Post by Mike on Apr 4, 2007 11:28:47 GMT
I just realised it's been three months since I said I'd have this up "any day now". I just reread it again and thought it was pretty awful, but as Brooke's pointing out over my shoulder, it's not like there's going to be a razorsharp dissection of it in the Times' literary supplement. I'll post the other one shortly.
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THE OFFERING
The sky was drained of colour, and the dreary tenements of Middlesbrough were stifled by heavy and unyielding humidity. From the upstairs window of a decrepit and squalid terraced house filtered inane and drivelling music from a cheap, tinny radio. The repellent atmosphere was reflected by the decrepitude of the houses squatting darkly in a haze of chemical smog. High altitude winds spread fumes from the chemical works that ringed the town’s outskirts like predatory creatures closing in on its mangled corpse. Mingling with the already unpleasant air were the writhing, swarming clouds of cigarette smoke generated by a group of dishevelled, gaunt and emaciated youths with messily close-cropped heads. Snivelling to each other in hackle-raising nasal tones, they coughed and spluttered with every sentence, a guttural, painfully dry sound in the thick air.
Their presence seemed to defile an already decrepit den of squalor, clinging desperately to the last vestiges of civility with bloodless, nicotine-bleached fingers.
They watched with eyes deadened by hopelessness, no emotions playing across their lifeless faces as PC Chandler, not long on the Force but already becoming weathered by its daily rigours, pried at the flaking boards on an abandoned house he’d been sent to check out for squatters and drug users.
He swore callously as his efforts resulted in a tiny chunk of damp, rotting wood falling to the floor.
Frustration working his lips wordlessly, he threw the crowbar hard at the pavement where it bounced heavily, chipping the stained, ancient concrete slabs.
What was the use of it all? He wondered.
He couldn't begin to guess what was so worthwhile in investigating another identical, wretched slum dwelling for signs of any of the town's endless legion of drug dealers and suppliers. The police only ever succeeded in penetrating the lowest echelons of a complex hierarchy of criminality worming its insidious way through the town's black and depraved underbelly.
The incident with the door was bitterly allegorical.
Every time he chipped ineffectually at the boards a tiny fragment would come free, offering but a glimpse of hinted rot within, just as any small-time criminal stupid enough to be caught would be the merest suggestion of the blacker depravity lurking just beyond the sulphurous light of the street lamps.
Chandler's car was about twenty metres away down the street, at the end of a huddled mass of terraced houses seeming to merge formlessly into one three-dimensional essay of decay. Behind it was a dirt-smeared, once-white van in which a man was enjoying a seemingly endless series of Superkings in what might only be described as apathetic rapture, features worn down by thirty odd years of booze and fags.
Chandler's eyes narrowed slightly as with a cracked-toothed leer the man leant out of the window and flicked his filter skittering across the patrol car, leaving a scattering tail of ash like the galaxy's most downmarket comet.
Calm withering, Chandler quickly made a mental note of the license number, and smiled bitterly at the lack of criminal charges he could level.
With disillusionment awakening anger, he picked up the crowbar and, turning, hammered relentlessly at the stubborn boards, splintering the wood and rupturing their bloated faces. Screw it, he thought.
The f**kers have their own ways in, so what difference does a few less boards make?
The emaciated street-kids laughed, and it sounded to Chandler like the chittering of malformed insects rather than the product of human vocal chords.
Had their mouths opened in a slightly distorted fashion, the lips too thin and their teeth abnormally small?
Their high-pitched tittering quickly became permeated by spluttering smokers' coughs and then receded as the youths shambled off, their entertainment done, with a disturbingly lopsided gait.
Chandler was pleased to see them go, and risked a glance into the stricken hovel he had forced entry to.
There was a clattering noise behind him and along the street.
One of the youths had tossed a package onto the hood of his car.
Chandler shouted the standard issue police threats at the cackling stick figures as they cavorted into a parody of a run and scattered like a nest of disturbed ants. One, glancing back, was grinning wider still with a grotesquely stretched mouth full of maltreated teeth and the lingering fumes of smoke. Chandler lunged forward as if to give chase, inwardly appalled by the kid’s seemingly elastic face muscles. “F**king pig!” echoed off the rot-dampened plaster facades of the tenements, and then they were gone, dispersed through the surrounding web of alleys.
Dole rats, thought Chandler.
