Is it WIP excerpt time? I think it is!
So htebazytook and I have just a handful of scenes left to write, and the first draft of "The Bone Fiddle" will be done! (I think we're looking at 60-65,000 words--by far the longest fic I've ever written even though only half of it's mine).
We've been having so much fun on it we didn't want the process to end. Fortunately, maybe, a wild plot bunny for a sequel appeared today!
Lead in to this bit: We're in (fictional) Arthel County, West Virginia, in November of 1973. John has come back from Vietnam to find that the old family land he expected to be able to live on has been destroyed by strip mining. (Broad-form deed. Google it and weep.) He's staying on another, crappier patch of land, in a crappy little trailer as temporary housing, and winter's coming on. It's in a little holler in the back of beyond; lots of maps don't even seem to know Route 221 is even there. He met his sweet friendly neighbor Mrs. Hudson his first day; and last night he's just met his creepy enigmatic neighbor Sherlock, who picked him up at a square dance (!) and wound up taking him to a place where a murder victim's body was found. And then abandoned him there.
The next morning, John decides to try a little deduction of his own, and by "deduction" we mean "snooping" and "trespassing."
John placed his first boot on the road, and tried not to think about how he was committing himself to walking probably near to a mile, there and back again, all uphill the first way, and it was being gloriously majestically easy. Mrs. Hudson's house came up so much quicker than it had before, and passed by quickly too. He smiled and waved in case she was at her window-oh no, she wouldn't be, church, yes, her little blue car was gone.
By all rights John should not be feeling this good. He'd been angry. There'd been bad dreams. The day was another gloomy and damp one, and now his shoulder-with the very real scarring from the very real wound-was aching slightly from the chill.
And still.
The road rose up sharply, putting more strain on his legs, and still John kept going. There was a sharp, Mobius-strip-like switchback, and John almost lost his footing on the loose rocks. But he didn't fall. He kept going.
Up ahead, far above him, he could see the crest of the mountain now - austere in the season, gray with a coat of naked deciduous trees, tinged a dark green with pine and spruce near the summit. Unmarked by the cut of any road.
When he rounded the next treacherous bend, he could see the eaves of an old farmhouse just above the banks of the road.
END STATE MAINTENANCE, said the sign with ominous blandness.
The passing of the last sharp curve let John finally see Castle Sherlock in all its glory. It was a big old Victorian pile, once smartly whitewashed, now peeling to gray, its tin roof covered in patches of red rust. The long porch and the pillars of the balcony looked slightly bent and swayed, but there was still probably another century of life left in it if its inhabitant would just keep it up.
The instinct to hello the house rose up in John, and it put up a good fight, but it lost out in the end to his desire to just plain snoop. There was wholesome-smelling woodsmoke from the chimney, and a bitter aftertaste of less wholesome chemical smells in the air.
The yard, oh my God, the yard. It occurred to John then that the house looked a lot like it should belong to the kind of person John had first thought Sherlock was. Now, John was a West Virginian born and bred, and he'd seen a lot of impressive collections of hillbilly lawn ornaments, as those yardfuls of rusting junk are often called. But Sherlock's yard deserved some kind of award in this category. Old cars, appliances, furniture, farm equipment, what looked like a complete and operational moonshine still he didn't even bother to try to hide in the woods like a decent person, sure, Sherlock's yard had all that. It was just so vast in its scope and its commanding sweep of history, from stone tools to the space age. It looked like a gang of marauding Amish had looted NASA.
That couldn't possibly be a piece of a Panzer, could it? Apparently it could. And the sharp, spiky wheeled things all around it, well, John knew they were probably farm equipment nobody alive now would remember how to use, but they could also pass for torture devices or seige engines. There were motors and piping and tanks and blades and old car shells, and an early rough draft of a motorcycle, and a rack of tanned hides, and part of the wing of an obsolete airplane.
But to the corner of the yard where it curved around behind the house, things looked much more orderly - which was the exact reverse of what even the most defiant of rednecks would generally do. There was an almost elegant row of square beehives lined up against the back of the hillside, and beyond that the remnant of a winter-dormant garden. John still had some scruples about wandering too far around a near-stranger's yard without invitation, though, fascinating as those outbuildings over yonder (but no outhouse, John noted with envy) might be.
He already knew some things he hadn't known before. Sherlock Holmes wasn't allergic to bee stings, for example. Hopefully he had some kind of superhuman immunity to tetanus and snakebite as well.
When John turned around to go to the front door and knock on it and pretend he was just arriving, he saw that it was already open.
“Good morning, John,” Sherlock said, standing on the porch in his long coat and shiny shoes like he'd been expecting him. He probably had. And probably had been watching him for a while.
“Mornin'!” John said with giddy forced cheer, and only got a smug chuckle for his trouble.
