The Cave and The Storm

So, this isn't the actual title - that's still a work in progress. The story, however, is nearly complete. Please tell me what you think and what I can improve upon.

The land before him was nothing but a perilous white. Comforted only by the sanctuary of a cold, empty cave in the midst of a mountain, Paul watched as a ravenous snowstorm tore apart the world outside. It came in devilish gusts, whistling menacingly as it hurtled through the dark caverns that tunneled behind him.

It had only been a couple of hours since he had sought refuge in that cave, but it was beginning to feel like an eternity. Every second filled with agonizing cold and torturous wind seemed nothing short of hours on end, and as his limbs grew stiff and weak, his pack seemed to be sitting further and further away. His intention had been to embark on an enlightening adventure up Mount Katahdin, but he had wandered dangerously off into the territory of the dead.

Eventually he simply laid there, acting as a corpse watching lifelessly as the darkness began to overtake the storm. The only essences of violence still evident being the fierce howling of the wind, Paul unwillingly allowed his eyes to close and drifted off in the restless confines of tortured sleep.

 

 

When he first opened his eyes, all he could see was white. The idea that he was sitting in the judgement room of heaven briefly fluttered through his mind, but it was dismissed as soon as he saw a blotch of deep red appearing in the distance. Within the blotch he saw a dark patch grow, and that dark patch turned into a beautiful, woman figure who approached him with an outstretched hand. She stepped out of an ocean of blood, leaving red footsteps upon the translucent, ivory floor like nothing more than an angel emerging from Hell.

“Carol?” Paul asked, staring deep into the hazel eyes of the woman he had loved for ten years.

She simply stared back at him, smiled, and placed a cold hand upon his cheek. Her lips were a lush red, her teeth were a pearly white, and her eyes were filled with such depth that he became lost in them, swimming helplessly in a dark sea as he tried to reconnect with his body.

“Oh, darling,” she whimpered. Her voice hit him harder than the gusts of wind that reined terror on the Maine mountainside. The power of her melodic words struck him like ice, forcing his body into state of immobilization as she caressed his neck and kissed his ear. “I’ve missed you, darling.”

At first the kisses felt sweet. Her supple lips against his ear sent surges of pure lust coursing through his being, and he felt himself involuntarily shivering with an agony so irresistible, he couldn’t restrain himself from reaching forward and stroking her arms.

Those mere moments of bliss, though, were replaced with sudden twinges of pain. The sweet nothings that filled his ear were suddenly laced with malice, the teeth that seductively played with his earlobe began to bite down with rage, and the gentle fingers that entwined him were suddenly ferocious, digging like talons into his skin and drawing forth blood.

He instantly cringed away from her embrace, but when he did he was forced once again to look into her eyes, and the loving, hazel sea he had been used to was replaced with a chasm of pure blackness. The cesspool of darkness that overtook her face was threatening to take him down into its confines, and the longer he stared in terror, the closer he felt to the deep depths of Hell itself.

He was at a loss of words. The woman he had loved more than life itself was beginning to turn into the very corpse that he knew was rotting below the ground in the graveyard two miles from his house in Maryland. Her skin was starting to peel away from her bones, revealing her blackening teeth and soulless eyes. The dark, brunette hair that flowed elegantly down her shoulders began to fall limply to the ground, sizzling as it hit the ivory floor before fading off into obscurity.

He watched soundlessly as the deterioration took place. As his late wife slowly fell to pieces before him, Paul could do nothing more than stare with an open mouth and sore eyes, just as he had done the day she had died. Before he knew it, though, there was nothing before him at all. Besides him and the whiteness, all that filled the desolation was a sad pile of bones, sitting in front of him like a solemn foreboding.

The same intense sorrow that had overcome him a year prior overtook him again right then. It only took moments for him to crumble to the ground in nothing more than a pitiful puddle of a sobbing man, cupping the bones in his arms and begging to have her back.

That ivory oblivion was unforgiving, however, and it gave him nothing but a cold, sad reminder that he was forever and eternally alone.

 

 

He awoke from his nightmare with tears frozen to his face. It wasn’t until he attempted to wipe them away that he came to the realization that he wasn’t in the same place that he had fallen asleep. The stark darkness of night was replaced with a dim, flickering light, and the mouth of the cave was nowhere to be seen. With wide eyes he frantically looked about him, attempting to sit up from where he lay to realize that he was incapable of doing so.

