J.G. Martin

The key was rusty, splotched red and gray. It almost blended in with the copper-gold of the dead autumn leaves but it didn’t. It stood out to the boy.

And so the boy bent down and picked it up.

‘Lucky find,’ he said, gazing at the key with reverence. Images of great adventure played in his mind, chased by phantoms of guilt and worry. He wasn’t supposed to be wandering. Not here. Not today.

What was it his mother had said?

Something about the stars in the sky. The angle of the sun. ‘There are omens in the air,’ she’d said. ‘You get us some water from the river and you come right back, hear? Today ain’t no time for play. And keep away from that old well.’

‘Of course,’ the boy had said. He’d promised that under no circumstance would he dilly or dawdle, nor wander to that old well. She gave him a pat on the head, a kiss on his cheek, told him to give a holler if he saw anything odd, and then sent him on his way.

But this key, strange as it was, wasn’t odd. It was just a key. The world had plenty of keys. The boy had seen several of them, and never once had any of those keys caused trouble, so why should this one?

The only question was, who did it belong to? What did it open?

i don't know who needs to hear this, but 'perfect' writing is a trap. all writing is subjective. what we create today, we may see as flawed tomorrow. what we see as flawed today, we may see as perfect tomorrow.

writing is the act of transmuting the human experience through words. and the human experience? it's a messy, chaotic thing filled with rough edges and uneven lines and mistakes and failures. you can erase all of that. you can. but then you're left with something sterile and artificial. you've effectively squeezed the soul out of your work, and i can think of nothing less appealing.

this isn't to say don't edit your work. please do. but keep it within reason, and make sure you're moving forward and not backward. momentum is key.

don't sit on an idea for three decades waiting for that dance with inspiration, or that dynamite first line, or that eureka plot twist, or the words to flow like magic from your fingertips. because it won't happen. and if it does, it'll strike like lightning and disappear twice as fast. the only surefire way to finish a story is to start.

so write. for the love of god, just write.

along the way, things will fall in line. i promise. and if they don't? then they already have. the magic of art is that everything we create is a snapshot of who we are at the time of creation. it's like a time capsule of human experience, and there's a beauty in that authenticity-- in the mistakes we make and the wrong turns we take. don't run from them. embrace them.

let their lessons flow through you and channel them into something tangible. if it's hard, then start with one word and keep going. don't erase it. don't start over. don't let yourself believe your story isn't worth telling because if you don't tell it, then no one else will. and that'd be a damn shame.

so one word a day. one sentence a week.

whatever it takes.

it might be tough letting go of the idea of perfect. silencing your inner editor. your inner critic. it might be tough realizing that your story will never meet your standards, not completely, but it won't be half as tough as looking back and wondering where all the days, weeks, and years went; that in the pursuit of perfection, you forgot to ever write a story at all.

so leave perfect behind. readers don't want it. why would they? they can't possibly relate to perfect-- none of us can.

instead, give readers a window to your imagination, stormclouds and all. you'll be surprised by how many stick around for the rain, how many relish the sound of your thunder, and how many cherish the worlds that only you could bring to life.

It's just the two of us here. Myself and Ryan Halflow, a seventeen year-old kid from Elktorch High. 

He’s typical as far as teenagers go. Impulsive. Disinterested. He and I are sitting in his parent’s garage, in a couple of fold-up camping chairs, with cheap cups of coffee on our laps.

We’re talking.

I’m here because I believe he’s witnessed an Event. A supernatural encounter of grave significance, and one which I believe could explain a series of grisly murders— murders which have gone unsolved, and plagued this sleepy town for close to a decade. 

The key was rusty, splotched red and gray. It almost blended in with the copper-gold of the dead autumn leaves but it didn’t. It stood out to the boy.

And so the boy bent down and picked it up.

‘Lucky find,’ he said, gazing at the key with reverence. Images of great adventure played in his mind, chased by phantoms of guilt and worry. He wasn’t supposed to be wandering. Not here. Not today.

What was it his mother had said?

Something about the stars in the sky. The angle of the sun. ‘There are omens in the air,’ she’d said. ‘You get us some water from the river and you come right back, hear? Today ain’t no time for play. And keep away from that old well.’

‘Of course,’ the boy had said. He’d promised that under no circumstance would he dilly or dawdle, nor wander to that old well. She gave him a pat on the head, a kiss on his cheek, told him to give a holler if he saw anything odd, and then sent him on his way.

