CoCo's 2nd Anthology - by Zid - "Through a Darkened Pane - The Cabin..."

by ziddina 7 Replies latest jw friends

ziddina

CoCo's post #7108 on this link... http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/social/entertainment/184687/15/Through-a-Darkened-Pane
Long before settling into the bungalow on Hernandez Terrace, my parents rented a mountain cabin in the shadow of Dark Mountain.
Even as a youngster, I was tuned in to Nature: so much in love with the sunny meadow of yellow mustard spilling cheerfully into the apple orchard that was bountiful with crunchy fruit and cidery aroma. In the protective lap of the Great One there were no worries as we kids gadded freely about. The few neighbors that were scattered here and there were a friendly and hospitable bunch, who had their own children (some, of course, grown and moved away) and weren't the least put out by our hooting and hollering and climbing their trees and playing with their mangy old dogs, or, as the case might be, new and cuddly puppies.
The dank cabin, on the other hand, willfully penetrated my little body with a chill and consequent trembling that was something other than mere shivers resulting from damp interior walls that never warmed, however earnest the robust fire chugging heartily in the little potbelly stove. My mother, who had a keen sense beyond the requisite five, knew that something was strangely amiss in this little house that refused all attempts to render her sparkling and agreeable. Though just a tot, I could feel discord and strange vibrations that simply were not usual in my family circle. Kids pick up on these things.
My parents learned, to their regret, that the probable cause of the pall hanging so heavily about us was connected to the dark spot on the old linoleum just inside the ill-hanging front door.
CoCo's post #7111...
The cabin, whose hidden dry-rotted structure could barely hold a leaky roof over our heads, was, at the very least, keeping the worst of the fierce winter weather outside where it belonged.
The yellow shellacked knotty pine walls gave the appearance of warmth but ran with condensation, leaving wavy streaks of grime that no amount of Mother's scrubbing with White King Detergent and elbow grease could remove. I didn't know at the time of my early years there what the smell was that permeated the interior. Through a remembrance of smells past I later, as an adult, associated the peculiar but not totally disagreeable aroma with that of kerosene. It may be that there was a small kerosene heater in one of the bedrooms because the pathetically inefficient but valiant potbelly stove in the tiny front room simply couldn't cut heating muster.
I was particularly vulnerable to the clammy atmosphere and brought low by the cold and damp. Many a chilly night my chronic respiratory ailments forcibly marched my fighting and weakened body to the wooden kitchen table, my head soon draped in a threadbare terry towel as I breathed in Vicks-scented steam rising from a yellow mixing bowl filled with scalding water. That was the closest I think that I ever got to warm. Unless, of course, I was all but sitting atop the wood stove.
Years later I drove by that desolate speck of a building and saw the sides crumbling and slanting inward. The long weakened roof had finally caved in, giving all the appearance of utter defeat. Surrender to decay and neglect, perhaps?
I have since wondered if the unspeakable act committed in the entry years before had at long last been avenged by the mighty and just hand of Nature.
ziddina

CoCo's post #7120...
Mother said we left the cabin because the water was bad and she was pregnant. There was more to it, of course. She knew it and I knew it.
Despite my young years, I felt something sinister lurking about (long before sinister made its unceremonious entrance into my official vocabulary). This dwelling of us - flesh and blood - and the other was becoming far too crowded for us visible entities and those just as real but invisible.
The old timers in our community knew it. The newest owners of the property and derelict house know it.
Why didn't my parents know it (before we moved in and were more or less stuck there)?
A murder was committed in the entry with a pair of old and rusty scissors. The blood stain could never be lifted ...
Death by lockjaw was not even afforded an opportunity to make its horrifying presence felt....
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(Okay, I just have to throw this in here, cuz' I think it's fitting... )
Cameo-d's addition to CoCo's story:
Cameo-d's post #5238...
The blood stain could never be lifted ...
I once begged momma to get rid of that carpet.
She squinted her eyes and looked at me as though I was some foreigner that did not belong in her house.
"That...is...my ...son's....blood!" She enunciated each word. "That is all I have left of him."
For sixteen years my sister and I tiptoed around the edge of that carpet.
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And now back to CoCo's version of the story... Seems he started having computer problems around this time, so don't know if there's more on that thread...
Lightning in area must get off computer
ziddina