“You shouldn’t fight,” a gruff voice growled, stirring the silence with an unsettling forewarning.

Paul’s head shot to the left to see a large, rotund man standing with his back to him. Clad in clothes torn and tattered by the tests of time, this stranger knelt on the stone ground next to a fire, throwing small pieces of wood on it and watching it burn. Unable to believe what he was seeing, Paul blinked his eyes several times before concluding that he couldn’t still be dreaming.

In a fit of panic, he lurched around where he was tied, coming to the horrifying realization that he was fastened the flat surface of a large rock with dozens of pieces of rope. They were tied across him so tightly, in fact, that he could feel his skin rip and tear as he fought to get free.

“I told you not to fight,” the man snarled, shooting up from where he sat racing over to grab Paul by the shoulders. Before Paul even had a chance to retaliate, he was struck with an intensely forceful blow to his right ear, sending his head banging against the stone he lay upon and filling his vision with blackness and stars.

“I don’t want to hurt you; I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I told you not to fight. You don’t want to fight. You want to stay.”

When Paul regained his sight the man was by the fire again, sitting in the exact position he had been before. If it wasn’t for the continuing surges of agony that surged through his disrupted brain, he wouldn’t have even known that the man had gotten up to begin with.

After moments of silence and waiting to be able to feel his tongue, Paul finally spoke. “What… what the hell is going on here?”

The silence of the cave was filled with a frighteningly haunting cackle. Eventually the man turned around, and Paul was struck numb as he was faced with the horrifying grin of the malevolently deranged. Illuminated by the firelight, his eyes gleamed with a frightening malice, and his blackened smile was hidden behind the forest of a beard that covered half of his face. Paul’s innate fear seemed to drive the man on, and he started laughing even louder.

“I saved you,” he stated, shuffling to his feet one more time and approaching Paul.

Afraid of being struck again, Paul instinctively flinched away, and this made the man laugh even more.

“Look at you. So afraid.” His hand playfully slapped Paul on the shoulder before the man walked away and took a seat against a nearby wall. “I saved you,” he repeated. “You were dying. Now you are with me. You are mine.”

Paul was at a complete loss of words. Feeling as though he had just taken the lead role in Misery, his body began to tremble with a confused terror as he tried to remember how Annie Wilkes was defeated. His mind teemed with questions, wondering if maybe he had actually died and had wandered off into Hell instead.

“Who are you?” He finally asked, staring at the ugly man who sat across from him.

“Baron,” the man stated with grin. “Baron Locks. God, it’s been forever since I’ve seen another person.” He laughed some more and stared up at Paul with vacant eyes. “I was beginning to forget what people looked like. I was going a bit crazy up here.”

“What are you doing up here?”

“Living. What does it look like?” Baron’s smile was replaced with a roll of the eyes as if Paul were some idiot off the street.

So many questions raced through Paul’s mind that it was beginning to hurt. His face flushed with an aggravated confusion as he struggled to form words. “What do you want? Why do you have me tied down? I… What… I don’t understand.”

“What’s there not to understand?” The man asked. “I saved you. You were lying by the front of this cave almost dead. I took you to my home. You are a runaway too, right? So am I. we can live together. We can help each other.”

Paul shook his head. “First off, I’m not a runaway. I don’t know what the hell you were running away from, but right about now I’m wishing they had caught you. And that doesn’t explain why you tied me to this God damned rock like some kind of prisoner.”

The man’s face was contorted once again into that ugly grin and he let out a perturbing cackle as he reached into his pocket, grabbed something, and popped it in his mouth. “You are my prisoner,” he said through his chews. “If I let you go, would you run?”

“Of course I would f*****g run.”

Baron shrugged. “Then you stay tied up. I can’t lose you. Baron gets lonely all by himself.”

“You’re crazy,” Paul said, wriggling in his spot. “You’re f*****g crazy. You’re insane.”

Baron shot up from where he sat and was standing over Paul in what seemed like only a blink of an eye. He placed one, grimy hand over Paul’s forehead and strained his neck backward, scraping his scalp against the grain of the stone as he dug his fingernails into his skin. “I told you not to fight,” he growled through gritted teeth. “Don’t make Baron angry. I can make your life easy or I can make it hard.”

