I don't think I've seen one of these X000th-post crits for a while, but like Christmas, if I'm the only one to keep the tradition alive, so be it.
This is from about halfway through my book2, The Empyreus Proof. Thanks to some unwise magical practices, Orc has been slowly losing his hold on reality and has been increasingly hallucinating the symbolic as being real. This scene approaches the climax of that process, so I'd like it to make a strong impact without going too overboard.
The setting is a 1900s-era city with extreme repressive "Victorian/Prussian"-type attitudes. Orc and Cass, who are visitors there, have just had an argument, and Cass has left the house they're staying in. Orc has been hallucinating her as wearing (and just now, removing) armour, hence the breastplate, which only some military officers wear in reality.
Thanks for all comments.
****
He’d heard a door bang, but wasn’t sure when, wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying there. He raised his head and the room swam. Cass had gone, and she shouldn’t have — he needed to find her, to explain. He pulled his shirt on and picked up her breastplate and went out onto the landing. His movements felt light and fluid, his feet strangely out of connection with the floor. Down in the hall, a maid stood by the front door. She also wore a breastplate, though not as ornate as Cass’s.
‘The young lady ran outside, sir. Seemed in some distress. She ought not to have done that, sir.’
Outside. He remembered a name: Knightsbridge. She’d gone to find it. To find something real, to pull him back, to anchor him.
Park Crescent was deserted, but Gelder Street bustled despite the late hour. All the men and women, even the children, wore breastplates, and he couldn’t remember whether this had been true before. Many looked at him with unfriendly eyes; others avoided his gaze.
As he passed a pub, one of a group drinking outside it called to him: ‘Put it back on, man, for God’s sake!’
‘Put what on?’
‘Your plate, man!’
He didn’t understand. ‘I’m trying to get to Knightsbridge.’
‘Get back where you came from,’ said another. ‘We don’t want your sort round here.’
‘My sort?’
‘Some kind of deviant, are you? Walking round with your plate off.’
‘It’s not mine. I’m looking for a girl, a woman. It’s hers: she lost it.’
The men glanced at each other. ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ said the first, his voice unsteady. ‘There’s a woman going round with her plate off?’
Others muttered uneasily, but one woman in the group said, ‘I’ve sometimes wondered how that would feel.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Lucy.’
‘What a thought to have!’ said another woman. ‘Makes my blood run cold.’
‘Can’t kill you, can it?’ said Lucy. ‘It didn’t kill her, did it? The one whose plate he’s got?’
‘Lucy!’
‘Just for a moment, Paul.’ She stepped away, unbuckling the straps at her shoulders. ‘Just to see.’
‘Lucy, I swear I’ll …’
She breathed out a long sigh as the breastplate fell away. Beneath, her dress and her corsets were already sodden, and now they split. Her belly protruded through, swollen, the skin moving as though with snakes or eels writhing inside her. Orc stepped back.
‘Ohh!’ the woman Lucy cried, and the sound carried on, drawn into a howl of pain or ecstasy. Some of the group edged away. The woman tore at her clothes; she squatted down and groaned, but her noise sounded now like pleasure. Orc covered his nose at the stink of faeces. People cried out, began to move.
The woman sprang up and seized one of the men and tore his breastplate from him.
Orc fled with the rest. After fifty yards he glanced back, saw no pursuit, and stopped alongside another young man.
Outside the pub was what seemed a moving mound of naked bodies, a grotesque tangle of limbs and heads, a fusion that pulsated in the yellow gas-flame of the streetlamps. As Orc watched in shock, a man-like figure separated from the group, the torso and head of another somehow attached to him, and shambled into a shop across the road from the pub. Screams came; the creature emerged followed by two other people, their breastplates torn off, their clothes falling about them. They threw themselves into the mass.
‘Bloody Lucy,’ panted the man beside him. ‘Paul never was good at keeping her in hand. Put that back on, for God’s sake!’
‘I said, it’s not mine.’
‘You want that to happen to you? All that stuff inside, you want it to come out? You want that filth outside to get in?’
Orc didn’t answer. The mess of what he was watching, the abandonment of it, pulled at something deep. The freeing of all restraint. How many times had he forbidden himself from even imagining what he and Cass might do together? More people joined the body-tangle from the surrounding buildings, throwing off their breastplates willingly, no longer needing to be corrupted by touch. Orc couldn’t tell if the people who made up the mass of bodies were engaged in any sexual act, or just moving; he had no idea if those at the centre were now dead, the individual life crushed from them but their bodies kept in motion. He had a heightened sense of his own, his blood racing through his veins, air being pumped through his lungs by the sheet of muscle below.
He glanced at the breastplate, wondering if he should put it on after all, and saw that its inner surface was thick with Cass’s blood. Points of nails stuck through the clotted mass, forming letters that spelled his name.
The young man’s cry made him look up. The body-mass thrust out vegetative tentacles that arced through the air. When their ends hit the ground, they began to spread across the paving, turning it to mud and marsh. Even before the plant-growth was halfway to them, Orc felt the softening of the ground beneath his feet.
‘The Cathedral!’ cried the young man. ‘Empyreus will tell us what to do. His Holy Mother will save us from that thing!’
