InsaneJournal

Untitled - Novel Excerpt
This is technically another portfolio piece, although obviously I didn't write it for class - it's a heavily-revised excerpt from last year's NaNo that I included as one of my original pieces, because my portfolio needed moar Construct. It's one of my favorite scenes for a lot of reasons, and also turned out to be a surprisingly concise summary of the novel's main themes.

Like the last one, this contains violence and some possibly not-quite-as-moderate gore.

It was difficult, at first, to figure out how to take care of her suitcase. The dressers and closets of the room were still filled with the old clothes of Lizzie's parents, and it seemed disrespectful to be moving them around and mixing them up just to get herself a little bit of drawer space.

Eventually she decided to just pack as much as she could into the one dresser, whispering a silent apology to the clothes' former owners. It was not a particularly successful experiment, as there simply was not enough room in one dresser for all of it, no matter how much she folded and shoved and tried to manhandle the drawers back in position, but she did manage to free up two or three drawers for herself, which was more than enough for what she had brought with her. She began to unpack, carefully re-folding her clothes to make the most of the available space.
After a little while, the suitcase was empty, and she stowed it in a corner, trying to think of something else with which to occupy herself. Anything but the strange, convoluted, altogether unreal situation in which she'd ended up—

No. That wasn't right. Avoiding this wasn't the answer. James might have been overzealous in his condemnation of their new hosts, but he had been right about one thing: it wasn't healthy for her to be so casual. Sooner or later she was going to have to come to terms with what was going on, and the longer she allowed herself to wallow in denial the worse it would be for her when circumstances finally became too much to ignore.

She flopped down onto the bed, still rumpled from her inexpert making of it the night before. All right, then, start from the beginning. I've met a girl who is living with an obviously supernatural creature, who is protecting her from a large assortment of human beings and strange beasts that are being sent after her by some mysterious Enemy.

She tested that out a little bit, tried to force herself to be shocked or horrified or anything about it, but nothing came. But really, when you thought about it, that was all right. When something this strange happened to you, there was no point in trying to convince yourself it was all some kind of elaborate hoax. She had seen the Construct with her own eyes, seen what it could do, seen the effect it had on other people — the only sane thing to do was to accept it for what it was. In any case, what she had said to James before was true: compared to what they had been assuming before, this situation was positively cheerful. She could deal with fairytale creatures if it was in this state of affairs.

On to the next bit, then. She had been absorbed by the protective spell over this house, and as a result, she was going to have to stay here for as long as the magic. That one she shied away from, almost to her relief. At least she could be upset over something about this. She was beginning to fear James was right, it couldn't possibly be normal not to be even a little bit bothered by the whole thing.

She tested it out a little bit. Was she all right with staying here in the short term? Well, yes, that was perfectly fine with her, even as an unplanned thing. Lizzie was a good child, after all, she found her quite pleasant. And it was a good house, and she felt like she could do some good there, if only she could be given a chance. In the short term, there was nothing at all wrong with it. But forever... no. She couldn't imagine finding ways of keeping herself occupied for that long. Lizzie had survived for two years, so far, but she was a child, and she still had the option of going to school when she wanted to, although Sarah rather suspected her attendance was not what one would call perfect. There was only one Construct to look after them outside the safety of the house, though, and Lizzie would always take precedence, even if the creature did eventually come around to their side of things. They would be allowed to go outside only occasionally, under the most controlled of circumstances. That, she couldn't see herself accepting.

So, then — what to do about it? She refused to be like James, withdrawing into herself and making everyone else miserable just because something was not to her liking. There must be some way of escaping the house. She couldn't just leave, as James had tried to do that morning — it wouldn't improve her situation any, as she would still essentially be trapped within the house's magical field, unable to live anything resembling a normal life. If she was going to do that, she might as well not take the trouble and just stay inside the house — it would amount to more or less the same thing. Besides, she hadn't liked the sound of whatever this "Enemy" turned out to be capturing her for information on Lizzie. Everything Lizzie had told them so far had turned out to be true; she would rather not give that one a chance to.

The issue was, then, to find some way of making the field unnecessary, to remove the danger so that Lizzie no longer needed such rigorous protection. On this, however, she drew a blank. If something as powerful as the Construct had not managed to remove the threat so far, she couldn't imagine how two amateur journalists had a hope of doing any better.

A faint noise from outside distracted her from her thoughts. She rolled over, stood up, and crossed to the window, peering outside curiously.

Her vantage point offered her a good view of the backyard outside. It was not particularly large, just a smallish square of grass and a strip of what might have been a garden back when Lizzie's parents had been around to take care of it. Standing in the center of the yard, motionless as a statue, was the Construct, and pacing around it was...

At first she thought it was only a large dog, one that had wandered over from a neighbor's yard, but after a moment she realized that it was indeed very large, larger than any dog had a right to be. She had been fooled by comparing it with the Construct's height, but now that she took into account what the Construct's height actually was, she realized that a dog that came up to its waist was a very unusual dog indeed. And when the dog's — no, you couldn't call anything that looked like that a dog, it was a wolf at the very least — when the wolf-thing's head came around into clearer view, she could see that the muzzle was much too big, the overlarge teeth sticking out of its jaw at odd angles.

Nothing natural looked like that. It was, Sarah realized, one of the monsters Lizzie had told them about.

