I had been doing a fuck ton of research for a story and decided to go ahead and use NaNoWriMo as an excuse/damn good reason to actually get shit written. Though I had already written a couple of pages before the month began, I just kept what I had written though it is not technically in line with the rules, but eh, fuck the rules, right? At least I'm writing.
So, in case you didn't read my previous bit of story from a few posts ago, here's the basic plot:
Genre: Historical fiction/ alternate history/ steampunk
Setting: Victorian London, 1895
Protagonist: Resh Nittercott, East End drug dealer.
Plot: Resh is going about her daily routine of drug dealing and other forms of illegal employment. She stops in at a pub to sober up and a dirty cop informs her which areas of town to avoid if she doesn't want to be arrested. She leaves to start work.
And here is a fun new sample of disgusting literature:
*****
She slumped her way through Whitechapel, hitching a ride on
the back of a Black Maria somewhere around Wilton’s. Resh made a mental note to
return to the music hall that evening to sell to a few boozy marks, deciding
start the business day by making a few rounds at Temple Gardens. The
chrysanthemums would be in full bloom, drawing out the usual crowds, and if
Garrow was right, there would be a good number of obsequious aristos and
lawyers with heavy purses and a taste for something a little less seasonal than
flowers.
The cab clopped along Royal Mint and soon Tower Hill loomed
like a grey brick above the chimney tops. The crowds were beginning to throng
about and the cab horses slowed their pace accordingly. Hopping lightly from
the cab, stumbling a bit from the momentum of jumping from a moving vehicle,
Resh cringed as she landed arch-deep in horseshit.
“Godsfuck!” she swore, hopping to the sidewalk and scraping
her boot against the concrete as a couple of passing women shot her dirty
looks. The closest to the street, adorned in an obnoxious hat complete with
mounted pheasant, muttered something about “Only filth excretes filth!”
“Yeah, and you’re as stuffy as your bird. Here’s some filth
for you!” Resh kicked a loose chunk of dung from her boot and cackled as it
smacked the woman right in the stomacher. Shrieking, standing paralyzed, the
pheasant-hatted woman waved her arms like an agitated turkey, smacking her
walking companion in the face as the latter attempted to placate her with a
handkerchief. Resh punted a few more pieces of shit at the cawing women, quite
enjoying her revenge.
She didn’t notice the policeman until he was on her.
“Oi, let me go, copper!” Resh tried to wriggle out of the
arm lock, craning her neck to look behind and find out which officer she was
dealing with today. The burly man, mustachioed and florid, held her tight.
“Was wondering when we’d find time to canoodle this week, Nithercott.
Wednesday, sooner than expected. Looks like today’s menu includes aggravated
assault and public blasphemy charges. You’re off to a fine start!” The man didn’t
look surprised. Resh squirmed harder, trying to avoid the inevitable
handcuffing.
“Flaxton! So sorry, didn’t see you there. Just giving these
ladies a gift from my heart.” Flaxton snapped open a pair of iron cuffs and
attempted to hold his charge still.
“I am sure it was something they could have lived without, you
little urchin.”
“Well, I’m not averse to sharing,” she muttered, raising a
foot behind her to smear shit on the officer’s uniform leg. The man swore
loudly, then even louder when Resh stomped his instep with her filth-sodden
boot. She broke away from Flaxton, who was now releasing a stream of
profanities, and shoved the indignant women out of her way as she pounded along
the sidewalk, weaving in and out of foot traffic. Judging by the thickness of
the morning street throng, Resh estimated that she could lose the policeman
with only a few corner turns.
“Get…back here…pant…you
wench!” Flaxton sounded a good way off, but Resh didn’t dare turn to look for
him. She bowled over a newspaper boy and squeezed past some portly businessmen
before slipping down an alley.
“I ain’t a wench, what has Quickly been telling folks…” she
wheezed, scampering along the damp cobbles. She skated along on fumes for a few
more blocks past Savage Gardens before ducking behind an overgrown fence that
framed the parish of St. Olave.
