The Origins of Maggoty Scrimm
Maggoty T. Scrimm
I have been in a consistent role playing group for close to 20 years. A few people have moved on. A few have taken their place. But more of less, the core group has been solid. It is an absolute blessing to be around such a diverse group of smart, funny, kind and creative people. I truly look forward to our Wednesday sessions so that I can blow off steam and share endless laughs among friends.
As they are a creative bunch, they come up with some of the most unique and bizarre character concepts. For my original Legends of Xenia campaign, my good friend, former Hollywood screen writer and current screen writing professor, creative genius and Master of the Pun Jon Chappell created one of my favorite characters.
Maggoty T. Scrimm is a drunkard and a drug addict. He’s a reprehensible human being full of self-loathing. He works as the local gravedigger and caretaker of the city cemetery. Gruff and thoroughly unlikable, he has no friends, no companions, and no desire to make any. Underneath all of that though is an individual born with the rare gifts of being able to speak with the dead. Maggoty possesses a deep understanding of the undead, the occult and the black arts. While he may seem to be a lowly bag of rubbish, he is one of the most important figures on the city payroll for he constantly tamps down undead uprising, finds and eliminates necromancers, and is a knowledgeable resource when things go bump in the night and no one can explain why. Maggoty quells the threat quietly and confidentially, and therefore is largely unappreciated, held in total contempt except by those very few who know what he has done and all he has saved.
I was instantly fascinated by Maggoty, and in my head are the serialized adventures of this waste of human life who is also the last line of defense for human life. Jon and I have flirted with fleshing out Maggoty and his adventures but you know the drill. Work, family and responsibility eat into one’s calendar quite swiftly.
Nevertheless, here is an origin story I wrote for Maggoty as a love letter to this character that has impacted me so profoundly. As with my session write-ups from my role playing campaigns, this was a pure stream of consciousness piece of fiction. One furious non-stop writing session followed by one edit done late in the evening when the creative itch struck and I knew no other way to scratch it.
Enjoy!
The Origins of Maggoty Scrimm
The walls of the meager shack shook as another concussive blast from the early spring storm slammed into the city. In the corner of the hovel, a small girl with scraggly blonde hair matted to her tear-streaked filthy face yelped and clung tighter to her equally filthy rag doll.
Maggoty Scrimm scowled at his younger sister, who seemed prone to sobbing fits at the most innocuous of events. At just nine years of age, he had just shy of four years on her, but in the Scrimm household, behaviors such as one would attribute to childhood were barely tolerated at even the youngest of ages. In the Scrimm household, you grew up fast or you got your ass whipped on a daily basis. Or you went without whatever little there already was for dinner. In the Scrimm household, as had happened with Maggoty’s oldest three siblings, not doing precisely as was expected ended with you forcibly ejected from the home at the apex of a whiskey-fueled screaming match with the matriarch of the Scrimms, Imelda.
A solid blow delivered to the back of Maggoty’s head coincided with the next flash of lighting. He winced despite himself – showing weakness to another Scrimm only meant more abuse – but severed his body’s urge to produce tears. Instead he shot a glare, filled with more malice than any child his age should reasonably be able to muster, at his sister, Gia, the fourth Scrimm child and oldest still living at home, as she crossed the room and collapsed on the rumpled couch.
“You don’t lookit my sister like that, Maggot Puke, you stupid lil’ goblin turd,” she slurred. At just 15, Gia was pregnant with her second child, a chip off the ol’ Imelda Scrimm block, and had also developed a dependency on the black powder the merchants from the eastern islands sold (when they weren’t snorting or injecting it themselves) down at the docks. Gia was as clueless about the father of either child as the family was about where the first baby had mysteriously disappeared to in the previous year.
Maggoty maintained his cold stare at Gia. Looking away first meant weakness in the Scrimm household and the weak did not survive for long. Remembering this steeled his resolve but also allowed a rueful thought to enter his head as he thought about Teese, who continued to sob in the corner as the unrelenting storm continued its display of blinding light and roaring sound.
Succumbing to the effects of the Dust, as the black powder was known, Gia waved him off as if he were insignificant. “Oh, jus’ go on playin’ wiff yer gross gods damned dolls, Maggoty. You ain’t nuthin’.”
