Watershed Tales: The Trail
Page 2
By this time, the presents from under the tree should all be torn open, toys and games and clothes strewn all about in haphazard holiday glee, and the family would be preparing to sit down to the big meal. Roasted turkey, sweet potatoes, stuffing, green beans and cranberry sauce. And to top it all off, a big wedge of cherry pie. That was his dream, his holiday wish, drinking wine around the table with a big family full of aunts, uncles and cousins, discussing the year gone by and the year to come. But all Amontillado had was himself, and his Christmas meal was going to be fried Spam and eggs, washed down with a cheap beer and for dessert, a pack of Ring Dings.
Amontillado was so caught up in feeling sorry for himself that he almost didn’t hear the thumping sound, very faint, coming from somewhere outside. He focused in on the sound, thinking at first that it was just someone knocking on a door to one of the other trailers, but it didn’t stop. “Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump,” constantly driving. He listened to the sound for almost five minutes before pulling himself up to go outside and find its source. The trailer creaked upon its worn out springs as he stepped down from it and walked to the end of his short driveway. The sound was louder outside, “thump-thump, thump-thump,” but it still seemed far away. There was no one visible in the park who could have been making the noise, plus he was beginning to think that it had to be mechanical in origin, as it was just too precise for too long a period to be someone beating on something.
Amontillado walked along the park’s main road, passing trailers decked out in brightly colored holiday lights with various images of Santa, snowmen and reindeer. The deeper into the park he walked, the louder the sound became.
“Thump-thump, thump-thump.”
He reached the cul-de-sac at the far end of the trailer park, but the sound was clearly coming from beyond the thin patch of trees that separated the site from the farmland. He walked through the small yard of the trailer at the furthest point of the park and pushed his way through the densely packed brush and between the rows of tall pine trees that were there. He emerged at the edge of a field of winter wheat, his gaze shifting to the old barn resting peacefully a few hundred yards away. “Thump-thump, thump-thump,” the sound continued unabated. From his position, it seemed to Amontillado that it was coming from the direction of the barn.
He started making his way across the field, his boots sinking into the muddy soil from the recent rains, and Amontillado was thrown back into memories of his youth. As a boy, he used to come out here to play, running through the high grasses which, back then, came almost up to his neck. Sometimes he would sit down in the middle of the field and just listen to the wind whooshing through the wheat, the millions of stalks brushing together in the breeze.
“Thump-thump, thump-thump,” the sound was getting louder the closer he came to the barn, but he could still see no cause. The barn was practically falling down. Its walls were cracked and grayed, boards were missing in places all around. And he could see a large depression in the roof where part of it had collapsed during a snowstorm two years earlier.
Amontillado emerged from the wheat in the small clearing surrounding the barn, and he kicked off some of the mud that had collected on his boots. “Thump-thump, thump-thump,” the sound was very loud now and clearly coming from inside the crumbling structure. He walked up to the barn’s large double doors and lifted the board that held them closed out of the way. The old iron hinges popped and moaned and the door itself buckled slightly as he pulled it open.
“Thump-thump, thump-thump,” the sound boomed inside Amontillado’s head, echoing through the barn, but he still saw nothing that could have been generating it.
As he walked across the barn’s floor, he noticed the dirt and desiccated straw covering it was now vibrating with each new pulse. He looked around the building’s interior, following several beams of sunlight that broke through the missing boards in the walls. His focus came to rest upon one large, especially bright patch on the floor, illuminated by light streaming in through the great hole in the roof. In the center of this patch, the floor shook violently in accordance with the sound.
“Thump-thump, thump-thump.”
Amontillado grabbed a badly rusted shovel hanging on the barn wall and used its square blade to clear the covering from this spot. He scraped away almost three inches of dirt and straw before he hit the old wooden boards of the building’s original floor. After digging out a spot almost ten feet across, Amontillado saw the outline of a trap door at the exact point where the vibration was the greatest, shaking the boards and kicking up small wisps of dust with each beat.
