Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28266772-20160729155428/@comment-28266772-20160810145508

Hey so without further ado is the update to 'The Fatso'. The overall jist is the same but most of it has undergone some change in one way or another. My main interest remains whether Frank's opinions still hold - in other words is it still confusing, or do things make a little bit more sense now? It took a while because I've tried to find a balance between this spoon-feeding, and being too vague. Also I took the time to include some other quirky bits of humour and gore. In particular you'll get some greater insight into poor Andrew's fate. Enjoy!

The Fatso

Ian sat in the car next to the young woman who drove through the endless rain. She was a young and pretty woman, but she spoke with the affectations and mannerisms of someone much older. She was confident, and so professional and well composed that when he eyed her legs at one stage of the journey, he swore he could have felt a voice from inside his own head give him a schoolteacher style scolding. This had kept Ian strangely awkward and quiet for most of the trip, until he finally managed to break the silence.

“Thank you,” he said. “What you did for Zoey was… something else.” The woman did not reply. “When my wife told me about your letter,” Ian added. “What you claimed to be able to do, well I laughed at you, and then I got angry. I was a dick, and I’ve waited a long time to apologize.”

“We don’t like apologies,” she said.

“Yeah, well,” Ian stuttered. “You’re getting one. I mean… you all keep acting like it was nothing. That’s kind of scary.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “Why is that?”

“Well,” Ian answered. “You uh, you brought her back. I mean she came back and not like Pet Semetary ‘came back’ where there’s some bullshit karmic sting. It’s been eleven years and she’s healthy and happy, and she’s had lovers, and enemies, and breakups, and friends, and…” Ian chuckled affectionately. “She’s had it all. And I just kept waiting and waiting. Waiting for the nasty catch, for the rub, for some horrible thing that’d make her suffer—”

“We don’t make children suffer,” the woman said.

“I know,” Ian said. “You made a big deal of that but you gotta understand it’s a hard idea to digest that you’d give so much for so little. I’d die for Zoey and yet all you wanted was an ‘IOU’ when the time was right. For years I kept thinking you’d call me up and ask me to do something terrible, like skin a fucking dog or sacrifice a baby but in the end it was… well, what? Go to this house? Cross reference some lists? Meet some old people? I worked with that lad Andrew and he was nice enough—bit daft though—and that was it. It’s just a job. It’s just another normal job for a private investigator like me. I would have charged, at most, a grand for this kind of work. But you… for you, apparently, it’s easier to bring a girl back to the dead than it is to withdraw some cash from your bank. I don’t want to seem ungrateful but is that all it is to you? Is bringing the dead back like… like what? A party trick?” For a brief moment the woman looked across to Ian and smiled, before turning back towards the road.

“How much do you know about us?” she asked.

“I know you’re rich.”

“Yes,” she replied.

“I know you can bring girls back from the dead,” he added.

“Yes.”

“I know,” Andrew paused. “I know that one girl I spoke to didn’t recognize my iPhone, and when I showed her Siri she accused me of trapping a woman in the ‘the obelisk of black’.”

“Had you?” asked the woman, to which Ian laughed, unsure if she was joking.

<p class="MsoNormal">“No,” he said. “It’s Siri. It’s a robot. It’s not a real person it’s just a machine that imitates a person.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“How clever,” the woman smiled. “You’re all doing quite well for yourselves.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Yes… well,” Ian continued. “I figure… I figure you’re some weird esoteric order—women only—hidden from the world with untold wealth and powers.” The woman, hearing this, immediately laughed.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Yes,” she nodded, growing somewhat warmer in her demeanour. “That’s right.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“I think you’re witches,” Ian added. Instantly the woman grinned, and turned to Ian with a pleasant look of surprise.

<p class="MsoNormal">“That’s one word we’ve been taught to recognize,” she said.

<p class="MsoNormal">“So what?” Ian asked. “Magic? Seriously, magic for real?”