He ran. Orc did the same, but quickly lost the man in the crowdedness of the next street. Panic had spread through the city. Looters smashed bright electric-lit shop windows. There were soldiers in full armour that looked like Tashi’s possessed form. Vehicles as large as buses ground past on circulating tracks, covered in battleship armour, guns as large as Nightfire’s protruding from their fronts. They crushed auto-carriages, cabs, screaming horses. Fires sprang up. Guns sounded. Something thundered overhead: a craft faster than a bullet, glimpsed as a black arrowhead against the under-lit clouds. Explosions shook the ground.
Orc fought his way from the source of the panic, feeling weirdly detached from the growing hysteria. To everyone who looked like they might listen, he asked where Knightsbridge was. Following the occasional snatched answer, he pushed against the press of people making for the Cathedral, and quickly found himself in less-populated areas. There was no paving here, only hard-packed earth. Many buildings were abandoned and covered with ivy. At last, when there was no one else around to ask, he looked back to where he’d come from, and his heart clenched with horror.
All the city in that direction had been levelled to rubble covered with ivy and grass, except for one vast structure, the Cathedral: shaped as a helmet, a thousand feet or more to the tip of its spire. A multitude clung to its exterior, at all heights, so that no space remained. Thousands of breastplates glittered in the fires from burst gas-pipes.
Facing it across the wasteland, the Mound now rivalled the Cathedral in height. It resembled less a joining of bodies than a single belly, swollen with pregnancy or bloated by malnutrition or corpse-gas. Nothing would stop its growth, Orc realised. All the world would become part of it. He felt strangely unafraid, as though a small switch in his mind was all that was needed to adjust to its inevitability. Not just horror, but a clutching thrill of awe.
‘I am rather hoping,’ came a voice at Orc’s back, ‘that you don’t intend to join her.’
From the doorway of a half-demolished building emerged a tall, wasted-looking figure. Orc found it difficult to focus on, as details flickered and seemed to change; he thought he saw wings, and a golden head, before the image settled to become an emaciated man in a mustard-yellow checked jacket, and a bowler hat.
‘Of course not,’ Orc said.
‘But her gravity pulls you,’ said the man, his jaw working with no apparent muscle beneath the skin. ‘You really should put on that breastplate.’
‘You don’t have one.’
‘I come from the World In Waiting, from the City of Gold and Glass. Not gold as in metal grubbed from the earth, but the result of alchemical transformation, by which mind can be set as ruler over matter. It is the only metal from which can be made chains that will bind her. I am not in danger. But you are. I am here to warn you that you stand on the very brink of ego-disintegration.’
This is from about halfway through my book2, The Empyreus Proof. Thanks to some unwise magical practices, Orc has been slowly losing his hold on reality and has been increasingly hallucinating the symbolic as being real. This scene approaches the climax of that process, so I'd like it to make a strong impact without going too overboard.
The setting is a 1900s-era city with extreme repressive "Victorian/Prussian"-type attitudes. Orc and Cass, who are visitors there, have just had an argument, and Cass has left the house they're staying in. Orc has been hallucinating her as wearing (and just now, removing) armour, hence the breastplate, which only some military officers wear in reality.
Thanks for all comments.
****
He’d heard a door bang, but wasn’t sure when, wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying there. He raised his head and the room swam. Cass had gone, and she shouldn’t have — he needed to find her, to explain. He pulled his shirt on and picked up her breastplate and went out onto the landing. His movements felt light and fluid, his feet strangely out of connection with the floor. Down in the hall, a maid stood by the front door. She also wore a breastplate, though not as ornate as Cass’s.
‘The young lady ran outside, sir. Seemed in some distress. She ought not to have done that, sir.’
Outside. He remembered a name: Knightsbridge. She’d gone to find it. To find something real, to pull him back, to anchor him.
Park Crescent was deserted, but Gelder Street bustled despite the late hour. All the men and women, even the children, wore breastplates, and he couldn’t remember whether this had been true before. Many looked at him with unfriendly eyes; others avoided his gaze.
As he passed a pub, one of a group drinking outside it called to him: ‘Put it back on, man, for God’s sake!’
‘Put what on?’
‘Your plate, man!’
He didn’t understand. ‘I’m trying to get to Knightsbridge.’
‘Get back where you came from,’ said another. ‘We don’t want your sort round here.’
‘My sort?’
‘Some kind of deviant, are you? Walking round with your plate off.’
‘It’s not mine. I’m looking for a girl, a woman. It’s hers: she lost it.’
The men glanced at each other. ‘You’re pulling my leg,’ said the first, his voice unsteady. ‘There’s a woman going round with her plate off?’
Others muttered uneasily, but one woman in the group said, ‘I’ve sometimes wondered how that would feel.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Lucy.’
‘What a thought to have!’ said another woman. ‘Makes my blood run cold.’
‘Can’t kill you, can it?’ said Lucy. ‘It didn’t kill her, did it? The one whose plate he’s got?’
‘Lucy!’
‘Just for a moment, Paul.’ She stepped away, unbuckling the straps at her shoulders. ‘Just to see.’
