Necropolis

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Blog Entries posted by Necropolis

  1. I've been thinking about posting some of the stuff I write. Heres a thing, more or less unedited. All feedback welcome



    A storm of dead leaves and sticks shot up, illuminated by the fitful gleam of a flashlight. Legs, tired from nearly an hour of this frantic chase still fired like pistons carrying Eric Grier through a dead forest. What was chasing him he could not see, but most definitely could hear, and smell, the awful stench of sulphur filled his nostrils threatening to send him into a coughing fit at any moment. But that would be death. Eric did not intend to die. Being a lifelong runner, and one of the most enthusiastic cross country athletes at his school had certain benefits. All the same, every moment he could feel whatever was behind him gaining, could hear the beat of its hooves against the damp, matted leaf floor of the woods.

    A scratching sound, that he would decide later to be a horrible laugh or chortle nipped at his heels. He looked at his watch, glow in the dark, raising his flashlight, and then immediately realized the folly of this. Without his main source of light, the detritus of the forest took its toll at last on Eric’s progress. A vine, a stick, it didn’t really matter what it was. What did matter was his footing slipped and his long run came to an abrupt halt, sending him tumbling, tumbling down. His flashlight left his hand and rolled a few feet away from him. Luckily, or in the current case, unluckily, the light granted him illumination of the thing that pursued him. He crawled backwards, sprawled out on his back, never letting his eyes wander from the slowly approaching...thing that had finally caught up.

    From the light he could see its legs, a goats, and as they went up the fur was replaced by flesh, and towards its belly it looked all the more human. It sauntered, clearly enjoying the thick radiation of fear from Eric, and its hands, each finger tipped with razor sharp talons dripping the blood of a fresh kill popped one at a time. Eric understood then that each sickening snap was the sound of his life ticking away.

    And then there was a beeping. At first Eric did not register it, didn’t even really hear it. as the beeps became more frequent he understood what it was. The victory bell. He looked at the creature, flexing the legs of its muscles to pounce, and with disgust spat at it.

    Then, a storm of things all happened at once. The creature sprung forward, a rictus grin on its bizarre hybrid features, and the screaming tones of “Thriller” blared from Eric’s pocket. Eric’s eyes shut in abject terror hoping he made his deadline. It wasn’t until Vincent Price began guffawing that he realized the loud thump thump he heard was actually his heart, threatening to crash through his ribcage. He reached his hand to his chest and took a deep breath and felt in his grasp, a card.

    Eric grabbed his phone from his pocket and, noting the missed call, used the backlight to look at the card. It was one of the Tarot, it read The Devil, but the picture on the card was strange. It showed a man, wearing the skin of an animal, half his body reflecting that animal, and half a twisted caricature of a man. It was the very image of the thing that pursued him, and even looking at it made him shudder.

    His phone rang again. Breathing heavily still, he answered, “Yeah….Its uh, its done. I made it. It was a skinwalker. Guess it makes sense given the card. You..wait what? Oh christ. Okay. I’ll be right over.”

    Eric was not the only one who ran for his life that night, just the only one who got away.
  2. By Necropolis,

    I like this little writing thing. Lemme know what you think, its nice to put these things somewhere, even nicer to talk about them.

    We walked alongside the shore. Which shore I could not tell you, nor what waters went up and down in rhythmic motion along it. Each of us was young, younger than I am now at least. 12 or 13, just at the age where the world is changing for you but while your still powerless to do anything about it. There were probably 10 of us, and each one of us in the procession carried a large hiking bag. Naturally I was at the front.

    Leading our little group was a woman of about 55. Her face was long and there was something wicked about it. As I think about it now she was familiar. She was every teacher who ever found fun in cruelty to her students. Every crooked nosed, wicked librarian who takes a certain glee in SHUSHING those that visited her. Every witch who, perched in her legged home, threw spite through crooked teeth like acid. I knew that she was nothing less than pure evil, and that whatever her designs for us followed suit. I knew all this, and I suspect my compatriots did also, and yet we all followed her with nary the complaint.

    She commanded us without speaking to drop our packs as we walked, and we did, every one of us in the same place. Then a short while later, she told us all to sit. And we did. Every one of us were sitting with our legs crossed as she had them, and she spoke.

    “Close your eyes children. We’re going to tell scary stories.” She said.