Whimpers and tears were the only thing that escaped him, and Paul could do nothing more than endure the pain and pray for mercy to any force that would listen.

At that moment the man began to laugh again. He let go of Paul and stumbled back, slapping his hands against his knees and doubling over in a fit of giggles. Filled with pain and overcome with rage, Paul simply glared at the deranged man and focused entirely on keeping his mouth shut, lest to enrage the beast.

“I know what you need,” Baron stated in between violent heaves of laughs. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of small, brown mushrooms.

Paul’s eyes widened at the sight of them and he clenched his teeth shut.

“Trust me,” Baron said, holding Paul’s head and attempting to pry his mouth open. “They make you feel good. Baron always feels good when he eats them. You won’t fight anymore. Do it for Baron.”

He fought for as long as he could, but the man managed to shove the mushrooms in, and Paul accidentally swallowed them without even chewing. Overtaken in a coughing fit, Paul immediately felt nauseas and began squirming where he was tied.

This made Baron laugh even more. Dancing around the cave in fit of hysteria, he laughed like a maniac as he watched Paul spit and sputter.

When he could finally speak again, Paul glared over at Baron angrily. “What the hell?” He growled. “What the f**k is the matter with you?”

Baron just continued to laugh, shaking his head and waving his hands.

This was a nightmare, it had to be a nightmare. Being held captive by some tripping psycho made him feel like a mouse held tauntingly over a pile of mousetraps. Knowing that he could scream at the top of his lungs and never be heard sent shivers down his spine.

“You’re going to thank me,” Baron assured. “I promise you. You’ll thank me.”

 

 

It took about twenty minutes and some serious convincing, but Baron finally untied Paul. Sitting up and regaining feeling in his arms and legs, he tenderly stroked the abrasions that the ropes left on his skin. His body was filled with a potent ache that packed his every vein and muscle, leaving him sore as Baron loomed over him.

“You’re not going to run,” Baron stated with a questioning glare, standing in between Paul and the tunnel of the cave like an angry sentinel.

“I’m not going to run,” Paul affirmed, racking his brain for escape plans. His anger, however was fading. His desire to run in a tumbling fit down that mountainside and back to civilization was dissipating, and overtaking him was a gentle, calming peace.

He sat there and stared at the red marks covering his arms and wrists, gawking in awe as he felt the pain slowly die away. He looked from Baron and back again to his wrists, a small smile slowly creeping across his face as he did so.

“See,” Baron said with a conniving grin. “I told you you’d be happy.”

Realizing what he was in for but laughing anyway, Paul shook his head and tried to remember why it was that he had been wanting to run. “God damn it…” He muttered. As a strange surge overtook him, he felt himself relaxing as he launched into a fit of giggles. Sitting like a broken imbecile, laughing with the psychotic man standing in the darkness, Paul no longer felt like a captive, and when a beautiful, brunette woman took a seat next to him, he was beginning to feel at home.

 

 

She wouldn’t speak, but she didn’t have to. All she had to do was stare at him with those hazel eyes, and he was home again. He was sitting next to her before the fireplace of their house, listening as she read him her newest poem, and flushing as he told her it was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. He was making her coffee and eating breakfast across from her at their dining table, reading the newspaper and talking about work. He was thanking her and kissing her on the cheek after she showed up at his classroom with a bagged lunch in hand. He was holding her one last time, holding her tight and never letting her go.

He sat there staring at her for what felt like forever. Her gentle smile was the most captivating thing he had ever seen, and he couldn’t look away even if he tried. Reaching forward and stroking his fingers through her silken hair, he leaned in closer and smiled back at her.

“I love you,” he whispered, closing his eyes and imagining the balcony of their wedding day. He saw her white dress, her family clad in blue, and the somber rays of summer filtering in through the window. “I will never let you go again, I promise.”

“You have to,” she whispered back, her words hitting him like ice as he opened his eyes. When he looked at her face again he lost sight of their wedding day. Instead he saw the dark room of her funeral. He saw the opaque walls covered in sad pictures, her family clad in black, and the unbearable sight of her lifeless body, lying there like a solemn reminder of what happiness was. The painful reminder was so agonizing that he actually felt his body quiver, his stomach churning with a depressed nausea and his brain thumping with a reminiscent anxiety.

