The Coffin's Occupant - Act 1
So, I've been rewriting the story like mad to get it ready in time for my writing workshoop class. Here's the first piece of it complete.
Edited again 02/16/07.
The Coffin’s Occupant
They all wiped fake tears from their eyes,
Sent for a coffin with teak sides,
And wrote a service full of lies,
Not caring that the miser died.
The poor maid who looked inside,
Found the casket was occupied.
When the encased fellow opened his eyes, he was staring into the face of a very freckled and very frightened young woman. Before he could speak, she ran shrieking from the room, leaving the man staring up at the ceiling, contemplating it. He could only see a small part of the room from where he lay, which was covered with detailed painted tiles that recreated an impressively expensive forest. This appeared to be a waiting room of some sort, part of a very old and very wealthy mansion.
Soon she came huffing and puffing back with two young men. They peered down into the man’s little world and laughed. The one with blond hair said, “No wonder it was such a bleeding weight!”
The man tried to join in their laughter, but it dissolved into hoarse coughs. The two men jumped back. “Let’s find the butler, he ought to know what to do,” muttered the brown haired one, running from the room.
The butler of the Clarford Estate had enough good sense to fetch the closest version of doctor they had on hand: the mortician who came to care for the dearly departed lord. The mortician, being a slightly wide fellow, was barely able to squeeze through the door and in quite a bad mood when he got there. His multitudes of years at various medical schools studying the science of autopsy were no use for this case, because the poor encased fellow smiled at him and rasped out of his poor vocal chords, “Water?”
His frail, ghostly hands with immensely long fingernails grasped the wooden sides, and the man pulled himself into a sitting position. For an instant they had a glimpse of his skeletal face and skin so transparent the veins beneath were visible. He flopped back down, surprising the maid, causing her to squeak uncontrollably. The mortician sent her off to fetch water as the noise grated against his nerves.
“So,” he said, heaving himself onto a chair arranged by the coffin so he could peer at the odd man without straining to see over his gut. “How did you place yourself in this predicament?”
“I doubt I did it. What’s the date? Where am I?”
“February 5th, in the Clarford Estate, Yorkshire.” The mortician rested his hands on his great girth. "I quite agree, but you said 'I doubt', and when people say that they doubt, they rarely know the actuality. Are you saying that you can't remember the event?"
“Nothing. But,” he replied, grinning. “That’s good. It sounds unpleasant. What year?”
The mortician’s eyebrows rose to his forehead. “Of our Lord’s year, 1896.”
The little man ignored his confusion. “Please, get me out?”
No one stepped forward. The mortician, being fearless of death or those near it, stuck his large arm in the coffin and plucked the little man from the box with ease. “Someone catch his legs!” he called. One of the maids hopped forward gingerly and lifted the little man’s legs out by his shoes. They propped him up, and for a fleeting moment, he stood.
He was small and slender for a grown man, barely reaching the maid’s chin. His hair was very long, in a matted black braid that hung past his knees, which buckled when he looked into the maid’s eyes. The maid caught him and looped his arm around her neck. He looked like a creature of the night who was weary of his mischievous deeds.
“Thank-you,” he mumbled, wincing. “Perhaps I can try walking later?”
The crowd about the door suddenly stirred. Philip Clarford, the new lord of the estate, burst in, dragging the maid with a pitcher of water along. “Let me see this!” he shouted, grinning from ear to ear. “God in heaven you look awful. How in Hell’s orchards did you get in there?”
“Don’t know.”
“Amazing! And in my father’s coffin too! What’s your name?”
The little man stared at him for a moment. “Don’t know that either,” he said finally.
“If only my father had seen this! This,” the young lord lifted his arms to heaven, “this is nothing short of a miracle! You’re alive?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain? If Marianne weren’t holding you up, would you be moving at all?”
“Yes, for the water!” He grabbed the pitcher from the squeaky maid, who squealed and scurried back into the crowd.
The entire room had silenced. Every eye was on the pitcher in the little man’s hands, watching it tip farther and farther back, hearing the tiny slurping noises, refusing to breath until he did. At last it lowered.
He glanced at the amazed faces around him. “Was there something wrong?” Now they could hear that he had a trace of an Indian accent, which he seemed to be fighting to hide.
“What should we call you? Lord Ruthven or Earl of Marsden?” asked Lord Clarford, gaping at him.
