at least as far as the character design goes, and the depicted scene might get cut.
We'll see if this gets a big redo, or just minor adjustments.
It's alive again. I'm keeping all the old rough drafts up unedited. Probably forever. I don't like them very much; they were never supposed to be final anyway. But I was also never supposed to erase them. I think there's something to learn from the process of what I think is worth changing, and what I think is worth keeping, even as the story's scope changes.
I always knew where Memento Mori was going. I started with the ending, and mostly had a hard time filling in everything that happens between the opening and the end. But I'm going to be honest: where I'm at right now, this is the first time that I've felt like I have absolutely no fucking idea where this is going. I don't even know if the ending that got me started on this project is going to still be there when I'm done. If I can get there.
It sounds silly, but working on a pen & paper prototype of a turn-based RPG I'd like to make at some point using these character concepts has shaken up some ways that I understand who they are and how they relate to one another. I've also gotten to cook with a few supporting characters absolutely essential to that game and its character work that cannot fit here without MAJOR reconsideration of the story's foundation. I'm willing to play with that, which means I might find myself in some strange territory, and the path forward won't always be clear. I think I can work with that.
We should open with an illustration on the first page, because I want to have it both ways and open with a poem without changing the story's first line. The poem before the chapter heading should be presented as handwritten in a notebook with some cartoons doodled in the corners.
Can't you hear the whippoorwills?
Softly crying to the sun,
Coldly wringing silence dry,
Wilting Dahlias with its chill,
Afraid of what has come undone.
Or afraid to be alone until
The twilight kills, and eats its fill
And lays them in the undertow,
Tearing three to two, then two to one,
Because it's cold below, beneath the snow.
But then the silence makes reply,
A shadow drifting on the wind, or maybe...
A chilling view pierces the dew,
Cold and wet and hazy,
Breathing again, a pusher of the daisies.
"Forget me or forget me not, for I
Break the silence, in my defiance
Of the night that dragged me low,
I will not comply, and leave the sleeping lie,
Something something something, until you die."
Chapter 1
Cold Feet and Damp Concrete
My blood is made of war. Back in the dinosaur days, my ancestors all got jobs conking raptor skulls together like coconuts. What a perfect job for nearly two-hundred pounds of viking muscle and cheeseburger ghosts, then, to copy out of a dictionary. Not that that's what I've been doing for the past twenty minutes.
Not that that's what they want anyway. A handwritten copy of some of a dictionary, I mean. They don't even bother to hide it. What they want is for me to suffer. That's the point. Like I don't do enough of that already.
I roll my pencil around my fingers. This place sucks. They keep the detention room boring on purpose. Even Mr. Johnson, the gym teacher, can't seem to take it. His dark blue baseball cap is tilted down to cover his face, and his scuffed up tennis shoes are propped up on the desk. I don't know when the last time he moved would be.
You know what? Fuck this. As far as I'm concerned, my time is done. Besides, if I wait for him to wake up and dismiss me, I could be here for hours. I quietly brush the eraser shavings away from my notebook, pack up my pencil and paper, and silently creep for the door.
The halls are all empty by now, except for the posters that remind us that it's cool to do drugs because authority figures tell you not to, and the sign painted over the entrance. A furious-looking cartoon hornet stands by the words "Welcome to Hell Valley High School", over the trophy case. Very important that that's the first thing you see.
I blast through the big double doors at the front of the school with a hip check, and duck outside to the top of the stairs. It's not quite cold enough to see your breath today, but it feels like it should be. There's basically nobody out here by now anyway. Just a bunch of tall pine trees keeping somber watch over the vacant lot across the street, an overgrown field in front of the King's Carcass.
That would be the remains of a Burger King that got shut down by the health department, supposedly because a manager tried to dispose of her murdered husband by turning him into man-nuggets and feeding him to customers, which is entirely too many different kinds of stupid to be true.
That hasn't stopped rumors of that building being reused for secret Satanic worship and ritualistic animal sacrifice. Unfortunately, rather than being something totally rad like that, the old King's Carcass is basically just a den for nerds to gather on weekends and play board games about wizards and dragons and shit. I know, I'm disappointed too.
I've been standing at the top of these stairs for a minute or so now. I still feel the call to climb things, and when I'm up there, to jump down off of stuff. Even though I know it's a horrible idea, and that that's why I've got back problems now, despite Bethany's insistence on an alternate explanation. It takes more willpower than I'd like to admit to walk down the stairs like a normal person.