Bloodsucking dole rats with no purpose in life than to piss off the people with the work ethics and wallow in drugs. Those types were never the dealers or the organisers; they were the mindless slaves, the witless moronic drones of an upturned anthill of perdition.
Sighing with a silk-thin temper he swung his gaze back to his work.
An unending fresco of dereliction masquerading as an entrance hall looked back.
Filth smeared the walls like the graffiti of an avatar of decay. Broken glass lay ready to crunch sickeningly underfoot, and a pregnant, blackened bulb hung overhead like a lurking predator. The bare floorboards were dirt encrusted and looked ready to submit a symphony of damp creaks and splintering crescendos. Bare mattresses and stained pillows slouched against the walls. The dank hall was silent but seemingly expectant. Chandler felt like the iniquities that occurred in this den had smeared the walls with a permanent veneer of sleaze and seediness.
A smell snuck sensuously into his nostrils before triggering the button labelled 'nausea' and hot-wiring his gag mechanism. He bowed to the pressure and stepped muzzily backward, almost tripping on a discarded vodka bottle.
Needing a moment to himself before searching the remainder of the house, Chandler staggered nauseated back to his car and eyed the package that the dole rat had tossed onto his bonnet suspiciously.
There was no address, but “PIG" was printed on it in a jerky, sloppily infantile hand. The whole thing was a sheet of tatty, stained newspaper messily held together by duct tape. He tore at the wrapping. It felt slightly greasy under his hands, which he rubbed on the seat of his trousers in disgust.
A handful of photos scattered into the gutter.
Chandler swore loudly and stooped to collect them into some semblance of order.
His eyes rested on the content of the photos.
The colour drained from his face until it nearly matched the Tupperware clouds reclining sullenly overhead.
His hands were visibly shaking as he looked at each photograph in turn, nausea dancing merrily around his stomach, bouncing off its walls and messing around inanely with his motor-functions.
Hastily and with a look of abject horror on his face he stuffed the photos into his pocket and slumped on the bonnet of his car.
He sat for perhaps five minutes, horrified eyes staring numbly at middle distance, before locking the horrible photos in the glove compartment.
He wanted to tear them up there and then, but they could only be evidence of some horrible crime that he couldn’t name.
With a new tremor of anxiety and muttering to himself disquietedly, he walked back to the house. This time he covered his nose with a hanky and fingered the end of his truncheon nervously as he stepped in.
All but one door downstairs hung invitingly, eagerly, hungrily. Little could be seen within the open rooms but dirt, damp-stained walls, burst bulbs, filthy bedding and sheets, the unsurprising sight of discarded needles glittering maliciously amidst the dust.
At the end of the hall rickety and unsafe stairs pathetically implored him to ascend, but Chandler doubted by the condition of the house that the upper floor was remotely safe. He would simply try the closed door at the end of the hall, to which there was a track in the dust. Then he would go home; with a renewed sense of revulsion, he resolved to ignore his duty, burn the photographs and dissolve the ashes.
Hesistantly, he reached for the knob of the closed door.
Locked…
A little angry with himself for the momentary surge of relief he felt, Chandler sighed heavily and turned back to retrieve his crowbar.
Passing the front room, something that gleamed in the gloom caught his eye, nestling in one of the folds of a moth-eaten quilt heaped amongst the bedding.
Walking over for a closer look, he saw a slightly chipped key. As he reached for it an enormous, bloated spider skittered hysterically across his hand. The revulsion welled up in Chandler so strongly that he barely resisted the urge to throw up, but he reached down again and withdrew the key quickly, with a nervous jerk.
His resolve partly reasserted, he returned to the locked door and opening it, peered inside with no small amount of trepidation.
A cavalcade of expressions temporarily suffused his face with several good examples of fearful puzzlement, tinctured by a flicker of intrigue. His underlying dread refined to a needle that burrowed into his spine.
Anxiety overruled by curiosity he approached the one furnishing in the utterly bare room, a battered black metal door decorated with painful scratches and disfiguring dents.
From around the frame, wormy tendrils of some nameless brown matter crawled across the wall like cracks in broken glass.
It was slightly ajar, a cloying, warm breath toying with the edge and teasing the ancient hinges into whining intermittently.
A peculiar, sinuous symbol filed roughly into the grimy surface glinted in a flimsy shard of light.
