The Farm - A Novella (A Tale of Horror and Suspense) by Christopher Motz

Author:Christopher Motz [Motz, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

Winter Nights

Frankie and I weren’t anticipating Christmas that year. We knew the holidays had been pretty much canceled. My mother half-heartedly hung a few decorations, but the tree was sadly absent, as were the colorful packages beneath it. No cookies, no poppyseed roll, no fucking Christmas music playing over the old record player. The view outside our window was certainly not the one Perry Como crooned about, and building snowmen - whether ones that looked like Parson Brown or otherwise - had become a thing of the past ever since our nightmare in the field.

“We have to tell mom,” Frankie told me one cold afternoon. “We have to at least warn her.”

“What are we going to tell her?” I asked. “She’s not going to believe us. Look what happened last time.”

Frankie hung his head and sighed heavily. “I need to tell someone. I feel like I’m trapped in a cage, and at any minute the zookeeper is going to open the gate and let the tigers in.”

“I know Frankie. I know.” The analogy was right on the money. We were animals locked in a cage. The snow was our nemesis, captor and punisher. There was no way to fight back. My father had summed it up best that day in the field - sometimes you dig holes because you never know when you’ll need one. I wish I had listened.

There’s always a certain procrastination about preparedness. A certain complacency. We never think that tomorrow could be our last day, so our wills go unwritten, things go unsaid. We leave behind a sloppy mess for others to clean up, all while telling ourselves that we’ll take care of it tomorrow. As a society we’ve come to understand that tomorrow is a certainty, even though deep down, we know the truth. Nothing is certain but death. Frankie and I stared into the forest until we were snow-blind, waiting for our own truth.

December 16th taught us our first lesson about the unexpected nature of the cosmos.

It was dark by four that afternoon. The clouds hung low, thick, gray, pregnant with another storm. Flakes smacked against the windows and piled up on the windowsills until the inside of the house felt like a cave. My mother had disappeared a few hours earlier, locking herself in the sewing room. I expected the second floor to buzz with the sound of her trusty Singer, but when I rapped on the door, I was greeted with only silence. I made sandwiches for me and Frankie. We ate quietly on the couch, plates held in our hands. No one was coming to yell at us. We were on our own.

We placed our plates in the sink and brushed crumbs from the couch, about to retire to our bedrooms, when the lights snapped off with an audible click. The house was plunged into darkness. I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me, and I only knew Frankie’s location by the sound of his heavy breathing. Our movements sounded dull and muffled, the snow acting as a buffer as it slowly buried us alive.

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