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A little while ago I wrote a short story for the L. Ron
Hubbard "Writers of the
Future Contest". I did not win, and I know why, my story is
really more horror than Science Fiction or Fantasy. But I decided that I
will post each chapter here on my blog. There are 37 very short chapters (and now this short Epilogue),
for a total of a little over 16,000 words, about a fifth of a modern novel. Here
is the first chapter.
Epilogue
Explanations
are always messy, and they always lead to new questions.
"Max,"
said the man in the suit, in his typical reassuring tones. "I am sorry about Wilton, Claire,
Allison, and Todd. Before we continue I
would like to tell you that no one thinks you did anything wrong, and from what
you told us you reacted as anyone in your position might."
"What
happened?" asked Maxwell. "I
mean, I have an idea, but why did it happen that way?"
"The
house you found in the hole," said the man in the suit. "We have an idea. It seems the house fell into a sinkhole
sometime in the past, we found the bodies of a middle aged couple crushed under
the house. The body you found in the
upstairs bedroom was presumably the couple's child. She was buried alive in the house, as it
started to partially collapse on itself from the weight of the earth, she
focused on her toys, and hoped for rescue."
"Rescue
never came," said Maxwell.
"No,"
said the man in the suit. "It never
did and we have a likely hypothesis as to why.
Regardless, the girl held out as long as she could in the dark. Eventually she gave into despair hanging
herself with a jump rope."
"God,"
said Maxwell.
"There
was a dead flashlight and some paper next to her," continued the man in
the suit. "She wrote something with
a marker, we were able to enhance the faded writing."
"What
did it say," asked Maxwell.
"She
wrote, 'I waited so long, but the
laughter in the dark is just too much'," the man in the suit said it
with a sort of reassuring tone, more wistful and sad then the subject matter
would suggest. "She was alive for a
while, she was strong, she was a fighter."
Maxwell
just put his head in his hands.
"Max,"
said the man in the suit.
"We--"
"How
do you lose a house?" interrupted Maxwell.
"I'm
sorry?"
"How
do you lose a house? Why was she not
rescued? How did you lose where we
were?"
"As I
was about to say," said the man in the suit. "We found something under the ruin of
the house. There was a... pillar made of
polished black rock, it has script written on it that we have not
identified."
"What?"
"Any
psychic that goes near the thing feels like they are going to puke and
die," said the man in the suit.
"It has been there a while, and we think it was the source of the 'laughter in the dark' the girl
mentioned, it messes with cell phones, GPS, makes people hallucinate, we
shipped it to a radiological institute to put in a shielded box till we figure
out what to do with it."
"So
people noticed the house was gone," said Maxwell. "But this thing scrambled their
brains?"
"That
house became a dream to the people who knew of it."
"Then
why weren't people just falling into that hole year after year?" asked
Maxwell. "Why only now?"
"A
section of the ground near it gave way," said the man in the suit. "Its weird signal spread out, it used
the young ladies memories and perceptions as a basis to lure people into the
trap. Her little models of a small town
and a carnival with little figurines of clowns everywhere. It played with your minds."
"You
talk like it is alive," said Maxwell.
"We
aren't sure if alive is the right word," said the man in the suit. "But we think it might be some kind of
device, a computer maybe."
"So it
just kicked on?"
"No,"
said the man in the suit. "And that
has us worried. We think it was turned
on. We think something might be
coming."
"What?"
asked Maxwell. "What is
coming?"
"Something
bad for all of us."
To Be Continued.
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