Bethany sits on the lowest step, casually applying clown makeup like that's a normal thing to do. Bonnie stands by the other side of the stairs with her boyfriend, Claud. Those two seem to be rehearsing lines for something.
"What's up, nerds?" I ask, stretching my back and growling like a sad, old dinosaur.
"Same as ever," Bonnie answers. "What kept you so long?"
"What do you think?"
"Alright," Bonnie says, with a disappointment that I usually only hear from my mom. "What did you do this time?"
"I failed to magically control gravity, I guess."
". . . Which means . . ." She waves her hand at me, like she can summon an explanation from me as easily as she could wave away a fart.
"Look, I know I try not to do too much in gym class, because of my legs and my back, but Mr. Johnson didn't like that I was walking instead of running. I tried to pick up my feet a little so he'd stop whining, but that just made him mad at me for being "disruptive", because how are the guys supposed to focus if there are boobs jiggling over there? I told him I could run or not run, but he needed to pick one, and he wrote me up for being disrespectful."
"So . . . you got in trouble for "running while female"?" Bonnie asks, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"Basically."
"Hey, he's kinda got a point," Bethany cuts in. "Lyra is absolutely stacked. Girl's got her own gravitational field."
"Thanks for the support, Bethany," I grumble.
"Oh honey, I'd support you any day," She makes a boob-holding motion at me and smirks suggestively.
"Cute," Bonnie says. "If that's your idea of "support", I'd hate to see you tear someone down."
"Oh, that's easy!" Bethany sneers. "See, you don't need that kind of support, considering that you're about as flat as a day old Pepsi. And you've got the long, chokable neck and skinny twig limbs of a goose. Of course, you'd know all about being an obnoxious honking embarrassment, wouldn't you, Frenchie?"
Bonnie scowls at her, then swipes the black aviator's cap off Bethany's head.
"My lucky hat!" She grabs back, but Bonnie ducks away.
Bethany tries to chase her, but she's never going to catch her. Bonnie's got some long ballet legs, and Bethany's got a cheesecake addiction.
Claud watches them circle around the grass a few times, without turning his head that way. Suddenly, Bethany starts spitting at Bonnie, though the way Bonnie's shrieking, you'd think she just pulled a gun on her. Claud shrinks back further, too timid to intervene. Instead, he's been blending into the background, disappearing in plain sight like a chameleon. A signature technique he learned from his older sister. Though, I wish she'd bother to do it more.
As if summoned by the thought of her, a bicycle rounds the corner and sidewinders down the sidewalk, the rider holding onto only one handlebar. Cloaked in a dark purple coat several sizes too large for her, she's got a grim reaper vibe to her, especially since she's wearing that coat over a hooded black sweatshirt with a glow-in-the-dark ribcage.
She's wearing a little black beret and a pair of thick-ass Velma Dinkley glasses, which don't do anything to dampen her frightening aura. Kind of like putting a cute little hat and bowtie on a viper eel. A long, narrow scar winds all the way up the left side of her face. The true story behind that, and her glass eye, is too painful for her, so she always has a different story when people ask her. Usually involving a demon or a knife fight. Occasionally both.
Carrie awkwardly skids to a stop in front of me, and steps off her bike. On sight, a crow glides down off the roof of the school and perches on her shoulder. Two more follow him down, landing on the handlebars. Carrie fishes some room-temperature stale french fries out of her jacket pocket, handing them out carefully. She smiles very slightly.
"You know you really shouldn't feed them like that," Bonnie complains coldly, walking back without Bethany's hat. All three of the crows scatter as she comes close. Carrie menacingly glares back in silence.
"Besides, are you trying to lose your other eye, riding that bike around one-handed?"
"She is one-handed, smartass," I answer for her.
"Huh?"
"Show her, creep," I tell Carrie.
She smiles like a cat about to pounce on a rat, and wriggles around to stretch back her jacket collar and enthusiastically waggle around a little 3-inch stump where her right arm ought to be.
Bonnie recoils like Carrie had just shot a lightning bolt at her.
"Ha! No way!" Bethany laughs. "How have I never seen that?"
"How often do you see her without that purple trench coat?" I ask.
"Damn. Fair," Bethany answers.
