Welcome to the first chapter of "The Storm", an ongoing serialized novella I've written, based upon my own original instrumental song of the same name. You can listen to the song in the imbed below, followed by the first chapter of the story. I hope you enjoy this reading experience, and please be sure to share your thoughts in the comments below.
Chapter One
It was to be a storm like no other. Rather than thunder and rain, this would be like a flash drought; a bottoming out of the ocean's depths.
"But why do we need to make a boat then?" Jessie asked her mother. "Why can't we just wait for the ocean to drain and then we can just walk to where we want to go?"
Samantha Bresmond hurriedly folded and packed some towels and stuffed them into her grandmother's old shipping trunk. She had much of their household items scattered around the living room floor, arranged in a bare semblance of order for packing away. Everything was pretty haphazard in their lives lately - a sign of the times. And this lack of order was obviously starting to wear on Jessie.
Samantha paused in her work long enough to look at her daughter. "It's not like that, honey. The bottom of the ocean will be filled with mud and other things."
"Other things?" Jessie stood with her eyes wide, clutching her doll Snoogies closer to her chest. As a distraction, Samantha turned to her son Colin.
"Colin dear I need you to go to the neighbour's and see if they can spare a few more planks of wood for your father to use."
Colin looked up. He'd been working on their C.B. radio at the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room, and it took him a second to draw himself out of his own concentration. Samantha gave him a quick pleading look, eyes darting over to Jesse. Then she went back to packing, dismissing him with a quick nod to the door. He could see from the expectant way that Jessie was eyeing their mother, there was going to be a private discussion between the two of them. And so he gathered up the various radio parts over to the far end of the kitchen counter and headed for the front door.
Outside it was raining, so Colin wore his windbreaker as he made his way eastward across to their nearest neighbour's home. In spite of the weather there were a lot of people outside, working on their boats - including his dad, whom he could see on the deck of their own vessel in dock, hammering away at a winch setting at the base of the main sail. There was a sense of urgent activity all along the dock; men moving back and forth, staging equipment for those who worked on the boats. The date was arriving soon.
The Anti Flood, everyone called it. Predicted by the charts, and the weather, and the ancient Word… Most everyone down here on the waterfront believed fully that it was going to happen, but it was the folks inland that still weren't convinced. Those people chose to believe the T.V. telling them it was all a myth. The inlanders were modernized.
Colin decided not to think about the inlanders for now, as he approached the doorway of their nearest neighbour. They actually did need some wood, to patch a wall of the rear cabin of their boat, and this neighbour most likely had plenty to spare. Mr Russo was an old mariner who had pulled up to shore here so long ago that the coastline was completely bare of any human beings at the time. He'd built his own house here, leading down to his dock that jutted out over the rocks against the shore, and slowly but surely this small sea side community had built itself up around the old man's homestead.
Mr Russo's boat was a rather large and rickety affair; Colin's dad had brought him along on a fishing trip once, and the whole thing felt like it was going to fall apart. But Mr Russo managed to keep it all afloat. And he was the best navigator in the community - essential to the safety of everyone's journey, according to Dad… To say nothing of what he represented to them all.
The doorway to Mr Russo's house was ajar, swinging listlessly back and forth in the ocean breeze. As Colin stepped up onto the porch he noticed the sound of wind chimes. That was strange. Mr Russo couldn't stand wind chimes. Maybe he had a lady friend now? Rumour was that when Mr Russo arrived here, he'd been forced to leave his own family behind, lost to a distant war…
The chimes tingled weirdly in Colin's ear as he approached the door. Maybe the old man was down at his boat, but this was a close knit community, and no one thought the worse of checking inside of an open door.
"Mr Russo?" Colin called out, hearing his voice echoing across the porch. The door creaked slightly on it's hinges as it swung back and forth, the sound in frequency with the wind chimes, and the rain... He reached out to still the door with the tips of his fingers.
At first there was no sound at all within the shadows of Mr Russo's home. "Hello?" This came out as a barely audible whisper, and so he cleared his throat and spoke more clearly. "Mr Russo! Are you in there?" He pressed against the door, allowing it to swing fully inwards.