Her buggered lungs strained to suck in gulps of fetid air,
and to aid in this endeavor, Resh dug around in her coat pocket for a fag. She
produced a limp cigarette, once adequately rolled, and shoved it between her
teeth, fingers trembling as she struck a match.
Drag, heave, wheeze.
“Thank Virginia for tobacco,” Resh exhaled, letting the back
of her head rest against the rust-and-vine iron bars. The day was off to a
quiet start, all things considered. She hadn’t been shivved or shot, nobody had
tried mugging or raping her, and her stash was intact. Wait. She rummaged around in her kit, relieved to find that the
vials remained uncracked. The aether she peddled was bloody good quality, worth
at least a pound each, and if she lost any product her handler would strangle
her. With her own garter, at that.
But honest work was honest work if you could find it. And to
the waifs and sluts of the East End, honest work was anything that paid and
didn’t require more than one murder a week. In return, the Morpheus Cartel made
sure it kept its agents honest as well by murdering the ones who grew too
conspicuous.
Resh was getting a little dishonest of late.
She hadn’t knifed anyone in the past eight days, which was a
record, considering how pestiferous the constabulary was acting of late, but
damn if she wasn’t drawing attention to herself with her antics. Last week’s
wed-and-run in Belgravia nearly cost her an arm when the livid bride tried
tearing off Resh’s tuxedo to expose her womanly charms to the congregation. The
con-woman had to abandon the service before signing the marriage license and missed
out on obtaining a decent dowry to tide her over for the next month.
She might as well consign herself to bachelorhood at this
rate.
A rustling in the ivy caused Resh to start, and she ashed a
thimbleful of cigarette soot on her mudspattered greatcoat while attempting to
turn and face whomever was about to accost her. A slink of fur wriggled through
the black rungs of the fence, and Hieronymous Bosch nuzzled against Resh’s
elbow before biting her calloused fingers with needle teeth. Resh knew she
should probably smack the ferret, who was being an ass as usual, but instead
lifted him onto her raised knees and bopped him on the nose.
“Bad Bosch. Naughty mink. No cigarettes for you.” Bosch eyed
her with beady, cynical orbs. He dooked
audibly and pawed at Resh’s knee with his foreleg, swiveling his neck to bite
at the tiny pack strapped to his posterior. Resh noticed the slight bulge in
the canvas pocket and unbuttoned it to remove a folded slip of paper.
“Huh.” Resh squinted at the scrawled message. She chewed the
butt of her fading cigarette. “The Viking has fresh product for us.” Ferg
Olsson, the top chemist in the Morpheus hierarchy, was always experimenting
with new compounds to produce a better, longer high. A practical man, he never
tested his creations himself, instead relying on his superiors to supply him
with living control groups. Resh had exhausted her usefulness in this regard,
having begun to present a slew of adverse effects from three years of constant
testing, and was now securely in a field position. She still got all the free
samples she wanted, though.
Shoving the note down her cleavage, Resh latticed her
fingers and gave her knuckles a crack,
which sent Bosch hissing up her arm. He coiled his lithe body around his human’s
neck, hitching a ride as Resh lurched to her feet, ejecting the spent fag from
her chapped lips with a spat.
“C’mon, Boschie, let’s hop to it. Olsson’s not a mile off,
shouldn’t take too long to make a pick up.”
Quickly’s remedy, combined with the adrenaline rush afforded
by her early morning scamper from the coppers, had allowed Resh’s system to
reset enough to fight off the night’s grog. She made the distance from Olave’s
to the Mark Lane underground station, stopping for a moment at a public toilet
to relieve herself. The usual traffic clotted the streets, pedestrians
shouldering past one another, goods vendors hauling crates from the docks to
the warehouses, shopkeepers sweeping the detritus of the previous night from
their doorsteps, a disinfector cart parked before some vermin-ridden residence,
and crushes of cab against cab sloughing through street soil. Resh, cowled in
silence and wrapped in her greatcoat, melted into the public scene, another
denizen of London town with a brisk step and a straightforward gaze.
