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Bonus Story

Mike Adamson

We are honored to have Mike Adamson return with a H. P. Lovecraftian tale for your reading pleasure. If you are a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, you know what I an talking about. If not, you have a treat in store. In addition to appearing in 4 Star Stories, "At the Well of Night" is now tagged to appear in his own single-author anthology from Belanger Books late this year, probably Q4.

Mike Adamson holds a Doctoral degree from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, Mike secured qualifications in both marine biology and archaeology. Mike was a university educator from 2006 to 2018, has worked in the replication of convincing ancient fossils, is a passionate photographer, master-level hobbyist, and journalist for international magazines. Short fiction sales include to Metastellar, Strand Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Abyss and Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Compelling Science Fiction, and Nature Futures. Mike has placed stories on some 250 occasions to date, totaling over 1.25 million words. Mike's first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Tradition of Evil, has been released by Belanger Books. He has three new anthologies in preparation, and his short fiction has appeared in translation in European magazines. You can catch up with his journey at his blog The View from the Keyboard and his website The Worlds of Mike Adamson.

The single-author anthology will be a collection of my Lovecraftian pieces over the last seven years or so, including a batch "in the style of," of which this is one. PseudoPod will be podcasting one of my Lovecraft pieces soon, "Arcanum Miskatonica," which first appeared in Lovecraftiana, and was given a second run in Jay Henge's Zadok Allen anthology. PseudoPod reviewed the collection favorably and selected a story to produce--which happened to be mine!                                                                                                                           -- Mike Adamson

  

At the Well of Night 

by Mike Adamson

Beyond Potter’s Field lies the Old Wood, and often have I been tempted by its shaded byways. In winter it is a pageant of gesticulating skeletons, frozen in their abandoned motion and clothed in pure white, while by summer its green bowers are the haven of bird and bee, and the fox who trots with russet-hued grace. But at each cardinal point of the year, in the endless turn of the seasons, there are moments the wood calls to me with a voice I almost hear with my waking senses; and invades my dreams with a soft siren song that woos the hardest heart. Only black legends keep me from walking into that wood and never returning.

The drab doings of city folk do not sit well with those who hear nature and are drawn to the green places shunned by the hurrying throng. My years among the tall buildings dulled my inner senses, yet incompletely, such that when one night I awoke suddenly, with childhood memories of rambling gardens, fields green in their season, and the whispering woods where badgers played beneath the moon, I could stand the city no longer. I settled my affairs, packed, and made my way home.

Autumn’s breath was upon the land when the train deposited me at a country station that had stood since the railways were first built, and I smelled the damp air, took in low sun over reaped fields where the last swallows still darted, and my heart rejoiced, for I was free. The family had scattered now, and I was lucky to open up the old house on the outskirts of the village, which had stood empty for the last year since my sister moved to New Zealand. The family had considered meeting to discuss realizing the old place and dividing its value, but as far as I was concerned, it was my home, and all my future endeavors would be pursued from the writing desk in the quaint parlor, looking out upon gardens bright with blossom and flowers in their season.

Over my back hedge lies Potter’s Field, where in medieval times clay was gathered for the making of vessels; and across that green undulation rises the dark, hunched heights of Old Wood. That first evening, I stood in the overgrown garden among creepers run to briar and roses sharp with thorn to stare off at the long mass, bright in its autumn colors, and heard its call as ever I had as a child.

As I settled back into village life and embarked upon new writings at the desk that had been my father’s, the whisper of the trees became my companion, and each day I would walk across the field, with raincoat and walking stick as the days grew cool and the wind cast the reds and golds of the tops in a tumbling race. The dry stone wall bordering the wood was full five hundred years old, pierced by a gate where a path led to villages long lost, as it had since the days of Lancaster and York. The antiquity of this land touched my soul and coaxed me on to walk the woodland paths, breathe the scents of nature, and feel the land beneath me.

Come to me, lost son, it murmured in my dreams, with visions of swirling leaves among grasping boughs, of trackways turned to mud, of scampering squirrels hoarding for winter, and the southward flight of birds. Come home, come home….

I woke with a start in the middle hours to the odd compulsion of this dream but stayed between my sheets, yet when it returned, I felt it a friend and saw in its hurrying dream-reality the way across the field and through the wood, where the trees seemed grander and more welcoming than ever before. And my intent probing of its depths brought me to a grove of old giants amongst which lay the stout stones of a medieval well. I peered down from the brink and found it free of intruding roots, and water glimmered, a black mirror, far below.

