DON’T OPEN THE WELL!
By Kirk Anderson
Galleon Publishing
This book, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or publisher.
This is a work of fiction and all names, places, incidents and character traits are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely and totally coincidental.
Copyright 2013 (All Rights Reserved)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 1
As the hellish, angry screams of rage erupted from beneath him, Michael fought in vain against the fear that threatened to overtake him. The flimsy wooden barrier, the only thing separating ‘them’ from him was beginning to splinter and crack as the relentless onslaught continued.
It wouldn’t be long before they broke through. They wanted him… wanted revenge for the atrocity he had committed.
“I didn’t know… I didn’t know…”
He screamed at them through the well cover he laid atop, straining to keep them at bay. They roared back with renewed fury and he turned his head away as a section of the well cover splintered beneath him, showering his face with needle-like slivers of wood.
Michael knew he had just seconds to act, but what could he do? Where could he go? They would come for him no matter where he went and … he shook his head, pushing the thoughts aside. He didn’t want to contemplate the fate that surely awaited him once they finally reached him.
There was a loud crack as the cover split up the middle and almost completely separated in two but Michael howled more in fear than anger and pushed downwards with all his might.
Just seconds…
His father’s words rang out in his mind as clear as if he were stood before him. “You’re about as much use as a wet fart in a thunderstorm kid,” he had said laughing before swigging his beer. “Ain’t one good thing you can’t turn rotten!”
Tears began to break through Michael’s clenched eyelids and no matter how hard he fought against them, the droplets formed a flood. He was babbling like an infant.
It was true – every damn word of it was true. He was useless, but most of all, he was a coward.
Had his father been wrong to try to instill a sense of courage within his son?
A blackened hand broke through the splintered well cover, scrabbling at Michael’s clothing before eventually latching on to his sweat-soaked shirt, pulling at him, his face painfully slamming against the wood. The pain was the last thing on his mind though – through the ragged gaping hole in the wood just below his face, he saw them closely for the first time since… since their ‘change.’
Merely a cluster of waving, scrabbling hands and pounding fists, but through the forest of arms, a hundred pairs of eyes fixed upon him, their mouths opening, snapping shut, opening and snapping shut again hungrily.
Michael screamed.
Chapter 2
The crematorium was where it all began, ironically the one place that Michael had feared the most, the place he dared not even go near and was forbidden from entering anyway. Even the woods around the cold grey hulking structure seemed to be dead and lifeless as though animals sensed its purpose, knew that it consumed flesh -- albeit dead flesh – on a daily basis.
That was his father’s job, the family run business passed on to him from his father and his father before him – to receive bodies each day and commit them to the hungry flames within. The closest Michael ever got to the crematorium was when he sat up in his tree house, watching as yet more filthy black smoke spewed forth into the sky from the enormous smokestack that rose up so high, it seemed to almost touch the clouds.
To him, the crematorium was a living, breathing entity – a monster that consumed the bodies of innocent people who just days earlier had smiled, laughed and taken life for granted like everyone else. That thick, smoke that snaked into the sky throughout the day was a reminder to Michael of what lay just over the river, through the trees as he wandered and explored the woods surrounding the family property.
The cloud of black choking smoke was like a wraith rising high up into the sky, and no matter how deep he ran and hid in the woods, it always found him, on the skyline, reminding him that one day father would summon him to work within that dark and dead place where no living thing belonged.
Michael’s tree house was the only place he could escape the smokestack’s poisonous promise. Even at home, when his father returned from another day of burning, covered with the remains of the burnt, black upon his face and hands, Michael avoided him.
But that had been when things were pleasant and they were a family, his mother, father and Michael -- with the promise of a baby brother on the horizon.
It was more than a distant memory, faded now, into obscurity behind the darkened veil that had fallen over Michael’s mind – the edge of insanity almost perceptible.
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Michael was twelve the first time his father took him inside the Crematorium. He remembered crying and blubbering as he begged his father to take him the following year instead, but his father beat the crying out of him, as he usually did. He’d been drinking again. That was no surprise, either.
He hadn’t always drunk. There had been a time when his father looked down on those who consumed alcohol, calling them bums and losers.
“Ain’t no good can come from living in a bottle, son, you stay away from that you hear?”
Those had been his words to Michael on many an occasion as they drove through town, Michael watching the men as they lounged around, drinking beer in the shade of the front porch.
