The Tomb of the Maharal Part 1

The Templars have been hired to track down a pair of grave robbers before they meet their end. A simple job, more than likely not, nothing is ever simple for the Templars.

(1)

 

Mikulov, Moravia

1935

 

The blood pooled at the tips of Richard Templar’s fingers before ballooning large enough to crash to the stone floor below. He glanced back down the hall, deep underground with his bright green eyes not seeing the stone golem after them but its heavy footsteps echoed all around the endless the maze. The tomb under some old house in a country he couldn’t remember, and it seemed to go on for miles, making anyone who went into them lost until death arrived. Death, in this case, wasn’t the lack of water or food but a stone man who could crush his skull with its hands.

            Richard dragged the thin girl with the brilliant auburn hair down the hall with him, hoping she still lived. She seemed to breathe in the dust, dust too old for him to want to think about now. There had to be thousands of years’ worth of dead skin floating around their faces. He shuddered to think of what he had been resting his lunges now, but soon the thought flashed away when a shape pain hit his side. A few of his ribs had to be cracked, if not broken at this point but Nova, the girl with a pointed face, and killer sea blue eyes had it a bit worse than him.

            He glanced down at her head hung low with bits of her hair falling out of her ponytail, and some blood being soaked up by it. The deep red almost blended into her auburn hair and when November ‘Nova’ Halo woke, she might be crying in agony as well.

            “Come on, Charlotte,” Richard whispered to the dark. “I need some saving here.” He pulled harder, the pain weakening his body, wanting him to stop or at the very least, drop Nova. It had been her fault they were in this mess in the first place. It had been her and her father, Dyson Halo, which brought them here. The man who hired them to robe this tomb quickly realized something had gone wrong when Dyson never showed up to their meeting. Their benefactor reached out to the Templars and asked them for help.

            They had worked with the Halos before hunting down artifacts for clues of human history before the Deluge, known as the Great Flood to command folk. Also been a stab in the back by them, Richard pointed out to himself. He had pointed out this little fact to his uncle and Charlotte, but it didn’t seem to matter.

            “Richard?” Nova asked with her thick Texas accent coming around. He stopped leaning her against the wall in the utter darkness and let go of her once she could stand. Standing was an overstatement, he noted, she held her hand out using the wall to keep her from curling over in agony. “What happened? My head is killing me.”

            He sat back on the wall, sliding down to the floor with a grunt and said, “You almost died.”

            “What?” She asked.

            The monster which seemed to be equally as lost in the maze of tunnels �"

            (thank God for small miracles)

                it had picked Nova up by the head and slowly started to crushed her skull between its large hands. Nova hollered and fought back, losing her breath. She kicked, punched, but nothing worked. Her strikes did not damage to the stone body of the nine-foot-tall man. She cried with tears of pure agony, the tears marching down her angular face and mixing with the blood that had started to leak from her nose and ears.

            “Oh crap,” Richard shouted, picking himself off the stone floor of the massive dead library they had entered. He could already feel the smack of pain from his ribs, but he didn’t have any time to think about it now. The stone man had tossed him a good few yards away from them, and now he tried his best to kill Nova. Richard pulled free his duel 1873 Colt Peacemaker decked out with magical runes which help him when fighting monsters like the stone man.

(Seventeen and this all seem a little too normal for me.)

He opened fire, hoping the magic would do something to stop the monster from killing his friend, but the bullet drummed against its body and raining to the floor.

            “Shoot the rune on its head,” Charlotte ordered from above Richard. She had rushed upstairs, trying to find a spellbook to put the stone man back to sleep. Charlotte nothing more than a fifteen-year-old girl, but smarter than a whip and knew her stuff when it came to magic. Charlotte and his uncle Lord Augustine Templar were desperately hunting for a way to stop the monster.

            Richard barely made out the words over the gunshots and the horrible screaming from Nova. A voice echoed through the library, making anyone who could hear above ground blood cruel. He took aim at the glowing rune on the monster’s forehead. He didn’t need the magic of his guns to take this shoot. Richard wasn’t very good a reading, writing or anything to do with school, not because he was dumb, but because he didn’t care to sit still long enough to study. His great skills were in the arts of fighting, running, and most of all, shooting.

            His aim was true, hitting the rune on the stone man’s head quicker than a nail being pummeled by a hammer. The stone man dropped Nova, grabbing its own head trying to cry out in shock, but it seemed the stone man had no voice of his own.

            Poor, b*****d, Richard thought as he picked Nova up, trying to take aim again at the rune, but the monster’s stone hands shield it from any more attacks.

            “It’s not going to kill it,” Charlotte yelled. “It’ll only stun it.”

            “Then what is going to kill it,” Richard asked, backing away from the stone man.

            “I don’t know right now,” she said, and they all glanced at the monster staring dead at Richard.

            “I think you made it mad,” Charlotte said.

            “Oh yeah, what gives it away?” Richard asked, unloading his gun with his free hand. A bullet ricocheted back at him, hitting his shoulder, causing him to drop his gun. Quickly, disregarding the pain, reached down and grabbed the pistol and tossed it in his holster.

            “I think you should run,” Charlotte told him.

            Not a bad idea, Richard agreed with her. None of them had seen him get hit by the ricochet, but the pain started to take hold as he ran from the monster chasing after them.

