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In an Unknown Tongue
“It's got his moustache,” I said.
We stared at the mounted head, secured inside a sigil-fortified cage. It was translucent, not like glass but like a thin shell of smoke. Its wild horns suggested something much more lethal than the simple defences of a plains herbivore. The light shining through the head lent a hint of a red glow to the rudely cocked eyes, and the lewd mocking leer offended me to my core. But that disgusting split tongue was the most disturbing of all. Just looking at it tied a knot in my crotch.
“Ms. Trammel?” said Inspector Graemes of the CID, Supernatural Branch. “Let's stay on track. When was the last time you saw Mr. Mabbleton, uhm, alive?”
“This past night,” I said. “The recent meeting of the Hell Explorer's Club. This plaque with the demon's head had just been brought in by al-Haqarabi. He said he won it in a game of pachinko behind a shoe store in Marrakesh. He tells a lot of hard-to-check stories like that, but he gets results so most of us let him have his way.”
“And for your club of demon hunters, was this a usual sort of item?”
“It’s good that you qualified that. Sir Marles has an impskin cap that occasionally gives him prescient visions, but costs him a finger joint each time he uses it. Lady Syesti has a matched pair of drake tattoos that can crawl over her body at will. MacAiles has boots that let him tread directly on unknown and alien soils; his feet seem to disappear into black clouds when he wears them.
“The demon head was the sort of thing we were used to handling, and we’d found nothing about it that would require additional procedures beyond the usual ritual words. We’ll be revising our rules and procedures in light of these events.”
Inspector Graemes nodded and flipped a page in his notebook.
“There was a collar of green metal that affixed the demon head to the plaque, and strange glyphs were burned into the collar. We started discussing what they could mean, and al-Haqarabi called in a bet he’d won last month, and challenged Mabbleton to decipher the glyphs, or at least pinpoint their origin. Mabbleton is--was--an expert linguist and master of sigilla, so he declared himself game and had a go at them.
“He sat there for nearly an hour, turning the plaque about, tracing the characters, checking the club’s library for references, and muttering under his breath. He tried ciphers, mirror images, iterative structuring, and even Lull analysis. Finally, he gave an enormous sigh, set the thing down and spoke nine words; only nine words, but they were all it took to set the horrible thing off.
“That damned head extruded its tongue, and it shot out like a cobra and went straight down Mabbleton’s pants. He turned the most remarkable shade of vermillion, but he kept his cool right up until that tongue hit the bullseye, so to speak. He yelled then, and a number of us were pulling on his arms and legs to get him off. But that tongue just kept going deeper and deeper, and the nightmare part was watching his expression change. It went from surprise, to indignation, to horror, to desperation. But when that damned tongue had struck deep enough into him to reach his heart, and you could see him starting to accept it, that was when most of us had to turn our heads aside. We knew we were losing the battle and so did he. It was stomach-wrenching and heartbreaking all at once--”
Graemes paused sympathetically and allowed me to collect myself. I took slow deep breaths for a minute, then continued.
“Mabbleton started to… collapse. His limbs shrank and curled up, escaping the grasp of those who sought to pull him free. His body thinned as he was drawn up to the demon’s mouth, and he started to merge with its face. It was as if he was a stocking being drawn over the thing’s head. You could see his face being pulled and stretched, the horns bursting through his forehead, and that obscene tongue supplanting his own tongue and protruding through his lips. The moustache may well be all that’s left of him. For his sake, I hope that’s true.”
Graemes paused in taking his notes. “You said he’d spoken nine words; what were they?”
I knew it should be safe to repeat them, with the thing under containment.
“He said, ‘I'll be damned if I let this lick me.’”
We stared at the mounted head, secured inside a sigil-fortified cage. It was translucent, not like glass but like a thin shell of smoke. Its wild horns suggested something much more lethal than the simple defences of a plains herbivore. The light shining through the head lent a hint of a red glow to the rudely cocked eyes, and the lewd mocking leer offended me to my core. But that disgusting split tongue was the most disturbing of all. Just looking at it tied a knot in my crotch.
