Worms & Atrophy

This short story was pieced together for a creative writing class. I realize this version has numerous errors. Some of it may be worth saving, so I would like more feedback. I am already aware of the grammar errors, though you may feel free to bring them to my attention. Primarily, I am looking for feedback to help me improve my syntax/sentence structure. I would also like feedback about how much and where descriptive language should be omitted. Any other constructive feedback is welcome. This version of the piece can be compared to the stripped down, revised version that I am also posting.

         Worms & Atrophy
         Rachel Pinkerman          
         CRW-1001
          2/10/19
It was a foggy November morning in Ohio that began like any other. The halo of sun could just be seen peering over the sprawl of the city head, over the factories, smoke towers, and warehouses just beyond the Columbus horizon line. Acid rain, the tears of concrete angels, began to fall out of the open steel sky. They fell infinitely out of nowhere, like parachuting martians coming to colonize miniature worlds stacking on top of one another in a dimensional Jenga stretching up into the smog filled heavens.
It was this morning that Elaina was coming home to her and Jareth's apartment, arms loaded from grocery shopping. Elaina was a tall, fever-eyed nervous type, and Jareth was her boyfriend; her perfect laid-back complementary. At least this was the case back when things were normal. Black-eyed and broad shouldered, though short for a young man, his personality had once served as a perfect foil to Elaina's anxieties. The past few months had been different.

"Jareth! There are groceries. Can you come help me? Please? Jareth?," Elaina called from the apartment's doorway.
After a few moments of silence, she made her way inside.

She passed the kitchen, the sink still filled up with unwashed dishes, accumulating to toxic levels. Ants were filing in from a crack in the far corner .

The apartment consisted of only three rooms, the living and sleeping quarters as well as the kitchen and dining area each combined into a joint section of the house. A cramped one-person bathroom jutted out of the east side of the kitchen. Sectioned off of the sleeping and living area behind a hanging curtain was Jareth's study. The apartment was furnished skeletally, their bed consisting only of a mattress, the ceiling brown with water stains, and most of the corners of each room littered with half-opened schoolbooks and garbage.

Jareth's study was by far the liveliest room in the apartment, with wall to wall jam packed books on topics as diverse as physics to chemistry to DIY home repair. The largest section was the section on metaphysical topics. A cluttered desk with an oil lamp sat at the far north wall. Crumpled papers with scribbled out inscriptions towered underneath. On top of the desk was a collection of items that to the unobservant would appear to be nothing more than curiosities displayed for sentimental value. Anyone who took more than a passing glance at this strange assembly of bones pieces, crystals, and tree branches would see it was arranged with some purpose in mind, the items placed as to form a peculiar triskelion shape centered around a crude heptagram with an eye resting at the center.
She pulled back the curtain to his study, then stopped in her tracks and dropped her keys. "What are you doing?," she blurted, "I burned your collection for a reason. This is serious! Any why haven't you washed the dishes like I asked?"

Jareth was sitting beside his desk with a book open in front of him. "You didn't burn all of it. Some of it was still packed away in the pantry," he announced, gesturing back at the burgeoning shelves, filled again with arcane grimoires and journals on something or other known as 'Cthuluism'. "Besides...", he said, "I'm going about it exactly like a scientific experiment. I've followed the procedures to the letter and am going record the results for posterity."

"Do you want to end up on the street like those vagrants out on 7th? " Elaina went on. "Because that's exactly what's going to happen if you keep these crackpot shenanigans up! What the heck has gotten into you? This is completely irrational. I'm talking off the chain, looney tunes insane. Do you have any idea what this looks like? What do you think our landlord would say if he saw this? Your physics teacher? For real, Jareth. Christ, Will you just answer me?!"

A black circular design stretched over his study floor, a candle carefully placed at each ending point. Everyday, Jareth would arrange his candles in different shapes, and draw out geometric diagrams connecting them in a mandala-like fashion.

. "Don't you want to know what happens? Isn't this the kind of thing we'd always dreamed about? Making a real scientific discovery? They mocked Galileo, too. I'm trying to travel to other worlds, Elaina. Magic, Elaina. This is ancient cutting edge science, reinvented and brought to the present age just waiting for someone open-minded enough to give it a chance." He peered back over his book.