“No, none of that novel nonsense,” said the mortician. “Find him a bed, and make certain,” he heaved himself onto his own feet, “he stays in it. He hasn’t got long.” With that, he pushed his way through the crowd, leaving a gap wide enough for the little man, being half escorted, half carried by Marianne, to pass through without trouble.
“Not in my house!” Lord Clarford called after them. “I don’t want a Lord Ruthven in my house!”
“Where should I take him, my lord?” she called, hesitating.
“I’m tired,” the little man whispered. “I must sit.” She carefully sat him down and turned to the young lord.
“I don’t know! Take him to the stables.”
“Take pity,” the mortician snapped. “He’s dying. Be a good Christian.”
Marianne looked at the little man, who was pulling at his chest, panting like a fish. He was pitiful. Then, before her eyes he flopped onto his back panting, his arms flung perpendicular to his body, his legs spread apart. His eyes turned to her, but his face looked toward the ceiling in a way that was oddly familiar. “Stay with me,” he gasped.
Marianne crouched besides him and picked up his hand, trying to make herself feel a little more useful. It was cold and slick with sweat. Suddenly his hand clenched, and the other grabbed at his chest. His breaths became shorter and shallower. She stared at him, trying to understand what was happening.
She started to stand up, but his grip tightened. “Stay! With! Me!” His other hand was beating at his chest.
“I need to get help.”
“Yes!” he rasped. His face was an odd yellow hue, as though all of the blood had drained from it. Only sinew and bone were left. “Stay! Stay!”
“Help! He’s collapsed!”
“So he’s dying already?” Lord Clarford said.
The mortician waddled down the hall to the little man’s side. “For God’s sake! Put him in a bed!”
Marianne studied the wide-eyed gaze that the little man wore. Was he glimpsing heaven? Then she remembered where she had seen this gaze before. Her father and brother had had an illness that weakened their hearts. They both had died the same way - gazing into the wonder of death. “I’ll give him a bed!” she said suddenly. “I’ll take him home.”
When the little man next opened his eyes, he was surrounded by faces in a room with plain white walls. The air moved freely here, he could smell the moors creeping in through the cracks in the walls. His foul clothes had been stripped from him, revealing his emaciated body carefully lain out on a small bed. The women shielded their eyes. Marianne was there too, leaning against the wall, chewing her lips.
The overweight mortician was gone. The local physician leaned over the little man with a fancy instrument for listening to the chest. “Good afternoon,” he greeted. “Welcome to the world.”
The little man blinked. “Where am I?”
The physician smiled warmly. “Miss Marianne Addison’s family decided to take you in till you recover your memory.”
“I thank them one thousand times.” He absentmindedly rubbed his chest.
“You’re welcome, one thousand times,” muttered an old woman with a weather-beaten face.
The physician chuckled. “They named you too. You arrived in Alexander Clarford’s coffin, so they elected to call you Alex for the while.” The physician chuckled. “Well, we now know something more about you. You have a weak heart, and you were in that coffin for a very long time.”
“Oh,” the newly named Alex whispered. “How do you know?”
“You have bed sores and calluses on your back, legs, and arms where they rubbed the coffin. You should be very grateful you cannot remember the ordeal.”
He nodded weakly. “I am.”
“Moreover, it has weakened your heart, in the same way that a person released from an oubliette dies when walking from the dungeon.”
Alex flinched. “They wanted to forget me?” He paused because his breath came in short gasps. Suddenly he stopped and grasped at his chest.
The doctor shook his head sadly. “I don’t think he’ll live much longer, or through the night. The best you can do is keep him comfortable, make his last day kindness after that hardship.”
Wheezing from Alex increased. “I’m glad for… your confidence… in me, but I… will not die!” Marianne couldn’t look at his face, but instead watched his fluttering chest and pallid, sweaty skin.
The odd little man did live through the night, and the next night as well, though only by pure determination. Several times he stopped breathing. His hand would fall limp in Marianne’s grasp. Each time she would feel for a pulse, her own racing, and he’d take a tedious, shuddering breath and clutch her hand, too tired to speak.
By the third day he managed to sleep and breathe at the same time. They were able to put some soup down his throat sitting up. That morning he watched the sunrise through the window sitting like Marianne did as a child on her mother’s lap.
Later that morning, Alex finally fell into a normal sleep. Marianne and Mrs. Addison sat in the kitchen, resting their minds. “It’s foolish, but I feel like a new mother again,” Mrs. Addison whispered. “He’s so small, so weak…” her voice trailed off as she looked about the kitchen. “Brian didn’t last this long. Do you think he will?”