    “This is the story of The Black Mansion, and Judgement day” she said. My eyes were closed, but I knew somehow that she was looking at me. She poked me in the stomach. “Have you heard that one?” She poked me again, harder “Huh?” She poked me again and again, each time it was harder, and it was punctuated by a “Huh?”

    A slow horror dawned on me. The pokes were starting to hurt, and I knew somehow that it would only stop when I opened my eyes. I also knew that when I opened my eyes, there would be something horrible to greet me. But despite this, I couldn’t stop myself. Trying as hard as I could to keep them shut my eyes slowly, painstakingly opened

    The woman, eyes wide open staring with evil glee sat 15 feet away from me, the waves lapping around her.
    And then I woke up. That was this morning. Its strange how much fear this dream provoked in me while it was going, when nothing to terribly frightening happened until the end, and the bit at the end was more subtle than nightmares tend to be.
  3. I've had a lot of things floating around in my head lately. I say lately, I actually mean in the last few months. this blog, as an example, I wrote about a month ago. I suppose I've just been floating a few things around in my head, letting them percolate until I thought I could express them in a way that accurately represents how I feel about something. First came clarifying in my head how in fact I do feel about it. And I think I know, or at least I know how to get the ball rolling

    The title of this first blog entry is The Protoculture. Besides being a Macross reference, I think its a solid term for the kind of things I'm talking about. Just to warn anyone off from this topic before I get rolling, this is about politics, feminism, and a lot of topics that are pretty divisive, especially on this website.

    I have trouble with my political identity these days. In high school I liked to tell myself I was fairly moderate, but after a fashion I realized I was on the liberal side of things on almost every hot button issue, so I identified, and still for the most part identify, as a left leaning individual. At the same time I try to play devil's advocate when I can, try to see debates from both sides. I do this because, if all you ever see or read are things from the same perspective as yourself its easy to get stuck in your beliefs. At that point all you're doing is participating in a big circlejerk. I don't want that. I don't ever want that, I want to be able to see things clearly, to cut to the truth of the matter, if such a black and white thing can be found. I get the feeling, and this is just a feeling, if I'm wrong please call me out on it, that LL is much the same on that. Like, he shows up and plays the devil's advocate on all of the political threads that pop up, but If I remember correctly, he's even more liberal than I am, just going by those tests a bunch of us took before. So I say all of that, I guess as a guidepost for what I'm going to talk about next

    For a long time, it was my point of view that feminism was an artifact of the past. That people like Susan B Anthony and other suffragette’s succeeded, women having the right to vote, Title IX being enacted. In school they teach feminism as something like that, or at least they did when I went to school. So, when confronted with the reality, that De Jure, there is Gender equality, but De facto, there are still a lot of problems. And I agree with that. There are. Culturally, there are still a lot of rigidly enforced gender roles, I don’t want to get into ALL of that, people have spent their entire lives talking about it, and I don’t have that long, its 1:00 in the morning and I have a trip tomorrow. Whenever I think about Gender inequalities, all I ever get back to is that in order to effect any change you would have to change culture in a lot of fundamental ways, and you can’t make people nice. You can’t force civility on people, or you wouldn’t be civil yourself. Its so easy to get lost in anger about these things, but when that happens you so often become worse than what you fight.

    A big scapegoat on the internet is lumping a lot of people and things into Tumblr, this new “Protoculture” and blaming it for everything. Maybe its not scapegoating, maybe Tumblr is the stereotype, but I generally try to assume the best of things. And I have it on good authority that Tumblr is 90% porn, and I can get behind that. Thought i’d throw a bit of humor into this rambling wall of text. Regardless, what i’m getting at is that there is a movement that I am witnessing and I don’t know where I stand anymore. A new kind of Liberalism I guess, and I can’t just chalk it up to radicals shouting loudly because I know reasonable people, some on this very site, that are as much a part of it. I keep looking at myself and my political identity and I always ask questions, I constantly question myself, check myself, to make sure i’m standing in the right place. I think I am, but I know people, have seen people, who KNOW that they are right. Sometimes that gives me pause. So, any civil discourse on where we sit in the pages of history is most welcome. This wasn’t nearly as solid as I thought it was when it was sitting in the percolator, but I think I needed to exorcise it, get it out there. Please feel free to engage in civil discourse in the comments, if anyone feels like getting through this wall of nonsense.