“Thump-thump, thump-thump,” the sound carried on as he pried the trap door open with the edge of the shovel. Once he’d raised one edge above floor level, he reached underneath and pulled the door open, slamming it over with its own weight, throwing up a large cloud of dirt on impact. He watched the mass of dust and tiny flecks of straw floating in the air currents visible only through the patches of sunlight. But the sound had stopped. As soon as the trap door had hit the barn floor, the constant, precise beat had ceased. Amontillado thought for an instant that it might have been coming from someone trapped here, banging on the door for help, but this floor had not been cleared away for a very long time. Anyone down there had to have been there for a decade, at least.
Amontillado looked through the trap door and saw a set of steps illuminated by the sun, leading down into what was probably an old root cellar. He started down the steps into the dark and, when his head broke under the plane of the floor, he saw it against the far wall, just at the very edge of the sunlight’s reach. It was a body, a rather old one from the look, just sitting there, leaning against the wall as if whoever it had been was just resting.
The air in cellar was dry and musty and it was oddly warm. Covered over as it was, this place must have been well insulated. Amontillado slowly made his way over to the body, actually more of a clothed skeleton at this point, staying to the edge of the sunlight, trying to keep his shadow from obscuring the view.
Lying on the dirt floor beside the decaying form, Amontillado made out the shape of an old syringe, its needle covered in flecks of rust. Looking at the body, he now noticed the belt fastened but hanging slack about the corpse’s right arm. He figured it had been tightly bound when there was still flesh on the arm, serving to reveal this person’s veins. He didn’t know if whoever this had been had meant to come here to kill itself, or if this had been just a good hiding place to shoot up and the overdose had been accidental, but either way, there wasn’t much doubt about what had caused this person to expire here.
Amontillado knelt beside the body, seeing if he could find any clue as to who it was or what had been making the sound he had followed to this place. He brushed some of the years of dust that had collected away from the body’s shirt, revealing the frayed and tattered blue fabric of a light coat. He gently reached for the edge, searching for any pockets that may have held a wallet or some other identification, when he saw them. He brushed off more dust to reveal a row of gold buttons, all shaped like anchors.
Amontillado stumbled backwards away from the body. He’d always been told that his father had run out on he and his mother, just left them behind. Now he knew why no one had ever heard from him since. He had always been so close by, closer than he had ever imagined, but even that was too far away.
He slowly walked back over to the body, suddenly feeling all the years of loss, all of the pain of his loneliness rising up into his throat. He slumped back against the dirt wall of the cellar, sitting beside the body, his head held in his hands. In a warped sort of way, Amontillado realized that he had gotten his wish. This Christmas, like he had wanted for so long, he got to spend some time with his family.
Author’s Postscript
It’s interesting how times change. Even just a few years ago, the thought of getting a short story published was pretty much limited to sending out copies to magazines and wading through months of inevitable rejection letters
until some publication somewhere decided that your little labor of love was worth a few pages at two cents a word, or more likely, a handful of complimentary copies and a pub credit to put on your cover letter when you started the process all over again with your next story. Now, however, with the advent of ebooks, all the traditional options and limitations under which writers have worked almost forever have been turned on their head.
There are simply no longer any technological, market-driven or logical reasons why shorter works can’t be published and out there for sale right along with the latest 900-page tome from today’s hot author of the moment. We, as writers, have now been unleashed to experiment, play around and otherwise explore an entirely new range of possibilities. To that end, this is one of a series of longer-form short stories—and by longer form, I mean 5,000 or more total words, generally—that I am publishing under the banner of Watershed Tales.
Will it work? I don’t know, but with just the fact that you’re reading this right now, one could argue that it already has. The new technological possibilities raise all sorts of interesting questions about the future, not just of writers, but for readers of both fiction and non-fiction. There are already some writers out there putting together fantastic, high-level journalistic works and self-publishing them to good success without the need of a newspaper, magazine or even a publisher. To me, that is a fantastic development. Anything that breaks down the barriers between writers and readers can be nothing but a positive for everyone on both ends of that equation.
I hope you liked the tales you just finished reading, and if you did, be sure to check out the next few pages for the other Watershed Tales available now. Thanks for reading.