He looked down at the items in his hands, two figures he handcrafted from rat and chicken bones and held together with copper wire salvaged from the warehouse district. One was wrapped in cobbled together tin scraps, holding a sharp stick; the other had claws fashioned from wire at the ends of its arms. She had called them dolls but to him they were his only escape from the misery that mired his existence. In his head he saw a brave knight, a soldier in the city’s Sentinels of Light, driving back the dark forces of evil or punishing people who brought misery upon others. People like Gia.
Elsewhere, his next oldest siblings, brothers Rory, Keff and Bruth, did their best to ignore the conflict – another key survival tactic under the Scrimm roof: if it doesn’t concern you, and you know what’s good for you, you won’t concern yourself with it. Three-year-old Bader slept in his crib near the fireplace, thankfully oblivious to the storm, while newborn Pansy wailed incessantly in the crook of Imelda’s arm as Imelda stood over Maggoty’s father, Ryckert, screeching curses at him and exchanging callous, demeaning comments.
“Of course, I don’t know why I expect more from you!” Imelda shrieked, looming over a sagging Ryckert who sat slumped in one of the five mismatched chairs at the dining table, his head held wearily in his hands as if trying intently to wish his wife away (or perhaps dead). “You’re nothing but a gods damned drunk and a gods damned loser who ain’t never gonna be nuthin’!”
Ryckert clumsily lifted his head to look up at her, his movements severely impaired by copious amounts of whiskey, as normal. “You bloody whore! All you are is an ungrateful whore who lets every sodden bastard with two coppers and a prick have a toss the moment I leave the house!”
“At least they can bring me two gods damned coppers, you sorry bastard!” she retorted, casually shifting Pansy, still relentlessly screaming, to the crook of her other arm to jab Ryckert in the temple with a finger from her free hand. “Not to mention a gods damned prick that actually works, you ignorant pile of spit!”
Ryckert shot out of his chair and came face to face with her in one motion so fluid it belied his drunkenness. He cocked his arm back and was prepared to unleash a brutish backhand when there was a sudden pounding on the shack’s door.
He held his blow at the sound. Imelda never so much as flinched. In fact, she snorted with contempt that he hadn’t gone through with it. Ryckert collapsed back into the chair, eliciting a loud groan from both him and it, as Imelda turned to the door.
Maggoty stopped playing with his figures at the sound of the door. Visitors at all hours of the night was not uncommon at the Scrimm household. Ryckert was the head gravedigger for the city, a job that the Scrimm family had been trained to understand required his services at a moment’s notice, day or night.
“You hesh up, gods dammit,” Imelda scolded the now hoarse Pansy as she tossed her up on her shoulder and opened the door to admit two men.
The first was a distinguished looking gentleman in his middle years wearing spectacles, dark brown dress trousers, a tan woolen four-button coat and knee-high soft leather boots. His silvery hair, still thick but receding, had been matted down by the torrential downpour and his clothes were sopping wet. Maggoty recognized him as Professor Emerson, a proper and educated man, now retired, who spent most days at the city’s massive library. He often came calling on Ryckert at odd hours of the night. Maggoty supposed that meant his father’s job of burying the dead was more important than the acid-tongued Imelda portrayed it to be. Or maybe it was just the wealthy folks who put importance on a hasty burial. Certainly no one, not even the Sentinels, ever seemed in much of a hurry to collect and bury the countless dead he had seen in the alleys and trenches in this part of town, be they beggars, the sick or homeless, whores or men who came out on the wrong end of a disagreement.
Behind the professor a veteran soldier stood solemnly in his mail and plate armor, rivulets of rain streaming off his conical helm. The white tabard with yellow cross identified him as a Spear of the Light, one of city’s footmen, while the three purple cords hanging off his left shoulder gave his rank as captain.
Professor Emerson removed his spectacles, produced a handkerchief from within his coat, and began drying the lenses. “My apologies for the late hour Lady Scrimm,” he said with a slight bow. He was always a gentleman with Maggoty’s mother. “We have come across a – .” He stopped suddenly, his gaze quickly taking in Maggoty and his siblings. “We have a rat problem at the cemetery that needs your husband’s attention.”
Imelda snorted. “He’s too gods damned drunk to kill a gods damned cockroach. Why don’tcha do us all a favor an’ give him a crossbow. Maybe he’ll shoot himself in his gods damned head and put us all out of our gods damned misery!” She leaned over within inches of her husband’s ear. “Let the rats eat his gods damned corpse!”
She nodded to herself with satisfaction and, as if realizing Pansy was crying for the first time, began pounding on the child’s back as she walked away.