Chandler sidled up to it, sweat beading his forehead and tracing rivulets down his cheeks. With shaking fingers he traced the edges of the strangely beguiling symbol that lay before him.
He was familiar with various bits of pseudo-occult garbage from previous raids on tenements in this area, sordid dens of perdition where pimps paid obeisance to unnameable entities while collecting their filthy money, and smack-heads clumsily genuflected with their needles born aloft. This was unlike them, though; it seemed darker, more insistently macabre.
He almost felt malice radiating off it like an intoxicant.
How many of those emaciated youths gathered here in a circle for a slaves' high on certain nights?
His nerves screaming horrified protest, Chandler gingerly grasped the edge of the door and held it open just enough to cautiously peer inside.
As soon as he looked through, his face went a ghastly white.
Terror threw him backwards in a tangle of limbs.
Shouldering the opposite doorframe painfully, he choked down a cry and ran clumsily down the passage, slamming into walls and further bruising himself in his agitation.
As he tumbled through the open door, he realised the sky was darkened overhead and rain was spattering across the litter décor of the pavement.
Lit by the dark, flickering storm light and their chittering blotted out by the thunder, the emaciated youths cut off all exits from the street, emerging from doors, grinning with malformed, stretched inhuman grins.
Their mouths emitted creeping wisps of oily black smoke.
Tracksuit jackets lay partially open, revealing dark tumourous growths and deformed frames.
From the house behind came the thunderous crash of a metal door slamming, and a ponderous, squelching sound like something huge dragging itself painfully along.
An emaciated youth grabbed Chandler from behind with soft, damp hands swollen by misshapen cysts and pulled him round to face the open doorway.
In the passage, something huge and filth-smeared was sliming its way across the floorboards, flesh quivering.
Chandler’s mouth opened to shriek, but his cry was lost in a convulsion of dry-retching as he saw where its face was.
The youths closed in, a crowd of spindly limbs grasping his arms and legs with unnerving strength.
Chandler screwed his face up as the tears came; he couldn’t bear to see what happened – what he knew would happen - when the approaching thing unfolded itself in the open air, and reared before him.
Already he could hear the eagerness of its low, wet breathing, a chorus of panting from a cluster of puckered mouths, poised to balloon out as a seething chaos of mismatched teeth.
After all, he’d already seen the photos.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE OFFERING
The sky was drained of colour, and the dreary tenements of Middlesbrough were stifled by heavy and unyielding humidity. From the upstairs window of a decrepit and squalid terraced house filtered inane and drivelling music from a cheap, tinny radio. The repellent atmosphere was reflected by the decrepitude of the houses squatting darkly in a haze of chemical smog. High altitude winds spread fumes from the chemical works that ringed the town’s outskirts like predatory creatures closing in on its mangled corpse. Mingling with the already unpleasant air were the writhing, swarming clouds of cigarette smoke generated by a group of dishevelled, gaunt and emaciated youths with messily close-cropped heads. Snivelling to each other in hackle-raising nasal tones, they coughed and spluttered with every sentence, a guttural, painfully dry sound in the thick air.
Their presence seemed to defile an already decrepit den of squalor, clinging desperately to the last vestiges of civility with bloodless, nicotine-bleached fingers.
They watched with eyes deadened by hopelessness, no emotions playing across their lifeless faces as PC Chandler, not long on the Force but already becoming weathered by its daily rigours, pried at the flaking boards on an abandoned house he’d been sent to check out for squatters and drug users.
He swore callously as his efforts resulted in a tiny chunk of damp, rotting wood falling to the floor.
Frustration working his lips wordlessly, he threw the crowbar hard at the pavement where it bounced heavily, chipping the stained, ancient concrete slabs.
What was the use of it all? He wondered.
He couldn't begin to guess what was so worthwhile in investigating another identical, wretched slum dwelling for signs of any of the town's endless legion of drug dealers and suppliers. The police only ever succeeded in penetrating the lowest echelons of a complex hierarchy of criminality worming its insidious way through the town's black and depraved underbelly.
The incident with the door was bitterly allegorical.
Every time he chipped ineffectually at the boards a tiny fragment would come free, offering but a glimpse of hinted rot within, just as any small-time criminal stupid enough to be caught would be the merest suggestion of the blacker depravity lurking just beyond the sulphurous light of the street lamps.