“Mummy, he’s a grown man.”
Mrs. Addison shook her head. “Looked no older than you, to my eyes. He could almost be Brian if he were blond.”
“I doubt I could ever be so tall.”
They spun around to see him propped up by the doorway. The nightshirt they had found for him had been Marianne’s father’s, and it was massively too big for him. It dragged on the ground behind him with his unbraided hair. He had walked from the bed to the door on his own.
It was as though he was a baby that had taken his first step, the way Marianne and Mrs. Addison carried on. Marianne rode into town to tell the doctor while Mrs. Addison made Alex presentable. She found her husband’s old clothes, pinned them up to fit, and combed out his extreme hair, for he refused to let her cut it to a more civilized length.
When the doctor knocked on the door, Alex greeted him standing up. “Still alive,” he told the doctor, and gave Marianne an enormous grin when the doctor had to sit down from surprise. With clean skin, clothes, and combed hair, he looked like a budding tree in early Spring, as though his withered appearance was only to protect him from the winter.
Glowing from the encounter, Marianne took the doctor back to the village, and she returned to a very loud argument taking place in the kitchen.
“Madam Addison, please let me help!” Alex pleaded. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bowed. Mrs. Addison wielded a soupspoon like an army commander wielding a sword.
“Go to bed! You’ve done enough for one day!”
“I can’t be idle while you toil!”
“Would you rather die? Go to bed, now.” Her soupspoon was dangerously close to his chin.
“I should be dead.”
“Good evening, Mother, Alex.”
They jumped. Alex clutched his chest. Mrs. Addison snatched the opportunity to say, “Don’t you agree with me, that he ought to go back to bed before he hurts himself?”
“No,” he muttered, but his hand started to shake.
“Yes,” Marianne answered. She marched over to him and looped his left arm around her neck.
“No…” he growled as Marianne dragged him away. Suddenly, his knees gave out, and a strangled yelp escaped his throat. He started shuddering violently on the floor.
“Mum! Help! He fell!”
Her mother scurried to help them, muttering, “I knew he was too weak to leave bed.” She lifted Alex as though he was a small boy and dropped him on the makeshift straw mattress.
“We need to keep him here. Sit on his legs if you have to! I’ll get a damp rag.”
“Stay! Stay! Stay!” Alex whimpered. Small streams of sweat slid off his forehead, visibly dampening the pillow. His dark eyes were locked on some invisible object high in the air before him.
Marianne and her mother sat by the bed for hours, bathing his forehead. The quarter moon lit up his face like a death mask. Only his eyes had any color, but the moonlight reflected a poisonous green glow. When the “Stay! Stay! Stay!” chant finally ceased, he breathed slowly for a few minutes before rolling onto his side. His head lolled and his eyes blinked lethargically.
“You are too kind,” he whispered. “My debt is too great.” Marianne stretched her aching knees. “I only wished to help her make dinner,” he muttered. “I was going to cook curry.”
“You’re being reckless,” she muttered. “My father died from a weak heart as well. Insisted to go out and herd the sheep in and died out in the field.”
“Oh.” His voice was caught between a moan and understanding. “I see why you would worry, but I’m not your father. I’m stronger than most.”
The wind picked up suddenly, shaking the roof. “Not at the moment. You couldn’t fight the wind and win right now.”
“But I’m frightened. I don’t want to fight anymore.” Alex laid back, listening to the wind howl against the rough stone walls of the cottage. “I’m glad that you’re here with me.”
For the bare remainder of the night, Marianne was haunted with a strange dream. She was in a smoky hut with a low ceiling. A great slab of stone was before her, and on it, blanketed with a brilliant red cloth, lay Alex. He was different. His skin was dark, as though he spent all of his days laboring under the southern sun, and he had muscles, not bones, showing through his skin. Death still was about him. A rash from a plague she had only heard horror stories of was on his skin. As he turned to see her, he screamed something in a foreign tongue and tried to lift his hands to protect himself, but he was tied down. Then Marianne realized she was clutching a knife in her right hand, but it wasn’t her right that he gazed at. He looked to her left. Something warm, slimy, and twitching was in her left hand. She awoke, gasping like Alex had, but told no one about the dream.
What do you think? TELL ME! Is it a grand improvement over any version I've posted so far? Are you intrigued? Would you like me to abandon my fanfiction exploits for a few days to finish this? Come on, I need some sort of feed back here. *cries like a fangirl realizing that Legolas would never have her*
Edited again 02/16/07.