Professor Emerson shook his head sadly as she left and then turned his attention to Maggoty’s father, who had his head buried in his hands again, elbows propped up on the table. He gripped Ryckert’s long, greasy hair at the scalp and lifted his head. Ryckert, eyes closed and jaw slack, let out a low moan.
Letting Ryckert’s head drop, it bouncing off the table top with a loud thud, the professor cursed under his breath as he scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Get him up and get him sober, Captain Lamont. We’re going to need him.”
A frown flashed across the soldier’s face, the first change in his expression since they entered the hovel, but he immediately sprung into action, dragging Ryckert from his chair and trying to get him settled on his own two feet. After a moment, and a few crisp smacks, he guided Ryckert out the door barely under his own power.
Professor Emerson started to leave but stopped suddenly and turned back to the children gathered in the home. Only Maggoty met his eyes. The professor’s lips moved wordlessly for a moment, a rueful look on his face, but in the end he gave Maggoty a slight nod, before closing the door quietly behind him.
Maggoty lie on his bed of matted down straw in the tiny, windowless room he shared with his seven siblings. Gia remained passed out on the couch and Pansy was with his mother in the room Imelda shared with his father (when he was actually home for the night and not passed out on the couch). His back was to the door so Imelda would not see he was still awake if she checked on them, an inspection that’s sole purpose was to impose her wrath on someone for something unrelated.
The storm from earlier in the night had abated, leaving only the sounds of light rain on the rooftop and the puddles outside, as well as the distant rumbling as the thunder clouds traveled away on the storm’s whipping winds.
Like most nights, Maggoty had trouble sleeping. For some reason sleep came easier during the day, a trait that brought him frequent beatings at the hand of Imelda or his older siblings. He had once overheard his father bringing it up to Professor Emerson, saying something about “not turn all ten dance seas,” but Maggoty has no idea what that meant. He remembered that earning a raised eyebrow and one of the professor’s studying looks, however.
Maggoty began sifting through the straw bed, counting the pieces absently, a trick that often helped him eventually find sleep. He hadn’t counted long before he heard a knock on the front door of their home. Shortly thereafter he heard his mother’s muttering curses as she awoke and moved across the home to find out who had come calling.
Most often it was the city guard bringing his father home, always drunk and usually passed out, which lead to a volatile screaming match before his father was unable to remain conscious, thus ending the fight. Maggoty braced himself for the explosion but instead he heard only the muffled voice of a man coming from the kitchen area.
He rolled over toward the door and propping himself up on an elbow tried to make out what was being said. Unable to do so, he rose and crept toward the door, pausing for a moment to weigh the consequences if his mother caught him out of bed, let alone snooping. Swallowing hard, Maggoty steeled himself, he had faced such punishment in the past, and slowly crept out into the main room.
The room was dark, providing easy pickings among the shadows within which to hide. A single candle burned on the dining table. From the meager illumination he could make out Professor Emerson talking in a low voice with his mother. The professor appeared troubled and the soldier he had come to the house with earlier, Captain Lamont, wore a glum expression this time, his eyes downcast.
Still unable to determine what the professor and his mother were discussing, Maggoty padded in his bare feet closer. As he did so the professor stopped mid-sentence casting his eyes about the room. Emerson’s searching gaze swept several times through where Maggoty was hiding but he was confident the professor hadn’t spotted him.
“I apologize, Lady Imelda,” the professor continued, his voice soft. “As I was saying the … rat … we summoned your husband to attend to. It had … very sharp teeth.” The professor took a deep breath. His eyes flicked beyond Imelda’s shoulder and then back to her face. “I’m afraid it bit your husband. I’m sorry. You know if there’s anything I can do…”
Maggoty stared wide-eyed, his eyes skipping from his mother to the professor and back again. No one moved or spoke – even breathed – for several moments. Then suddenly Imelda’s bony frame seemed to convulse all over as she sagged to the floor. The next moment she was wailing, “No-o-o-o-o! Not my Ryckert! No! No! No! Say it’s not true! Gods damn you, Emerson! Say it’s not true, gods dammit!”
The professor then pulled her up into her arms, holding her tightly in his embrace. Maggoty could see his lips moving but could no longer make out the words. His mother continued sobbing into the professor’s chest, her words muffled. Jerking her head back, she shrieked, “I love you, Ryckert! Oh the gods, I love you so much! You gods damn bastard, Ryckert! How could you do this to me you gods damn sonofabitch…”
With that she buried her head back in the professor’s chest and shook all over as the sobs continued to wrack her body.