Colin stepped into the doorway and peered into the gloomy interior of the old house. There was no entrance hallway, just a living room that fronted the building, with a kitchen off to the right, across from the back hallway that led to the south end of the place… The living room had a sofa beneath the front window and an old Admiral T.V. set against the side wall; one of those behemoths in panelled wood that ran on vacuum tubes and random airwaves picked up by it's rabbit ears. When the reception was right, the old man would sit in his patched up leather recliner in the centre of the room and catch a baseball game, beer in hand.
But now that leather recliner was gone. Because there was a hole in the middle of the living room floor.
Colin stared in awe. At once he could hear the sound from the hole over the rain and the wind chimes: the eerie whistle of rushing air filling a hollow space. And as his eyes adjusted to the light he was able to track clouds of dust being drawn into the gaping chasm. A single half empty beer can lay discarded on the floor, about half a foot from the opening's edge. The hole itself was about eight feet wide, but with each passing second it appeared to grow slightly larger. He noticed a thin line of beer from the can on the floor, trickling over the floorboards towards the hole, but before reaching the edge it just evaporated. Colin felt his throat go dry and his lips begin to crack. It was as though all of the moisture was being drawn out of him…
The airy sound that rose up from the hole seemed to be changing timbre, blending with the chimes… In fact, the more he listened the more it sounded like these chimes were coming from within the hole itself. And that would make sense, wouldn't it? After all, he hadn't spotted any wind chimes outside, had he? Of course they were down there, deep below the widening empty space that beckoned from within the centre of Mr Russo's living room floor. The chimes made time inside of the abyss like sand through an infinite hourglass. The sound of sand counting time from an internal wind that pulled and dried to a petrified husk. And the wind: drawing him in, closer to the edge of nothing, closer…
With a jolt Colin blinked his eyes open. He looked down at his feet and saw that he was standing just at the edge of the hole in the floor. And deep within the hole he could see… something. Shapes, moving slowly in a spiral. Turning over.
He managed to jerk himself backwards, stumbling away from the hole and careening to the front door. As he braced himself against the doorway Colin felt a lancing heat against his palm where he clutched the frame. Pulling his hand back, he saw that the skin of his palm had dried out to a papery shell, now torn and bleeding.
He had to get out of there now, but he knew that first he needed to get the front door closed. Careful not to even glance back at the hole, Colin took hold of the door with trembling fingertips (a reminder of how he'd first pushed the door open, but now for a very different reason) and pulled it closed while stepping outside. When he reluctantly gripped the brass door handle with his uninjured hand, he was surprised to find that the metal was cool and relieving to his touch. With a final pull the door clicked shut.
He stepped back from the door. The sound of wind chimes was gone now, and the rain was beginning to die down. Everything seemed perfectly normal. But when he looked at his hands he received a stark reminder of what he'd just encountered. Turning his hands over before his eyes, Colin could see how thin and brittle the skin looked, and what was more, there were wrinkles. Lots of them. It was as though he now had the hands of an old man.
With a barely stifled groan, Colin turned away from Mr Russo's front door and stepped down from the porch on shaky legs. When he reached the front walkway, he pulled back the hood of his windbreaker and let the last of the raindrops fall onto his face, holding out his tongue to catch any spare water that he could. After a few moments the rain more or less stopped, and for some reason this brought on a dark premonition that gripped Colin's chest like a tightening noose.
He needed water. But first he needed to warn people. When Colin reached the front gate he spotted Mrs Bonafeld, who lived directly across the lane from Mr Russo's house. She was busy pulling a large box from the trunk of her car in front of her home, so much so that she didn't notice Colin as she slammed the trunk while hefting the box with her hip, adjusting into a two handed hold. He tried to call out to her but his voice trickled out like barely audible dust, and then she was through her front door and inside of the house.
Should he go across the lane to knock on her door and warn Mrs Bonafeld? How would she react? Would she even believe him? And were the Bonafelds in any way capable of dealing with what lay within Mr Russo's home?
No. He knew who he had to to tell about this. And so Colin turned around and stumbled down the lane as quickly as he was able, moving desperately towards the shore, and the boat where his father was working at this very moment.
To be Continued...
Writing, music and images by Greg McCann, the author of this post and owner of this Steemit Channel. To view more of my work, please visit www.fireawaymarmot.com.