The Coffin’s Occupant
They all wiped fake tears from their eyes,
Sent for a coffin with teak sides,
And wrote a service full of lies,
Not caring that the miser died.
The poor maid who looked inside,
Found the casket was occupied.
When the encased fellow opened his eyes, he was staring into the face of a very freckled and very frightened young woman. Before he could speak, she ran shrieking from the room, leaving the man staring up at the ceiling, contemplating it. He could only see a small part of the room from where he lay, which was covered with detailed painted tiles that recreated an impressively expensive forest. This appeared to be a waiting room of some sort, part of a very old and very wealthy mansion.
Soon she came huffing and puffing back with two young men. They peered down into the man’s little world and laughed. The one with blond hair said, “No wonder it was such a bleeding weight!”
The man tried to join in their laughter, but it dissolved into hoarse coughs. The two men jumped back. “Let’s find the butler, he ought to know what to do,” muttered the brown haired one, running from the room.
The butler of the Clarford Estate had enough good sense to fetch the closest version of doctor they had on hand: the mortician who came to care for the dearly departed lord. The mortician, being a slightly wide fellow, was barely able to squeeze through the door and in quite a bad mood when he got there. His multitudes of years at various medical schools studying the science of autopsy were no use for this case, because the poor encased fellow smiled at him and rasped out of his poor vocal chords, “Water?”
His frail, ghostly hands with immensely long fingernails grasped the wooden sides, and the man pulled himself into a sitting position. For an instant they had a glimpse of his skeletal face and skin so transparent the veins beneath were visible. He flopped back down, surprising the maid, causing her to squeak uncontrollably. The mortician sent her off to fetch water as the noise grated against his nerves.
“So,” he said, heaving himself onto a chair arranged by the coffin so he could peer at the odd man without straining to see over his gut. “How did you place yourself in this predicament?”
“I doubt I did it. What’s the date? Where am I?”
“February 5th, in the Clarford Estate, Yorkshire.” The mortician rested his hands on his great girth. "I quite agree, but you said 'I doubt', and when people say that they doubt, they rarely know the actuality. Are you saying that you can't remember the event?"
“Nothing. But,” he replied, grinning. “That’s good. It sounds unpleasant. What year?”
The mortician’s eyebrows rose to his forehead. “Of our Lord’s year, 1896.”
The little man ignored his confusion. “Please, get me out?”
No one stepped forward. The mortician, being fearless of death or those near it, stuck his large arm in the coffin and plucked the little man from the box with ease. “Someone catch his legs!” he called. One of the maids hopped forward gingerly and lifted the little man’s legs out by his shoes. They propped him up, and for a fleeting moment, he stood.
He was small and slender for a grown man, barely reaching the maid’s chin. His hair was very long, in a matted black braid that hung past his knees, which buckled when he looked into the maid’s eyes. The maid caught him and looped his arm around her neck. He looked like a creature of the night who was weary of his mischievous deeds.
“Thank-you,” he mumbled, wincing. “Perhaps I can try walking later?”
The crowd about the door suddenly stirred. Philip Clarford, the new lord of the estate, burst in, dragging the maid with a pitcher of water along. “Let me see this!” he shouted, grinning from ear to ear. “God in heaven you look awful. How in Hell’s orchards did you get in there?”
“Don’t know.”
“Amazing! And in my father’s coffin too! What’s your name?”
The little man stared at him for a moment. “Don’t know that either,” he said finally.
“If only my father had seen this! This,” the young lord lifted his arms to heaven, “this is nothing short of a miracle! You’re alive?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain? If Marianne weren’t holding you up, would you be moving at all?”
“Yes, for the water!” He grabbed the pitcher from the squeaky maid, who squealed and scurried back into the crowd.
The entire room had silenced. Every eye was on the pitcher in the little man’s hands, watching it tip farther and farther back, hearing the tiny slurping noises, refusing to breath until he did. At last it lowered.
He glanced at the amazed faces around him. “Was there something wrong?” Now they could hear that he had a trace of an Indian accent, which he seemed to be fighting to hide.
“What should we call you? Lord Ruthven or Earl of Marsden?” asked Lord Clarford, gaping at him.
“No, none of that novel nonsense,” said the mortician. “Find him a bed, and make certain,” he heaved himself onto his own feet, “he stays in it. He hasn’t got long.” With that, he pushed his way through the crowd, leaving a gap wide enough for the little man, being half escorted, half carried by Marianne, to pass through without trouble.