But this key, strange as it was, wasn’t odd. It was just a key. The world had plenty of keys. The boy had seen several of them, and never once had any of those keys caused trouble, so why should this one?

The only question was, who did it belong to? What did it open?

I watch the sunset bleed.

Its outer edges drip like molten gold. In the distance, I hear the hiss of steam before I ever see the clouds rising from the arctic snow.

“Told you,” Raens says. He stops short of me, slings his rifle over his shoulder and folds his arms. He surveys the sunset like it’s a regular occurrence. An everyday thing. “There’s a reason this place is under lockdown.”

“So it’s true,” I say. “They haven’t let anybody leave for the past three years.”

“Not a soul.”

I look back at the sunset. A pit of unease grows in my stomach. The shape of it is all wrong. It’s pulsing, throbbing like a living thing– like a monster from science fiction. “What about the guy I replaced?”

“Lently?"

"Yeah."

"Dead and gone."

[TW: graphic, gore]

The house sat as a broken, teetering tribute to the dead, perched atop Cackle Hill like a crown of rotting lumber. It was an old property. Shambling. Many years ago, it belonged to a wealthy aristocrat named Erich Cackle. The story goes that Erich had a taste for delicacies. He imported fine foods from all around the world, everything from snake wine to escargot.

Why?

Well, he loved to taste things. He delighted himself with new flavors, new culinary odysseys. At one point, he decided to try human meat. And at one point, he decided that he liked it very much.

Today, it’s estimated that over a hundred different corpses litter Cackle Hill. It’s officially recognized as a burial ground. A final resting place for a legion of people with no name and no history, no record of their existence besides the occasional femur rising from the dirt. One Halloween in 1989 though, Cackle House added a new page to its book of nightmares. A page that our town would never forget.

That night, four children climbed the hill. They crawled through the thickets and thorns that encircled the mound, and then crossed into the home of Erich Cackle himself. The infamous cannibal. All four of those kids? Massacred. They’re still finding pieces of them today.

Ever since, the house has been closed off. Out of bounds. The authorities claimed it was out of respect for the deceased, for the dozens of unmarked graves that covered the property, but the locals knew better.

We can’t leave the house.

They’ve boarded up our doors and windows, started shooting people trying to break free. There are things in the streets. Tall things. I see their shadows sometimes as they run past the wooden boards. I hear the rumble of their feet.

I don’t know what they are. None of us do.

They cut our access to television and the internet when the lockdown began. They even took out the cell tower. Anne said they didn’t want us communicating with the outside world, telling them about what’s going on out here. I think she’s right.

It’s been two weeks since the men in suits came by. They said they worked for government intelligence and that they were looking for a terrorist. They didn’t strike me as government types, personally. They looked distracted. Spaced out. More like Scientologists than CIA agents, but then I’ve never met a Scientologist or a CIA agent, so who was I to tell the difference?

Either way, they said it would be over soon, and they sounded official. More importantly, they had guns. “We’ll need to search every household,” they explained. “We can’t have anybody leaving before we’ve cleared their property, so we’ll have to board you in.”

It made sense, I guess. In a twisted dystopian nightmare sort of way. It made sense all the way up until the end of the fourth night, when the Tall Things started roaming the streets. They were dressed in long raincoats. Hooded. The way they moved gave me the chills, all jerky and snapping, so I stayed away from the windows.

The sail was classified.

Whatever we were doing out there, they didn’t want anybody to know– not the Russians, not the Chinese, not the public and certainly not us, the crew. They kept us in the dark, fed us the lie that we were heading out on a routine patrol.

Up and down the coast, they said.

Back in no time.

But that was before the storm. It was before the sea turned into a maelstrom and the night swallowed the sun. It was before the captain slit his throat on the bridge, and before the crew tossed themselves overboard.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m a retired navy veteran, and I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t. It’s the sort of thing that might get me killed, but I’m long past caring. I’ve got one foot in the grave anyway. Doctor says it's terminal. That means I can tell you whatever the hell I want, and short of conscripting ghosts to arrest me in the afterlife, the Powers That Be can go fuck themselves.

My name is Walter. This is the story of Operation EDENFALL, and how our world ends.

Just finished part one and I loved it!

You've got such a talent at building tension out of thin air. Like, you manage to draw me in and make me care about the characters with nothing but a handful of dialog lines (leshy included)-- seriously impressive stuff. I've always admired how 'alive' your stories and world-building feel, and how quickly you manage to absorb readers.

Any advice on that front? Inspirations?