The Mantelpiece

     That night I sat up in bed, waiting intently for my Father to begin his story. By most people’s standards, I was too old to be told a bedtime story, which may well have been true, but most people couldn’t tell a story the way my Father could. The world, he said, was made to take all the magic and wonder out of a boy, and I’d better hold on to a piece of it; hide it away where they wouldn’t ever find it and take it away from me. The worst thing a man could do, as far as my Father was concerned, would be to grow up and forget all about the magic being a boy.

     Unlike most boys’ fathers, mine still had a touch of that magic left in him, a piece of his boyhood that he never let go. When he began weaving one of his stories, you could see it flickering in his eyes like a little flame. He was a born story teller through and through.

     “Have I ever told you about the old well?” He asked, leaning towards me and placing his hands on his knees.

     I shook my head, no.

     “Well then it’s about time I did, isn’t it?” He smiled, now leaning back in his chair, crossing his arms. “All anyone knows about the Old Well is that it’s as deep as it is old. People say it’s so deep that sunlight has never touched the bottom. No one knows how the well got there, or even who dug it, but we do know the well is as old as sin; it was here even before Ashford itself was born. Nobody knows precisely where it is either, except that it’s somewhere deep in the woods out beyond our back field. Every once in a while someone will come back from a hunting trip claiming to have found the Old Well, but so far none of them have ever been able to find it again. That’s why you have to be careful when you’re out there. It isn’t marked at all, and most folks say that it’s been so obscured by underbrush that you’d never see it coming if you happened upon it, until it was too late.”

     “Has anyone ever fallen in?” I asked, wide eyed.

     “Well, no one knows for sure. If you happened to fall in, no one would ever figure it out, because there isn’t anyone left in town who can say where it is. A few times, people in town have gone missing, and when they never turn up again, people just assume that the Old Well must have swallowed them up. In fact, a couple years before you were born, a local boy went missing. His name was Adam Clay. He had gone off into the woods alone to hike and no one heard from him ever again.”

     I gulped, terrified and completely spellbound. “Did the Well swallow him up?”

     “No one knows for sure. People say that the Well is so far in the woods that it’d take a boy your age hours to get to it even if he knew right where it was. The fact remained though, that Adam Clay was never from again. The townsfolk decided that the Old Well must be to blame, so one day all the men in town gathered together to go find it.”

     “Did you go too, dad?”

     “Yes, yes I did. We all did. We knew that Adam couldn’t have been saved by that time, but we wanted to find the Old Well and cover it up, so no one would ever fall into it again. You can imagine how heartbroken Adam’s parents were. None of us wanted to experience the same feeling, so we set out to find it and cover it up once and for all.

     Every man in town was there, and we all linked elbows so that if someone stumbled across it, they wouldn’t fall in. We started combing the forest, which was a slow process. We made sure to cover every inch of the woods, walking a mile in one direction, then a mile back the other. We walked all day, must have been twenty miles altogether, but we didn’t find a thing. A few of the men had thought to bring flashlights and torches, so we walked all night too, just looking for any sign of the well or even evidence that Adam Clay had come through that way. We walked straight through until morning, and never found hide nor hair of Adam or the Old Well.”

     “But how could you look for so long without finding anything, Dad? I just think you’d have to find something sooner or later, don’t you?”

     He smiled, stretching his arms back, yawning. “Well son, I think I know why we never found anything. I’ll tell you something that your granddaddy told me years and years ago.

     Now I’ve lived in Ashford my whole life, but when I was your age, we lived in a house over on the other side of town that isn’t there anymore. I was in high school when your Granddaddy died, and I wish you could have met him. He was touched by magic, a story teller just like me. He used to tell me stories the same way I tell you stories now. My favorite stories were the ones that scared me, though they kept me up at night and even gave me nightmares sometimes. My Mother used to yell at him for scaring the pants off me right before bedtime, but he loved to tell the stories and I loved to hear them.

