I have this story idea but I'm having a hard time both with starting it and deciding what tone to use in it. I initially decided to have it be a serious horror type thing, but then I couldn't help throwing in some...I don't what the word is. Not exactly humor but...snarkiness. I'm not sure it works mixed like this. I also don't know if this is a good way to start or not...let me know, k?
******
The town was unremarkable in most ways; it was small, it was plain, it was cold and northern. There was a general store and a bar, a shoe store and a gun shop, all overshadowed by a great looming beacon of a furrier store jutting out like a church steeple. The church itself didn’t have a steeple; it had fallen down in a time outside the memories of the citizens and was never put back up. The streets were unpaved and full of holes from the rain and snow, but this was of little consequence to the inhabitants, who used only their feet for transportation. The people were unremarkable as well; they were hunters, mostly, or carpenters. Some of them were children and some of them weren’t.
The town was only extraordinary because of what fed on it.
There was a massive bulge of a hill to the south that swelled up from the flat land of the town like a tumor, which some of the residents called the most lively part of town. It was covered from stem to stern in small grey markers and crosses, and, from older times, when the people had bothered to carve out such things, large angelic statues with wind-blasted faces.
It was on this hill where a large part of the people were gathered on the day the shaman came. The priest was leading a prayer as the two coffins of a husband and a wife, containing what was left of them, were lowered into the ground, and the gathered bowed their heads in attention.
“I’m sure they thought it was very cute, the whole ‘I can’t live without you so I’ll die with you’ thing, like Romeo and Juliet. Well, we might have had only one life taken yesterday if it weren’t for Mary’s great show of foolishness, so let’s all pray that she got some sense knocked into her, so she doesn’t offend God’s intelligence in heaven. And take this as a lesson: don’t go around throwing yourself right in the damn paths of the fuckers in order to give your philandering husband three more seconds of life. Amen.”
“Amen.” The crowd began to disperse, when suddenly a womanly scream exploded in the air like a meteorite over Siberia.
“Demon! Demon!”
The crowd gasped in unison. Some of it spilled over the other side of the hill towards the town, while some remained, petrified, in place. The watchmen ran to the top of the hill and aimed their rifles at the approaching figure.
They gave pause, however, for the thing was not so tall as the beasts were, moved unlike them, and was simply walking towards them with the air of someone on an early morning stroll.
As it got closer, they could see that although the thing wore the head of one of the beasts, its body was different. It was monstrous, but at the same time it was human.
“I’m not so sure that
is a demon, Joe,” said Lazarus, the first watchman.
“Why don’t you shoot it and find out,” said the second watchman.
Lazarus squinted at the approaching thing and a gleam of sunlight, bouncing off of something the figure carried, hit his eyes. He looked more closely, and saw that it looked like some kind of rod or shaft…
His eyes widened. He had thought the shaman would never come to such a little spit of a town as this. But here she was.
Their savior had come.
***********