Don't Open The Well
Read Don't Open The Well Online
Authors: Kirk Anderson
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
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.
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.
----------
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.
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.