Chandler's car was about twenty metres away down the street, at the end of a huddled mass of terraced houses seeming to merge formlessly into one three-dimensional essay of decay. Behind it was a dirt-smeared, once-white van in which a man was enjoying a seemingly endless series of Superkings in what might only be described as apathetic rapture, features worn down by thirty odd years of booze and fags.
Chandler's eyes narrowed slightly as with a cracked-toothed leer the man leant out of the window and flicked his filter skittering across the patrol car, leaving a scattering tail of ash like the galaxy's most downmarket comet.
Calm withering, Chandler quickly made a mental note of the license number, and smiled bitterly at the lack of criminal charges he could level.
With disillusionment awakening anger, he picked up the crowbar and, turning, hammered relentlessly at the stubborn boards, splintering the wood and rupturing their bloated faces. Screw it, he thought.
The f**kers have their own ways in, so what difference does a few less boards make?
The emaciated street-kids laughed, and it sounded to Chandler like the chittering of malformed insects rather than the product of human vocal chords.
Had their mouths opened in a slightly distorted fashion, the lips too thin and their teeth abnormally small?
Their high-pitched tittering quickly became permeated by spluttering smokers' coughs and then receded as the youths shambled off, their entertainment done, with a disturbingly lopsided gait.
Chandler was pleased to see them go, and risked a glance into the stricken hovel he had forced entry to.
There was a clattering noise behind him and along the street.
One of the youths had tossed a package onto the hood of his car.
Chandler shouted the standard issue police threats at the cackling stick figures as they cavorted into a parody of a run and scattered like a nest of disturbed ants. One, glancing back, was grinning wider still with a grotesquely stretched mouth full of maltreated teeth and the lingering fumes of smoke. Chandler lunged forward as if to give chase, inwardly appalled by the kid’s seemingly elastic face muscles. “F**king pig!” echoed off the rot-dampened plaster facades of the tenements, and then they were gone, dispersed through the surrounding web of alleys.
Dole rats, thought Chandler.
Bloodsucking dole rats with no purpose in life than to piss off the people with the work ethics and wallow in drugs. Those types were never the dealers or the organisers; they were the mindless slaves, the witless moronic drones of an upturned anthill of perdition.
Sighing with a silk-thin temper he swung his gaze back to his work.
An unending fresco of dereliction masquerading as an entrance hall looked back.
Filth smeared the walls like the graffiti of an avatar of decay. Broken glass lay ready to crunch sickeningly underfoot, and a pregnant, blackened bulb hung overhead like a lurking predator. The bare floorboards were dirt encrusted and looked ready to submit a symphony of damp creaks and splintering crescendos. Bare mattresses and stained pillows slouched against the walls. The dank hall was silent but seemingly expectant. Chandler felt like the iniquities that occurred in this den had smeared the walls with a permanent veneer of sleaze and seediness.
A smell snuck sensuously into his nostrils before triggering the button labelled 'nausea' and hot-wiring his gag mechanism. He bowed to the pressure and stepped muzzily backward, almost tripping on a discarded vodka bottle.
Needing a moment to himself before searching the remainder of the house, Chandler staggered nauseated back to his car and eyed the package that the dole rat had tossed onto his bonnet suspiciously.
There was no address, but “PIG" was printed on it in a jerky, sloppily infantile hand. The whole thing was a sheet of tatty, stained newspaper messily held together by duct tape. He tore at the wrapping. It felt slightly greasy under his hands, which he rubbed on the seat of his trousers in disgust.
A handful of photos scattered into the gutter.
Chandler swore loudly and stooped to collect them into some semblance of order.
His eyes rested on the content of the photos.
The colour drained from his face until it nearly matched the Tupperware clouds reclining sullenly overhead.
His hands were visibly shaking as he looked at each photograph in turn, nausea dancing merrily around his stomach, bouncing off its walls and messing around inanely with his motor-functions.
Hastily and with a look of abject horror on his face he stuffed the photos into his pocket and slumped on the bonnet of his car.
He sat for perhaps five minutes, horrified eyes staring numbly at middle distance, before locking the horrible photos in the glove compartment.
He wanted to tear them up there and then, but they could only be evidence of some horrible crime that he couldn’t name.