CoCo's post #7435, page #28...
It was not a light slam of flesh and bone against a slanting wall of the derelict cabin.
Animal rage set its talons upon an unsuspecting, trusting child and sent her hurtling into the air and, upon impact with the splintery cedar paneling, edging downward, painfully downward by a stop-go motion that could hardly be described as sliding. Landed in a shocked but still breathing heap, she lay quiet until the beast left its lair. Once out the ill-hung door and into the labyrinthine wood that all but put the tiny speck of four rotting walls safely off the map, Mommy went to work. For the day. All day. The reprieve was, nonetheless, too brief.
Liz knew what awaited her and her little brother if their rundown home was not sufficiently spic and span upon Mommy's return from work. Richie somehow escaped the brunt of their mother's physical brutality, however, and floundered like a drowning puppy under the muddy torrent of his mother's loose and vulgar tongue. Whimpering, he ran over to his battered sister, running his little hand up and down the torn sleeve of her dotted swiss blouse as if the magic of his youthful innocence would heal the bruises beneath.
Elizabeth Vincent, nee Freitas, was staring out her bedroom window at the little stand of trees beyond the property line of her home on Hernandez Terrace. An evil, unwanted recollection of her beloved Richie had been triggered by some lurking, subconscious memory fiend. The trees, their compact density, something within an otherwise innocuous copse of oaks, grabbed inside the infinite and jumbled mix of memory and metaphor and shouted that Richie had died too young, that he shouldn't have died at all ... not like that....
"Mommy, Mommy," Andy called out to his preoccupied mother, whose aspect had gone from pensive to dark and ugly. Growing within was an already sprouted bad seed of irrationality and wanton mayhem awaiting a deadly harvest. She averted her look from the seemingly real but imagined looped rope dangling from a distant black oak limb, and glared red, angry, frenzied at her own little boy.
"Mommy, look what I made for you!" shouted Andy.
(Aw crap... More bloody lightning. Gonna have to get off again...)
ziddina

CoCo's post #7467, page #30...
(I put this with "The Cabin", because it seems to be the same "Andy" character in this post...)
As mindless rage swelled within the young mother to the point of bursting and letting fly its emotional shrapnel, young footsteps padded silently up the mossy cement walk. Hesitant, never knowing in what condition he might find his best friend's capricious health, Billy Tobias knocked softly but resolutely upon the old bungalow door. And again, seconds later, but with less the soft touch and more the determination to ask after Andy's mercurial state. Too long, too long a separation from necessary connection. Bad health or not, friends need to connect on some level, any level.
The murderous reverie of resurfacing memory was abruptly shattered. An insistent yet otherwise politely restrained rap, rap, RAP at the front door was echoing through Elizabeth's cluttered living room and head.

"Mommy, do you want me to answer the door?" asked a little boy who was all too aware of his mother's mental walkabouts. Who, besides the tortured soul herself, could know the true nature of the snarling beast within? And did even she understand? Though not privy to his mother's secret, Andy's uncannily precocious manner - one of patient insight into his beloved parent's mood swings - was good medicine. Mommy's mind returned to home base, wearily so, however.

"No Babe, you're not well today, remember? Get back on the couch. I'll see who's at the door ... what's that in your hand?" vacantly inquired this unwitting survivor, bruised and beaten, but saved again from total meltdown by her son.
ziddina