“Not in my house!” Lord Clarford called after them. “I don’t want a Lord Ruthven in my house!”
“Where should I take him, my lord?” she called, hesitating.
“I’m tired,” the little man whispered. “I must sit.” She carefully sat him down and turned to the young lord.
“I don’t know! Take him to the stables.”
“Take pity,” the mortician snapped. “He’s dying. Be a good Christian.”
Marianne looked at the little man, who was pulling at his chest, panting like a fish. He was pitiful. Then, before her eyes he flopped onto his back panting, his arms flung perpendicular to his body, his legs spread apart. His eyes turned to her, but his face looked toward the ceiling in a way that was oddly familiar. “Stay with me,” he gasped.
Marianne crouched besides him and picked up his hand, trying to make herself feel a little more useful. It was cold and slick with sweat. Suddenly his hand clenched, and the other grabbed at his chest. His breaths became shorter and shallower. She stared at him, trying to understand what was happening.
She started to stand up, but his grip tightened. “Stay! With! Me!” His other hand was beating at his chest.
“I need to get help.”
“Yes!” he rasped. His face was an odd yellow hue, as though all of the blood had drained from it. Only sinew and bone were left. “Stay! Stay!”
“Help! He’s collapsed!”
“So he’s dying already?” Lord Clarford said.
The mortician waddled down the hall to the little man’s side. “For God’s sake! Put him in a bed!”
Marianne studied the wide-eyed gaze that the little man wore. Was he glimpsing heaven? Then she remembered where she had seen this gaze before. Her father and brother had had an illness that weakened their hearts. They both had died the same way - gazing into the wonder of death. “I’ll give him a bed!” she said suddenly. “I’ll take him home.”
When the little man next opened his eyes, he was surrounded by faces in a room with plain white walls. The air moved freely here, he could smell the moors creeping in through the cracks in the walls. His foul clothes had been stripped from him, revealing his emaciated body carefully lain out on a small bed. The women shielded their eyes. Marianne was there too, leaning against the wall, chewing her lips.
The overweight mortician was gone. The local physician leaned over the little man with a fancy instrument for listening to the chest. “Good afternoon,” he greeted. “Welcome to the world.”
The little man blinked. “Where am I?”
The physician smiled warmly. “Miss Marianne Addison’s family decided to take you in till you recover your memory.”
“I thank them one thousand times.” He absentmindedly rubbed his chest.
“You’re welcome, one thousand times,” muttered an old woman with a weather-beaten face.
The physician chuckled. “They named you too. You arrived in Alexander Clarford’s coffin, so they elected to call you Alex for the while.” The physician chuckled. “Well, we now know something more about you. You have a weak heart, and you were in that coffin for a very long time.”
“Oh,” the newly named Alex whispered. “How do you know?”
“You have bed sores and calluses on your back, legs, and arms where they rubbed the coffin. You should be very grateful you cannot remember the ordeal.”
He nodded weakly. “I am.”
“Moreover, it has weakened your heart, in the same way that a person released from an oubliette dies when walking from the dungeon.”
Alex flinched. “They wanted to forget me?” He paused because his breath came in short gasps. Suddenly he stopped and grasped at his chest.
The doctor shook his head sadly. “I don’t think he’ll live much longer, or through the night. The best you can do is keep him comfortable, make his last day kindness after that hardship.”
Wheezing from Alex increased. “I’m glad for… your confidence… in me, but I… will not die!” Marianne couldn’t look at his face, but instead watched his fluttering chest and pallid, sweaty skin.
The odd little man did live through the night, and the next night as well, though only by pure determination. Several times he stopped breathing. His hand would fall limp in Marianne’s grasp. Each time she would feel for a pulse, her own racing, and he’d take a tedious, shuddering breath and clutch her hand, too tired to speak.
By the third day he managed to sleep and breathe at the same time. They were able to put some soup down his throat sitting up. That morning he watched the sunrise through the window sitting like Marianne did as a child on her mother’s lap.
Later that morning, Alex finally fell into a normal sleep. Marianne and Mrs. Addison sat in the kitchen, resting their minds. “It’s foolish, but I feel like a new mother again,” Mrs. Addison whispered. “He’s so small, so weak…” her voice trailed off as she looked about the kitchen. “Brian didn’t last this long. Do you think he will?”