Read More Watershed Tales
The Long Walk
What happens when your conscience is over-ridden by your orders? Is it better to simply do as your told, even when you find the actions abhorrent? And if you do, despite your better judgment, what kind of consequences will follow, if any?
In The Long Walk, a young cavalryman gets assigned the duty of escorting some particularly violent prisoners to their place of execution. The manner planned for the deaths of the condemned is particularly horrible, but no one questions their actions or orders until it’s far too late. Honor doesn’t supersede duty in the unforgiving desert, and the results are severe.
Buy The Long Walk
Faded Summer Leaves
You hear so much about the innocence of youth, but in truth, youth isn’t all that innocent. The same mean-spirited viciousness, rage and emotional trauma adults suffer through exists for the young, as well. And often, the lack of experience of youth amplifies the problem.
Growing up is a hard row to hoe sometimes, and for a small, scrawny little kid like Tommy, it can be even tougher. But everyone has their limits, even someone who you wouldn’t think could ever stand up for themselves. A group of young boys on an afternoon fishing excursion is the stuff of sweet anecdotes and quaint paintings. That is, until things go sour. On this particular day, Roy, the town bully, really should have kept his mouth shut.
Buy Faded Summer Leaves
Kingdom of the Sick
It’s often been said that money can buy happiness, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, great wealth can create far more problems than it solves. For Ashley Blair, daughter of wealthy businessman Charles Blair, trouble and torment has been the story of her life.
The family home, and an almost ethereal garden hidden on the property, has been the one constant in her ever-shifting existence. Now that her father is nearing his own death, and the vultures of her siblings are circling to pick his bones for their inheritance, Ashe needs the solace of her childhood secret more than ever. But will she find that peace she desperately desires?
Buy Kingdom of the Sick
Journalistic Integrity
Reporters and war correspondents regularly put themselves in harm’s way all in the name of journalism, ratings and informing the people. Most times, things work out; sometimes they go horribly wrong. When a military madman rises to power in a former Russian province after the collapse of the Soviet Union, threatening Moscow and London with some old Soviet nukes he’d managed to get his hands on, it looks like the story of the century.
A bevy of reporters from all the major news agencies in the world make their way through the war-torn countryside in pursuit of an exclusive. But when they find what they’re looking for, these newsmen discover that instead of covering the story, they are about to become it.
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The Garden
Isolation can do strange things to a person, and there can be no place more alone than in the depths of space. Duane is an astronaut on a 20-year mission to test technology that could lead to mankind’s greatest exploration ever. His ship, being fully automated, leaves him with nothing but time to fill. The large garden that provides his food, water and oxygen for the journey is his only distraction from the tedium.
But several years into his mission, things start to go wrong and he loses contact with Earth. The constant loneliness begins to dredge up memories of his unhappy past, and the garden that provides not only the elements for his survival but also his sanity, is threatened. Will Duane find within himself what it takes to survive and make it back home or will he be lost forever?
This edition of Watershed Tales also includes a short bonus tale, Travis Walton Never Had It So Bad, a story of planetary exploration and how very wrong things can go.
Buy The Garden
Modern Art
The world is changing rapidly and not always for the better. As circumstances change, our concept of what makes art changes with it. What was once ugly and horrific can now be seen as beautiful. The Artist has spent his entire career celebrating the worst things that can happen to people, somehow managing to take the destruction and pull some positive elements from it. But now, his career is winding down and his creative vision quickly fading. At the definitive showing of his life’s work, he plans to reveal his “retirement” with his most ambitious piece ever. But will the world truly understand?
This Watershed Tales edition of Modern Art also includes the bonus tale, The Work Unborn. Carl is a sculptor of some renown, having built a career on expressing the deepest of emotions through the clay. Finally, happiness found him in the person of Sarah, a woman who took away all the internal pain that festered for years within him. However, Carl has discovered, much to his dismay, that without his internal pain, his art is starving and, indeed, his very livelihood is threatened. Now, he finds that he must make a choice, his life’s work or happiness?
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Table of Contents
The Trail
Bonus Tale: The Tell-Tale Heartache
Author’s Postscript
Read More Watershed Tales