Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28266772-20160729155428/@comment-25226524-20160801175138

Ok, I got around to the second story. I'm suffering from some brain fog this morning, so I'll likely read this again later and give more of my overall opinion. For now I'll post the notes I felt worth mentioning:

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 strangely 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 (second use of "strangely" in the opening paragraph. Just something to consider) awkward and quiet for most of the trip, until he finally managed to break the silence.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re paying us in kind,” the woman calmly told him. Ian laughed and replied,

“No I’m not. What you did for Zoey was something else.”

“Not for us,” the woman sharply interjected.

“Yeah, well…” Ian paused. “It is for us. I lost a lot of time just thinking she’d never come back. And like what? I was supposed to believe you guys when you told us what you could do. I laughed at you, and then I got angry. I was a dick.” (maybe it's just me, but I don't follow what this means or is referencing - "And like what?")

“We don’t like apologies,” she said. “Not from men.”

“I know,” he replied. “I met your boss.” The woman immediately smiled at the mention of this. “Yeah,” Ian continued. “She reminded me of my grandmother. But anyway, yeah... what you did. You all keep acting like it’s 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 clause. 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. I’ve seen her do it all. I’ve seen her have everything after knowing that it was impossible. And all the time I kept waiting for it. Waiting for the nasty catch, for the rub, for some horrible thing that’d make her suffer…”

“We don’t make the girls suffer,” the woman said. “They’re not the ones who make the payment.”

“I know,” Ian said. “It’s us, the fathers. We have to make the payment. <(those two senteces feel a bit contrived. Not sure of the remedy, but I wanted to  mention it.  The information given is 100% necessary, but the delivery feels like spoon-feading) But even then… I mean, 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’s it? It’s just a job. It’s just another normal job. 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 you’re misandrists. 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’.” (Ha!)

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

“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.”

“How clever,” the woman smiled. “You’re doing quite well for yourselves.”

“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.

“Yes,” she nodded, growing somewhat warmer in her demeanour. “That’s right.”

“I think you’re witches,” Ian added. Instantly the woman grinned, and turned to Ian with a pleasant look of surprise.

“That’s one word we’ve been taught to recognize,” she said.

“So what?” Ian asked. “Magic? Seriously magic for real?”

“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..”

“So yeah… magic. Is that what happened to Andrew?” Ian asked.

“Oh,” she said. “You’ve heard?”

“Yeah,” Andrew replied. “I’ve heard. You didn’t do a great job of keeping it suppressed or anything. I just got a call from his wife is all. I’d gone there some nights for dinner and she knew I’d want to know given that we told her we were friends.”

“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.”

“A what?” Ian exclaimed.

“A curse,” the woman reiterated. “Just think of it like that. It was a bloody curse that made him do things against his will. Well…” she trailed off, “kind of. It actually rewrote his will, or merged it with someone else’s. In this case she made him want to do things to his children that were out of character. We’ve never really figured out where Evelyn got the power from. She has been known to associate with… well we never found out. Whatever it was it only wanted to make a deal with Evelyn.”

“Sounds like a demon,” Ian said.

“Yeah,” the woman sighed. “That would be one word for it, I guess. It’s all blurry I suppose. It’s just demons aren’t really associated with giving lectures on string theory given to a German schoolgirl in 1432.”

“String…?” Ian asked.

“Don’t worry,” the woman said.

“So what?” Ian added. “Andrew was cursed? Is that what happened to this girl we’ve been looking for? Was she cursed by this Evelyn?”

Instantly the woman’s face grew sombre, and her shoulders slumped.

“We’re here,” she said. “It’s the last place on the list. Annabelle must be here.”

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. It had clearly been abandoned for a long time.

“Alright,” Ian said. <(All right) “I’ll get the torches and we’ll start looking. She might have been kept in some bunker or someone might have built something or…”

“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.

“But…” Ian stuttered. “This place was abandoned like 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 she that’s where a young girl is being kept.” (that "she" needs removed) The woman turned back to Ian and sighed.

“Annabelle went missing sometime in the 1300’s,” she said. (1300s. Apostrophe is still meant to be used possessively, such as "1300's clothing" or "80's hairstyles")  “We might not be looking for someone alive. Or… well, like I said, we don’t know what Evelyn did to her.” 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 pushed the car door open and left. Ian remained behind for a second or two, and muttered, quietly, to himself,

“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 already stood <(something has to be changed there) by a waist high wall. She was leaning over it and shining her light down towards the rotten wooden floor (wood floor, perhaps?). 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.

“There’s something down there,” she said. “Some room, or something maybe.”

“That uh,” Ian stuttered. “I guess that makes sense. But it could just be a crawl space.”

“Might be,” the woman replied. “But when the church was abandoned it was because of a sinkhole that had appeared underneath.”

“Surely not,” Ian said. “In Britain?”

“It’s not just for Florida, Mr. Hamilton. It can happen anywhere the conditions are right.”

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-foot (feet. plural) 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 at <(towards or at needs to go) what remained of the walls, and roof, and found himself growing increasingly concerned that there was no ivy, or cobwebs. It was, aside from structural damage, not obvious that the church had been abandoned for more three centuries. Ruins, after all, were usually drowning in plants, mushrooms, and other fauna.

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 down below and highlighted only the rain water that cascaded down between the cracks and the dust that it had disturbed.

“It’s deep,” he said to the woman who had now arrived by his side.

“How deep?” she asked.

“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.

“What is it?” the woman asked. Ian stood back up, clearly unsettled, before answering,

“They look like a child’s drawings. Little stick figures, dogs, clouds, the sun shining.”

“Oh God,” the woman cried, her hand coming to her mouth.

“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.

“Stay here,” she said in a tinny voice, before turning and walking away back to the handbag she had left by the wall.

“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?” The woman leant up and faced him.

“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.” Ian had grown afraid and was by now desperately trying to move his feet. Terrified he shone his flashlight all around him, and quickly began to realize why there were no signs of life, and why there were no plants, or animals.

“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.

“There’s nothing we can do for her,” she sniffed. “Except offer her comfort the only way we know how.”

“Comfort her!?” Ian cried. “Are you fucking serio…” 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, accompanied only by a distant and 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.

Out of nowhere, from beneath the Earth below, came two gigantic columns of marble coloured flesh. At the end of each one 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.

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, and pull at it with his hands. He had thought that whatever curse the woman had put upon him would have been lifted with her death, but he quickly realized ("realised" since you've been using British English) that was not the case. There was nothing he could do.

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 rotting face of a woman. Her skin distended and coated in crusted puss and layered with unending boils and filth. She chewed aimlessly on a torrent of soil coated gore that trickled down her chin, and her eyes were a faded white with scratched and pale corneas. She sniffed furiously at the air, before suddenly fixing her gaze upon Ian, and smacking her lips with hunger.