     The story that frightened me the most was the tale of the Old Well. I think that old story piqued his interest too, since I never had to ask him twice to tell it. He told me that as near as he could figure, the Well must be magic. That’s why no one can ever find it when they’re looking for it; because it goes into hiding. It opens up when it’s hungry and closes when anyone goes looking for it.

     For all we know, he said, the Well didn’t even have to stay in one place; it could open up anywhere it chooses to.

     Your Granddaddy said that the scariest thing of all, the most frightening thing about the Old Well, was that the only other thing in the world he could think of that can open and close like that, is a doorway.”

     I gasped. To say I was terrified would be an understatement. The idea that a boy my age could go missing forever in my own backyard was mind boggling to me. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be lost forever; to know that you would never see your family ever again. I could barely comprehend the magnitude of the thought, and trying to made me feel incredibly small and helpless.

     What had happened to Adam Clay? Was there really an Old Well waiting somewhere in the heart of the woods? If no one could ever find it, then no one could ever know for sure whether it existed or not. The mere fact that even it’s existence was a question mark frightened and intrigued me more than anything else.

***

     That night I dreamt I was lost in the woods and scared half to death. I was running, and in my terror I had stupidly lost track of where I had been and where I was going. I fled blindly through the forest, zigzagging, doubling back, running in circles and never getting anywhere. I knew that the Old Well was out there somewhere, and the thought of stumbling into it threw me into a panic-stricken frenzy.

     I awoke suddenly, drenched in cold sweat. I tried to tell myself it was only a dream, but the reassurance provided no relief. It may have been a dream, but the Old Well really did exist. This was an evil that was actually tangible. It wasn’t some made-up movie monster, or the boogie man. It wasn’t a Martian from some far away galaxy like in my comic books. It was real, and it was out there somewhere, just beyond my backyard.

     I got out of bed and walked to the window. I looked out at the black silhouette of the forest just on the sky line. It lay there just as I feared it would, black and ominous, beckoning.

     Just then, something in the corner of my eye caught my attention. It was a light moving the road that passed my house. I leaned on the window sill, to get a closer look, and I realized it was a flame. The flame was floating along through the air, bobbing and flitting ahead as if it were a fishing lure being pulled through the water. I frowned, completely dumbfounded.

     It was then that I saw the figure following the flame, staying ever so slightly behind it’s flickering halo of light. The figure sauntered along the road, carrying a large bag over it’s shoulder with a light-hearted swagger that made me think of a con-man or a pickpocket. I couldn’t see well enough to make out it’s features. It was shaped like a man, but the sight of the thing sent an ice cold chill through my body and I knew that whatever it was, it was unnatural. Something about the way the illumination from the flame touched it, as if the surface of the creature was absorbing the light, rather than reflecting it. I was transfixed, nauseated to my core by the sight of the thing, but too horrified to move. The darkness that shrouded the creature was deeper and blacker than any kind of darkness I had ever seen, giving the impression that this monster, whatever it was, was actually consuming the space around itself, swallowing everything up in those shadows, never to be seen again. It was a blackness that was absolute; true immutable emptiness that made my head spin with the drunkenness of fear in it’s purest form.

     Although the memory of the man-shaped thing in the road remained flawlessly and irrevocably seared in my brain, I cannot recall ever looking away from it or even returning to my bed that night.

     Be that as it may, I thankfully awoke the next morning safe and sound in my own bed. The sun still hung in the sky and as far as I could tell, my soul still dwelled somewhere in my body. For just a few brief and shining minutes I felt relief in my self assurance that yes, it was only a dream.

     I ran down stairs, feeling more than indebted to the daylight for washing away the desperate loneliness of a night spent plagued by nightmares. I found my father sitting in the kitchen and felt immediately grateful to my family, whom I was overjoyed to find still existed. I rounded the table, going to hug my Father and bury my face in that hardware store smell the way I used to. I didn’t care if I was too old to be doing that sort of thing, I was too relieved to care. When I looked into his eyes though, my heart dropped like a guillotine.

     The man sitting in the kitchen was not my father.