"You can't possibly think that this will get you anywhere." Elaina stomped her foot. "It's completely against the laws of nature. What do you think will happen next? Machine elves and demons?"

"Maybe," he said, without any hint of what on any other day for Jareth would have been sarcasm.

Their bickering intensified, but it was nothing new. Jareth had been at this for weeks. He would go on and on about dimensions and astral travel. He had stolen some book from the local library some five or six weeks earlier and ever since had been convinced he could use the spells it contained to astral project and visit parallel worlds in what he believed was a mathematically provable multiverse.

Jareth was prone to bouts of mania. Elaina had always known this but believed his positive attributes out-weighed his eccentricities. He was passionate about all scientific topics and was even part of the University's physics club. Jareth had always excelled into school, up until about two or three months ago when his obsessions began. Though his grades started slipping, he had never cared less. He would often talk to Elaina at night about how he had been manipulated by the school system. "I'm nothing in a pawn. A pawn in their game that I am forced to play but not even know the true purpose of. I should have dropped out years ago," he would say, twisting his hair and keeping Elaina in and out of fractured, disturbed dreams.
Jareth methodically turned the pages to a particular page with a written spell and began to wave a home-made wand around in a spiral while chanting aloud.
"Up & through, 
tried and true,
a sleeping
spiral stairwell of
fractured mirror-heads, 
madness fed...," he began.
"Jareth!" Elaina screamed.
"Writhing
coiling
lurching parasitic
blood stained sludge
of tomorrow's sprawling
factaform world
worn in stagnant pestilence
conjuring old gods..."
"God, you're really scaring me now.
What are you doing?"

"I'm practicing mindfulness, that's all."

"Do you really need all this? What are you trying to do, open a portal?"

Jareth smiled ,"something like that.

"I have achieved spatial nirvana. My life's work is complete."

"Stop saying crazy stuff. You've been at this for days....Jareth, I'm worried about you. What about your classes?" Elaina now looked like she was to the point of tears.

"Those things don't mean anything to me anymore. They were all things that used to have meaning when I was attached to the physical world, but not anymore. I have found a way to escape the control matrix and enter a world of complete potentiality," He stated matter-of-factly.

"Jareth, are you on drugs,?" Elaina spat.

"I have no need for such things."

"Then you've lost your freaking mind."

She turned and grabbed her keys, throwing back the curtain in a fury and ripping it off of its railing in the process.
"Wait...where are you going?"

"I'm moving out ,Jareth. You're lucky I don't call the police. "

As soon as he heard Elaina slamming the apartment door, without even a pause to digest what had just happened, he continued chanting.
"Let the arms of the city embrace me
like a wall of dark mother.
Let me sink beneath concrete skin,
through layers of worms and atrophy."

He did exactly as the book said, quoting each line verbatim and stared vacantly for hours as the lines on his diagram began to light up.
By the time he realized the spell was working ,he also realized that the current itself was alive. A jaunty, thousand-eyed, tooth-pick mouthed wyrm appeared, its energy pouring in from the center of a widening, abysmal vortex at the center of Jareth's diagram. His writhing , electric body was forming from the floor's inscription. It reared its head and stared into Jareth's eyes.

"Ss-surrpriszed?," it choked in a gravelly voice that sounded somewhere between Mongolian throat-singing and a gender-confused robot.

"You've been initiated into a cult. The Angels of Death; the most prolific of interdimensional gangsters. "

"Where the heck am I?"

"Oh, nowhere in particular," it said. "As a matter of fact, you've stopped breathing."

Its voice was rasping, creaking, slow, sure.

"All those spells you've doing from that grimoire of yours are actually rituals designed by our most honorable order, " it went on. "Each spell was carefully constructed by us specifically to guide the initiate the into the ranks of our exclusive brotherhood." A troop of shadow-like minions gathered behind him.

"I don't want this."          
"Aha ha..heh.." the wyrm croaked. Ink colored tar began to shoot from its nostrils.

Jareth stared, his eyes widening..

"Most don't," the wyrm continued. "I think, though, in time you'll come to like our eh..Should I say...work. Heh heh.."

He slammed the book down, wildly tearing pages and flinging them around the room.