With a new tremor of anxiety and muttering to himself disquietedly, he walked back to the house. This time he covered his nose with a hanky and fingered the end of his truncheon nervously as he stepped in.
All but one door downstairs hung invitingly, eagerly, hungrily. Little could be seen within the open rooms but dirt, damp-stained walls, burst bulbs, filthy bedding and sheets, the unsurprising sight of discarded needles glittering maliciously amidst the dust.
At the end of the hall rickety and unsafe stairs pathetically implored him to ascend, but Chandler doubted by the condition of the house that the upper floor was remotely safe. He would simply try the closed door at the end of the hall, to which there was a track in the dust. Then he would go home; with a renewed sense of revulsion, he resolved to ignore his duty, burn the photographs and dissolve the ashes.
Hesistantly, he reached for the knob of the closed door.
Locked…
A little angry with himself for the momentary surge of relief he felt, Chandler sighed heavily and turned back to retrieve his crowbar.
Passing the front room, something that gleamed in the gloom caught his eye, nestling in one of the folds of a moth-eaten quilt heaped amongst the bedding.
Walking over for a closer look, he saw a slightly chipped key. As he reached for it an enormous, bloated spider skittered hysterically across his hand. The revulsion welled up in Chandler so strongly that he barely resisted the urge to throw up, but he reached down again and withdrew the key quickly, with a nervous jerk.
His resolve partly reasserted, he returned to the locked door and opening it, peered inside with no small amount of trepidation.
A cavalcade of expressions temporarily suffused his face with several good examples of fearful puzzlement, tinctured by a flicker of intrigue. His underlying dread refined to a needle that burrowed into his spine.
Anxiety overruled by curiosity he approached the one furnishing in the utterly bare room, a battered black metal door decorated with painful scratches and disfiguring dents.
From around the frame, wormy tendrils of some nameless brown matter crawled across the wall like cracks in broken glass.
It was slightly ajar, a cloying, warm breath toying with the edge and teasing the ancient hinges into whining intermittently.
A peculiar, sinuous symbol filed roughly into the grimy surface glinted in a flimsy shard of light.
Chandler sidled up to it, sweat beading his forehead and tracing rivulets down his cheeks. With shaking fingers he traced the edges of the strangely beguiling symbol that lay before him.
He was familiar with various bits of pseudo-occult garbage from previous raids on tenements in this area, sordid dens of perdition where pimps paid obeisance to unnameable entities while collecting their filthy money, and smack-heads clumsily genuflected with their needles born aloft. This was unlike them, though; it seemed darker, more insistently macabre.
He almost felt malice radiating off it like an intoxicant.
How many of those emaciated youths gathered here in a circle for a slaves' high on certain nights?
His nerves screaming horrified protest, Chandler gingerly grasped the edge of the door and held it open just enough to cautiously peer inside.
As soon as he looked through, his face went a ghastly white.
Terror threw him backwards in a tangle of limbs.
Shouldering the opposite doorframe painfully, he choked down a cry and ran clumsily down the passage, slamming into walls and further bruising himself in his agitation.
As he tumbled through the open door, he realised the sky was darkened overhead and rain was spattering across the litter décor of the pavement.
Lit by the dark, flickering storm light and their chittering blotted out by the thunder, the emaciated youths cut off all exits from the street, emerging from doors, grinning with malformed, stretched inhuman grins.
Their mouths emitted creeping wisps of oily black smoke.
Tracksuit jackets lay partially open, revealing dark tumourous growths and deformed frames.
From the house behind came the thunderous crash of a metal door slamming, and a ponderous, squelching sound like something huge dragging itself painfully along.
An emaciated youth grabbed Chandler from behind with soft, damp hands swollen by misshapen cysts and pulled him round to face the open doorway.
In the passage, something huge and filth-smeared was sliming its way across the floorboards, flesh quivering.
Chandler’s mouth opened to shriek, but his cry was lost in a convulsion of dry-retching as he saw where its face was.
The youths closed in, a crowd of spindly limbs grasping his arms and legs with unnerving strength.
Chandler screwed his face up as the tears came; he couldn’t bear to see what happened – what he knew would happen - when the approaching thing unfolded itself in the open air, and reared before him.
Already he could hear the eagerness of its low, wet breathing, a chorus of panting from a cluster of puckered mouths, poised to balloon out as a seething chaos of mismatched teeth.
After all, he’d already seen the photos.