Okay, CoCo, that's the main portion of your posts on that thread...
A few comments and suggestions, if I may...
Please think of this thread - and the other thread[s] - as WORKSHEETS...
True, they're a testament to your talents, but... I'd like to see you do the following:
Start using Word. I really felt the limitations of using this website as a "worksheet"; the inability to go back and edit posts past 30-minutes time is fine for a chat site, but limits the ability to edit and clean up text, errors, insert new text, and so on...
In Word....
1. Make a story outline. Think of it as the 'skeleton' which will give all of your stories a cohesive 'form'.
2. Make a section for the "backstory". Every "story" has a "back-story", and you'll be pulling from this "back-story" to inform the readers of the whole picture, as the story progresses...
3. Make several sections following your actual text, one for character development (the characters' back stories), one for a selection of names to use for characters, one for location information - the 'lay' of the land, color and appearance of the surroundings, time of year, climate, flora and fauna, and so on..., and perhaps a section for future story ideas. (Your writing is such, that new ideas seem to spring up within every written section - that can be a GOOD thing, if you put the new ideas 'on file', and stay on-track with your original story/narration...)
Here's my idea or concept of a "story outline" for your "The Cabin" story...
This is JUST AN EXAMPLE - you'll need to take this story IN YOUR OWN DIRECTION...
"The Cabin" - outline:
(You'll notice that this is a really rough, "hit the tops of the waves" outline... I've found that, after the main outline, one needs to have "sub-outlines" to clarify what happens in certain scenes in more detail....)
Man and woman - and son - arrive at cabin. They're financially destitute; have no other place to stay.
Man goes off to work at job that he's totally unsuited for. Woman tries to make cabin a home, but fails miserably. She misses previous life so much, that she falls into deep depression.
Son is fairly oblivious to what is going on - he's around 8 - 10 years old, and still has confidence in his parents' ability to "protect" him.
But there's something strange about the cabin...
There's a strange dark brown stain on the cabin floor...
Strange noises in the cabin, when no one's there...
Strange sounds in the forest - moans, sighs, whispers....
Son begins to notice something in the woods. He cannot quite make it out, but his curiosity is piqued.
Meantime, his mother is quietly going crazy. She comes closer and closer to the point of killing her son and herself. But the son, though upset by the changes in his mother, does not want to see the growing insanity in her eyes, or the growing danger to himself.
Meantime, that 'thing' in the woods becomes more alluring. He tries to sneak into the woods to see what is there...
But the question is - will the thing in the woods kill him? Or is it there to protect him from the evil in the cabin...???
"The Cabin" - backstory:
This is set in the (1930's... 1940's... 1960's... Need a time period... Let's say late 1940's...)
In a remote cabin in a wild and lonely forest clearing, a murder once took place. Years after the murder, some of the murder victim's distant relatives fall on hard times. The war [WWII] is over, but the father's investments took a real beating - he'd invested heavily in Dresden porcelain and German machinery factories, which had basically wiped out the family's fortune.
His wife received the double disappointment of learning that her husband had lost their fortune, while supporting, in a distant way, the vicious Nazi regime and it's pogrom against Jewish people...
The disappointment was doubly painful, as the wife's family, who had provided a generous dowry with their daughter at their wedding, were proudly Jewish.
Many of their distant relatives had died in the camps...
The father's [Mr. Vincent???] ancestry consisted of Engish and German blood, but with a twist of Romanian blood - there was talk of some dissipated Romanian count who was put to death in Bucharest for the deaths of several young peasant lasses, but that dark family secret had only been whispered of in his father's drawing room, and certainly was not been spoken of after his marriage to the dark and lovely Jewish girl, Elizabeth, who'd brought a sizeable dowry into the marriage.
The cabin itelf and the land it was situated upon, had originally belonged to a crusty old mountain man, an "indian fighter" with a nasty reputation. He'd gotten drunk one night and had disappeared into the woods, never to be heard from again.
After his death, the cabin and land had been sold to Mr. Vincent's distant relatives, who had modernized and improved the cabin to use as a summer getaway. But they had suffered several unexplained tragedies of their own while using the cabin in the summers.....
One child had drowned in the nearby stream...
One had fallen from a tree and been crippled for life...
One had simply disappeared, as had the cabin's original owner...
The final straw was the murder that had occurred in the cabin, between the distant relative's remaining members - the mother of the children, her last remaining son, and the woman's second husband. A fight had erupted between the mother and her second husband - he'd always been of a vile, evil temper - and in attempting to protect his mother from the stepfather, the son had stepped between them at the instant the mother raised a long, sharp pair of scissors to end the man's long reign of terror over she and her son's lives...
The son was stabbed to the heart, and bled to death on the green linolium floor of the cabin. The mother was declared insane and locked up in a sanitorium, while the stepfather sold the cabin to Mr. Varrick, who bought it, sight unseen... Then the vile stepfather had subsequently drank himself to death...
