Chapter 4 of "City of Pillars" is now live!

Chapter 4 of “City of Pillars” is now live!

March 31st, 2008

For those of you who follow this blog but may not be aware of my grand fictional exercise in blatantly ripping off H. P. Lovecraft, Footnotes to the Human Species, please hop on over there and check out my novella “City of Pillars,” the fourth chapter of which has just gone live! If you enjoy my nonfiction writing, there’s every chance you might dig my fiction as well—but do be aware, however, that my fiction is relentlessly depressing, frequently so violent it would make dear little Alex of A Clockwork Orange shrink in fear, and always, and I do mean always, very vicious and despairing. Here’s a little sample to try out before jumping in headfirst:

The only way I knew we’d made it out onto the 107^th floor was that there was noise all around me again and the heat and smoke were a little less horrible. I opened my eyes and Raj was there, asking me, “Where’s Ray? What happened to Ray?”

“He let go,” I choked, “But he was right behind me. Hasn’t he come up yet?”

There were three men pushing the stairwell door shut but Raj threw himself into the gap shouting, “No, not yet—there’s still someone in there!” and the guys started arguing with him, telling him they had to shut the door or they’d all suffocate and they were pulling him, trying to get pull him back in so they could shut the door when Raj said, “Stop it, stop it—I got him!”

And then Raj just…vanished. It was like he was yanked into the stairwell.

[Cressida pauses again to take a bottle of pills out of her purse. She takes two of them—Klonopin, to help control her anxiety—then resumes with a feverish urgency, clearly desperate to tell the rest of the story and be done with it.]

One of the doormen went in after him. I heard the man scream, but it was cut off almost instantly. The last two guys on the door were calling him—“Bob! Bob, what happened?! BOB!”—and then the worms came through the door.

[“Worms?” I ask.]

They looked like worms—that’s how I keep seeing them. Like earthworms, but big and purple, big as firehoses. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: two of the things whipped out of the smoke and wrapped around the man closest to the doorway and he didn’t even have time to say a single thing—he was gone. They’d pulled him into the smoke. “Close the goddamned door!” somebody shrieked and then I was throwing myself at the door with a bunch of terrified people—people who must’ve seen the same thing I did—and the heavy emergency exit door slammed shut. I had my hands on the door and felt something hammering against the other side. Hammering. The door was jumping beneath our hands and everyone was saying, “Block the door, block the door.” I was shoved aside and two boys in black-and-white waiters’ uniforms came through the smoke carrying a metal desk. They threw it up against the door but the…the worms on the other side were still pounding—pounding so hard it sounded like someone was throwing bricks at the door. People were standing on each side of the desk holding the door shut while the waiters and some others went back and forth dragging dining tables and chairs behind them, heaping them up in front of the door. “Get out of here if you ain’t helping,” someone said to me, so I just…wandered away into the crowd.