Author's Note

I hope you have enjoyed the first part of ‘The Tomb of the Maharal’ and can’t wait for the next part of the story. I wrote this short story at the beginning of the summer for a bit of fun. I had been reading some steampunk books back then, not sure what the titles were, but it made me want to write my own steampunk tale. So, this is the start of my steampunk world and let me know what you think about it.

Reviews

[JayG]

Your bio says you’re a storyteller, and proud of that fact. And in line with that, the presentation methodology of this—and your other writing—reflects that fact. Clearly, it’s a transcription of you telling the story to an audience. And as such, when you read it, it works perfectly, because the voice you hear is your own, alive with the emotion that would fill it in a live performance. There are changes in cadence, meaningful hesitations to take a breath, and changes in intensity, all of which combine to place the necessary emotion into your performance and bring the story to life.

Added to that, as you tell the story, you'll illustrate the necessary emotion via such things as eye-movement, expression, gestures that visually punctuate, and body-language that can amplifies and moderate that emotion.

In short, you don’t just read the words as a reader must. You perform, exactly as you would in person. But...without having performance notes to study, and no practice time in which to generate and enhance their own performance what does the reader have? Only what the bare words on the page suggest to them, based on what has gone before in the story, and what the words suggest, based-on-THEIR-background, not yours. And those words come with no more emotion that what’s inherent to the words and the punctuation.

To hear how different what the reader gets is from what you intend, have your computer read this aloud.

Another problem is that because you’re "telling" the story, and weren't aware of the three issues a writer needs to address quickly, in order to provide context, you’ve left out things that are obvious to you because you begin reading knowing the characters, their backstory, and the situation in the opening scene—things opaque to a reader. Look at the opening through the perceptions of a reader in that situation: seeing it for the first time, and having only what the words suggest:

• The blood pooled at the tips of Richard Templar’s fingers before ballooning large enough to crash to the stone floor below.

“The blood?” The reader has no idea of where we are, who we are, or what’s going on. So while we might accept a line beginning with “blood” pooling, when you say, “the blood” you’re referring to specifics for which the reader lacks all context. From that reader's viewpoint, how can blood “pool” without a container? Only if it's inside the fingers and subject to force of some kind. A ship accelerating seems implied. But then, the blood “balloons.” How can blood that’s “pooled” “balloon?” And how can any liquid “crash?” Splash, yes. But crash on a “stone floor?”

That line might make perfect sense were the reader to have context as to why there’s blood on his fingers, and the significance of it. But without context the words have no meaning as they're read. And it matters not at all if you would clarify as early as the next line because you cannot retroactively remove confusion, making this opening line where the agent/editor reaches for the rejection.

• He glanced back down the hall, deep underground with his bright green eyes not seeing the stone golem after them but its heavy footsteps echoed all around the endless the maze.

Wait…there’s a man of indeterminate age, in an unknown place, with blood balloons falling from his fingers and he glances around, not at his hands? He takes no steps to stop the significant blood loss you report? Again, you know why he’s doing this, but the reader doesn’t. And since you mentioned blood in the first line it must be significant. Yet after mentioning it you never come back to it or clarify. So why was it mentioned that strongly? Damned if I can tell. And what’s an “endless maze?” Unless the reader knows what’s going on, where they are in time and space, and who they are as people, this lacks all context.

The short version: Storytelling on the page is vastly different from that on stage. The mediums are very different, so the presentation methodology must be, as well. Your golden voice? The reader hears only what a text-to-speech engine would provide, which is why we cannot “tell” a story on the page. Instead, we must show it through the protagonist's perceptions, and how they influence the character to behave.

On the stage as a storyteller, because we’re alone, and have no visual aids but our performance, we play all the roles, and talk to the audience in overview and summation. There, the storyteller provides all necessary explanation and comment. But when the audience can neither see nor hear that performance, rendering it emotion free, the narrator can only speak in support of the action IN PROGRESS if they don't want a quick rejection. So a story on the page is told from within the viewpoint of the protagonist, within the moment they call “now.” That makes the future uncertain, and something to speculate on, and therefore, interesting.

Readers aren’t seeking an informational experience. History books provide that, and when was the last time you bought one? Readers want to be made to feel as if they’re LIVING the story as-the-protagonist, and in real-time. No way can you substitute the transcription of a live performance and make that happen. To do that takes an entirely different set of presentation skills.

So it’s not a matter of good/bad writing, talent, or the story itself. It’s what Mark Twain was talking about when he said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Universally, we leave our school years possessing only the nonfiction skills that will make us useful to employers. Our years of writing reports and essays have made us proficient in explaining, not entertaining. And the skills of verbal storytelling are useless in a medium that reproduces neither sound nor vision.

But that’s not bad news. Every profession has its own, unique, set of necessary craft. So it’s more a rite of passage than a disaster. You have the desire. And that’s good. You’ve demonstrated the necessary perseverance, a necessity. And, you have the story. What you need to add is the necessary presentation skills, which you can find in a book like James Scott Bell’s, Elements of Fiction Writing.

Add that and the act of writing fiction becomes more fun, if for no other reason than that your protagonist becomes your co-writer and advisor.

So have at it. And while you do, keep writing. It keeps us off the streets at night.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/