his truck’s door and locking it.

The children are only being mischievous, he thought. There is no need to be scared.

He then began to walk towards the front path of the house that beckoned him with the amber light of the bottom floor window. He pushed past the damp and rotten wooden gate that framed the feeble garden and was quickly assaulted by a wretched smell of acidity, oil, and sewage. It was not a natural smell. Mitch wondered if it was perhaps some runoff from the lake but as he came nearer to the front door—whose screen was left hanging askew on only one hinge—he could make no mistake that it was the building and nothing else that stank. He glanced towards the living room with its netted curtains and saw a television playing through the stained and warped glass. He reached forward and gently rapped his knuckles against the plastic door.

It immediately threw itself open and from it poured an unfathomable tide of blackened and sooty water that had filled the hallway behind it from top to bottom. The barrage knocked Mitch back and consumed him, forcing him to firmly shut his mouth and hold his breath while trying to flail and roll over onto his front so that he might crawl away. The tide was freezing and its wretched smell assaulted him even as he clasped one hand over his nose. Eventually it subsided and Mitch rose from the pathway quivering and in a state of total shock. He glanced back towards the window and saw only a decrepit room devoid of all life. The plasterwork was sagging with only a few soggy patches of wallpaper left clinging to it. The television was left smashed on the centre of the floor and was covered in moss and algae. The light fixture was rendered from the ceiling and left dangling in a nearby corner.

<p class="MsoNormal">Dishevelled and feeling unwell Mitch turned around and saw a single child clutching the handle of his truck’s door. The child had their feet up on the side of the cab and was pulling furiously in order to open it. Still reeling from confusion Mitch ran forward and cried out to the child,

<p class="MsoNormal">“Stop it! Stop it now!” By the time he was near them the child had taken to kicking the sides of his truck while giggling inanely. “Get away!” Mitch shouted as he grabbed the child and pulled them back with some force sending them stumbling back. They quickly gathered their footing and ran off towards the nearby house and disappeared within. Mitch was left panting, wet, perplexed and ever-so-slightly angry; he decided to get back inside Blue Betty as quickly as he could, but not before he noticed that where the child had gripped the handle and kicked the truck there were wet and grimy prints of remnant algae. Quickly holding it to his nose Mitch noticed that it produced the same wretched miasma as the house.

<p class="MsoNormal">In anger he flicked the residue on the floor and clambered back into his truck.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Fuck this,” he muttered to himself before turning the ignition and slowly reversing his truck out of the one-way street. At this stage Mitch was prepared to write-off the entire evening as some elaborate prank. He had driven far during the last few days and was riddled with a melancholic homesickness. All throughout the drive to Celú he had found his mind wandering off to simple comforts he knew only at home. His wife’s painted nails, his son’s light-up trainers, the leaves that gathered by the front gate; all these and more were the fleeting memories that had spent the endless nights chipping away at his patience and determination.

<p class="MsoNormal">He would not make the delivery. In the moment as Mitch pressed the gas pedal down hard and reversed a little faster than he should have there was a merging of fear and frustration. The entire time he had been in Celú he had felt anxious and out-of-touch with reality; he needed to leave and go back to those comforts he dreamt of on the endless roads of France. When Mitch had finally reversed the truck around a corner and shifted into first gear he couldn’t help but notice that the roads were not as he remembered. He puzzled for a moment before looking off into the distance to see the towering dam that could act as a waypoint for his navigation. He decided he would just drive towards that beacon before beginning the slow meandering exit through Celú’s twisted elaborate roads.

<p class="MsoNormal">-

<p class="MsoNormal">''An endless spire of furious cogs and throbbing pipes pumped endless vapours and toxic green emissions into the sky. There across a rolling horizon, up and over the ancient lifeless continents of pre-Cambrian Earth, lay the endless moss riddled stone bound machinery which cranked slowly across the span of hundreds of thousands of years. As life formed around it in fleeting flashes of motion so too was there labour for the rising tower that jutted out of a mist covered valley. It called outwards in a rumbling thump that ground away in the tectonic plates. The Spire had called out to life in the ocean and like a dreaded plague did any fish, squid and lizard that quivered past those wretched shores beach itself in a depressed and ragged attempt to reach the call of the machine without end. Man did not know this but it was The Spire that dragged the fish from the sea and gave rise to the evolution of legs, and from that came the lumbering monsters of the greatest era in Earth’s history. ''

<p class="MsoNormal">''Those thundering lizards and soon-after the grotesque vermin squirmed between the teeth of the great machine which sat in the centre of an enormous stone clad valley. It was metal and bone and rock and sinew and it rose up through the clouds like a mighty totem to some star-bound horror. Within the endless caverns of its interior laboured twisted malformed creatures plucked from every era of Earth’s evolution but eventually the Earth itself got the better of it. Like skin that layers over a grotesque so too did the plates of Europe crack asunder and swallow the whole damned thing.''

<p class="MsoNormal">''The great vertical monstrosity was plunged like a mile-long needle deep into the crust and enclosed and forgotten. From great underground oceans, did it rip salt; from veins in the Earth did it rip iron and copper; from what little air it felt it too stole carbon. The Spire and its mysterious industry did not stop. Vats were filled with magma, metal was forged, and the great jagged nail that fell from space and lodged itself between mountains found a new home beneath the Earth.''