<p class="MsoNormal">“I suppose,” she said, playfully shrugging her shoulders. “We’re mainly taught maths, science, engineering and neuroscience, not the ones your scholars have come up with though. But yeah, it’s pretty much magic, although your Siri is a kind of magic too. Don’t you think?”

<p class="MsoNormal">“So yeah… magic. Is that what happened to Andrew? Magic made him do those things? His wife told me everything, thought I’d want to know given that I’d joined them for dinner once or twice.” Ian asked.

<p class="MsoNormal">“That’s sweet,” the woman smiled. “And you can call it magic if you want. It’s easier I guess. We’d call it a neurolinguistic virus—a speciality of Evelyn’s—and you should be thankful Andrew shot himself before he got anywhere near those daughters of his.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“What are you on about?” Ian exclaimed.

<p class="MsoNormal">“A neuroling… a curse,” the woman reiterated. “Just think of it like that. It was a magic curse that made him do things against his will. Well…” she trailed off. “Kind of. In this case she made him want to do things to his children that were out of character.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“No,” Ian clarified. “What do you mean ‘his daughters’? Andrew committed suicide in an animal shelter.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Oh,” the woman said. “We had heard… we thought… we had a recording of his conversation with Evelyn and she mentioned his… she must—” The woman paused and thought carefully for a moment before asking, “An animal shelter, you say? God... she has a sick sense of humour, and she's getting better and better at hiding her true intentions.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“So let me get this right,” Ian said. “Evelyn made Andrew do those things with a magic curse? It wasn't that Andrew was sexually attracted to cats and dogs? I kinda just thought he was a perv.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Well,” the woman replied. “We’ve never really figured out where Evelyn got the power to do what she does. She’s never shared what she knows with anyone, but no Andrew was not like that normally. Evelyn must have compelled him to behave like that.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“So,” Ian said, lingering. “Is that what happened to this girl we’ve been looking for? Was she cursed by this Evelyn too?”

<p class="MsoNormal">Instantly the woman’s face grew sombre, and her shoulders slumped as though she had remembered a terrible sadness.

<p class="MsoNormal">“We don’t know,” she said. “Evelyn stole her away from us with tricks and lies. By the time we realised where Annabelle had gone, and who with, it was too late. Evelyn had her hidden away behind all sorts of rumours and riddles. And we’ve been looking for so long,” the woman continued. “Annabelle’s loss was devastating. We’ve had to spend so long recruiting people like you—investigators, policemen, secret agents, you name it—to find her. Bit by bit we’ve pieced the clues together and after a long, long, time we finally seem to be getting closer."

<p class="MsoNormal">“Well,” Ian smiled. “I’m sure we’ll find her. And no matter what we find,” he said. “I’ll keep you safe.” The woman’s eyes widened and she glared across at Ian with a perplexing look of incredulity that, for a moment, embarrassed him. “That is why you brought me?” Ian asked, nervously. “Isn’t it?” The woman’s eyes shifted across for a second, before she turned back to the road and said,

<p class="MsoNormal">“Yes… Well… Something like that. Oh look! We’re here,” she pointed anxiously. “This is the last place. This is where she has to be.”

<p class="MsoNormal">The building that came into view as the car rounded the long and isolated drive was nothing but some rotten beams and jagged, charred, stone that jutted upwards out of the ground. As they approached the building Ian heard the woman gasp as the headlights brought into view some rusted brown and red graffiti that reached to the highest point of the crumbling walls. The writing was the sort of hurried and panicked scrawl you’d expect to see in a quarantine, or a war-zone, and it read,

<p class="MsoNormal">“Beware the Fatso.” An ominous silence befell the woman, and trying to help ease her mind Ian told her,

<p class="MsoNormal">“Places like this often get reputations for hauntings. Some kids reported sightings of some worm, or slug-monster a few years back. And there’s a lot of dead cattle that keep turning up. It’s nothing to worry about, just English folklore going back hundreds of years. Now, I’ll get the torches and we’ll start looking. She might have been kept in some bunker or someone might have built something so we'll need to look for clearings, well trodden paths that lead-”

