DANGERPANTS!

I would really appreciate it if you follow along. 🫣

[ the following is a short story that will be posted to my Patreon, Drafts & Dread, on Monday morning. But I'm putting it here a day early for my Tumblr besties. If you like it, I would really appreciate you following my Patreon – the free tier gives you access to all my little short fictions, thoughts about writing horror, and other little dark brain bits. There is a paid $5/mo tier that will include additional goodies soon, like stickers, and nicely formatted and printed versions of collected stories. In the meantime you can also use it just to help me support my coffee habit. In any case, if you enjoy the little tale below, I would be grateful for a reblog of this or a share of the link with someone who you think might enjoy it. Thank you, spooky pals. ]

* * *

My grandfather told me this story when I was small and his hands were already very old.

He said that his grandfather had told it to him, and that his grandfather had heard it from a traveler who had once slept in a hayloft in a village that no longer had a road leading to it. This was how my grandfather spoke of true things; never long-winded like his made-up tales, which all grandfathers love to tell, but plainly and all at once.

“There was a girl in that village,” he told me, “who wanted to know everything.”

And here he stopped to look at me, as if emphasizing that wanting to know everything was a sickness that children caught from one another.

“She was not a wicked girl,” he said, “and that is important. This one was simply clever, and quick, and had bright eyes that were always searching. She just wanted answers. That was all.”

Then my grandfather crossed himself, though he had not seen the inside of a church for half a century.

“That was more than enough,” he said.

* * *

A long time ago, in a village with no name anyone remembers, there was a girl who asked questions constantly.

Why does the priest lock the church at dusk? Why does Old Tomas leave a bowl of milk beneath the milestone every new moon? Why must no one ever go near the dry well behind the blackthorn hedges?

Her father, who was raising her alone, would answer in the way adults in fairy tales always answer children, which is to say badly. “Because it is so,” and “because your elders know better,” and “because a child with too many questions grows into a woman with no peace.”

Naturally, this was about as effective as sealing a leaky bucket with sugar.

One day, at the peak of summer, Marta accompanied her father to the village square where he was retrieving some boots he had left at the cobbler for resoling. There was a group of other children playing on the green, some of whom she knew, and she joined them as they were playing a circle game.

She recognized the tune they were singing, but the words they sang were unfamiliar to her:

Ask the well, ask the stone, ask the dark what it has known

She sang along, cheerily, and paid no mind to the words. Presently, her father emerged from the cobbler’s shop, and on the way out of the village he bought them a large basket of honey cakes at the baker before they walked home.

She was allowed one honey cake after supper that night, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

“Tomorrow I want you to go out to the edge of the East Woods,” her father said at bedtime as he banked the hearth fire, “and gather mushrooms for us. If you can fill the bushel basket by the end of the day, you may have two honey cakes after supper.” He gave her a little wink.

Marta was, as most children are, highly motivated by sweet delights, and was determined to return home the next day with an overflowing basket.

The following morning she woke into bright summer sunlight. Her father had long left for the mills, so she ate her morning oats and dressed for her day. Her thoughts suddenly returned to honey cakes, however, and she hunted the kitchen for them, to no avail. Her father had hidden them, obviously, and this vexed her.

Nonetheless, she made her way along the path that led to the East Woods. Farther along the path were the blackthorn hedges, behind which was the old dry well she had always been warned about. She stopped, and pondered.

She remembered the song the other children had sung the day before. And curious little Marta, being ever dissatisfied with the lack of answers to all of her questions, gave in to her curiosity.

Setting her basket down on the edge of the path, she then made her way through the tall grass and wildflowers into a break in the hedges. She emerged from the other side, slightly scraped for the effort, and saw the overgrown old stones of the dry well.

Marta pulled some vines from the top of the well, and peered down into it. Noticing some old iron rungs set into the stone, she decided to descend into the darkness below. She climbed down slowly, rust flaking beneath her fingers.

When she finally reached the bottom, the summer daylight above her had shrunk to the size of a coin. Cold air struck her from all directions, cooling her perspiration.

She stood for a while, and her eyes began to adjust to the darkness. She could see that the bottom of the well went off in every direction.

“Do you have a question for me, child?” came a voice from somewhere in the darkness.

Marta spun around. She saw nothing. The voice seemed to have come from nowhere but also everywhere.

“Have you come to ask, little mouse, or have you come to know?”

The voice seemed that of a boy about her age, but spoke with the tenor of someone far older.

Her sudden fear collided with her insatiable need for answers and knowledge.

“I… I have come to ask, I suppose, yes.”

“You may ask me three questions over time, child. My first answer will be useful. My second answer will be painful. My third answer will seal your fate. So consider these terms carefully.”

Marta was quick to blurt out her first question. “Where does father keep the honey cakes?”

“The honey cakes,” the voice said after a moment, “are hidden in the large tool chest in the garden shed.”

Marta was delighted. She giggled as she scrambled up the iron rungs and back out into the daylight.

She only managed to fill the basket half full of mushrooms that afternoon, and so was not allowed a second honey cake after dinner. But that was fine, because she had already filled herself from the secret stash before her father returned home from work that day.

