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GNO Chapter Excerpts Page ~ B1C17 Quick-Browse
Chapter Quick-Browse For Graven's Grotesque: A Gothic Epic
Chapter 17 Excerpt Teaser
Description: Lazarus Trapped in the Fish House ~ 7 Paragraphs
Thump-thump-shhh! Thump-thump-shhh! Lazarus stirred to a disquieting and unnatural series of sounds that could have resembled that of a large beast crawling across a soggy ground, repeatedly slamming its heavy forelimbs into the mud and dragging its lifeless hindquarters behind it. Lazarus heard the heavy breaths betwixt the steps, and he recalled a day in the Well Hole of the Abbey catacombs, when Squire Thateus believed that a monster had attacked Squire Miguel. Truly, Lazarus now heard noises similar to those, which he envisioned as belonging to a winded and wounded sea beast, struggling to heave itself from the shoreline and find its final place to fester.
Lazarus rolled to his side and winced, rubbing himself where the suspended weight of him pressed his chest and legs against the timbers. He rose and squatted atop the beams before staring at the threshold of the exterior door and its red glow. The crimson light that he once recalled now cast itself as a different shade of red—a dying red—and he knew, from the lasting pain of the rafters, that the dawn of day had finally dwindled to dusk. ‘Soon, the night skies would be his,’ he assured himself. Yet, he spotted passing shadows as they broke through the threshold’s glow. Noises grew. He held his breath; his heart pounded. If the door should open to allow even a thin beam of light to reflect —
Boom! The door burst open. A fountain of sunlight spilled over the floor to part a roiling sea of roaches. Waves of insects rippled into the shadows. Lazarus turned his sunburned face away and closed his eyes. He winced and clenched his jaw, holding himself as a statue. In his blind and guarded state, he heard the troubling disturbance carry into the fish house—as though the dragging and wheezing sea beast found the rancid interior of the building to be a more appealing place to die. Yet, the apparent sound of a beast’s pounding forelimbs morphed into the more distinctive noise of a man’s boots striking the flagstones. Door hinges creaked and the blinding cast of daylight dimmed. Lazarus opened his eyes. He looked down to find a man standing with his back to the interior of the fish house and peeking through the crack of the nearly closed door. He carried himself like a suspicious or mischievous man, him hiding within and spying without.
From the shadows above the rafters, Lazarus saw the backside of the intruder: a rather heavy-set man with a full head of greasy black hair. Mud stains lined the bottom of his cream-coloured robe; and below his robe, Lazarus spotted a pair of black boots similar to his own, caked with clumps of mud. A line of muddy footprints led away from the man’s boots and toward the centre of the room. Only when looking toward the marred table, did Lazarus find the likely cause for the dragging sound, which he formerly heard—he eyed a limp and delicate hand that lay upturned on the floor. However, from his vantage point, Lazarus saw no more of the owner’s arm or body, since the long tabletop obscured all view, save that of the pale hand. Nevertheless, he dared not an attempt to garner further details and chance a creaking of the crossbeams.
At length, the man stole away from the door and gathered torches from the tall pail. After which, he opened the lid of the smaller pail, wetted the torches in oil, and traversed the periphery of the fish house whilst sliding the torches into mounted wall brackets. With a few flicks of a tinderbox, he had the entire enclosure aglow with flaming torches. Then he returned to the exterior door and briefly peered out before sealing it closed with a rugged crossbar. Finally, he spun about and stared at the workbench against the back wall, with its tidy stacks of clothes and shoes. He clapped once and held the fingertips of his praying hands against his smiling lips, as though to appreciate the spread of a scrumptious feast. Lazarus noted the finer details of his features: olive complexion, a wiry black beard, dark eyes, and an outwardly pronounced, beak-like nose. Although the man’s face appeared foreign to Lazarus, the most troubling feature of it lay in the unnatural space of his eyes—upon such a seemingly meaty face, the man’s narrowly spaced eyes altogether delivered a rather disturbing Cyclopean stare.
Straight away, the man’s face changed; his grin became a frown beneath a hard brow. He strode forward, lifted a lifeless woman from the floor, and placed the body lengthwise atop the table. He propped the woman’s arms beside her and positioned her to centre the table, adjusting her posture as he might, a life-sized doll. As Lazarus looked down upon her, she appeared to return him a wide, blue-eyed stare that cried aloud with a profound desperation. Yet, the conveyed terror in her eyes lay in stark contrast to the contented expression of her relaxed face—she appeared to look at him with warring emotions of revulsion and self-gratification, equally marked by the stricken gaze and the subtle smirk tucked in the corner of her lips. And there she lay, peering up at him, drilling her eyes through his own, and perhaps into the very basements of Heaven, even as the man began to remove her clothing. Carefully and meticulously, the man’s fingers moved like those of a loving mother with her bed-ridden daughter, with him strictly folding every stitch of garb and stacking it beside the table-strapped corpse.
Lazarus staggered and clutched a rafter to regain his balance. He cupped his hand over his mouth and winced from an unexpected wave of nausea that washed over him. Through a steady hum of flies and clicking insects, Lazarus heard every heavy breath of the man, completely with its steady gurgle of phlegm; and he watched the fat fingers of the man as they gracefully smoothed and folded the last item of clothing. To Lazarus, the fingers did not seem to fit the hands of a seasoned fisherman. as they appeared plump and tender; unlike the longer, leaner, and more thick-skinned fingers of his father—or his own, for that matter.....
[ End Excerpt Teaser Text ]
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