Match #15

[James]

ARENA ROUND

Deadline: Tuesday, 2nd June

Write us a story that begins with:

The trees were a tapestry of madness. Symbols and figures were carved deep into their flesh, depicting some fable that Jack had never heard before. He could only just make out the drawings in the meagre moonlight; meandering bas-reliefs etched into the living wood. Occasionally there were words as well, as many scrawled in Cyrillic and Arabic as there were in Latin. What few he could sound out felt guttural and wrong in his mouth. Pressing a finger against the tree, the hairs on the back of his hand rose in unison, a standing ovation to the coldness pushing back at him.

“Corporal?” a voice to his left called, the syllables shivering.

Corporal Jack Arlington turned away from the iconography threatening to pull him under, and walked back to what remained of his platoon . They were good men, ordinary men, more willing than most to die for the cause. Airborne Infantry had to be. If something went wrong with the jump they might be finished long before they ever saw contact with the enemy. Usually that meant your chute jammed and that was the end of it, but looking around at the dark, ancient forest that surrounded them, Jack couldn't help but think that a slower mistake could be just as deadly.

Driven off target, chased by Luftwaffe fighters, forced to bail out while their plane disintegrated around them. Now stranded, lost is the woods, twelve American soldiers alone in Germany at the height of the war. Jack shivered at the thought of being found by the enemy, being captured, being killed. Then he looked around at the forest again, the forest out of every Grimm's fairy tale he'd ever heard, and he remembered the stories of things older and darker than any Nazi.

In the distance, a wolf howled.

[ASGetty ((Zovo))]

The trees were a tapestry of madness. Symbols and figures were carved deep into their flesh, depicting some fable that Jack had never heard before. He could only just make out the drawings in the meagre moonlight; meandering bas-reliefs etched into the living wood. Occasionally there were words as well, as many scrawled in Cyrillic and Arabic as there were in Latin. What few he could sound out felt guttural and wrong in his mouth. Pressing a finger against the tree, the hairs on the back of his hand rose in unison, a standing ovation to the coldness pushing back at him.

“Corporal?” a voice to his left called, the syllables shivering.

Corporal Jack Arlington turned away from the iconography threatening to pull him under, and walked back to what remained of his platoon. They were good men, ordinary men, more willing than most to die for the cause. Airborne Infantry had to be. If something went wrong with the jump they might be finished long before they ever saw contact with the enemy. Usually that meant your chute jammed and that was the end of it, but looking around at the dark, ancient forest that surrounded them, Jack couldn't help but think that a slower mistake could be just as deadly.

Driven off target, chased by Luftwaffe fighters, forced to bail out while their plane disintegrated around them. Now stranded, lost is the woods, twelve American soldiers alone in Germany at the height of the war. Jack shivered at the thought of being found by the enemy, being captured, being killed. Then he looked around at the forest again, the forest out of every Grimm's fairy tale he'd ever heard, and he remembered the stories of things older and darker than any Nazi.

In the distance, a wolf howled.

Jack's hands were shaking.

“Headcount?” he said, his voice distant.

“Twelve, sir. That's including you.” The private pointed to each man in turn, but found only an empty patch of ground where Marsh should have been. “Er, strike that, sir. Eleven. Where the devil did Marsh go? Vance, Waldo? You two were on watch.” Vance shrugged and shook his head.

“Think he went to take a piss or something,” said Waldo.

Ostrowski stepped forward and pointed a finger westward, deeper into the wood. “Ran off that way, mumbling strange things. Gibbering, I think that's the word. I can read, he kept saying. Big deal, right? I can read too, don't see me going on about it... I think the poor bastard had checked out, wouldn't listen to a word I said. Maybe this mess we're in was the straw that broke the camel's back... Tried to stop him, but he was too damn fast. Didn't wanna split the group and go after him without you giving the go-ahead.” He shot Vance and Waldo a wicked glare. “Maybe if you two hadn't have been so busy sucking each other off....”

“Hey!”

“We were establishing a perimeter!”

Ostrowski was about to respond, but Jack put a stop to the bickering with a wave of his hand and a dour glance. He stepped forward. Corporal Jack Arlington had two rules when it came to behavior in front of his men: show no fear and show no mercy. He took a breath and repeated his mantra, banishing any uncertainty from his voice.

“Marsh was our radioman,” Jack began, in an officer's tone. “Without a radio, well... There's a lot of Germans between us and home. So understand me when I say it is our number one priority to locate Marsh. With that in mind, form up, two teams. Ostrowski, take point. Vance and Waldo, behind him. Packer and I will head up the rear. The rest of you wait here, in case he comes back. In the mean time, you can inventory our supplies. Campbell, you have command. I want rifles at the ready, people! We don't know what could be out there waiting for us, Nazis, wolves, worse... C'mon, move out, double time!” The men hesitated only for the briefest of moments before doing as they were told.