“No,” he shook his head and closed his eyes again, wishing the pain away. “No. No I don’t. I won’t.” He reached forward and twined his fingers in her hair, pressing his hand to her scalp and holding her head.

“Paul,” She whimpered. “You’re hurting me, Paul. Let me go.”

“No,” he growled, clenching his eyes shut as images of her corpse raced through his mind. He clenched his hand down harder. “I won’t. Never again.”

“Paul,” she urged again, her voice becoming more stern. “Let me go right now.”

He saw the day she laid helplessly on their living room floor, the darkest day in history. He saw her squirm, he saw her flail, and he saw her writhing like a dying worm as she gasped for breath. He heard her scream two names " his and God’s. She was begging. She was begging for the very thing everyone seems to take for granted " life. And, in the end, it was the very thing that was taken away from her.

“Paul!”

Her scream brought his eyes shooting open, and the face that stared back at him was not the face he fell in love with. With skin deteriorating under the tests of time, she stared at him with vacant, sunken eyes. He reared back, his hand escaping the tangles of her hair as her frown turned into a snarl and she shook her head.

“Same old Paul,” she grumbled. “Shy away from death. Shy away from me, just like you did that day. You’re just going to leave me here, aren’t you? Leave me to rot.”

“No,” he whimpered, watching in horror as a maggot squirmed its way from her mouth to her right eye. “I’ll never leave you to rot. I love you.”

Carol got up from her spot and turned away, facing the tunnel that led away from Baron’s fire lit haven. She stood tall and straight, her long hair flowing in a breeze that had no logical way of being present, and Paul was overcome with an insatiable hunger for her embrace, fighting the urge to leap up and hold her once more.

She took a couple steps forward before turning around, and Paul could begin to feel the customary feeling of loneliness that he had become used to in the last year. Right as he was about to let his gaze drop and welcome back the feeling of solitude, she looked back at him one last time. Her face was that of a resurrected angel, and Paul was compelled from his seat. The beauty that stood before him was undisturbed by death, and simply couldn’t let it go.

“Goodbye, Paul,” Carol said. “It’s time. I have to go.”

“No…” Paul started, but before he could convince her otherwise, she was off. In long strides she traversed through the cave, illuminating the darkness with her very essence of life. He followed her in a stumbling run, sprinting to catch up with her, but always falling one step short.

After a race through the black tunnels of the mountainside, they soon both stood at the mouth of the cave. Staring at the wall of snow that the storm had left behind, Paul felt a surge of relief as he realized that she was trapped there with him. She wasn’t going to run away from him this time.

She turned around and looked back at him with a heartbreaking frown. “I’m sorry, darling, but I have to go.”

Paul looked from her to the wall of snow confusedly. “You can’t. We’re stuck here.”

Carol simply shook her head. “I’m not stuck anywhere. The only place I was trapped was in your mind, but you can’t keep me there anymore; I’ll drive you crazy. I’m leaving you, Paul, and you can’t come with me.”

She turned away and started walking toward the mouth of the cave before he could put up an argument. Lurching forward and attempting to restrain her, he watched as his hands clawed at nothing but air, and the image of his late wife walked right into the snow and faded off into oblivion.

He was ready to give up. Standing alone in solemn defeat, Paul simply stared at the wall of snow, about to capitulate to Death itself. As the de ja vu of the day she died hit him, though, he refused to surrender. He launched himself forward into the unforgiving snow and began to dig.

“I won’t stand around anymore,” he grumbled as he clawed his way through. “I’ll fight for you, Carol. I’ll fight like I should have that day. I’ll never stop fighting.”

For hours he dug his way through the mound that covered the mouth of the cave. He dug until he saw trails of blood being left behind by his fingernails. He dug until he began to hear the soft whispers of her voice in his ear, and he didn’t stop until she was lying right beside him, stroking his face with her delicate fingers. He lay in that icy chamber complacently, warmer than he had ever been before, completely at peace as the woman he loved told him that he could now lay at her side forever.

 

 

He had scaled the tunnels of that cave looking for his victim, but there wasn’t a trace of life anywhere. The sinking feeling that he might have escaped sent shivers throughout him, but Baron wasn’t ready to give up. He held his fire lit torch high up in the air and continued on his search.

When he reached the mouth of the cave and saw that it was snowed in, he let out a deep breath of relief, realizing that the man had to be in the tunnels somewhere.