“If I had shot you for trespassing, there's not a jury here that would convict me,” Sherlock said, without the slightest trace of anger or threat in his voice.
“I know,” John said, because he did know that, very well, and not hello-ing out was a choice he'd made out of his own perversity. “But I didn't think you would.”
“Sound conclusion. I'd even go so far as to say you knew I wouldn't.”
John walked slowly towards Sherlock and the porch, wondering for a moment if Sherlock was going to invite him in. He tried, none too subtly, to peer past him into the house. But Sherlock had a scarf around his long neck and his car keys - well, his hearse keys-in his long hand, and you didn't need to be a genius to reckon he was on his way out.
“Goin' to church?” John said.
Sherlock laughed. “In a sense. Get in, we're going to the morgue.”
Of course, John thought. Of course we are. Where else would we be going? He thought he ought to put up some token resistance, but what would be the point?
The wheels of the hearse spit up gravel as they rolled down the dubious road-and no, John didn't miss the studying gaze Sherlock gave his little trailer as they passed it. He drives the same way he thinks, John thought. There's a method in it, he knows what he's doing, but it's terrifying to anyone who isn't him.
“Yes! Good timing!” Sherlock blurted, appropos of nothing. “Stupid. I left my riding crop at the morgue last time.”
Now that was a sentence John had never heard uttered before in his life. “Oh, good,” he said weakly. “So you can pick it up now.” He let the silence unfold for a moment. “You ride horses?”
“No. Well, not very often. I have one, it came with the house. Mostly-quarterhorse gelding named Arthur who lives up in the meadow by the barn. Haven't ridden him in months. He's always trying to kill me with deadly falls. He's no dumber than some of my human enemies, but no smarter either, so, tedious.”
“Oh.”
“But that's not what I use the riding crop for.”
John turned half around in his seat and looked straight on at Sherlock's impassive profile. “You know what? I think you want me to ask about what you do use it for. And I'm not going to.” Sherlock really did have a stunning smile. John felt proud of himself for bringing it on. And then he thought that if he kept thinking this way, he was going to have to open the door of the moving hearse and jump the fuck out, so he tried to make himself get angry again. “You're not going to ditch me again, are you?”
“Not if you can keep up.”
I have htebazytook's agreement that it's fun to do this, but still to be on the safe side I grabbed an excerpt that's pretty much all me (at least at this early stage; I have a feeling we'll merge a lot more soon). We live and die by the Rule of Funny, but we've got some dark drama in here too, we promise.
We've been having so much fun on it we didn't want the process to end. Fortunately, maybe, a wild plot bunny for a sequel appeared today!
Lead in to this bit: We're in (fictional) Arthel County, West Virginia, in November of 1973. John has come back from Vietnam to find that the old family land he expected to be able to live on has been destroyed by strip mining. (Broad-form deed. Google it and weep.) He's staying on another, crappier patch of land, in a crappy little trailer as temporary housing, and winter's coming on. It's in a little holler in the back of beyond; lots of maps don't even seem to know Route 221 is even there. He met his sweet friendly neighbor Mrs. Hudson his first day; and last night he's just met his creepy enigmatic neighbor Sherlock, who picked him up at a square dance (!) and wound up taking him to a place where a murder victim's body was found. And then abandoned him there.
The next morning, John decides to try a little deduction of his own, and by "deduction" we mean "snooping" and "trespassing."
John placed his first boot on the road, and tried not to think about how he was committing himself to walking probably near to a mile, there and back again, all uphill the first way, and it was being gloriously majestically easy. Mrs. Hudson's house came up so much quicker than it had before, and passed by quickly too. He smiled and waved in case she was at her window-oh no, she wouldn't be, church, yes, her little blue car was gone.
By all rights John should not be feeling this good. He'd been angry. There'd been bad dreams. The day was another gloomy and damp one, and now his shoulder-with the very real scarring from the very real wound-was aching slightly from the chill.
And still.
The road rose up sharply, putting more strain on his legs, and still John kept going. There was a sharp, Mobius-strip-like switchback, and John almost lost his footing on the loose rocks. But he didn't fall. He kept going.
Up ahead, far above him, he could see the crest of the mountain now - austere in the season, gray with a coat of naked deciduous trees, tinged a dark green with pine and spruce near the summit. Unmarked by the cut of any road.
When he rounded the next treacherous bend, he could see the eaves of an old farmhouse just above the banks of the road.
END STATE MAINTENANCE, said the sign with ominous blandness.
The passing of the last sharp curve let John finally see Castle Sherlock in all its glory. It was a big old Victorian pile, once smartly whitewashed, now peeling to gray, its tin roof covered in patches of red rust. The long porch and the pillars of the balcony looked slightly bent and swayed, but there was still probably another century of life left in it if its inhabitant would just keep it up.