The legends, though, give me pause. I heard them at the knee of my old grandmother, in the parlor adjoining, as she spoke of villagers long ago swallowed up by the wild. In ages of wolf and brigand many must have lost their lives, but something dark swirled around Old Wood, such that the young were taught to stay away by night, lest that darkness seep out from beneath the rotting boughs of fallen trees, from out the leaf mulch and teeming maggots beneath rocks, rise up and bear away the innocent to places unimagined.

I scoffed as an adult, of course, but so strong is habit that for a full month I resisted the call in aught but afternoon light. But as the season drew toward winter, sharp airs and rains accompanying shortening days, I set aside my writings and walked at last into Old Wood with no thought of return short of whatever secrets it truly held.

Come home, lost son, it whispered, warm breath almost upon my ear, and I hurried my stride into the November afternoon. I passed the gate and made my way among the crackling drifts of leaves, smelled hearth smoke from afar, and heard the call of crow and raven in the tops. Now I was home, I felt, truly home as I set aside all preconception and let the arms of the woods enfold me.

I could not have said how long I walked as day ended in a flurry of orange and yellow, and evening closed about me in purple gloaming, and the ash and silver-birch, beech, and oak made ever more imposing outlines against the first stars. It seemed I moved in a dream, not feeling the ground beneath my feet as I forged through thicket and briar, and at last came upon the well of my dream.

The crumbling stone seemed permeated with the breath of antiquity, a low parapet of blocks cut by forgotten hands, yet the gaping maw to the earth was now covered by a wrought-iron safety grille, to keep the unwary from plunging to their deaths. Even this addition, this intrusion of modern times upon the ancient, was old.

The breeze did not penetrate here, and it seemed the baring trees rose in convoluted majesty I had not appreciated before, over-arching as if to create a hallowed space. My heart thudded in anticipation, for here, something told me, I had come upon all my grandmother would have kept me from.

But she was long gone, and I had come home, and I stood by the well, alone and yearning, though I did not know for what.

It began as a gleam in those black waters, a phosphorescence perhaps, a cold, greenish radiance that built slowly, filling the shaft so the slick, dank stone of ages shone with a sickly light. I looked into it with racing heart, wondering what it could mean, hoping it meant something, anything beyond the tedium of the ordinary, and I was not disappointed. My legs weakened and I collapsed to my knees at the low rim of eroded stone, to peer into the well, as it seemed, little by little, to grow deeper, vaster, until my fevered vision stared down into a world, an entire glowing dimension. Then, with the greatest ease, a grace of submission to superior forces, I plunged, impossibly, over the edge and raced down, down, down….

Yet there was no meniscus of cold and foul water, and I streaked on at speeds unguessable, falling through a space whose measure was delineated by glowing filaments of blue and green, reaching past me, scattered with dust motes and moonbeams, and after what seemed an age I plunged into a warm and buoyant ocean of gold-green radiance, and lost all notion of myself in the wonders thus revealed.

Even the soul of a poet struggles to describe that for which there are no words, and truly language was inadequate to express the universe opened to my senses. Did I look out-over to cosmic vastness, or inward to the interactions of energy at the heart of matter? I could not imagine, but was filled with the wonder of the vision, not terrified, not desperate to escape to the safety of the mortal realm, but reveling in all I encountered, hungering for it as the balm to one beaten down by remorseless, unremarkable reality.

I could have wandered a thousand years, yet the visions faded too soon, and when I opened my eyes, cold and stiff, slumped against chill stone under the stars and flurrying clouds of an autumn night, I could have wept to return. The iron grille was ice-cold under my fingers, but I realized it had likely saved my life, preventing me from joining those others in the past who also were called by the whispers of the world. And when I struggled to my feet, it was with a renewed sense of purpose, for the mysteries of the universe had been offered to me, as if I, a scion of this ancient place, had a birthright to such knowledge, and the veil was drawn back, to my edification.

Now the doings of mortal travail seemed petty, the smallness of the blind, and I did not fear the woods. I walked home with a joyous heart, for a new life had opened wide before me.  I knew with a deep and satisfying certainty, I would journey those realms again, and, just perhaps, come to understand the magnificence gifted me.

 

THE END


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