Descending the stairs into the station, Resh shoved a dock
worker into a sailor and used the ensuing commotion to discreetly jump the
turnstile, saving herself a few pennies on the fare. As the electric carriage
shot toward the Limehouse district, Resh sat squeezed between a sallow solicitor
and a small Chinese woman, a seamstress by the look of her pinpricked fingers.
Resh leaned into the seamstress and whispered, “Say,
mama-san, you got a line on my fortune?”
The woman pursed her lips and glared at the Englishwoman.
“Go fuck yourself and fall in a ditch, that’s your fortune, you rancid limey
bitch.” Resh nodded thoughtfully and filed the horoscope away for later
reference. She decided it would be best to avoid ditches today.
Disembarking at Stepney, Resh trotted the distance to
Nightingale Lane by way of Northey Street. The dock workers paid little
attention to her and her ferret, accustomed as they were to the presence of
wharfside doxies and strange animal imports. A good number of Nightingale
denizens recognized Resh, but none addressed her or gave her a second glance as
she shouldered past them.
Ferg Olsson made his laboratory in the fourth floor of a
brown brick warehouse used for tobacco storage. Resh skipped the rickety wooden
stairs two at a time, stopping outside of a heavy steel door studded with
bolts. The edges were sealed so that not a crack could be discerned, and Resh
was sure that the warehouse employees were grateful for the fact. Everyone knew
what kind of business the Viking conducted and nobody had time for toxic
inhalants.
Olsson had rigged a primitive doorbell on the wall next to
the entry, and Resh pressed the black button with a callused finger. She heard
it buzz on the other side, waited, tapped her toes against the baseboard, but
her supplier didn’t appear, didn’t draw back the steel slat on the window that
allowed him to spy upon whomever was bothering him. Resh buzzed about fifteen
more times in quick succession, and finally grew impatient enough to dig her
tools out of the kit harnessed at her waist. She knelt to the lock and as she
pressed a pin to the frame, the door gave way.
The Viking never left the door unlocked.
Resh staggered to her feet, and without any trepidation or
sense of self-preservation, pushed the door ajar. Bosch, coiled around her
neck, hissed as they were hit with the smell of sulphur and formaldehyde, and,
lurking more insidiously in their olfactory sinuses, a distinct iron tang.
Resh stood stock still, taking in the scene. Bosch scurried
down his human’s shoulder and burrowed into one of the many pockets lining her
greatcoat.
The thorough speckling of blood in all directions wasn’t
even the worst part of the scene. That prize went to the chunks of flesh
settled upon every surface, pink fillets of Ferg veined with gleaming ribbons
of fat and sinew, blown apart at the seams. Broken glass and the contents of
shattered bottles peppered the room. Wooden planks, those not covered with treated
tarpaulin that could withstand acidity, still hissed and steamed from contact
with splashes of corrosive liquid that was slowly eating away at their fibers.
Some chunks of the Viking were coated with acid, and the stench of quickly
corrupting flesh bit into Bosch’s sensitive ferret nose. Resh didn’t mind much,
as the smell reminded her of her halcyon days working the streets as a whore in
Spitalfields. The odd corpse in the gutter wasn’t uncommon on a busy night. Ah,
nostalgia.
“Boschie, come!” Resh snapped her attention back into the
present. Kicking the door shut behind her, she scanned the room for booby
traps, then realized that it was a little late to do so and if there had been
any traps her internal bits would be mingling with Ferg’s by now in a kind of guts
trifle. So much for foresight.
Bosch poked his snout from out of his human’s coat. He dooked in trepidation. The last time
they had encountered loose chemicals, the fur had been singed from his tail and
Resh received a second degree burn to her skinny ass. But alas, he was under
contract and had to do what his boss said.
Better pay me in
fucking platinum food pellets, he grumbled, sneaking back out into the
open. Resh tapped him on the head.
“Look around, see if we can salvage anything. The Duke won’t
like it if we just leave this shit for the dock workers to pick through.” She
and Bosch tip-toed gingerly around charred pieces of Ferg and puddles of liquid.
Bosch screamed when he found Ferg’s head, nestled soundly in the wash basin.
