What with my new collection Little Deaths and an armful of short stories that will be appearing over the next few months, I've seriously depleted my stable of usable, unpublished short stories. So I'm trying to do that before I jump back into the novel I'm working on.

The little novella I'm trying to finish right now is sort of a scifi ghost story about a planet where the dead appear. The story is called "Visitation," and I am about 80% done.

If anyone would like to read a snippet and let me know what they think, holler. I'll post a chunk here--a chunk that doesn't give away to much, of course!

John

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John F.D. Taff
Author
johnfdtaff.com
Twitter @johnfdtaff

18 views and no one's left a note? Come on!

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John F.D. Taff
Author
johnfdtaff.com
Twitter @johnfdtaff

Sure, I'd like to read the little bit that you're willing to post. I think we all enjoy finding writers new to us and trying their work. Thanks for the offer.

Thanks, man. Excellent.

Anyone want to second that?

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John F.D. Taff
Author
johnfdtaff.com
Twitter @johnfdtaff

I'm game!

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Eulogies II: Tales from the Cellar

http://www.facebook.com/groups/167261980056002/

One more...one more teensy note?

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John F.D. Taff
Author
johnfdtaff.com
Twitter @johnfdtaff

Ditto

OK, three is officially the magic number.

Now, some stage setting. This is from the middle of a novella or a long short story or whatever. It's called "Visitation," and it's kind of a scifi ghost story. I don't want to give away too much, but there's a planet on which the spirits of the dead appear to their loved ones. The planet is quarantined and under study, but each year a select few names are drawn in a kind of galactic lottery for a two-week voucher to this planet, called Visitation, to visit with their dead. The main character of this story is one of those lucky few. But--and there's always a but here isn't there?--there's something going on here, something more than just a haunted planet.

OK, with that, here's an excerpt. I know that, removed from the rest of the story, it's hard to get your bearings and even harder to place it in the larger flow of things, but at least you can get the flavor. And remember that this is raw...I most often don't like showing stuff at this early stage, but what the hell. Let's get this board moving!

Here we go:

After he saw her again on the fifth day, he had the certitude he had wished for. There was no doubt it was her, and the encounter left him enervated, edgy.

Just past the pond stood a dark copse of trees, thin-trunked, tall, with papery bark that had a silver-green sheen. None had branches any lower than about six feet up on their trunks. There was little undergrowth beneath them; something like moss or lichen coated water-smoothed rocks, a few clumps of plain, green fronds from which sprouted dense globes of pale indigo flowers.

Where the branches began, though, the leaves of these trees grew dense, blocking out much of the sun. The leaves were large, spatulate, coated with dense grey fibers that made them looked furred. The light that made it through them to the ground was dim, greyed through its passage.

These trees were malarn, Fen learned, a common tree on Visitation, similar in some ways to the birches of Old Earth.
For Fen’s first few days, these trees represented a sort of border, a dark curtain behind the pond, past which, for some reason, he felt he couldn’t go.

But Abram assured him that the little grove was well within his limits.

So, on that morning, Fen set out for it, walking the edge of the pond. As he tracked through the mud, small creatures noted his coming. Most held their ground, surveyed him and his passing with small, gimlet eyes. Others, perhaps more timid, perhaps more intuitive, leapt into the water, disappeared with little croaks, creaks and splashes.

The pond exuded the usual odors of standing water, the wet, fishy smell of the living things within it, the miasma of plants and other things rotting on its banks. The air, though, was crisp, laden with the ozone of a coming storm.

Fen pushed on, lost in thoughts of Katmin.

During the last week or so, the last month aboard the Eidolon, Fen had spent a great deal of time thinking about her. How they’d met, how he’d courted her. How they had eventually fallen in love, not at first sight, not even in the first several months of dating.

But when it happened, it happened quickly, fell over both of them like a landslide.

He tried to hold her face in his mind, scared that this was becoming more and more difficult the further her death receded. So, he broke her down into components, remembered her eyes, her smile, the smell of her hair, the feel of her hands, the taste of her mouth. He remembered her laughter, her voice, the sound of her crying.

With these also came less positive attributes; her temper, her brusqueness, her many little neuroses, her unwillingness, often, to do things he enjoyed.

These flooded through him as he walked the shores of the pond, and this bewildered him, frustrated him because they were not things he chose to remember. They were part of her, undoubtedly, but not the characteristics he would choose to describe her. And yet, each time he tried to reconstruct her in his mind, these came to him just as strongly as the things that made him smile.

It gave him pause, but it also gave him an unusual kind of comfort. He didn’t want to forget her, to be sure. But he also didn’t want to make her into some kind of saint or angel, either.

Lost in these thoughts, he wasn’t aware that he’d entered the woods until he felt the coolness of its collected shadows fall over him. Stopping about ten feet in, he looked around. Outside the dense stand, the air was bright, if grey, humid and cool. Within the copse, the air felt congealed, dense, more humid and less cool, as if he was inhaling the breath of the trees.

Dim, almost eldritch light diffused through the air, coming from no specific source. It was as if the air itself was fluorescent, as if each of the tiny motes and spores that moved upon it bled their own internal light into it.