“Ms. Trammel?” said Inspector Graemes of the CID, Supernatural Branch. “Let's stay on track. When was the last time you saw Mr. Mabbleton, uhm, alive?”
“This past night,” I said. “The recent meeting of the Hell Explorer's Club. This plaque with the demon's head had just been brought in by al-Haqarabi. He said he won it in a game of pachinko behind a shoe store in Marrakesh. He tells a lot of hard-to-check stories like that, but he gets results so most of us let him have his way.”
“And for your club of demon hunters, was this a usual sort of item?”
“It’s good that you qualified that. Sir Marles has an impskin cap that occasionally gives him prescient visions, but costs him a finger joint each time he uses it. Lady Syesti has a matched pair of drake tattoos that can crawl over her body at will. MacAiles has boots that let him tread directly on unknown and alien soils; his feet seem to disappear into black clouds when he wears them.
“The demon head was the sort of thing we were used to handling, and we’d found nothing about it that would require additional procedures beyond the usual ritual words. We’ll be revising our rules and procedures in light of these events.”
Inspector Graemes nodded and flipped a page in his notebook.
“There was a collar of green metal that affixed the demon head to the plaque, and strange glyphs were burned into the collar. We started discussing what they could mean, and al-Haqarabi called in a bet he’d won last month, and challenged Mabbleton to decipher the glyphs, or at least pinpoint their origin. Mabbleton is--was--an expert linguist and master of sigilla, so he declared himself game and had a go at them.
“He sat there for nearly an hour, turning the plaque about, tracing the characters, checking the club’s library for references, and muttering under his breath. He tried ciphers, mirror images, iterative structuring, and even Lull analysis. Finally, he gave an enormous sigh, set the thing down and spoke nine words; only nine words, but they were all it took to set the horrible thing off.
“That damned head extruded its tongue, and it shot out like a cobra and went straight down Mabbleton’s pants. He turned the most remarkable shade of vermillion, but he kept his cool right up until that tongue hit the bullseye, so to speak. He yelled then, and a number of us were pulling on his arms and legs to get him off. But that tongue just kept going deeper and deeper, and the nightmare part was watching his expression change. It went from surprise, to indignation, to horror, to desperation. But when that damned tongue had struck deep enough into him to reach his heart, and you could see him starting to accept it, that was when most of us had to turn our heads aside. We knew we were losing the battle and so did he. It was stomach-wrenching and heartbreaking all at once--”
Graemes paused sympathetically and allowed me to collect myself. I took slow deep breaths for a minute, then continued.
“Mabbleton started to… collapse. His limbs shrank and curled up, escaping the grasp of those who sought to pull him free. His body thinned as he was drawn up to the demon’s mouth, and he started to merge with its face. It was as if he was a stocking being drawn over the thing’s head. You could see his face being pulled and stretched, the horns bursting through his forehead, and that obscene tongue supplanting his own tongue and protruding through his lips. The moustache may well be all that’s left of him. For his sake, I hope that’s true.”
Graemes paused in taking his notes. “You said he’d spoken nine words; what were they?”
I knew it should be safe to repeat them, with the thing under containment.
“He said, ‘I'll be damned if I let this lick me.’”
Pics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTvrF_YRw4U
I really like the tone of this world, where demonic encounters are a thing that procedural law enforcement folks look into. The little bit about all the supernatural items the group has gathered was also a fun little aside.
I think I'm having just a little trouble with two things here; your prose and your tone.
Starting with the former, there's definitely nothing inherently offensive about the text itself, but I do need to note that the whole thing feels a little exhausting to read. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that dialogue easily makes up the vast majority of your wordcount. When you have this much speech, it's easy for the reading experience to slip into talking heads territory, and it can start going right over the reader's head. So I think my suggestion would be to give your framing device a little love, and use it more frequently to break up the longer stretches of dialogue.