There was something out of place about the woods: an absence, a silence, and in that silence, a hypothermic tension. There was no wind in the forest, but there was an autumn chill to the air; a mist, translucent yet obscuring. It softened things and drained them of color, as if the world was out of focus. One's gaze drifted and slid easily in this place.

Their boots were barely audible against the mud. Jack's heart was beating faster, and not just from the exercise. He kept his outward demeanor stern and steady.

Marsh had made his trail fairly obvious, trampling the underbrush and apparently shedding his clothing. Jack called his men to a halt when they found the man's jacket. It was all torn up, most strips harbored blood stains of dark crimson. The shreds of cloth were arranged purposefully to form a symbol, something that felt at once completely alien and totally familiar. Jack knelt down to inspect it, ever stoic, at least in front of his men. The blood was wet and warm. The symbol, Jack realized, was something he had seen in the bark of a tree.

“Corporal?” Packer said from over Jack's shoulder. Jack kept his gaze locked on the tattered symbol, his peripheral vision growing dark.

“What?” he muttered, not quite present. Some of the color had drained out of his features.

“We should get a move on, sir. You've been staring at that thing for nearly five minutes.”

“I have?” Jack snapped his vision away from the bewitching character and got to his feet, finding everything but the mark on the ground to be a blurry mess. “I have,” he agreed, stricken with confusion. Vance and Waldo did their best to look tough and unaffected, but Packer and Ostrowski were wise enough not to hide their distress from their commanding officer.

“Are you alright, sir?”

“I'm fine,” Jack barked, rubbing his eyes in an attempt to clear his vision. “Let's keep moving.”

They found Marsh's shirt next, then his boots, his socks, his trousers, and everything else. Each was dyed with blood and shaped into more alien ideograms. Jack tried not to look, but they were the only thing clear, the only thing bright. Everything else was an amorphous mess, lacking in color, texture, and shape. Jack found himself relying more and more on his right-hand-man, Packer, to guide him, though he would not admit it. Something like sweat or mist smothered his pores.

“Show no fear,” he mumbled under his breath, “show no mercy.”

The night air was throbbing hot-cold on their skin, like a hand dipped in boiling water, too slowly retracted. The moonlight filtering through the canopy concealed as much as it illuminated. The men trudged on. The trail of abandoned clothing was quickly transitioning into a darker thing altogether: where once they had found strips of fabric, now they found strips of skin. Ostrowski brought the others to a halt, his gauntness amplified by the sallow moonlight.

“I am a soldier,” he began, “I am a paratrooper. I get shot at and jump out of planes.” Ostrowski gestured to the freshly assembled skin-symbol. “But this... Man, fuck this.” He pushed past Vance and Waldo, who were holding each other and spilling their stomachs onto the forest floor. Packer stepped in his path, only to have his small frame shoved to the ground by the larger man. Jack growled and bared his teeth, grabbing a handful of Ostrowski's coat.

“I don't have room for cowards in my platoon, private. So by all means, if you can't follow orders, get going, but it's a long walk back to the U.S.A. without a radio.”

Ostrowski removed the intruding hand from his garment and stared his commanding officer down with a frigid anger. His pride told him to keep walking, but he wasn't stupid, he knew Jack was right. Ostrowski had only skimmed his breaking point, he would stay with the group. Jack went to help Packer up.

“Vance, Waldo, you'd better finish up quick and clean yourselves up. Marsh is out there without clothes and apparently losing skin, but we've seen no sign of the radio equipment. I'm not gonna pretend any of this makes sense, but we don't have much choice. We have to find Marsh and... and whatever did this to him. I'm in front this time. Ostrowski, cover our six. If you want to slip away, now's your chance.” Jack had to fight for every syllable, his voice raspy and exhausted. His words sounded surreal, as if speaking in a foreign dialect he had never encountered before.

Weakly, Jack led his men onwards. His head was spinning and the world around him had taken a turn for the impressionistic, as if Jack could see the very brushstrokes of reality. Each mark was a beacon for him and the trail was easy to draw between them, even if everything else was unclear.

The men were shaken but determined, gripping their rifles tight and squinting into the mist. They kept close to each other and did not speak.

The band soon came upon a clearing. Jack stared with empty eyes at its center, trying to make sense of the scene. Packer was speechless and slack-jawed. Waldo screamed when he saw it, Vance tried to run. Ostrowski caught him as he tried to run by.

“If I'm staying, you're staying. What is it now?” he said, giving Vance a good shake and stepping up to see what the rest of them were so riled up about.

The skinless man had been called Marsh, but it no longer answered to such a name. It sat cross-legged on a boulder in the center of the clearing, facing the group. It had decorated itself with radio parts, demented vacuum tube jewelry. The skinless man stared at its former comrades with quizzical, lidless eyes. The violated corpse of the bulky radio set was leaning against the boulder but its guts littered the entire clearing. More symbols, made of rocks and twigs and bits of radio, they connected with each other like a language written in spirals. Jack felt sick when he noticed he was able to comprehend some of the sinister script.