Fen stopped breathing for a moment. Here, right now, was the first time he felt he’d stumbled upon a place that was truly alien, not just since his arrival on Visitation, but in his entire life. This was so far removed from any experience on his planet, on any planet he’d visited that it might have been a fairy tale, a fantasy.

When he realized that he wasn’t breathing, when he started breathing again, he realized that it was a fairy tale, he was inside a fantasy. This was a haunted planet which the spirits of creatures who had not been born here, for some unfathomable reason, sought out, congregated at, awaited the arrival of their living.

As this thought, both sublime and profound, washed through him, something changed. An electric charge crackled across the air, lifted the hairs on his arms, the nape of his neck.

The coolness within the glade concentrated like a frown, chilled.

The sounds faded, disappeared, the croaking of frogs, the murmur of the leaves, the susurration of the wind.

There, ahead of him about a dozen feet, between the slender green trunks, a figure pushed into existence; a smear of grey at first, but slowly taking definite form, a shape.

Fen found he wasn’t breathing again, but it seemed that he didn’t need to breathe at the moment, so he ignored the burning of his lungs.

Katmin!

She was clearly visible within the foam of clotted, green air that clung to her.

Her face was serene, smooth. She neither smiled nor frowned, beckoned nor forbade.

Her feet floated inches off the mossy ground, toes pointed down. Her arms were at her side, paddling through the air. Her dark hair floated, as if the air around her was as thick as water.

She hung there for what seemed an eternity, and Fen found himself rooted to the spot. He was not afraid, at least not precisely, not purely. Rather there was a strange lethargy to this experience, dreamlike in its quality, ethereal in its tone.

Rather than say anything, rush to her, call her name—though he ached to do so—he felt it necessary to take in all of her details, like an aspiring artist committing a great painting to memory so that he would be able to sketch it later in all its detail.

Fen, she called, and he heard her voice not as from the distance separating them, but as if whispered directly into his ear, his brain.

Fen.

“Katmin!” he responded, forcing the word through the silence of his constricted throat, a moan, a cry. “I love you! I miss you!”

One of his feet snapped forward, awakening suddenly from its paralysis, stepped toward her.
Fen!

He took another lurching step, and was dismayed that, suddenly, the bland countenance of her face twisted, as it had in the pond when his hand touched the water.

She raised her hands in distress, to ward him off, to warn him…

Only they weren’t hands.

They were tentacles.

Eight of them sprouted from her side, Krishna-like, and they weaved incantations in the green, bleeding air, imprecations to him.

To stop.

And he did, as suddenly as he had started.

Her face looked aghast, as if realizing some error, some lapse, and her entire form waivered, shrank into itself, pulling the green-tinged air in with it.

Fen watched the tentacles—tentacles!—fold up behind her, gather at her back like a pair of great, black wings.

Then, in an instant, she was gone.

No fading, just gone.

The sounds of the nearby pond returned slowly, and the air warmed perceptibly around him.

Still, Fen shivered, his teeth chattered. The goose bumps that stood out on his arms felt permanent, a natural part of his skin.

His breathing returned in a gasp, as if he were breaking the surface of some dark, deep pool of water.

Backing up, unwilling to take his eyes off the place where she had appeared, he left the woods, the trunks closing around their silent, sacred interior as if they truly were curtains.

He turned back stood looking at the dense wall of their leaves, their wood, as if his gaze could penetrate it, find her again.

Then, he felt the rain, a curtain itself, closing on him.

There was thunder, lightning, and it awakened him, shook him as firmly as a hand.

Blinking against the water that poured over him, he made his way back around the pond, up the steps to the house.

Abram waited there for him, a thick, warm towel and a hot mug of tea at the ready.

And Fen knew that he knew.

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John F.D. Taff
Author
johnfdtaff.com
Twitter @johnfdtaff

Thank you for posting this. I thought it very atmospheric. I enjoyed the second half of the snippet much more than the first, but since I don't know what transpired prior to this, that could change after reading the piece from the beginning and I was more into the characters head. I thought the snipped very well written. And yes, it did make me want to read more.

Thanks for the comment. I appreciate it. Yeah, that's the problem with reading something out of context. You have no idea what's transpired up to that point to give you any sort of reference. But glad you liked it. Hopefully I can actually do something with it one it's finished. I already have on long sci-fi short story/novella. The length proves difficult to sell. Perhaps I can put three or four of these together in a collection? Who knows...someday.

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John F.D. Taff
Author
johnfdtaff.com
Twitter @johnfdtaff

I completely agree with this assessment. Atmosphere is either something you can or can't do, and I think you nailed it in the small piece you posted. Thanks for putting that up here.

Thanks, TT!!

I may post more stuff here in the future, just to see what people think and to get some conversation going!



And, yes, I am trying to use each of the emoticons!

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John F.D. Taff
Author
johnfdtaff.com
Twitter @johnfdtaff

That was Thad that posed the second comment. We often get confused.

And I'm often confused, so no problem!

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John F.D. Taff
Author
johnfdtaff.com
Twitter @johnfdtaff