Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-2007196-20190706200104

While I'm working on completely re-writing that other story I asked for feedback on, I thought the people here might fancy totally shredding another story I've written. I feel like it's somewhat clichéd and needs to be purged of its weakness. Thanks ahead of time. Below is the story.

Somewhere in Texas, there exists a manuscript titled “Malormelar”. I do not know what this word means, since it doesn’t appear in any English dictionary, and my mastery of other languages is limited at best. I know it exists because I saw it. In an abandoned house with people who don’t exist and maybe never did.

Back in 2006 I was headed to Houston on a business trip, when I was alerted, much to my dismay, that my truck’s fuel gauge suddenly read all the way to “E”. “I thought I refuelled before I left New Mexico…” was all that I could think as I stepped out of the black truck, a few miles from civilization, at 1:00 AM in the morning. So, I pulled my trusted Nokia from my pocket and found…

//**NO SIGNAL**

Great. Just my luck. I checked my truck bed for my spare gas can, only to find that I must have left it at home. To be sure I wasn’t somehow missing it in the dark, I got my flashlight out of the driver’s seat and flashed it around the vehicle. Nothing but shiny gold thread. I didn’t know how it got there, but the more pressing issue of fuel was at hand.

It wasn’t too far of a walk to the next town; maybe four or five miles. At night, the desert wasn’t so hot – in fact, it was rather cold. My walk to town was punctuated by the occasional sound of animals rustling through the bushes, darting shadows – that sort of thing. The only real unusual incident was that a couple of times I’d see weird footprints trailing into the desert. They looked like an adult was walking along while their toddler bunny-hopped on one leg next to their ankle every other step, but with bare feet. In other words, two large footprints with one small footprint right beside one of the larger ones. Things changed when I crossed the border into a small town called Imperial.

As I crossed into town, the chill of the desert night nipped at me, and I began to feel uneasy; at this point, I wish I had brought my jacket with me. There was something peculiar about the night in small, poor towns like this one. Something more oppressive. It was that way all the time in these towns, but so much worse at night. I shambled about in search of a gas station or something, but I had no such luck. By now it was close to 3:00 AM and I was doubtful that knocking on doors would bring me any luck. Not that I’d want to – most of the houses I came across were little more than corrugated tin shacks.

It was one of the few small houses with actual drywall that held my salvation, so to speak. Just when I was about to give up and move on to the next town, I saw it: a gas can in the corner of a house that appeared to be burned out. The roof was almost entirely missing, along with the windows, doors, and the north wall. I don’t know how I could be stupid enough to think that there would be a full gas can inside that was free for me to take, but I was desperate, and felt mysteriously drawn to the building and the shiny red exterior of the gas can.

I approached the building with bated breath, carrying one foot ahead of the other at a snail’s pace – I was concerned there might be a homeless person squatting in the building. Instead, I found the building empty. It had been tagged by someone in the past, but no one living was there at the time. I crept to the corner of the building, passing the occasional glance to the roof lest it collapse on my head. As I bent down to take the gas can, I caught a glint of light in my eye. There was a room of the south side of the building, and there was a pale bluish light emanating from the room. Against my better judgement, I inched into the room, and peeked inside to see just a sliver of the room, holding onto the rotten doorframe for its meagre support. What I saw shocked me: it was a computer screen, on, running a word processor with a file open. I couldn’t conceive of how there could even be electricity in this house, let alone who would choose to write anything here. My hands shaking at the thought of whoever might be using this room were not enough to override my morbid curiosity at the room, and so I moved closer.

I saw two figures and bolted back out of their (presumed) line of sight. In my moment to glimpse them, I saw that one was an adult man dressed in much nicer clothes than the building he was in would imply. But what stood out most was his brown waistcoat, which had gold-coloured details. The other appeared only as a humanoid silhouette in this lighting but seemed deformed. Its joints bent in the wrong direction, it had more fingers than a human should, in places along the arm where a human shouldn’t, and one leg branched off into two toward the ankle.

I heard the normal looking one speak. “It’s time to go, brother. Soon, the world will know.” Expecting them to come out and murder me right there, I pushed myself against the wall, closed my eyes tight and prepared for the worst. Ten minutes passed in what felt like an eternity, and nothing happened. I swivelled my head around the doorframe and the two figures were gone as though I had dreamed them up to begin with. I walked inside to see that the computer was powered by the quietest gasoline powered generator I had ever seen. I sighed in relief, assuming that whatever I saw must have been a sleep-deprived hallucination. I looked at the computer screen. Black block letters sat on a backdrop of white emitted by the screen:

MALORMELAR: AE ARTUR DU REVIVAR O FETAE MALFORMADOR

I scrolled down past the title page, past the table of contents; there was no ISBN, copyright, author name or publisher page. I continued scrolling and my eyes were greeted by hundreds of photographs and diagrams of fetuses with various deformities, and bizarre surgical operations being performed upon them. It was all written in the same Latin-based language as the title and subtitle, but I still have no recognition of what language it was. I felt sick seeing it, yet my eyes were transfixed. One operation seemed to suggest that, in the case of twins, one can be used for spare parts for the other. At least, that’s what the photos seemed to depict. Another depicted an umbilical cord being grafted to an adult woman’s (presumably the mother’s) carotid artery to apparently extend the life of a premature birth. I flashed through too many operations to recall until reaching the last page. Appearing on it was the word “VICTIRAR” and another deformed fetus, though apparently alive and stable; it had joints that bent the wrong way, more fingers than a human should, in places along the arm where a human shouldn’t, and one leg branched off into two near the ankle.

I grabbed the gas can from the house and ran out of town, my legs burning in the cold night until they finally carried me to my truck. By then, dawn was just starting to break.

Needless to say, I missed that business trip. 