“Corporal?”

“Jack?”

“What the hell do we do, sir?”

The voices and their owners were unimportant, Jack understood that now.

“That one,” he said, pointing to a symbol reminiscent of a beached whale, split open and bleeding on the shore. “That means kidnapping a new friend. And that one, that one means a house with too many legs. Yes. I understand now. The barrier between all things.”

The skinless man nodded at Jack, looking content as it watched him study the runes.

“He's lost it! He's fucking lost it!”

“What do we do? What-do-we-do? What the fuck do we do?!”

Their voices were terrified, trembling.

“We have to-- We have to--”

A single bullet, fired in blind panic, burrowed into the Skinless man through his eye. Jack smiled as the eyeball burst, for he knew what had to be done.

“Show no fear,” he said, drawing his pistol from the holster and wrapping his fingers, no longer shaking, tight around its grip, “and show no mercy.”

[James]

Team Zovo

The whole decorating himself with radio parts was a really great bit of imagery. To take their chance of survival and turn it into worthless jewellery was really cool. Actually, that whole section was the strongest part of the story – it’s like you just stepped up a level in writing. “The violated corpse of the bulky radio”, the language being made out of rocks, twigs and radio parts, Jack babbling of metaphors which didn’t make any sense, all of that was great. Look at that part of the story, and build off of it.

The rest of the story I had some problems with.

I’ve talked about atmosphere for horror stories in the first round. You didn’t really achieve it here. I want to feel the weight of that dark, spooky forest pressing in around –me-. And that never really happened. There are moments where you try, Jack staring at the symbol for minutes as opposed to seconds, but you didn’t emphasise it enough.

I think the main problem, though, was the combination between characters, tone and internal story logic. It was a reoccurring problem, but I’m going to use one example because that one paragraph literally contained all of the wider flaws:

Ostrowski stepped forward and pointed a finger westward, deeper into the wood. “Ran off that way, mumbling strange things. Gibbering, I think that's the word. I can read, he kept saying. Big deal, right? I can read too, don't see me going on about it... I think the poor bastard had checked out, wouldn't listen to a word I said. Maybe this mess we're in was the straw that broke the camel's back... Tried to stop him, but he was too damn fast. Didn't wanna split the group and go after him without you giving the go-ahead.” He shot Vance and Waldo a wicked glare. “Maybe if you two hadn't have been so busy sucking each other off....”

So, two things:

- We’re in the middle of a creepy forest. Yet Ostrowski seems happy to crank out some jokes about reading and oral sex. Way to undermine the entire tone that the start built up.
- SERIOUSLY, OSTROWSKI? You saw one of your comrades wander off, seemingly gone mad, and you didn’t say anything? Sure, don’t run after him or anything. But, uh, maybe stick your hand in the fucking air and tell someone? (Basically, characterisation and internal story logic).

Those are the types of things you need to keep an eye on. Does the tone stay consistent throughout the story? Or does a dark atmosphere suddenly get punctured with juvenile dialogue? Meanwhile, do the characters act in a believable and logical way? I don’t want to read about people who do something only because the plot demands it. I want to read something with an amazing plot, but also independent characters who act in a way because that’s who they are (fictional) people.

Keep an eye on those things and you’re golden.

[Matteo ((Taed))]

Team Zovo:

Inkdrinker wrote this. I can tell.

There was some cool descriptive imagery, particularly the radio jewellery. The way he stopped shedding clothes and started shedding skin was also very creepy and cool. You're pretty slick at the whole body horror thing.

I like that you set up a clear goal: find the radioman. The actual execution was less interesting, but this was more a consequence of length than anything else, I think. I'm not sure if you were pressed for time and had to write a short story, or if you kept the story short on purpose. If it was the former, fair enough, maybe come back to this story later and add to it. If it was the latter, that's something you need to work on, because there was definitely more room to grow here. You shrunk the size of the group down to a manageable level for character development (when writing the topic, we gave you twelve guys so that some of them could be cannon fodder, if necessary) but there then wasn't enough room left to actually develop them at all.

The ending was a touch off. I suspect that you were trying to imply that Arlington snapped, and turned on his men. That's what I suspect. But there's definitely another interpretation where his "show no fear" line is a call to arms against whatever demons haunt this place. In either case, I think Arlington's own mental state needed to be better explored to make his tip over the edge, or his pull back from it, more impactful.

[Inkdrinker]

Jun 28, 2015 17:09:04 GMT -5 Matteo ((Taed)) said:

Team Zovo:

Inkdrinker wrote this. I can tell.

 

I keep falling back onto the same few themes/images for horror. It really can't be healthy to be so fixated with the loss of skin/loss of self dynamic.