This was the atmosphere that Elizabeth and Mr. Vincent found themselves in - broke, limited to this miserable and creepy cabin in the woods, with Mr. Vincent leaving for long period of time to work as a lumberjack at a nearby sawmill/lumber operation - a job that he was woefully inadequate for, but forced to struggle onwards to provide a meager lifeline for his tiny family...
The stresses and difficulties were weighing heavily upon him. There were days in which he wondered whether they might all be better off, if the kerosene heater in the cabin just gave out a fatal dose of carbon monoxide and they all went to sleep and never woke up again...
What will be the resolution of this story? Who will die? Will anyone survive?
"The Cabin" - character names list:
Character names: the wife: Sarah, Vashti, Malina, Merari... Whoops... Never mind... I guess her name's "Elizabeth Vincent", nee "Freitas"...
the husband: Bailey, Brock, Varrick... I like "Varrick" - old English term for "stronghold" - good irony for the situation with the cabin and the loss of the family's fortune.... But it doesn't go well with "Vincent" - Varrick Vincent... Naaah....
the son: - well, far as I can tell, he's already named "Andy"...
"The Cabin" - character development:
Elizabeth Vincent is a cultivated, fragile, gentle, mild woman who's been pushed to the very edge. Not only has her husband [??] Mr. Vincent betrayed her by helping the enemies of her people [going with the idea that she's Jewish, as I postulated above], but his betrayal led to her being dumped into the middle of these cold, dark woods where even the sunlight appears afraid to tread.
She's struggling to maintain her sanity. To avoid killing her own beloved son. But the dark thoughts that seep into her mind, drag her ever closer to the unthinkable crime... The deaths of her distant relatives - indeed, of so terribly many of her people - in those German concentration camps, makes her determined to avoid such an act. But the thought of killing her offsring has a bizarre, diseased fascination for her - and she fears that coal-black evil, which occasionally takes the form of German officers in her dreams, dragging her son out of her flailing arms to shoot him like a dog in the street.
But in the dream, hers is the finger that pulls the trigger ...
[? first name not determined yet...] Vincent... Mr. Vincent is, at heart, a staid and eminently practical Englishman - or so he thinks. His marriage to Elizabeth was the 'right' thing to do; she was young, moldable, willing, and decently attractive. The generous dowry which enriched his pockets and added to his personal fortune upon their marriage, made it the perfect mating.
It was most unfortunate that his business affairs went so badly awry - and he had had absolutely NO idea that the Germans were committing such terrible crimes! After all, he hadn't set out to do such things himself, he couldn't control what the Germans did with the funds he'd invested. He'd trusted his business associates who were much closer to the situation to make the decent, proper decisions. Several of them had attended Oxford with them - what ever had happened to the gentlemanly behavior expected of such illustrious graduates of that elevated almumni???
And then there was that damned, inconvenient war... Bloody tragedy what had happened to London; he wondered what was left of the city in which he'd spent much of his youth. Occasionally a chill thought passed through the back of Mr. Vincent's mind; how much of HIS money had contributed to that German "blitskrieg", but he usually succeeded in pushing that thought totally out of his mind.
And now Elizabeth was wracked with guilt. Well, why should she be? She hadn't had anything to do with the situation. She seemed to expect him to feel guilty, too. But all of Mr. Vincent's energies were being taken up by the daily struggle for survival. Some days he hobbled home, too weak even to think - and he had been accorded such accolades at Oxford, in his school days, too... "Most likely to succeed", they'd said, and he'd believed it too....
Then there's Andy... A disingenuous child, open, happy in spite of the private hells his parents were suffering through, he seemed almost magical at times - in possession of a fey's knowledge of the forest and nature. The boy kept talking about some 'creatures' in the woods... Surely his active imagination had conjured up visions of Old World fairies...
[Description of Andy is more the way his father perceives him, than actual character development from Andy's point of view...]
And that's my example of using an outline, backstory, character names' list and character development sections as support for your writing efforts...
You - and Sylvia/Snowbird - have miscellaneous poetry pieces, and Sylvia/Snowbird has several good story vignettes which I will eventually put into an anthology of her own...
But I've got to get back to my own murder mysteries... I'd like to start submitting stories within a few months - like that's going to happen, ha ha....
Happy writing to you, CoCo!!!
Zid
ziddina

Bumping for CoCo...
compound complex

My O my, Ziddy!
How do you do it? - incredible. Your suggested back story gives me lots to ponder over.
I am Andy and Elizabeth is my mother - really. Events described are all true. Including the violence. When I wrote ALL of this, it came flowing, all in a sitting (per post). The in depth background you've provided is an excellent example of character development and unfolding story line.
This will be a challenge for me, the providing intertwining details that have marched from the past into the present ...
Gratefully,
CoCo
ziddina

Hah!! Glad you spotted this!!
I had only copied the outline info and posted it to your other thread - "Through a Darkened Pane", but went into more detail here...
KEEP IN MIND THAT THESE WERE ONLY SUGGESTIONS - used to demonstrate how you could do "backstory" and so forth... My ideas on where your story might come from - and where it might be going...
I hope that you feel free to use the techniques but give your own interpretations to the "backstory"...
Zid

CoCo's 2nd Anthology - by Zid - "Through a Darkened Pane - The Cabin..."

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