Maggoty fell back deeper into the shadows and putting his back to the wall he slid all the way to the floor. His began wringing his hands uncontrollably, eyes wide as saucers and darting in every direction as he processed what he has witnessed. His stomach clenched as if to make him vomit and a painful lump appeared in his throat. Clamping his eyes tightly shut, Maggoty scrubbed the soiled sleeve of his thin, linen nightshirt across his eyes. He forced the lump from his throat and commanded his stomach to settle. Scrimms did not cry. Not if they knew what was good for them. There was always a better reason to cry than what you might be shedding tears over. Ryckert and Imelda Scrimm were always more than obliged to demonstrate what that might be, too.
A curl in his lip grew to a menacing sneer as Maggoty pushed himself up and strode purposefully toward his parent’s room, no longer caring who heard him. Closing the door behind him he threw aside the tattered remnant of a faded oval rug that covered the middle of the room. Oh yes, he knew about the secrets his father hid beneath the floorboards there. All those nights without sleep and the home’s thin walls revealed much to Maggoty. If his father knew he knew about what was stashed away there however, he had no doubt a few cracked ribs would be payment for such knowledge.
Removing the loose slats of floorboard revealed a small pit dug in the ground. Inside were several vials of a clear liquid, short but thick wooden shafts, a hand held mirror framed in steel and a package wrapped in black velvet cloth. The last item is what Maggoty had come for. He snatched it from the hole and peeled off the covering to reveal a slim, nine-inch silver blade with a handle made from bone.
How many times had he thought of this knife and felt immense hatred for his father? His family went hungry more days than not and all along his father had a stash of treasure that could have fed them for a month. Why would he keep it hidden? What selfish motivation could he possibly have? It didn’t matter, however. Ryckert was his father and if some sodden rats in the cemetery had hurt him, Maggoty was going to deal a return blow.
For all the Scrimm family’s faults, only a Scrimm was allowed to lay a hand on another Scrimm with the intent to do harm.
Slipping through the window, Maggoty raced off through the streets toward the cemetery.
The massive iron gates to the city cemetery were locked for the night, but with Maggoty’s malnourished frame, he was able to easily slide between the bars. The storm had moved on completely now and the light of the full moon provided him all he needed to spot and kill rats. He had developed some skill for it. When it comes to hunger, necessity breeds radical, previously unthought-of decisions.
He moved stealthily, row by row through the headstones, both massive, artistic monuments covered in script to lowly tombstones scrawled with chalk or crudely carved markers. He found no sign of rats. As he reached the end of one row he heard a disturbance from within a nearby mausoleum that was inexplicably sitting open. He jumped in spite of himself at the noise and his heart suddenly beat as if trying to escape his chest.
Steadying himself with a series of deep, calming breaths, Maggoty crept toward the mausoleum, his eyes scanning back and forth along the ground for any sign of rats. As he reached the door he dropped to his haunches and looked for signs of tracks or droppings that might indicate the size of the rats nest that might be tucked away within the mausoleum.
Fortunately the position of its open doorway allowed the moon to cast a faint light within the squat, square structure of stone. His eyes moved along the floor from the doorway to the far side of the mausoleum. As his search reached the far wall, the shadow of a hunched over man sprang up on the wall.
Maggoty clapped a hand over his own mouth to muffle a gasp and instinctively raised the silver dagger to eye level, prepared to use it if need be. He started to slowly back away from the mausoleum when the man inside casting the shadow began to cry out in agony. His screams quickly became more guttural, like growls, and as they did, Maggoty noticed with horror that the man’s shadow began to shift. The form bent over and its torso began to puff out and pulsate. The man doubled over as if in pain and then dropped to his knees. At the same time the face began to elongate like a snout and sprout pointy ears, and long claws grew forth from the finger tips.
This time Maggoty did screech ever so slightly before catching himself. He fell back to his rear end and began scrabbling backward on his hands and feet. Suddenly the whiskered face of a rat, albeit one the size of a large dog, emerged from the doorway. It turned toward Maggoty and, baring a mouth full of pointy, lethal-looking teeth, hissed menacingly.
