Don't Open The Well by Kirk Anderson Page A

he could
escape the smokestack’s poisonous promise. Even at home, when his father
returned from another day of burning, covered with the remains of the burnt,
black upon his face and hands, Michael avoided him.
    But that had been when things were pleasant and they
were a family, his mother, father and Michael -- with the promise of a baby
brother on the horizon.
    It was more than a distant memory, faded now, into obscurity
behind the darkened veil that had fallen over Michael’s mind – the edge of
insanity almost perceptible.
     
    ----------
    Michael was twelve the first time his father took
him inside the Crematorium.  He remembered crying and blubbering as he
begged his father to take him the following year instead, but his father beat
the crying out of him, as he usually did.  He’d been drinking again. 
That was no surprise, either.
    He hadn’t always drunk. There had been a time when
his father looked down on those who consumed alcohol, calling them bums and
losers.
    “Ain’t no good can come from living in a bottle,
son, you stay away from that you hear?”
    Those had been his words to Michael on many an occasion
as they drove through town, Michael watching the men as they lounged around,
drinking beer in the shade of the front porch.
    A proud man, his father – at least he had been once,
before everything changed, before he himself began living at the bottom of a
bottle. It seemed to Michael that his father consumed whatever he could get his
hands on, whether it was liquor or beer, and the result was always the same.
The beatings and the put downs, but Michael grew immune to them eventually,
withdrawing into himself, though somewhere deep down under all the apparent
acceptance there was a burning hatred – perhaps it was that which had sown the
disaster soon to follow.

Chapter 3
    Inside the dark stone building there had been a deep chill in the air, almost seeping
into Michael’s bones and causing him to shiver involuntarily.  Michael’s
father began pulling levers and twisting knobs beside the enormous steel doors
of the furnace’s main chamber.  Suddenly, the furnace roared to life,
filling the room with warmth, but also that sickly-sweet scent of burning flesh
– flesh that had soaked into the very fabric of the walls becoming part of the
crematorium.   

“You can’t be a little pansy ‘all’ your life,” his father spat angrily, before
slipping the pint of whiskey out of his back pocket and taking a long, deep
swig.  A low, satisfied moan escaping his lips as he pulled the bottle
away slowly, almost regretfully.  

His father then opened a small metal locker in the adjoining wall, and when he
reached deep inside and began pulling, a metallic rasp accompanying the
movement, out slid a long stainless steel table, on top of which lay something
covered by a sheet
    Michael knew instinctively what it was. It could
only be one thing, the thing he dreaded the most – cold, dead flesh and big
lifeless eyes staring into him, as if seeing him despite the lack of life
within the pale, sallow flesh. His dreams had been filled with them ever since
he was a kid, for he knew that the day had to come and he had known for a long
time.
    The time was upon him.

Michael began to cry and turned away shielding his face, but his father grabbed
him roughly by the back of his hair, and pulled young Michael’s tear-streaked
face towards the sheet-covered form atop the cold steel slab, positioning his
face over the clearly defined face beneath.

“Now stop it,” Michael’s father screamed in his ear. “You keep cryin’, and I’m
gonna ‘give’ you something to cry about alright!”

Michael knew the game all too well.  If he could just shut down that part of
him that produced those gut wrenching pangs of fear and replace them with
nothingness, he could handle it – for a while. His father had unknowingly
beaten and abused his son almost into inhumanity, but somewhere inside, the
little 12 year-old boy