Several days passed, and Marta did her usual chores while occasionally stealing an extra honey cake from the tool chest. One particular morning, her father told her he was going into the village to see the doctor about his poorly leg, which had been plaguing him for many years and caused him to limp, some days worse than others. He told Marta she was free to do as she wished that afternoon so long as her morning chores were completed.

After changing the beds and doing a cursory job of cleaning the chicken coop, she decided to make her way back along the path to the East Woods to visit the well once again. She had another question for the well, and was determined to learn things.

She was more prepared this time, having brought a lantern along with her. Though she discovered, upon reaching the bottom of the well, that the lantern did nothing to dispel the vast darkness.

“You climb down here too eagerly,” said the boy’s voice, “and answers can sometimes be too heavy to carry back. What is your second question?”

“My second question,” said Marta, “is why does my father limp?”

There was a longer pause this time.

“Your father was not born lame,” the voice said. “When he was quite young, he went deep into the West Woods with a beloved companion. Too deep. Something in those woods set upon them, and your father was wounded. He fled, and left his companion behind to a terrible fate. Whatever was in the woods that evening tore the young man he left behind into something not even fit for a charnel house. Your father lied to the village constable and the grieving family about what happened.”

For a moment, Marta did not believe it. She could not. Her father was gentle. Everyone in the village loved him. He mended old Ansel’s gate without being asked, carried wood for the widow Bovet, and always gave the first ripe pear from their tree to whichever child happened to be nearest. A man like that did not leave another man to die in the woods.

But then she thought of the pauses. The small silences that came whenever she asked about his youth. The careful way he spoke of the woods, both East and West, as if every tree there had ears. The nights he went out to “hunt” and returned the next morning with no game, his boots black with mud and his face gray with something worse than weariness. She had always thought these were pieces of him she was too young to understand. Now she wondered if they were pieces he had hidden.

She rushed home in tears, composing herself while preparing supper and staying mostly silent during the meal. She could hardly look at her father, and after cleaning up after the meal, mumbled to him that she was feeling out of sorts and retiring to bed early.

Sleep never came for her that night. She wondered what other lies all the adults had told her over the years, whether directly or by omission. Her whole life, so many of her small questions were either ignored, awkwardly deflected, or given simple answers that never made sense when examined closely.

Marta woke to the dawn chorus of the blackbirds, and with lantern in hand, left the house as her father still slept. She made her way down the path towards the East Woods and reached the dry well just as the sun was piercing the tree line.

Mist lay low among the roots. The blackthorn hedge, which by daylight looked almost ordinary, scratched at her sleeves as she pushed through it. Marta climbed over the stone lip of the well and set one foot on the first iron rung.

Below her, the darkness waited.

By the time she reached the bottom, her hands were cold and her dress was stained with rust.

She lifted the lantern, but the light did not travel far. It seemed to stop a few feet from her face, as if the dark had raised a hand against it.

“Well?” said the voice.

Marta swallowed. “My father lied,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And the constable lied with him.”

“Yes.”

“And the priest must have known, because father would have confessed. And old Ansel, and all the others. They all know things. They all keep things from us and smile as if their mouths are not full of secrets.”

The stones gave back no answer.

Marta felt tears rise again, hot and shameful. She wiped them away with the back of her hand.

“All my life,” she said, “they have told me I was too young to know. They have told me there was no answer, or that the answer would come when I was older, or that good girls do not trouble their elders with questions. I tire of it.”

She looked up. Far above her, the new morning had made a small pale coin of the sky.

“I am asking now,” Marta said. “What do the grown folk know that they will not tell their children?”

The well was silent so long that Marta thought perhaps the voice had gone. Then it said, softly, “That is not one question.”

Marta’s fingers tightened around the lantern handle. “Then answer all of them.”

“Little mouse,” said the voice, and for the first time there was something like pity in it, “all is a very deep word. And as I told you, there will be a consequence for knowing.”

Marta thought of her father’s careful silences. She thought of his kind hands. She thought of every closed door, every turned face, every sudden hush when she entered a room.

“I want to know,” she said. “Everything.”

And the well answered.

No one saw Marta climb out of the well. By sundown, her father was calling her name through the East Woods, and by winter the village had begun the work of forgetting her.

* * *

A generation passed, and then another year besides, and the village had grown very good at forgetting Marta.

Her father’s house was sold thrice over while his grave sank crooked in the churchyard next to her mother’s. Children were still told not to play near the old well, but children are made mostly of disobedience and questions.

So it happened that a small boy named Jakob, who had been dared by his cousins and was too proud to refuse, climbed down into the dry well behind the blackthorn hedges one late autumn evening.

The old iron rungs had long since disintegrated, so he descended by a rope he had tied to a larch tree. The thick lichen covering the stones crumbled a bit beneath his boots as he lowered himself along the wall of the well. Far above him, the disc of fading daylight became smaller and smaller.

At the bottom, there was no water. Only damp earth and darkness in all directions.

Jakob stood very still. He had expected bones, perhaps, or, if he was lucky, treasure.

Instead, from somewhere beyond the stones, a young girl’s voice said:

“Have you come to ask, little mouse, or have you come to know?”

Meanwhile I've over here selling peat fics.

Yep. Stories about bogs.