‘Lucy, I swear I’ll …’
She breathed out a long sigh as the breastplate fell away. Beneath, her dress and her corsets were already sodden, and now they split. Her belly protruded through, swollen, the skin moving as though with snakes or eels writhing inside her. Orc stepped back.
‘Ohh!’ the woman Lucy cried, and the sound carried on, drawn into a howl of pain or ecstasy. Some of the group edged away. The woman tore at her clothes; she squatted down and groaned, but her noise sounded now like pleasure. Orc covered his nose at the stink of faeces. People cried out, began to move.
The woman sprang up and seized one of the men and tore his breastplate from him.
Orc fled with the rest. After fifty yards he glanced back, saw no pursuit, and stopped alongside another young man.
Outside the pub was what seemed a moving mound of naked bodies, a grotesque tangle of limbs and heads, a fusion that pulsated in the yellow gas-flame of the streetlamps. As Orc watched in shock, a man-like figure separated from the group, the torso and head of another somehow attached to him, and shambled into a shop across the road from the pub. Screams came; the creature emerged followed by two other people, their breastplates torn off, their clothes falling about them. They threw themselves into the mass.
‘Bloody Lucy,’ panted the man beside him. ‘Paul never was good at keeping her in hand. Put that back on, for God’s sake!’
‘I said, it’s not mine.’
‘You want that to happen to you? All that stuff inside, you want it to come out? You want that filth outside to get in?’
Orc didn’t answer. The mess of what he was watching, the abandonment of it, pulled at something deep. The freeing of all restraint. How many times had he forbidden himself from even imagining what he and Cass might do together? More people joined the body-tangle from the surrounding buildings, throwing off their breastplates willingly, no longer needing to be corrupted by touch. Orc couldn’t tell if the people who made up the mass of bodies were engaged in any sexual act, or just moving; he had no idea if those at the centre were now dead, the individual life crushed from them but their bodies kept in motion. He had a heightened sense of his own, his blood racing through his veins, air being pumped through his lungs by the sheet of muscle below.
He glanced at the breastplate, wondering if he should put it on after all, and saw that its inner surface was thick with Cass’s blood. Points of nails stuck through the clotted mass, forming letters that spelled his name.
The young man’s cry made him look up. The body-mass thrust out vegetative tentacles that arced through the air. When their ends hit the ground, they began to spread across the paving, turning it to mud and marsh. Even before the plant-growth was halfway to them, Orc felt the softening of the ground beneath his feet.
‘The Cathedral!’ cried the young man. ‘Empyreus will tell us what to do. His Holy Mother will save us from that thing!’
He ran. Orc did the same, but quickly lost the man in the crowdedness of the next street. Panic had spread through the city. Looters smashed bright electric-lit shop windows. There were soldiers in full armour that looked like Tashi’s possessed form. Vehicles as large as buses ground past on circulating tracks, covered in battleship armour, guns as large as Nightfire’s protruding from their fronts. They crushed auto-carriages, cabs, screaming horses. Fires sprang up. Guns sounded. Something thundered overhead: a craft faster than a bullet, glimpsed as a black arrowhead against the under-lit clouds. Explosions shook the ground.
Orc fought his way from the source of the panic, feeling weirdly detached from the growing hysteria. To everyone who looked like they might listen, he asked where Knightsbridge was. Following the occasional snatched answer, he pushed against the press of people making for the Cathedral, and quickly found himself in less-populated areas. There was no paving here, only hard-packed earth. Many buildings were abandoned and covered with ivy. At last, when there was no one else around to ask, he looked back to where he’d come from, and his heart clenched with horror.
All the city in that direction had been levelled to rubble covered with ivy and grass, except for one vast structure, the Cathedral: shaped as a helmet, a thousand feet or more to the tip of its spire. A multitude clung to its exterior, at all heights, so that no space remained. Thousands of breastplates glittered in the fires from burst gas-pipes.
Facing it across the wasteland, the Mound now rivalled the Cathedral in height. It resembled less a joining of bodies than a single belly, swollen with pregnancy or bloated by malnutrition or corpse-gas. Nothing would stop its growth, Orc realised. All the world would become part of it. He felt strangely unafraid, as though a small switch in his mind was all that was needed to adjust to its inevitability. Not just horror, but a clutching thrill of awe.
‘I am rather hoping,’ came a voice at Orc’s back, ‘that you don’t intend to join her.’
From the doorway of a half-demolished building emerged a tall, wasted-looking figure. Orc found it difficult to focus on, as details flickered and seemed to change; he thought he saw wings, and a golden head, before the image settled to become an emaciated man in a mustard-yellow checked jacket, and a bowler hat.
‘Of course not,’ Orc said.
‘But her gravity pulls you,’ said the man, his jaw working with no apparent muscle beneath the skin. ‘You really should put on that breastplate.’
‘You don’t have one.’
‘I come from the World In Waiting, from the City of Gold and Glass. Not gold as in metal grubbed from the earth, but the result of alchemical transformation, by which mind can be set as ruler over matter. It is the only metal from which can be made chains that will bind her. I am not in danger. But you are. I am here to warn you that you stand on the very brink of ego-disintegration.’