The Viking’s face was frozen in a rictus that registered either shock or
constipation. Resh took a vial of cocaine from her waist kit and sprinkled it
over the man’s ginger locks.
“Requiescat in pace,
you weird fucker.” They resumed their search, collecting various and sundry
uncracked jars and bottles of chemicals in a burlap bag they found hanging on a
hook among some lab coats. Resh started on the bookshelf, stocked with
chemistry books and a collection of Holywell rags, hoping that maybe the man
had slipped some bank notes in the pages.
She found the plans hidden in between the pages of an
illustrated copy of Lady Bumtickler’s
Revels.
Like most chemists, Ferg Olsson liked his pornography
classy. The page that Resh opened to was adorned with a detailed woodcut of a voluptuous
woman practically doing yoga with a young man on a divan. Resh was so absorbed
in figuring out the logistics behind the position of the two characters (and whether
she could replicate it by herself) that she didn’t notice the folded paper slip
from the pages and onto the sawdust floor. Bosch darted forward to catch it
with his teeth before it made its way into an adjacent puddle of formaldehyde.
He clawed his way up Resh and smashed the paper into her face.
“What the hell, pesky rodent?” she grumbled as she unfolded
the paper. She had no idea what she was looking at. It looked as if Ferg had
gotten into a box of discarded algebra and dumped it on the page. There was a
pretty symbol that was scribbled into every equation, something like a mash up
of Lucifer’s cross and a key, which Resh imagined would make a very nice tattoo
to complement the one that the cartel had scrawled on her inner wrist with a
rusty needle.
Bosch scanned the paper from her shoulder, squeaking when he
spotted the cross glyph. He springboarded onto the bookshelf, running along the
edge while skipping over clots of blood, and onto a table littered with smashed
bottles and sodden sheets of formulae. Resh followed him to where he nuzzled a
glass vial, corked, sealed, and filled with a bioluminescent blue liquid, in a
rack alongside six other identical tubes. She carefully picked up the vial and
turned it over in her hand, recognizing the odd cross inked onto the label.
“Well, looks like something survived,” she murmured, peeling
the wax from the rim and allowing the liquid to breathe. She snapped off a
strand of her greenish hair and dipped it cautiously into the vial. It didn’t
sizzle or create any odd reaction. Probably past the settling phase. Resh
pursed her lips and nodded, placing the uncorked tube back in the vial rack.
Safe to consume, it seemed.
Brushing the detritus of the table onto the bloody floor,
Resh hopped up to sit and rummaged through her kit after shrugging off her coat.
She fished a clean handkerchief out of the bag and tipped a spoonful of the
aether onto the fabric, causing Bosch to dook
in disapproval, but it was her duty to test new batches of aether. Or so she
told herself.
“Here’s to Queen Vicky and her bitches, may they be roundly
outwitted by the foxes every time,” Resh toasted, raising the embroidered handkerchief
high before shoving it in her face. Bosch decided to make himself comfortable
on the seat of Olsson’s chair, mercifully spared from the blood spatter by its
location behind the desk.
Resh had barely inhaled when it hit her like a hurling stick
to the brain.
The initial blow was like the tense buildup to an orgasm, but
about ten times more potent. She collapsed, convulsing, on the table, her body
hardly registering external stimulus while her brain flooded with endorphins.
Her pupils dilated and contracted, the room going in and out of focus, until
the jolt hit its zenith. Resh screamed as her brain registered a climax, and
instead of the usual melting response, she stayed there.
It was weird and pleasant and horrible and uniquely
spiritual, in a Satanic sort of way.
Riding the high, she checked in on her body.
It turns out that when she collapsed, she experienced a
forced shove away from her body. Slowly turning her head, she shrieked upon
seeing herself, or rather her corporeal form, perched on the table behind her,
half inside her astral form and half out. The whites of her upturned eyeballs
gleamed like the drool seeping from her slackened lips, and with each breath her
mannequin sucked in a strand of hair. She hovered a few inches above the
blood-greased oak, a kind of astral projection amid an abattoir.
“Huh. So that’s what I look like full up to the knocker.”