A proud man, his father – at least he had been once, before everything changed, before he himself began living at the bottom of a bottle. It seemed to Michael that his father consumed whatever he could get his hands on, whether it was liquor or beer, and the result was always the same. The beatings and the put downs, but Michael grew immune to them eventually, withdrawing into himself, though somewhere deep down under all the apparent acceptance there was a burning hatred – perhaps it was that which had sown the disaster soon to follow.
Chapter 3
Inside the dark stone building there had been a deep chill in the air, almost seeping into Michael’s bones and causing him to shiver involuntarily. Michael’s father began pulling levers and twisting knobs beside the enormous steel doors of the furnace’s main chamber. Suddenly, the furnace roared to life, filling the room with warmth, but also that sickly-sweet scent of burning flesh – flesh that had soaked into the very fabric of the walls becoming part of the crematorium.
“You can’t be a little pansy ‘all’ your life,” his father spat angrily, before slipping the pint of whiskey out of his back pocket and taking a long, deep swig. A low, satisfied moan escaping his lips as he pulled the bottle away slowly, almost regretfully.
His father then opened a small metal locker in the adjoining wall, and when he reached deep inside and began pulling, a metallic rasp accompanying the movement, out slid a long stainless steel table, on top of which lay something covered by a sheet
Michael knew instinctively what it was. It could only be one thing, the thing he dreaded the most – cold, dead flesh and big lifeless eyes staring into him, as if seeing him despite the lack of life within the pale, sallow flesh. His dreams had been filled with them ever since he was a kid, for he knew that the day had to come and he had known for
a long time.
The time was upon him.
Michael began to cry and turned away shielding his face, but his father grabbed him roughly by the back of his hair, and pulled young Michael’s tear-streaked face towards the sheet-covered form atop the cold steel slab, positioning his face over the clearly defined face beneath.
“Now stop it,” Michael’s father screamed in his ear. “You keep cryin’, and I’m gonna ‘give’ you something to cry about alright!”
Michael knew the game all too well. If he could just shut down that part of him that produced those gut wrenching pangs of fear and replace them with nothingness, he could handle it – for a while. His father had unknowingly beaten and abused his son almost into inhumanity, but somewhere inside, the little 12 year-old boy was screaming out in terror.
His father’s hand hovered over the sheet, ready to grasp it and fling it back and Michael took a deep breath and held it, not wanting to breathe in the dead thing’s air, not wanting to scream.
“Time for you to grow up, boy,” his father said, his voice cold and hard. “You need to come face to face with what death ‘really’ looks like.”
When his father ripped the sheet away, Michael’s body jerked and spasmed as his mind screamed for him to get away, but his father’s grip on his hair tightened and twisted hard, forcing him to stare directly into the mutilated face of what was once a man.
“Car crash,” his father spoke matter-of-factly. “For all of our technological achievements, for all of our great cities, for all of our towering libraries filled with knowledge, when all is said and done, we are all nothing more than fragile little sacks of blood and bone. Even Goliath was felled with the tiniest stone. Look hard into that face, boy, and see your own reflection, ‘see’ what you will one day become – just another pile of dead flesh on a slab like your mother!”
He growled the last word, as though he were filled with fury that she had passed away and left them alone – alone with the dead.
Michael twitched and shook, and no matter how hard he clenched shut his eyelids, the tears found a way through and the corpse mere inches away from his face shone in what little light that penetrated the gloom, glistening with his tears.
It was just like his dreams, cold dead eyes, staring through him as if they were seeing him, ‘wanting’ him. His own eyes stared into the vacant and blood rimmed eyes of the eternally grimacing man with the right side of his head caved inward. Slowly, Michael left the moment, and went inside. He’d been beaten enough in his twelve years on this earth, and when he could, he’d do whatever it took to avoid another beating even if that meant retreating deep inside his psyche, where the corridors were dark and swallowed him up, reality fading away.
Over and over he would will himself to his tree house, the one he had built high up in the old sycamore by the river on the edge of their property, just out of eyeshot of the crematorium.
Over the months of constant abuse suffered at the rough hands of his father he had discovered that if he focused hard enough, he could go to his tree house – in his mind. There he could switch off from the pain and the constant insults thrown at him by his father, a man he no longer recognized.
It was as if the crematorium had sucked the soul out of him, leaving him an empty shell just like the corpses he burnt daily, only there was more a little more than an empty shell – just a little.
He never told his father that he’d build that little tree house. His father had no time for childish things, and since Michael had turned twelve, his father had made a point to burn every single reminder that his son had of being a child.
Toys, comic books, even old photos, all incinerated.