As for the tone, this was honestly kind of confusing to me to read. Three major elements here seem to have conflicting tones, which makes it kind of hard for me to give this peice sense of identity. The first is the event that happened, the second is how the event is described, and the third is the punchline.
The event itself is, well, pretty darn ridiculous, when you sit and think about a demon consuming someone ass-first via the tongue, and then inheriting his glorious mustache. The first bit of conflict comes from the fact that despite how ridiculous this is, Ms. Trammel seems to try to describe it in a horrific/grotesque way. So immediately, our sense of amusement is kind of squashed, since we're being told that we're supposed to be disgusted by what happened. This retroactively kind of hurts the more amusing bits earlier in the story, with the crazy artifacts and the general irreverent tone. But then, the punchline tells us that everything was ridiculous, after all. It's a bit of a whiplash to have to go back and forth between treating the events comedically and treating them seriously.
So overall, although I definitely like parts of this story, I'm having trouble coalescing them together into a coherent whole, and the dialogue-heavy nature of the piece itself makes it hard for me to get emotionally invested.This has some really neat ideas (and I love the explanation for the mustache from the art), but I think it needs to define itself a little better before it can fully pay off.
Thanks for submitting!
I really like the tone of this world, where demonic encounters are a thing that procedural law enforcement folks look into. The little bit about all the supernatural items the group has gathered was also a fun little aside.
I think I'm having just a little trouble with two things here; your prose and your tone.
Starting with the former, there's definitely nothing inherently offensive about the text itself, but I do need to note that the whole thing feels a little exhausting to read. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that dialogue easily makes up the vast majority of your wordcount. When you have this much speech, it's easy for the reading experience to slip into talking heads territory, and it can start going right over the reader's head. So I think my suggestion would be to give your framing device a little love, and use it more frequently to break up the longer stretches of dialogue.
As for the tone, this was honestly kind of confusing to me to read. Three major elements here seem to have conflicting tones, which makes it kind of hard for me to give this peice sense of identity. The first is the event that happened, the second is how the event is described, and the third is the punchline.
The event itself is, well, pretty darn ridiculous, when you sit and think about a demon consuming someone ass-first via the tongue, and then inheriting his glorious mustache. The first bit of conflict comes from the fact that despite how ridiculous this is, Ms. Trammel seems to try to describe it in a horrific/grotesque way. So immediately, our sense of amusement is kind of squashed, since we're being told that we're supposed to be disgusted by what happened. This retroactively kind of hurts the more amusing bits earlier in the story, with the crazy artifacts and the general irreverent tone. But then, the punchline tells us that everything was ridiculous, after all. It's a bit of a whiplash to have to go back and forth between treating the events comedically and treating them seriously.
So overall, although I definitely like parts of this story, I'm having trouble coalescing them together into a coherent whole, and the dialogue-heavy nature of the piece itself makes it hard for me to get emotionally invested.This has some really neat ideas (and I love the explanation for the mustache from the art), but I think it needs to define itself a little better before it can fully pay off.
Thanks for submitting!
As a feghoot:
This works quite well, but I'm greedy. I'd like it to work just as well as an actual story. Right now, it's got a loose end that makes it less than satyisfying to me, and that's that we still don't know anything about the demon head when the story finishes. I'd like for Mabbleton's unfortunate end to provide the clue that Trammel needs to solve the mystery of what the artifact actually is. Just make something up--preferably something a little silly--but that bit of closure is all I really need.
Mike
This works quite well, but I'm greedy. I'd like it to work just as well as an actual story. Right now, it's got a loose end that makes it less than satyisfying to me, and that's that we still don't know anything about the demon head when the story finishes. I'd like for Mabbleton's unfortunate end to provide the clue that Trammel needs to solve the mystery of what the artifact actually is. Just make something up--preferably something a little silly--but that bit of closure is all I really need.
Mike