As she watched, it stopped its wary circling and lunged, claws outstretched. For a moment, it seemed like the attack would connect, and Sarah found herself holding her breath, wondering what would happen if something actually managed to take a bite out of the Construct — but then the Construct simply stepped aside, with that inhuman speed it had displayed before, and swiped at it almost lazily with one claw. A red gash appeared in the monster's side, and Sarah could hear its whine of pain and anger through the glass, but it recovered almost instantly, and turned back for another try.

The fight was almost pitifully one-sided. An ordinary human would have been no match for the wolf, but the Construct seemed almost bored. It sidestepped its attacks easily, staying out of the monster's range and slicing at it every so often when it seemed to be running out of steam. Again, Sarah remembered what she had witnessed in the alley, countless days before: the Construct toying with its victim, letting it pretend it had a chance of winning, or at least surviving, before finally finishing it off. And even as she thought it, the Construct seemed to tire of its sport. The monster made one last, desperate lunge, missing by a wide margin, and as it passed the Construct stretched out one claw and cleanly sliced the monster's neck open. The monster stumbled, woozy, as blood poured out of the wound; it collapsed, twitched briefly, and then lay still, the grass around it stained a deep red.

Sarah wondered idly what the Construct would do next. Would it just leave it there to decay? It seemed a remarkably inefficient way of doing things — surely someone would have noticed all those corpses. Perhaps the Enemy's monsters disintegrated very fast, as a kind of special defense mechanism to keep any outsiders from noticing its involvement. Or perhaps the Construct would dispose of the body itself — bury it, maybe, or throw it in the lake, or maybe it would just toss it in a dumpster somewhere. That had the same problem as her first idea, though — concealment spell or no concealment spell, with that much evidence being left around it was too much to expect that no one would catch on.

The Construct paced in a brief circle around the corpse, as if sizing it up. Then, quickly, and with surprising precision, it lashed out a few times with its claws, chopping the wolf into several pieces—head, torso, legs, tail. Sarah winced a little at this, although she continued to watch, fascinated: perhaps that was its strategy, scattering the bodies, although it would certainly require much more energy to bury them all separately, and if it was just going to toss the pieces somewhere then she couldn't imagine why it bothered. It certainly wouldn't have any trouble carrying the wolf when it was all in one piece, not after what she'd seen of its brute strength.

The Construct picked up one of the pieces, one of the creature's forelimbs — then its chest opened, a black, gaping hole stretching all the way across it, like some kind of grotesque mouth. And indeed, that image was confirmed only a moment later, as it shoved the bloody leg inside. The hole closed briefly, only to open again to receive the rest of the monster. Soon, the entire animal had been completely — ingested, swallowed, consumed, whatever you could possibly call it. The hole closed again; for a moment, there remained an uneven lump in the Construct's chest and abdomen, and then, slowly, it contracted, until the Construct was back to the same shape it had always been, and the only sign that anything strange had happened was the conspicuous stain on the ground.

But even that, it seemed, the Construct had ways of dealing with. It shuffled forward slowly, dragging its feet across the grass, and as Sarah watched the stain began to contract and fade. The blood seemed to be seeping into its skin, its feet darkening to a brownish-red before finally fading back to their regular pallor once the stain had been completely absorbed. The bits of blood that had fallen on its clothing, too, were slowly disappearing, fading into the fabric until finally it was pristine and white once more.

As it had before, the Construct seemed to become aware of her all at once, although Sarah was convinced she'd done nothing to draw attention to herself. The eyeless mask stared up at her, clearly able to see her watching, and there was something almost defensive about its posture, as if Sarah had seen something it would rather have not shown to anyone. But by now she was use to it staring at her, and simply stared back, her mind working too furiously to bother wondering whether it might be upset with her, and if she had just inadvertently made her life that much more difficult.

Finally, the Construct looked away, and trudged off towards the front of the house. Sarah retreated from the window and sat down heavily on the bed. So that was how it did it — completely and utterly disposing of the evidence, by taking it all within itself. She was willing to bet it wouldn't even leave any telltale traces of DNA. A perfect, untraceable kill. Whatever being had designed the Construct, they had certainly known what they were doing. She couldn't imagine a more efficient bodyguard.

And yet... somehow, despite all this efficiency, the situation was no better than what it had been two years ago, according to what Lizzie had told them. Certainly, Lizzie seemed to be safe, able to live something resembling a normal life despite all of it, but the threat was still there — no matter how many monsters the Construct killed, more always showed up eventually. Lizzie would still have to be cooped up in her own house, unable to go outside without supervision, cut off from the rest of the world. She had survived that for two years, might survive it a few years more, but she wouldn't be able to survive it forever, any more than Sarah could.

Perhaps, then, killing monsters wasn't the answer. The Construct was impossibly good at what it did, but what it did was only treating the symptoms, not the real problem. After all, the monsters did not simply materialize out of nothing — they were created, sent scouting around by this mysterious Enemy, the entity that neither Lizzie nor the Construct seemed particularly interested in, despite it being the root of all their troubles.

And that was what she and James could do, she realized, perhaps even what they had been brought there to do in the first place. They could provide an outside perspective, drag Lizzie and the Construct out of their two-year pattern and show them what they really had to do, what they really had to start focusing on: finding and destroying the Enemy itself.