<p class="MsoNormal">Mitch was thrown forward with a terrible momentum. He gasped furiously for breath and felt tears streaming down his cheeks. He was shaking violently and was overcome by a crippling thirst. His clothes were coated in a strange green powder that caked every fold of fabric and which puffed out in the strangest of ways like dust in the moonlight as he shuffled around and slowly woke up. His eyes were sore and his vision blurred and he felt a strange and peculiar sensation of suffocation even as he took deep heaving breaths down into his chest. Stranger still, the cab of the truck was riddled with that wretched and foul odour which choked him; in desperation Mitch leant across and wound down the window.

<p class="MsoNormal">It was with a maddening terror and confusion that he watched water flow out from the truck and down onto the pavement below. As it slowly poured out and emptied from the cab of his truck Mitch was finally relieved of a claustrophobic panic. His mind was a throbbing blank as he glanced around behind himself and saw that the lorry from his truck had been stolen. With a tremendous quiver Mitch reached forward and turned the ignition to Blue Betty before desperately trying to ignore the strangeness of his visit. 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 that village drowned below the waves.

<p class="MsoNormal">Mitch, despite being an intelligent and rational man, drove the entirety of the way from Celú to Southampton in England without a single mention or thought of his visit. He would not question why his nightmare of the great machine had left him in such panic and fear that its shadow seemed to chase him across the great motorways of France. He would not question why he had such potent and vivid memories of shuffling around the blackened inky waters that flowed between the broken alleys of old Celú. He would not question why the water that had filled his cab had not drowned him. Nor, when he finally found out the date from a newspaper at a rest-stop, did he question how he had laid in it for over three days.

<p class="MsoNormal">Such was the madness of Celú.

<p class="MsoNormal">-

<p class="MsoNormal">“Officer,” said the short and fat man, “I appreciate your concern but he ain’t really any of my business.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“I thought he was an employee of yours,” the woman replied.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Who said that?” cried the old man. “Jesus Christ I don’t got no fuckin’ Mitch on my pay roll.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“He said it, sir,” the woman said with an intense expression of concern. “He gave a statement while still in police custody.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“So he’s a crazy?” the old man answered.

<p class="MsoNormal">“But you did provide him with cargo,” the officer replied.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Yeah,” the old man nodded. “He came from some company I ain’t ever heard of before. Some canter or something like that but yeah, I sold him about eight or nine tonnes of bagged fertilizer. All his paperwork was filled out right plus I figured he ain’t gonna use it to blow nothin’ up on account of him being no uh…” the old man’s eyes widened and his speech came to an awkward pause. The police officer sighed and continued her questioning.

<p class="MsoNormal">“When did he pick up the shipment?” the woman asked.

<p class="MsoNormal">“About two weeks ago,” the old man answered. “I thought it was strange cuz I didn’t recognise his make of truck and the Scania logo was all weird. But yeah, he seemed pleasant enough. You don’t think he used that stuff to make a bomb did you?”

<p class="MsoNormal">“We’re not sure,” the woman answered.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Cause I saw the damned reports of that dam getting blown up to hell an’ back in France!” the old man shouted. “And he committed suicide, so I hear,” he added with a quiet mutter.

<p class="MsoNormal">“The man was under the… he was convinced that he was in your employ. He believed you had hired him to deliver some goods to Celú.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Why would I do that?” the old man shrugged.

<p class="MsoNormal">“So you have no record of a man named Mitchell Webb living at 129 Dragon North in Southampton on your pay roll?”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Lady,” cried the old man, “I don’t deliver. This ain’t a truckin’ company; I work with truckers to deliver my goods but I don’t employ them. Do you have a record of that guy!? Cause he kinda sounds fuckin’ made up.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Thank you for your time,” the policewoman said with a polite smile before turning away from the balding and sweaty man she had questioned. By the time she had reached her car she was in a state of utter confusion. She herself had questioned the man named Mitch; his conviction was infectious. There was no record of him having ever lived in England although he had somehow passed the border. He had claimed to the police who found stumbling around the motorway at around 2am that his passport was in a nearby truck but they found no truck. CCTV recordings of the border control reveal a blue Scania driving past a booth but the person at the booth had nothing sane to say about what they saw.

<p class="MsoNormal">For all that it was worth she had believed Mitch. She just couldn’t quite understand what had happened during his drive home. Nor could she understand why, after further questioning on his life prior to the journey to Celú, he had broken down and committed suicide in his cell. She had only wanted to know a little more and had asked him

<p class="MsoNormal">“Do you remember anything before you journey?” But he had stared back at her with a glazed and bedraggled expression before muttering in an old and peculiar dialect of German,

<p class="MsoNormal">“Only more Celú.”

<p class="MsoNormal">Clearly, some part of her slow and deliberate investigation into his life had unsettled him. Or perhaps it was the news that Celú’s dam had finally broken and the rural lake was slowly draining out into some distant valleys whose residents complained of violent dreams and sickening odours. She had repeatedly been told throughout the investigation to drop it and leave all further matters to the French police who suspected some foul-play on behalf of a terror group called ‘The Jagged Nail’. But it was what Mitch had scrawled haphazardly on the wall of his cell in a foul-smelling algal trail which had left her trembling and unable to sleep peacefully for weeks as her dreams had been pierced by the most frightening and violating of imagery.

<p class="MsoNormal">He had written in ragged letters,

<span style="font-size:11.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language: EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">“Celú - She is hungry.” <ac_metadata title="The Great and Jagged Nail"> </ac_metadata>