Critics; be gentle, lol
its written as a narravtive, inspired heavily by H.P. Lovecraft, I don't have a name for it


About nineteen or twenty years ago, I was spending the summer at my grandfather's farm in Moorcroft, Wyoming. It was a little town, about 300 people living there at any given time. I had always spent the summer at Grandpa's farm, he had horses and cattle and my parents thought it would do me some good to get out of the big city for at least some of the year. About fifteen years ago, if I remember right, there was some weird stuff going on out at Grandpa's place.

It was the same as ever when I got there on July first, brown, flat, blazing hot, and not a building taller than a tree in sight. As soon as I got out of the car, my summer started, I ran, jumped, climbed trees, helped Pa bring in the cattle at night and when they needed branding. I started to fashion myself a real cowboy after a while. And Snickers was always there, Snickers was my favorite horse, tall and a real dark brown color, and boy was she friendly, I don't think Snickers could've bucked someone off if she had wanted to. I used to take Snickers and we'd ride for hours out there in the prairie land. We'd go so far we couldn't even see the house anymore.

One morning in early August, I woke up bright and early, right as the sun was coming up. I went downstairs and put on my boots and shot off through the door. I went to the barn, got Snickers and we took off like a bat out of hell. In retrospect that was a bad decision, I should have taken some food with me, because I got hungry soon after, or at the very least some water, but I was too excited to have a whole day of exploring. There really wasn't much question about where to go, we had been going in the same direction for the past few days, and every day we'd go out a bit farther before coming back home, and yesterday I saw something that caught my eye. We were probably between twelve and fifteen miles out from the house and I saw a little glint of aluminum off in the distance, near a stand of trees I'd never been to before. It had looked like a small building from way off, maybe an old pump house, but that didn't make much sense because there weren't any houses out there.

So we rode, it was at least an hour, probably more, and maybe even two hours of hard riding until I saw that glint of metallic sunlight burning out in the stand of trees, it was so bright I couldn't look directly at it. When we finally got there, it turned out I was right, it was some old brick building right next to a stand of thirty-some odd trees. It had a corrugated aluminum roof and an old wooden platform in front of an old wooden door that served as a sort of step. There was a rickety looking hitching post off to the side that was away from the trees, off to the right of the door, I think it was on the east side of the building but I don't remember for sure. I hitched up Snickers and started looking around the area, I wondered why I had never been out there before, that old pump house would make the best secret hideout you'd ever see.

I walked around to the side of the building the door was on and opened it. The floor was old and wooden and covered in dust, it looked like no one had walked on it in quite some time, maybe even years if not just a few months. There was a little wooden table in the far corner, there was a chair to go with it, a bookshelf wit some empty jars on it, most of the jars had probably had something in them at one point, and some still did have some little dried up bits of something or other all curled up and dried out on the bottom. All the water or whatever was keeping them wet had apparently evaporated long before I ever knew about this place, and there was a big old circle of wood in the other corner, opposite the little table and the chair, it looked pretty old too. Bit I guess I was right, there had been a well in this little building at some point, because thats the only place I had ever seen a circular wooden cover like that, back in Grandpa's well house.

I started walking around in there, looking at the walls and shaking the jars, trying to see what had been in them, because now they were just little bits of curled up black stuff rattling around because they were so dried out. I shook the table, testing how sturdy it was, but my vision kept going back to that big wooden circle in the corner, I went over to it and just stood there a while, looking down at it, I got on my knees and reached out so that my hand was over the middle, and I pushed on it pretty hard, seeing how sturdy it was, it didn't move an inch under my hand. I stood up stepped on the outside edge of it, still didn't move, so I walked over to the middle and started jumping up and down. It didn't feel like it was moving at the time, but it probably was because right after I started jumping there was a loud cracking sound but by the time I realized what that meant I was already in the middle of my next jump. I came down on the circle and it gave way, the floor rushed up around me and then over my head, all the time I was being covered in a shower of splinters and little bits of rock and dust, luckily for me, and my legs since I didn't break them, or anything else for that matter, the well wasn't deep, only about ten feet, and it was dry, long dry. I was stuck down there though, and I had only one thought pounding in my newly panicked brain, “get out of the well, there might be snakes down here, and grandpa always told me never get bitten by a snake, and I'm so far from the house...”. I started yelling for Snickers, thinking maybe if she came in here and lowered her head over the hole, I could grab the reins and lift myself out. Then I heard a sound, probably the only sound I did not want to hear at that point, a low, shaking, rapid rattling sound covered the hole at the top and flooded down to me. All of a sudden I heard the sound of snapping wood, of Snickers whinnying and then galloping away, the most lonely sound in the world, hard hooves pounding against the harder packed earth and fading away.

I started looking for a way to climb out, even then it would have taken me forever and a day to walk all the way back to the house. It didn't really matter though, because the walls were essentially smooth and the only thing trying to climb did is give me some little, bloody cuts on the end of my fingers from the sharp bricks. I just sat back against a corner, and decided that when Snickers got back home, Ma and Pa would see I wasn't with her and come looking. While I was sitting in the well i looked around on the floor and saw a big square-looking package, like a few pieces of wood wrapped up in an old horse blanket. I opened it and saw it was a big black book, it was bound in leather, just like the really big Bible Ma and Pa had back at the house. When I tried to see what was in the book, it was all in some weird language I'd never seen before. I must have sat there staring at it for a long time because it was starting to get dark soon, and I heard hoof falls off in the distance, and Pa calling out for me, I screamed as hard as I could “HERE I AM!”, “IN THE WELL”, then the steps faded and I thought he had passed me and I started crying. But soon I looked up and saw a big, dark silhouette of a big man with a high collar and a Stetson hat. It was Pa, and he threw me a rope, I climbed up and we just sat there for a while and I told him how I had fallen down there and how Snickers had run away. I showed him the book too, I had brought it up with me when I climbed the rope, he took it from me, opened it, and just stared at it for a long time, until it was almost too dark for him to be able to read, if he was reading it. Then he got up and gave me the meanest look I think he's ever given anybody, he just stared real hard and said “You should mind you own affairs, we don't want anything to do with this, or this building, get on your horse”. So I did, and he walked back in there and threw the book down the hole and he came back, got on his horse, looked at me again and told me “I don't ever want you coming back this way again, understand?” I just stared at the ground and nodded because I was sad, then he patted me on the back and said we should get home, because Ma was all a-worry about me. So we rode back, and he and I never talked about it again, and I never went back, although I heard from Ma a couple weeks later that he had gone out there with a big gasoline can after I left that summer and burned that building and everything inside and around it to the bare ground.


...I realize it ends kind of abruptly, but oh well, whatcha gonna do?

ACK!!! Jobot, I need to know what was in the well!! What was up with the bible?? I can't sleep!

HAHA. Not bad, Jobot.

that is another story for another day, and thank you

h.p.would have been proud.good story base.