<p class="MsoNormal">“No,” the woman said. “It’s the church.” She then pointed towards the collapsed pile of bricks and timber that was centred in the car’s headlights. “Evelyn wouldn’t miss an opportunity for irony.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“But…” Ian stuttered. “This place was abandoned three hundred years ago. There’s no way she could have been kept in there alive. There’s no bloody roof!” Ian turned to the woman who was already preparing to leave the car. She had turned to reach behind her and grab a large umbrella, since it was raining heavily, when Ian began to tap her on the shoulder and say, “She’s not in there. Come on there’s no way that’s where a young girl is being kept.” The woman turned back to Ian and sighed.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Annabelle went missing sometime in the 1300s,” she said. “We don’t know what we’re looking for. A girl? A corpse? We don’t know. There’s only a slim chance she might be alive.” The woman then turned back to the wheel and straightened her coat, pulling up her collar, before bracing herself for the cold wind and rain. She then turned on her torch, and kicked the car door open and left. Ian remained behind for a second or two, and muttered, quietly, to himself,

<p class="MsoNormal">“Might be alive?” But he quickly composed himself and got up to follow her. It was raining heavily, and difficult to see, but they both had torches that made them each a glowing beacon amidst the darkness. Ian lightly jogged ahead until he had caught up with the woman, who was standing by a waist high wall. She was leaning over it and shining her light down towards the rotten oak floor. Occasionally the light would cut through the gaps in the beams of wood and reveal some dust, or water that dripped into a chasm below, but it was too transient and fleeting for anything real to be seen.

<p class="MsoNormal">“There’s something down there,” she said. “Some room, or something maybe.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“That uh,” Ian stuttered. “I guess that makes sense. But it could just be a crawl space.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Might be,” the woman replied. “But when the church was abandoned it was because of a sinkhole that had appeared underneath.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Surely not?” Ian exclaimed, but the woman did not reply. She just kept staring at the floor below. Ian would have asked more, but he felt increasingly anxious. Instead he looked up and shone his light towards the pile of disused furniture that lay in the centre of the small church’s ruins. It was around three-feet high, and untouched by plants or animals. As the woman continued to shine her light below Ian took some more time to look up towards what remained of the walls, and roof, and found himself unsettled by the absence of life. The church was a place of desolation, and stank of hopelessness and fear. There was a tangible sense of loss present in every nook and cranny.

<p class="MsoNormal">Ian pushed these thoughts from his mind, and decided to keep looking towards the ground, until he finally noticed a small gap in the wooden planks somewhere near the edge of the piled furniture. He tapped the woman on the arm and pointed towards it, before quickly scaling the wall and walking, carefully, across the wet and slippery floor. There he managed to wrestle one of the pulpits out of the hole to reveal a neat tear that lead down into the chasm below. He shone his light downwards and highlighted only the rain water that cascaded down between the cracks.

<p class="MsoNormal">“It’s deep,” he said to the woman who had now arrived by his side.

<p class="MsoNormal">“How deep?” she asked.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Deeper than my light,” he answered. “Just seems to go on forever. Wait,” he suddenly said, as his light caught the walls of the chasm and revealed strange white lines that rolled across the edges into strange intricate designs. “There are patterns on the walls. They’re uh… they don’t look like writing. They look like shapes. They look like…” suddenly Ian’s voice dropped. “Oh,” he said.

<p class="MsoNormal">“What is it?” the woman asked. Ian, clearly rattled, stood back up before answering,

<p class="MsoNormal">“They look like a kid's drawings. Little stick figures, dogs, clouds, the sun shining.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Oh God,” the woman cried, her hand coming to her mouth.

<p class="MsoNormal">“That chasm,” Ian said. “It’s gotta be hundreds of feet deep. And the drawings bigger than a house. How in hell did she even get to the walls? How did she reach them?” The woman turned to face Ian, and he could see she was clearly upset.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Stay here,” she said in a tinny voice, before turning and walking away back to the handbag she had left by the wall.