The next moment the gigantic rat was leaping forth from the mausoleum and bearing down on Maggoty. It quickly closed the distance and sprang for him. Unable to think, Maggoty simply reacted, falling to his back. With a flash, he brought Ryckert’s silver blade to bear on the rat-man. He thrust the dagger forth blindly and felt it penetrate something heavy. Rivers of warm fluid and slimy gore poured down the handle, over his hands and down his arms. The strength in his arms quickly ebbed and using the little momentum left from the rat-man’s attack he turned to his side, letting the monster fall beside him.
Maggoty’s heart beat faster still and his breath came in difficult gasps as the lump in his throat and sickly feeling in his stomach returned. With a yelp he snatched the blade free and scrambled away from the monster, rounding back on it with the dripping dagger held out before him in both hands.
The rat-man lay prone where Maggoty has deposited it, but he still studied it warily for a long moment before he mustered the courage to slowly walk toward it and give it a precautionary kick. Seeing no further movement from the monster, Maggoty let out a ragged breath and slumped to his knees, weary more from the emotional toll the encounter had taken than the physical one.
No sooner did he do so then the rat-man shivered slightly. Maggoty snapped back to full alert and raised the dagger savagely in one hand, prepared to skewer the beast again if needed. It did not make another move toward him, however. Instead it began to shift in shape, the snout and ears shrinking to the size and proportions of a man once again. The body thinned out and elongated as the coarse brown hair fell out. After a matter of moments, a nude man with a fatal wound in his belly lie bleeding out in the cemetery grass.
The look of bewilderment on Maggoty’s face as studied the man-to-rat-to-man slowly changed to one of contemplation and finally understanding as he looked between the man’s corpse and the dagger. Now all the late night visits by noblemen and soldiers for a simple gravedigger took on greater meaning. The secret conversations and the nights where his father never came home fell into place. Maybe now he had a better understanding that Ryckert faced personal demons with a bottle of whiskey as both his only shield and sword.
Now he understood that perhaps the gravedigger’s most important job is to protect the city not only from beasts like the rat-man, but something much more terrifying than any monster his father or the people of his city might face: the dirty little secret about things that go bump in the night.
# # #
Maggoty T. Scrimm sloshed through the sewers beneath the city streets. His boiled leather boots would keep his feet dry but nothing could protect his senses from the sickly sweet and sour scent of human waste and refuse that flowed down here.
“Gods damned Professor Emerson … and the cowardly sodden Legion of Sentinels …” he muttered among a stream of curses. “Trying to get a decent night sleep in this gods damned hell hole of a city … after 10 years you’d think the pay would be better…”
He came to a sudden stop, propping a silver-bladed shovel on his shoulder. He reached into a pouch inside his soft leather long coat, raised two pinched fingers to his nostrils and inhaled deeply. His body convulsed, head jerking side to side briefly.
After hocking up a ball of snot and spit, he turned to the younger man cowering behind him, a skinny, underfed bloke with a clean shaven head and the look of sheer panic on his face. In both hands he too tightly gripped a pick-axe. “Now, these shuffling bloody bastards aren’t anything to worry about. You’d think for all the gods damned brains they eat they’d grow some.”
The other man’s eyes bulged from their sockets as his head swiveled in all directions at once, and he flinched at every shadow and drop of water.
Maggoty muttered a curse. “That’s a joke, you bloody arse. Gods damned … better pay for this gods damned …” He shook his head. “They don’t eat brains – they eat any gods damned flesh they can sink their sodden teeth into.”
His companion shot him a look of pure terror.
“Now listen up. I don’t have time to repeat every gods damned lesson if you’re going to be my apprentice. The sonsabitches are slow but they’re sneaky. They can just pop out of the darkness at you.”
At that exact moment a rotting animated corpse of a woman lunged from the shadow behind the apprentice, wrapping it arms around his chest and chomping down into his shoulder.
The apprentice roared in terror mixed with pain, dropping his pick-axe and flailing unsuccessfully to break the zombie’s hold on him.
“Gods dammit,” Maggoty muttered as with one fluid motion the silver-bladed shovel came off his shoulder and swept the zombie’s head from its body.
Both the zombie and the apprentice collapsed into the calf-deep muck running through the sewer system. The apprentice lie shaking, blood spurting from the shoulder wound and all but his wildly moving eyes paralyzed as the affect of the zombie’s bite coursed through his system.
Maggoty T. Scrimm sighed. “Lessons over, kid. Looks like you failed.” He raised the shovel above his head and thrust downward.