Max and Sebastian - Chapter 1

Fiction - excerpt

Hello, Dearest Penguin People.

Years ago I started writing a novel. Life got in the way so I put it aside. But the things that made life difficult are still present and if I want to finish the book I’ll just have to power through it. I completed the first draft six years ago. I went through a developmental edit and I sent it to a couple publishing houses. Of course, I got rejected. And rightfully so. My ending was horrible. It didn’t hit me until last year what the ending should be.

I joined Substack three months ago. I see people working hard at their craft so there is no excuse for me to not do the same.

The following is the first chapter of “Max and Sebastian”. The genre is contemporary young adult horror fiction. If you want to leave a comment that’s fine. If not, that’s okay, too.

Under the short fiction section in my substack there are four stories connected to this book. George is a chapter that my then editor told me to cut. Larry and Armadillo Annie are stories that I wrote after the fact. I liked the characters so much from the book, that I decided to revisit them. The short story Lilith is set in the same world as Max, but is not a character in the book.

So, for better or worse, here it is…

Hand drawn and then I used a mosaic photoshop filter…

The blank page stared up at Max, ready to eat her soul and spit her lifeless body onto the library carpet, because that’s what monsters do, they suck out the marrow and leave the husk. If eyes were the windows to the soul then words were the crunchy bits left behind. And no one touched her bits. No one.

Max closed her notebook. There would be no offerings today.

Bored, she nibbled her eraser. It tasted terrible. She nibbled some more then pursed her lips. Ketchup might help.

As she chewed, a hint of ozone tickled her nose and singed the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. Never a good sign.

The pages were angry. They fought against the cover, pushing it back in a flurry of damning white. She slapped them down. Greedy things.

“Stop it,” she said.

So hungry.

“You can’t have my words.”

The blue lines of the wide rule curved into a sneer.

Max chewed on the eraser again, not caring about the taste. She reached for her backpack. Scissors, or better yet a match, would do nicely.

“Max?”

She tensed, one hand lingering in the front pocket of her Pokemon backpack. “Yes, Mrs. Hall?”

Her teacher was squinting at her through tortoise-shell bifocals. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

Their eyes locked, neither of them blinking.

“Did you finish your homework?”

Max dropped the backpack. “If this is homework, why am I doing it now?”

Her teacher grew flush and cleared her throat. “Young lady, do I need to come over there?”

Max leaned forward on sharp elbows. “Oh, I wish you would.”

Her classmates whispered and nudged each other. But Max didn’t care what these lemmings with smart phones and poop emoji T-shirts thought. Worthless, one and all. Among the murmurings, one word rose above the others. “Freak.”

She stood up. “Mrs. Hall?”

“Yes, Max?”

“I’d like to join the class on that side of the library.”

Abrupt silence. The lemmings dropped their heads and resumed their obedient scratching of pencils in notebooks.

Mrs. Hall’s voice had a catch in it, as if she had swallowed a fly. “I think it best you stay where you are.”

Max’s lips quivered. She sat down; tiny fists clenched. She hunched over her notebook, watching the ruled lines dance. Oh, what the hell. She cracked her knuckles and began.

“I am a mouse. I bite when provoked. I live in your house, unseen, unwanted; aware of the desperate, hidden thoughts that seep through the facades of pretty faces and forced smiles. I see all, like God, but without the benefit of forethought. I won’t live long, just long enough to creep under your skin and take what is mine. So, pray I don’t find you before you disappear into the oblivion that eventually claims us all. Because if I do, I will drag you into the darkest places where only the smallest can go. Since as I said, I’m only a mouse.”

The words settled onto the page, no longer hers. It would be worth turning it in, just to see Mrs. Hall’s face. She had a way of pursing her lips when she was annoyed, as if trying to keep in a rancid prune.

Max rolled her eyes and wrote in big block letters “I IZ SMRT. YOO IZ DUM.”

The paper burped, finally satisfied.

At least someone was happy. She leaned back and considered her mouse, a fellow outcast who shared her affection for all things odd and melancholy. In a kinder world she would have moved in with her flea-bitten creation and huddled with him between the plaster and wood panels. The subtle nuances of quivering nose and tail would replace all the relentless discussions. Sniff and twitch, what else did you need?

Max hummed quietly under her breath; her mind still adrift. She found it less tedious than keeping it in one place. “Mouses, meeces, mooses.”

Her pencil slid over the paper, curving into loops and splayed lines to form the mouse’s ears and whiskers, followed by two dots for its all-knowing eyes. She smiled at this rare vision who loved her back. As she drew the mouth a familiar pressure grew inside her head. The mouse’s image faded, devoured by the void. She lowered her head to the table’s cool surface and tried not to scream.