His father had changed. Before he’d started drinking every day, before the beatings drew blood, before the burnings, his father had a reason to smile. They had been a family and although he had always ruled with an iron fist, he had still been a fair man who allowed Michael to express his youthful exuberance for life however he wanted. They had gone fishing together, camping and his father often took him into town with him to pick up supplies, treating him to a meal once in a while.
Yes, they had been a family. That was all gone.
It all changed after his mother died. She had some form of cancer, but his father had never said what kind. It ate her alive from the inside out like a worm eats and apple and left her no different to the corpses that were delivered to their property for cremation.
By the end, she was nothing more than a living corpse.
She simply sat there, motionless, blank-eyed, her body hollowed out by the mutating cells that sought to multiply into with no end, even though the pursuit would surely kill them all, as well as their host.
The day before Michael’s tenth birthday, his mother finally succumbed to the disease.
Just two days later, his father burned her body. Pushed it into the gaping mouth of the incinerator to be consumed and burned away to nothing, as though she had never existed at all.
If Michael lost a part of himself that day, his father lost everything. All he had been up to that point was seemingly burned away with his mother’s remains and from that day on, his father became a lifeless, hollow-eyed figure, merely a shadow of the man he had formerly been.
Not only had Michael lost a mother – he had lost a father too.
Seizing the body, and almost falling in the process, the liquor beginning to take its toll, his father nonchalantly shoved the pale, bloodless corpse into the incinerator and bolted shut the doors before pushing the button that would summon the flames to devour it.
He seemed to be in a hurry. Michael knew why – the drink. It was the memories, it had to be. They plagued Michael too, but he didn’t have the welcome release of alcohol as his father did – he had his tree house, his secret.
“You did alright in there, boy,” his father said distantly, his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Took it like a man. That’s good, because you’re going to be in there with me every day from here to the end of the summer. This burn house is our family’s responsibility to the community, and some day, this will be yours to run.”
“But I don’t like dead people,” the words had left Michael’s mouth before he’d even had a chance to think them over.
The older man reared back and backhanded him across the mouth so hard that it spun him around and dropped him to the dirt. Michael spat a mouthful of blood into the dust as he lifted his head from the ground fearing another blow, but none came.
“You’re not supposed to like what you do,” Michael’s father screamed. “You just man up, do what has to be done, and then wake up the next day to do it all over again! It might not seem fair, but that’s life, and buddy, life ain’t fair!”
That night, Michael made a promise to himself. Just as his father had burned everything he’d ever cared about, Michael would one day watch the crematorium engulfed in flame, one last fire to put an end to the darkness that had taken not just his mother, but his father too.
What would come after that, Michael didn’t want to think about.
Chapter 4
Every day, Michael would dread stepping inside the cold, dark interior of the Crematorium, and every day, his father would make sure that his son was there by his side, prepping the furnace, moving the bodies into it, incinerating the remains, cleaning out the ashes, and depositing them in boxes and urns for the families of the deceased.
Michael was more than proficient at what he was doing to assist his father, but it didn’t seem to matter how hard he worked, as his father would always find a way to deride him about something.
“I told you I wanted that furnace clean enough to eat off of,” his father bellowed. “You stupid little shit! Ain’t one good thing that you can’t turn rotten!”
As the days wore on from that first day, Michael would work relentlessly for his father, and every evening, he would slip off into the woods, follow the creek to where it bends hard to the right, and find his sycamore – his haven.
&nbs
p; He’d hoist himself up by the bottom branch, and once he made it to the next highest branch, he’d nailed a few pieces of wood to the tree where they couldn’t be seen. The tree had so many leaves, that it was the perfect place to hide his little tree house from prying eyes.
One day, after a fairly pleasant day working with his father, a day on which his father didn’t seem to desire to yell or hit him once, even smiling on occasion, Michael left that afternoon and headed towards his sanctuary feeling far happier than usual.
The change in his father was curious and he mistakenly allowed a little hope to creep into his mind. He followed the creek, but as he did, he detected the sweet smell of burning wood. Moving further down the creek, the smell became stronger, and soon, Michael was running full speed to his sycamore, fearing the worst, the impossible.
When he arrived, he fell to his knees in front of the charred blackened remains of his tree. There was little more than a blackened trunk with a few large branches still attached, devoid of all life.
Parts of the blackened trunk were still smoldering, smoke rising lazily into the air above. Michael cried for the loss of the last remnants of his innocence. His one and only safe zone had been snatched from him cruelly by his deranged father and for once, he felt a growing rage steadily burning inside him. What had once been fear and subservience all at once became a yearning need for revenge, upon the man who had beaten and burned everything Michael had ever known out of him until he was nothing but a shell just like his father.
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