<p class="MsoNormal">“Come on,” Ian said as he tried to follow her. But he found that he could not move his feet. He shone his light towards the woman who, while clearly crying, was also furiously rummaging through her bag. “What?” he shouted. “What have you done to me?”

<p class="MsoNormal">“I'm sorry. But it’s been too long,” she said. “That hole… it must have been made by something huge. She couldn’t have stopped eating from the day that Evelyn hid her. God… no wonder she nearly sank the church. All this time with nothing but… but dirt. Dirt and pain.” Ian had grown afraid and was by now desperately trying to move his feet. Terrified he shone his flashlight all around him trying to understand what was happening.

<p class="MsoNormal">“No,” he cried. “No, you can’t… you can’t be serious!?” he shouted. He looked back towards the woman who now held a small bell in her hands. “What are you going to do to me?” he began to weep.

<p class="MsoNormal">“There’s nothing we can do for her,” the woman sniffed. “Except offer her comfort the only way we know how.”

<p class="MsoNormal">“Comfort her!?” Ian cried. “How in fuck am I meant to--” He was interrupted when the woman rang the bell, and the pair of them fell silent in anticipation. He waited anxiously, his light furiously trying to see something from the chasm below. He was terrified, and he knew he was about to die. He looked up to the woman, desperately hoping that she might pity him, when suddenly he noticed the glare of the car’s headlights disappeared, followed by a distant yet thunderous din. The woman grew concerned, and looked behind her towards the car, then back towards the bell in her hand which she rang again, and again.

<p class="MsoNormal">Out of nowhere, from beneath the Earth below, came two gigantic columns of marble coloured flesh. At the end of each pillar—the size of a full grown man—were enormous paws with gnarled and yellowed claws that splintered, irregularly, out of the flesh of Annabelle’s clumpy hands. There were no fingers that she might grab the woman with; instead she tossed her colossal arms aimlessly with a tremendous strength that knocked bricks from the church’s stonework. Quickly enough she had skewered the screaming woman on her nails, and yanked her with a terrifying speed and ferocity back into the soil below.

<p class="MsoNormal">Horrified, but relieved, Ian tried to process what he had just seen. Suddenly, he began to laugh. He had been betrayed, and saved at the last moment only by serendipity! He was thankful that the woman, who had so clearly intended to feed him to the monstrous Annabelle, had been caught instead by her own trap. It was brilliant. He turned to leave when he noticed, once more, that his leg could not move. He shone his light at his foot and tried to move it, but still could not. He had thought that whatever curse the woman had put upon him would have been lifted with her death, but he quickly realised that was not the case.

<p class="MsoNormal">Desperate, he placed the flashlight down so that the beam glared into the abyss below, and pulled with great strength and difficulty. After minutes of work he noticed he had moved his foot by about an inch, which offered him some hope. But in his hysterical lifting he had not paid much attention to his surroundings. And so when he turned his head quickly during the struggle and glanced at the hole in the floor, it came as a shock to see the warped, and plump rotting face of a woman embedded in a plum shaped wall of veiny flesh that expanded to fill the void. The skin that surrounded the little face was distended and coated in crusted puss and layered with unending boils and filth. She chewed aimlessly on soil coated gore that trickled down her chin, and her eyes were a faded white with scratched and pale corneas that lacked direction. As she chewed thoughtlessly she also sniffed at the air with a fervent curiosity.

<p class="MsoNormal">Ian was dead still, and watched her intently, desperately trying to not make a move. But only moments had passed when the girl’s nose twitched, and she stopped all movement. Suddenly she jerked her head towards Ian and fixed her gaze upon him. The last thing Ian saw clearly as he leapt forward and grabbed the flashlight in a panic was her drooling cracked lips smacking together with a desperate greed and hunger.

<p class="MsoNormal">