Over the years, adults in lab coats and ugly sweaters had told her that she had sensitivities, a blanket statement to describe all the normal sensations that randomly tried to kill her. But sensitivities didn’t explain why light and sound turned against her with such swift cruelty. It didn’t explain why the ticking of the clock and the incessant tapping of a classmate’s pencil against his desk could send reverberations of mind-numbing pain between her eyes. Or why the library’s fluorescent lights clawed and growled their way into her skull to ferret out all the wonderful thoughts of mousitude. Like it was doing now.

Max sought comfort in the dark spaces behind her eyelids, but even there, angry pinpoints of light stabbed her brain. Gritting her teeth, she opened her eyes, knowing what she would find. And there they were, things that sensitivities would never explain. Gray images, nebulous shadows that faded when gazed upon only to reappear in the peripherals. Their shapes shifted and blended one into the other, their whispers a hiss of underlying aches and fears. Young and old, they reached for her. Freaking vultures.

“You’ll have me soon enough,” she whispered.

Then something new. Her hands ached, like the crawl of insects dragging tiny embers beneath her skin. Rubbing them made it worse and soon they were ablaze with indigo fire, leaving shimmering trails in their wake. She painted dark lavender swirls in the air and watched them fade.

Below her, the notebook choked. The words, like tiny water-logged spiders, floated across the page. They pooled and eddied in a mass of tangled legs then streamed off the paper, down to the floor. She smiled. Just yesterday, an overly pleasant intern had told her she might experience a series of visual disturbances. If he only knew.

“Come back,” she whispered to the fleeing words.

They paused, murmuring among themselves. New words appeared. “By the pricking of our thumbs.”

“I don’t understand.”

The murmuring increased. The letters nudged and tossed, then settled in a neat row. “Look it up, smarty pants.”

“Geesh. Rude much?”

The letters shook slightly, as if caught in a light breeze. Two words gazed up at her. “So shiny.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Max said.

They scattered once again and re-emerged in caps. “EAT YOU UP.”

“That’s not funny!”

The letters merged, fell apart, then reformed, “Please use your inside voice.”

That was it. They were just messing with her now. “We’ll see who eats who.” She leaned in and blew the letters as hard as she could. The mangled bits flew off the table to join the others on the carpet.

Abruptly, the world righted itself and the words on the page stared back at her with deliberate indifference. Dry and untangled, they could care less. The pain in her head receded to a subtle roar, the gray people disappeared. But they would come back; they always did. And her hands were just that: plain, boring white hands. Meanwhile, her classmates wrote blindly in their notebooks. If they had noticed anything, they gave no sign. Except for Patrick, the stupid boy at the next table who was writing way too intently, his pencil digging holes in the paper.

Max threw a chewed-up block of pink eraser across the empty space between them. It skittered across the scratched wooden surface and into his lap.

He looked up. That psycho was staring at him, her eyes boring into his brain. He picked up a dog-eared textbook and hid his face behind the cover.

Max glared at him, willing him to put the book down. He didn’t. What a dweeb. Fine. Back to that dumb mouse. A quick rip and an empty page stared at her.

Feed me.

“Die,” she whispered.

Now you’re talking.

Max sucked her breath in through her teeth. The faint blue lines taunted her, ready to strangle her with their fine threads. She set her pencil to its whispery tirade.

“Once upon a time a mouse named Millicent of not inconsiderable means lived in the basement of a retired botanist who despised vegetables and ate only red meat and bacon. He loathed her but was afraid to kill her because he knew that death was greedy and might take more than one soul on the way out, leaving him to be swept away to his own private hell of rutabagas and lima beans if he did the dirty deed himself. So, coward that he was, he set out humane traps and hoped that she would willingly stumble into one. Then he would take her somewhere far, far away, like a swamp or a toxic waste dump. But Millicent evaded his efforts and sat in his basement day after day thinking that humans were truly strange creatures.”

Max frowned. The ending lacked teeth. Any decent mouse would take matters into its own hands and give the botanist a little nip. She drew another mouse, this time with long fangs and claws, suitable for comeuppance.

Sitting a few feet away, Patrick looked up. Max was gone. In her place was a broken doll, fragile and ragged, red lips painted with the cruelest of brushstrokes. It scribbled furiously on the page. Discontent clung to its tiny body like a storm cloud, sizzling and sparking over its head. He rubbed his eyes and the illusion faded.

Unaware of her audience, Max filled in the ranks of her mouse army until every blank, hungry space on the page was occupied. But her fingers still itched. What good was an army without direction?

Then a stillness, like the moment before rain. Frost dusted her eyelashes, coated her glasses. She blew on the lenses, watching the ice crystals melt.

“I know you’re here,” she whispered.

A faint, but obvious obscenity tickled her ears. Sebastian had entered the room.

If you have the inclination…