"I don't believe it. I don't believe it's true." He slammed the floor with his fists
.
"Believe it" it said, assimilating a pistol from a mass of hideous slime protruding from its backside. "All the seconds in between the inhaling of toxic vapors, of rumors spreading throughout the city and junkie's preparing their fix, between the wee hours of the morning and deeds better left in the night, you were preparing for this moment. The time has come."

The shot fired once but the sound of it lingered for what seemed like eternity.

Everything faded into an explosion of technicolor fireworks, and Jareth realized he was falling through infinite darkness. After what seemed like hours and no end in sight, he began to talk to himself.

"This feeling like this has happened before a shock to the system so vital ,so necessary, so precious... It happens every second. Life! How could I have missed it.... Elaina! Elaina! I'm so sorry I've been ignoring you these past few months, but I've finally done it," He shouted. "If only you could see. If only I wasn't dead."

Jareth opened his eyes and realized that he was back in his Columbus apartment. He gazed over his study from an aerial point of view, then slammed onto the apartment floor. She had come back! There was Elaina with his friends John and Damien and Zoey from school.

Jareth shook his head and frantically began grabbing at his chest and arms, testing them for solidity.

"My god, I've done it! I've done it! I was clearly someplace else...in a holographic version of the room. I was in astral space and now I've returned. I read about this some place before. Once I'm dead in that particular realm, I shouldn't be able to return to it. I shouldn't have to worry about seeing that shadow demon freak ever again! But what an introduction to interdimensional travel, eh?! Elaina! You won't believe this!"

"Jareth. I've brought your friends over. I know you won't listen to me, but we care about you. There's help out there, Jareth. We shouldn't have to live like this. You shouldn't make -me- have to live like this. We can get you the help you need."

"Elaina!," he started, running towards her. "I've done it! I opened the portal! I know it took weeks and you were scared as hell, but by god, I've finally done it! I travelled to another world! It was like a virtual copy of this room superimposed on itself, but I swear it was someplace else. If only you could have seen it! It's really possible. Elaina?!"

He screamed and waved, but Elaina and his friends from school stared on. Elaina shrieked and clutched her chest, nearly toppling face first before Damien could grab her. Zoey and John gaped stupidly, like two five year old children that had just walked in on their parents copulating.

There on the floor laid Jareth's cold, unmoving body.

"That must be some kind of trick," he said. "I bet that wyrm demon put it there. Of all the rotten hijinks," he spat. "Elaina, guys you've got to listen to me. I was in another world."

There was no response except Elaina's sobbing, which had now reached deafening levels.

"I guess we'll have to break the news. Whose going to call his parents?," John said, but no one else made a move. The apartment was filled with the sound of his friend's tears.

"This is a nightmare!" Jareth screamed. "Can't any of you see me? Can't any of you see me, god-dang it!? This is supposed to be what death is like!"

Suddenly he was pulled up, back through the darkness and rainbow fireworks, still staring directly down the barrel of a loaded cosmic trigger.

The wyrm grinned ear to ear, the end creases of its smile impossibly contorting off the sides of its face.
Jareth blinked. After some moments of silence, he spoke.

"I ...I thought I had died."
The wyrm cackled and the shadowy minions joined in. Jareth's his eyes widened.

"That's because you did!!," the wyrm sneered, slithering up to Jareth with an unnerving swagger. "You have fulfilled your final step of initiation. Welcome The Angels of Death. Your job from now on will be to send the souls of mortals to their immaterial destinies. You will send them into realms of torture and bliss, each contoured to the sound of their own demise, each fitting the deeds accumulating while alive in the physical world."

"Yes," Jareth said in a monotone voice, as if possessed. He realized now that there was no returning. "I am proud to be part of your order."

That night, Elaina laid down on their mattress for the night, alone with her thoughts and the spiders.
Jareth found himself on the street by their complex. He found the outlet to the building's air conditioning and followed the tunnel up through the vent into his old apartment. He floated over Elaina's sleeping body. Her tear-soaked face turned, and her body rising and falling steadily, as though the events earlier in the day had never happened. She startled and cracked open an eye from underneath the covers.

"Welcome to the angels of death," he said. "Your job from now on will be to send the souls of the living to their immaterial destinies."
He pointed the gun at her head and pulled the trigger.

word count: 2465