Right before he was about to turn around to keep looking, however, he noticed a glint of black in the midst of the whiteness. Letting out a disappointed tisk as he rested his torch against the wall of the cave, Baron went forward and brushed some of the snow away, revealing a single boot. As he attempted to yank it out, he found that it wouldn’t budge. He yanked and yanked, brushing away more snow only to discover that the boot was still connected to the body of the man.

After several minutes were spent prying at the body in the snow, Baron was finally able to get it free. The man fell to the ground of the cave in a frozen heap, eyes still wide up but vacant of life. Baron let out a sigh and grabbed both of the man’s feet.

“Silly man,” He wheezed as he began dragging the body away. “Baron told you not to run.”

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[Alasdair Cook]

I have read this several times now, not quite sure I fully understand what it all means. But the characters and scenes are captivating and really pulled me in. I especially like the phrase about the eyes turning from a "loving, hazel sea" into a "chasm of pure blackness".

[Parker101]

It's good and the setting in the begging is very detailed

[Coyote Poetry]

I enjoyed the story. All of us who write. Need to go back and edit. I wait a few days and fix. You create good character and I liked the situations create in the story. The story did bring me in and held my attention.
Coyote

[JayG]

You've worked hard on this, that's obvious. So I hate to do this. But you did ask, so since you need to know...

Before anything else, what I have to say has nothing to do with talent or potential as a writer. Nor is it about good/bad writing. The problem is that you're writing exactly as you have been taught to write. But remember all those reports and essays we wrote in school, compared to the number of stories? There's a reason. We're being trained to be productive and useful adults, who are self supporting. And to aid in that we're given a set of general skills useful to employers. We are NOT being trained to write as professionals in the field of fiction.

So though we're not aware of it, we leave high school precisely as well trained to write fiction as we are to remove an appendix. And our reading helps little, because we see the product, polished till it shines. To create the product we need the process.

Think about it. We all realize that were we to want to write screenplays we need more training. The same applies to journalism. Yet we never wonder if the profession of fiction writer requires more than high school writing and maybe an undergrad CW course.

In this case, you're trying to make the story more vivid by transcribing the words you would use when telling the story aloud. But can we? Isn't verbal storytelling a performance art? Isn't how we speak lines as important as what we say? Take a simple line like:

"John, you truly are a b*****d."

How did you read that line? As deadly insult? It could be. But spoken in another way, it could be high praise. It might also be a doctor presenting the result of a DNA test. Could you hear it spoken you would know. Could you see the face or even just the body language or gestures of the speaker you would know. But the page reproduces none of that.

Try an experiment. Read a few pages of this graphic novel:
http://www.gocomics.com/lostsideofsuburbia/2011/07/26

Then go back and look at only the words, without the pictures, and ask yourself if they would have provided even a fraction of the emotional content without the pictures. Ask yourself how much like your presentation style that prose is.

Writing for the printed word is very different from storytelling. It's different from writing for the screen. Our medium enforces that.

When telling a story you have your golden voice, your expressive gestures, and more. But none of that makes it to the page, and that's the emotional part of the performance. On the page you have the bare words, and what they evoke in the reader, based on THEIR background, not yours. And while the images in your head led to the words, the words do not reconstruct the image in the reader's head.

Not what you were hoping to hear, I know. But it is necessary knowledge. And since I'm talking about the learned part of the profession, the problem is fixable. It's not easy, because it involves mastering an entirely different approach to writing. Though if you were meant to be a writer the learning is fun (though perfecting the skill-set is every bit as hard as was making the nonfiction skills you use every day feel intuitive). But then, every profession requires us to gain proficiency, so it's no big deal.

My personal suggestion, given how dedicated you seem according to your bio, is to pick up a copy of Dwight Swain's, Techniques of the Selling Writer, and read it slowly, with lots of time to practice and master each point as it's raised. Then, after about six months of practice, go back and read it again, and you'll get just as much the second time.

You might also want to dig around in the writing articles in my blog, for a kind of overview of the issues. Most of the articles are based on what Swain teaches.

The public library's fiction writing department is another great resource.

But whatever you do, hang in there, and keep on writing. Writing is a journey, not a destination. So if every day you write just a little bit more skillfully, and you live long enough...


Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/