Carrie throws a longing glance towards the King's Carcass, then looks up at me expectantly.
"We'd better get out of here. I'll catch up with you guys later."
Somewhere in there, Claud had crept away from the school to stand behind Bonnie. Carrie gives him a disappointed look, before following me over to the bike rack.
We ride our bikes together over the grassy lot and behind the King's Carcass like we belong here. Tucked away in the trees, about ten yards behind the skeletal building, there's a shallow, innocent looking little ditch. Carrie and I bury our bikes in the tall, untamed grass, bike locks wrapped around the same tree trunk.
We hop through an icy breeze onto rocky, uneven ground. It's bone dry today, but water collects in here like crazy when it rains. That's by design, I think. I'm pretty sure this is part of a storm drainage system. It's a huge, writhing leviathan, slumbering between the town's toes, wriggling under the streets in some places until it eventually connects with the river.
Ahead of us, there's a concrete tunnel. The entrance is roughly chest high for me, but Carrie barely needs to lower her head to get inside. You get around one of the corners down here, and it gets deep-sea black. I don't know what this smell is, but it's always like this down here. The scars of the Earth always smell of stale air and old rain. Spend enough time down here, and it soaks into your clothes. Carrie always smells like she lives in a cave.
We're in one of the longest tunnels, and one with the least headroom. The low ceiling makes this an ordeal for me, but Carrie navigates this place like it was built for her. After two or three minutes of walk-crawling through silence, gravel, and damp cold empty darkness, Carrie stops instinctively. Buried in the left wall by the floor, there's a little side tunnel.
Barely over a foot tall, made of that ribbed steel they use in sewers, you wouldn't notice it if you were feeling the wall to find your way through. And even if you brought a flashlight and saw it down there, you'd have to be completely deranged to try crawling through it.
Carrie immediately starts crawling through it. Hell, we've squeezed through twenty feet of this cramped black hole through water cold enough to shock you to the bone and deep enough to cradle your chin with your head scraping the ceiling. I mean, it's not much of a "squeeze" for Carrie, but you know what I mean.
Finally, out the other side, there's a little concrete room. I'm not sure what it's supposed to be for, but it's taken on a new life as Carrie's dank underground lair. It's a round room, with a floor that slopes down to a drain in the center. It's just barely too short for me to stand upright in.
There's some rustling of fabric and clattering of chains as I drop my backpack on the ground and drape my jacket over the entrance pipe. I can hear Carrie settle down on the far side of the room. For a few moments, the still emptiness is death-like. Nothing but the glow-in-the-dark bones on her shirt and a silhouette digging through a backpack.
There's a gentle click, and a faint orange light fills the space. Suddenly, she's the real Carrie. She's always looked so out of place walking around in broad daylight or sitting at a desk bored out of her mind. Like catching Freddy or Jason waiting in line at the grocery store. She always wears this darkness like it belongs to her. Something in the flickering of distant firelight gives Carrie her actual form.
Holding a little black leather booklet with the same hand, she tears out a little paper talisman with her teeth, and drops the booklet into her lap. She licks the back of the paper, and slaps it onto the concrete between us. The alien-looking symbol gently glows white, and a smokeless white flame peeks out of the paper to softly light the room.
She drops her lighter back into her jacket pocket, and digs around her backpack some more. She lies down on the floor, spreading out a black spiral notebook in front of her. She clenches a pencil between her teeth, flipping through the pages. Then, she stops. And looks up at me patiently.
"You want to read something for me?" I ask.
". . . " She nods slightly.
"Whenever you're ready."
I lay on my back and try not to think about the nearly four feet of earth piled on top of the concrete. It's a strange feeling, one you wouldn't understand if you've never been underground. It gets stranger the deeper you get, and we've been deeper than this. A lot deeper.
Carrie stares down at the paper for a while, then takes a huge breath and sighs deeply. Her voice is faint. Out of practice.
"This will happen soon," she says:
Deep in black chambers below
Beneath a tar of anguish remains
Bitter blood and formless bone
And restless wrath stalking in chains
Find a stirring in thy swamp of hate
By my breath alive, by my voice awake
Stalking like a starving hunter
Part thy lips, and salivate
Feast of flesh, thy captors consumed
Rise, Shoguset! Beat thy hearts again
Cry "Alive!" and burn down the sky
So the age of Man may see its end.
"That . . . is a prophecy," Carrie says.
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