The instinct to hello the house rose up in John, and it put up a good fight, but it lost out in the end to his desire to just plain snoop. There was wholesome-smelling woodsmoke from the chimney, and a bitter aftertaste of less wholesome chemical smells in the air.
The yard, oh my God, the yard. It occurred to John then that the house looked a lot like it should belong to the kind of person John had first thought Sherlock was. Now, John was a West Virginian born and bred, and he'd seen a lot of impressive collections of hillbilly lawn ornaments, as those yardfuls of rusting junk are often called. But Sherlock's yard deserved some kind of award in this category. Old cars, appliances, furniture, farm equipment, what looked like a complete and operational moonshine still he didn't even bother to try to hide in the woods like a decent person, sure, Sherlock's yard had all that. It was just so vast in its scope and its commanding sweep of history, from stone tools to the space age. It looked like a gang of marauding Amish had looted NASA.
That couldn't possibly be a piece of a Panzer, could it? Apparently it could. And the sharp, spiky wheeled things all around it, well, John knew they were probably farm equipment nobody alive now would remember how to use, but they could also pass for torture devices or seige engines. There were motors and piping and tanks and blades and old car shells, and an early rough draft of a motorcycle, and a rack of tanned hides, and part of the wing of an obsolete airplane.
But to the corner of the yard where it curved around behind the house, things looked much more orderly - which was the exact reverse of what even the most defiant of rednecks would generally do. There was an almost elegant row of square beehives lined up against the back of the hillside, and beyond that the remnant of a winter-dormant garden. John still had some scruples about wandering too far around a near-stranger's yard without invitation, though, fascinating as those outbuildings over yonder (but no outhouse, John noted with envy) might be.
He already knew some things he hadn't known before. Sherlock Holmes wasn't allergic to bee stings, for example. Hopefully he had some kind of superhuman immunity to tetanus and snakebite as well.
When John turned around to go to the front door and knock on it and pretend he was just arriving, he saw that it was already open.
“Good morning, John,” Sherlock said, standing on the porch in his long coat and shiny shoes like he'd been expecting him. He probably had. And probably had been watching him for a while.
“Mornin'!” John said with giddy forced cheer, and only got a smug chuckle for his trouble.
“If I had shot you for trespassing, there's not a jury here that would convict me,” Sherlock said, without the slightest trace of anger or threat in his voice.
“I know,” John said, because he did know that, very well, and not hello-ing out was a choice he'd made out of his own perversity. “But I didn't think you would.”
“Sound conclusion. I'd even go so far as to say you knew I wouldn't.”
John walked slowly towards Sherlock and the porch, wondering for a moment if Sherlock was going to invite him in. He tried, none too subtly, to peer past him into the house. But Sherlock had a scarf around his long neck and his car keys - well, his hearse keys-in his long hand, and you didn't need to be a genius to reckon he was on his way out.
“Goin' to church?” John said.
Sherlock laughed. “In a sense. Get in, we're going to the morgue.”
Of course, John thought. Of course we are. Where else would we be going? He thought he ought to put up some token resistance, but what would be the point?
The wheels of the hearse spit up gravel as they rolled down the dubious road-and no, John didn't miss the studying gaze Sherlock gave his little trailer as they passed it. He drives the same way he thinks, John thought. There's a method in it, he knows what he's doing, but it's terrifying to anyone who isn't him.
“Yes! Good timing!” Sherlock blurted, appropos of nothing. “Stupid. I left my riding crop at the morgue last time.”
Now that was a sentence John had never heard uttered before in his life. “Oh, good,” he said weakly. “So you can pick it up now.” He let the silence unfold for a moment. “You ride horses?”
“No. Well, not very often. I have one, it came with the house. Mostly-quarterhorse gelding named Arthur who lives up in the meadow by the barn. Haven't ridden him in months. He's always trying to kill me with deadly falls. He's no dumber than some of my human enemies, but no smarter either, so, tedious.”
“Oh.”
“But that's not what I use the riding crop for.”
John turned half around in his seat and looked straight on at Sherlock's impassive profile. “You know what? I think you want me to ask about what you do use it for. And I'm not going to.” Sherlock really did have a stunning smile. John felt proud of himself for bringing it on. And then he thought that if he kept thinking this way, he was going to have to open the door of the moving hearse and jump the fuck out, so he tried to make himself get angry again. “You're not going to ditch me again, are you?”
“Not if you can keep up.”
I have htebazytook's agreement that it's fun to do this, but still to be on the safe side I grabbed an excerpt that's pretty much all me (at least at this early stage; I have a feeling we'll merge a lot more soon). We live and die by the Rule of Funny, but we've got some dark drama in here too, we promise.