“Mummy, he’s a grown man.”
Mrs. Addison shook her head. “Looked no older than you, to my eyes. He could almost be Brian if he were blond.”
“I doubt I could ever be so tall.”
They spun around to see him propped up by the doorway. The nightshirt they had found for him had been Marianne’s father’s, and it was massively too big for him. It dragged on the ground behind him with his unbraided hair. He had walked from the bed to the door on his own.
It was as though he was a baby that had taken his first step, the way Marianne and Mrs. Addison carried on. Marianne rode into town to tell the doctor while Mrs. Addison made Alex presentable. She found her husband’s old clothes, pinned them up to fit, and combed out his extreme hair, for he refused to let her cut it to a more civilized length.
When the doctor knocked on the door, Alex greeted him standing up. “Still alive,” he told the doctor, and gave Marianne an enormous grin when the doctor had to sit down from surprise. With clean skin, clothes, and combed hair, he looked like a budding tree in early Spring, as though his withered appearance was only to protect him from the winter.
Glowing from the encounter, Marianne took the doctor back to the village, and she returned to a very loud argument taking place in the kitchen.
“Madam Addison, please let me help!” Alex pleaded. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bowed. Mrs. Addison wielded a soupspoon like an army commander wielding a sword.
“Go to bed! You’ve done enough for one day!”
“I can’t be idle while you toil!”
“Would you rather die? Go to bed, now.” Her soupspoon was dangerously close to his chin.
“I should be dead.”
“Good evening, Mother, Alex.”
They jumped. Alex clutched his chest. Mrs. Addison snatched the opportunity to say, “Don’t you agree with me, that he ought to go back to bed before he hurts himself?”
“No,” he muttered, but his hand started to shake.
“Yes,” Marianne answered. She marched over to him and looped his left arm around her neck.
“No…” he growled as Marianne dragged him away. Suddenly, his knees gave out, and a strangled yelp escaped his throat. He started shuddering violently on the floor.
“Mum! Help! He fell!”
Her mother scurried to help them, muttering, “I knew he was too weak to leave bed.” She lifted Alex as though he was a small boy and dropped him on the makeshift straw mattress.
“We need to keep him here. Sit on his legs if you have to! I’ll get a damp rag.”
“Stay! Stay! Stay!” Alex whimpered. Small streams of sweat slid off his forehead, visibly dampening the pillow. His dark eyes were locked on some invisible object high in the air before him.
Marianne and her mother sat by the bed for hours, bathing his forehead. The quarter moon lit up his face like a death mask. Only his eyes had any color, but the moonlight reflected a poisonous green glow. When the “Stay! Stay! Stay!” chant finally ceased, he breathed slowly for a few minutes before rolling onto his side. His head lolled and his eyes blinked lethargically.
“You are too kind,” he whispered. “My debt is too great.” Marianne stretched her aching knees. “I only wished to help her make dinner,” he muttered. “I was going to cook curry.”
“You’re being reckless,” she muttered. “My father died from a weak heart as well. Insisted to go out and herd the sheep in and died out in the field.”
“Oh.” His voice was caught between a moan and understanding. “I see why you would worry, but I’m not your father. I’m stronger than most.”
The wind picked up suddenly, shaking the roof. “Not at the moment. You couldn’t fight the wind and win right now.”
“But I’m frightened. I don’t want to fight anymore.” Alex laid back, listening to the wind howl against the rough stone walls of the cottage. “I’m glad that you’re here with me.”
For the bare remainder of the night, Marianne was haunted with a strange dream. She was in a smoky hut with a low ceiling. A great slab of stone was before her, and on it, blanketed with a brilliant red cloth, lay Alex. He was different. His skin was dark, as though he spent all of his days laboring under the southern sun, and he had muscles, not bones, showing through his skin. Death still was about him. A rash from a plague she had only heard horror stories of was on his skin. As he turned to see her, he screamed something in a foreign tongue and tried to lift his hands to protect himself, but he was tied down. Then Marianne realized she was clutching a knife in her right hand, but it wasn’t her right that he gazed at. He looked to her left. Something warm, slimy, and twitching was in her left hand. She awoke, gasping like Alex had, but told no one about the dream.
What do you think? TELL ME! Is it a grand improvement over any version I've posted so far? Are you intrigued? Would you like me to abandon my fanfiction exploits for a few days to finish this? Come on, I need some sort of feed back here. *cries like a fangirl realizing that Legolas would never have her*