You probably thought I forgot about the Suspense Techniques Contest! Nope. I was just snowed under by a deadline. But now that I am up and breathing again, I'd like to announce the winner of the 5th Segment of the Contest: Trail of Bread Crumbs. This is when an author employs foreshadowing to hint at larger, more important events to come.
I know this was a struggle for many of the writers who frequent EtDW. But in the end, I think we ended up with some VERRRRY promising work. I could totally see some of these being published--that is, of course, if the authors can fill a manuscript with such high-caliber material.
Afters several reads, I must grant the well-earned win to...{waits for suitable drum roll and fanfare} {Beautiful wife Mary Lu hands him envelope, sealed with gold trim.} {Slowly, unbearably slowly, he tears at the seal.} {He yelps after enduring a level 5 Paper cut.} {Opens the envelope and clears throat}
And the winner is...
Everlasting Scribe
Here's her winning entry:
“Lie down ole bones, lie down”
“Lie down old bones, lie down,
Don’t you know that you are dead?
You are, dead and buried dead and buried,
And so you can not dance, no, you can not dance”
The words piped out, tangling the brightness with mischief, and seemed to scuttle along the before Mynasthoa. He frowned slightly, and left the shade where he’d been playing hide and find with the nooning brightness of Aledal’s suns. The intensity of the light rolled over him like honey filling up all of his senses and threatening to overload them. Mynasthoa took several deep breaths, blinking in the brightness, and the light finally gave up the disorientation slid away.
“Lie down ole bones, lie down”
“Lie down old bones, lie down,”
The rhyme he’d known in his childhood repeated itself in a breathy taunt, though it sounded as if it were coming from behind rather than in front as it had when it started. The singer had to be very near him.
Mynasthoa turned slightly as several people pressed pass him; there were two venders trotting behind their push carts of wares, headed to the scarlet awnings on the other side of the avenue to show their goods to those trapped there by the brilliance of the nooning hour, a man and two small girls that held hands tightly and ran along the near side of the street, perhaps looking for the other half of their family, and a pair of street artists running for cover their caps jingling with coins they’d earned from telling stories to the stranded shoppers.
No Aledalian child would be familiar with the chant, he ran a hand through his hair smearing his fingertips with grit and sweat, before giving his locks a gentle tug as if that would release the answer from where it was hiding in his mind. It wasn’t something that a merchant would sing; it was too provoking and rude to be found in a salesman’s mouth. No Talebearer would start off their roll of stories with something so archaic, stories of heroes and daring escapes and kings and princesses running afoul of luck and then having everything turn out well, were what people wanted to hear.
“Don’t you know that you are dead?
You are, dead and buried dead and buried”
Mynasthoa scowled and turned on his heel moving back under the protective awning but as he did so, his long coat brushed up against his back and then whispered out again as someone insinuated an arm between his ribs and inside coat pocket
“Stars take it” he swore and spun with the motion of the intruder, catching a wrist and yanking the thief hard against himself. Dust scuffled up from the cracked stone road, and he felt the gazes of the clustered citizens snap to him as his prisoner writhed and twisted.
“Ah, there will be no biting, for I will bite you back and you’ll go home with half a hand” he warned as the pick pocket lowed their head and he felt teeth set against his knuckles. There was a hoarse word and he laughed. “Manners now, manners. And I caught you out, so by law you owe me seven times what you took” There was a hard inhale from the small frame and then Mynasthoa’s leather courier roll dropped onto the ground. So that’s what they’d been after. Odd.
“Now that’s a start, much better one than trying to rob this old man” Mynasthoa smiled grimly “Tell you what, I’ll take what is mine and you keep what is yours and we’ll be friends. What do you say to that?”
“I’d say that you never were one for knowing what was yours and what wasn’t” the thief murmured. Mynasthoa’s eyes widened and the tension in his arms slacked on the other frame, just enough. The thief broke his hold and spun away from him, dipping down between his feet a moment to snatch the dropped papers and then she straightened, black hair fierce in the brightness and eyes that were too blue to be purple and too purple to blue looked straight into his own. She slipped the paper down inside her jerkin and straightened her arm. A cylinder twanged into her hand and she squeezed it, out shot two lengths of pole and she stepped to the side, twirling the staff through her long fingers. “I wonder though, dear Rulebook, if in our time apart perhaps finally you’ve learned how to dance.” He backed away, giving ground and fumbled for his own calibone as her collapsible one struck at his boot tips.
Wayne's Take:
Scribe, this is your second win. I'm wondering if you've got a future bestseller squirreled away here. Seriously, the foreshadowing you employ is top shelf. The old poem about bones and death serves to add historical authenticity, but you absolutely must have something planned for that later on. The dialogue also drops hints, I think. The supposed thief and the Mynasthoa have a history, and we readers are dying to know what it is. Brilliant stuff. Email me and let me know what book and for whom you'd like it signed.
Honorable Mentions to: Josh (okay, what lurks below deck?) Patrick (not really the overwhelming suspense--trail of breadcrumbs, per se, but just too good a story not to mention.) Eve (Love the potion concoction and the tension).
There's still time to enter suspense technique #6 and especially #7. I'm not quite sure "The What If Twist" technique came clear. Hmmm....
Write on!
-WtB
The wall was fairly unremarkable. It was stone; simple, gray stone. But there was something that the old man was interested in, for he ran his finger down the crack in front of him with a perusing gaze, trying to find something. There was not much to be heard; A mouse here and there, but whoever this man was, he was alone in a rather unsettling, dusty, narrow hallway.
He breathed in through his nose and tilted his back a little, causing his tweed cap to fall over his eyebrows. The man reached into a pocket inside his jacket and pulled out a small blue crystal, and then fitted it into a crack where four stone blocks met.
The crystal started to shine, reacting to the miasma in the air in the hallway, and then burst, breaking down the wall. The man brushed some dust out of his white mustache, and proceeded through.
Beyond the opening was not much, only some old copper pipes in a space the size of a small room. The man wasn’t too happy that he used one of his crystals to only make it to a maintenance room.
“Where are you…” he mumbled to himself, putting his hand to the stubble on his chin. He stood there, contemplating his situation, and then turned his back to explore further down the hall. Once his back was parallel with the wall he had just broken, a rush of air flew past him, with a sound like a giant breathing in. Light, too, drifted past him, and a shadow drifted forth from the room he had just left.
This man knew what was happening, and quickly turned around to see a figure of shadow.
“Johannes Wächter, not this time,” exhaled the figure of shadow, growing ever more solid, but it was still translucent, it was still the thing that Johannes had come here to find: a ghost.