She reached out a spectral hand to brush away the hair, but, being
non-corporeal, it did a shit amount of good. Spirit-Resh shrugged and turned
her attention to the room.
Being a practical woman, Resh didn’t flinch at the sight of
blood. She couldn’t understand how any woman could, seeing as its presence was
a regular sight for most, but then again the mess in the laboratory was more
than any amount of jelly rags could mop up. Trying out her ghostly feet, Resh
glided across the floor. It reminded her of her one skating experience, except
there was no falling through cracked ice and into the murky Thames and
subsequent hypothermia. Just the silent sweep of consciousness across the
floor.
She didn’t expect Ferg’s severed head to start talking, but
being used to trips, it didn’t surprise her.
“Well, Nittercott, you picked a grand time to stop in.”
Ghosting over to the sink, Spirit-Resh regarded Ferg’s skull
with mild interest.
“I was just thinking the day needed some spicing up, my
friend. Thank you kindly for indulging me. Say,” she leaned her elbows on the
porcelain basin, “what possessed you to blow yourself up? Concocting a new
formula?”
Ferg hawked and spat at Spirit Resh. The ball of mucus
passed through her right eye.
“If I knew the fecking brew was so damned unstable, maybe I
wouldn’t be a splat o’ gristle on the floor, would I? ‘Sides,” he glowered,
“wasn’t what you’d call mandated research, technically speaking. Just a bit of
tinkering in my dwindling spare time. Morpheus likes to stick to the classics,
don’t take any chances on new and interesting compounds.” Ferg relaxed his brow
and sighed. “And now I see why.”
Spirit-Resh chucked her tongue against her teeth, still
yellowing in their astral form. “Well, seems you succeeded somewhat and failed
lotswhat. Tell me,” she tapped Ferg’s melon, “if you were to do it all again,
what would you change about your process? You know. For posterity.”
The scowl spreading across Olsson’s lined face made him look
like crotchety old Gladstone.
“You’re not thinkin’ of snitching my formula, Nittercott,”
he warned. A trundling fly alighted upon his veinbroken nose.
Resh thought a moment, then shrugged. “Nah. Can’t say I’d
have any way to replicate, you know I have no competency in chemical endeavors.
I just imbibe the stuff.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “But for
curiosity’s sake.”
Ferg thoughtfully chewed his cold lower lip. “S’ppose the
first batch was a fluke. Nothing blew up in me face an’ I got a good handful of
vials corked an’ sealed. Problem was with the second round. Tried to add me
signature dash of lavender oil, ye know, the kind what the ladies like.
Apparently this new aether has an affinity for combustion when the right
catalyst is added. Fuck my life.”
Resh nodded and patted Olsson’s ginger head. “Yeah, you’re
fucked, my friend. Welp,” she wiggled her fingers, feeling a bit more corporeal
every moment. Seemed like the high was wearing down.
“I’ve got to run, Fergie,
lots of work to be done and I’m guessing it’s about lunchtime. I’ll make sure
the Morpheus team comes by to clean up—”
Before she could complete her statement, Resh felt a violent
tug, as if a hook had snagged her by the navel and yanked her backward. Her
geist shot across the room, the blood and beakers and sooty brick walls
swirling together in a kaleidoscopic puree. Slamming back into her prone
corpse, Resh’s consciousness remained locked in place as her body began to come
out of its stupor.
She could have done without the visuals. As her neural
connections attempted to spark her mind-body coordination back into place,
various bits of scenery began to fluctuate in size, their colors waxing evil
and making her a bit frightened. She screamed in the prison of her cognizance
as a flocculent behemoth reared its form above her, baring a maw of misericord
teeth that parted to allow the dark tunnel of its throat to emit a terrifying—
Squeak!
A violent shock ran through Resh’s body as she snapped back
into the present, causing her to start forward involuntarily so that she upset
Bosch, perched upon her chest. The ferret dooked
in concern, nuzzling his human as she pried herself off the table and picked
off bits of glass that had pressed into her back. She blinked and willed her parched
mouth to water, breathing deeply as she raised a corked vial to the light.
“Well. How’s that for a morning jog.”
