REST OF CHAPTER 1

Last week, I posted the first half of the first chapter of one of the books I'm currently working on.  If you didn't read it and would like to do so, then just check out my Facebook or Twitter. The link is there on one of my recent posts. But if you're too lazy, then I'll provide you with a quick recap. The main character has just inherited his father's mansion. He left home at 17 and swore that he would never go back for reasons that are still unknown. At this point in the story, he is in a cab, in front of the mansion's gate.

Lots of people have given me feedback so I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to read and give me their opinion. I don't know if people realize it, but I put a lot of thought, work, and effort into every single word I write. There are times where I drive myself insane and spend an entire hour on a five sentence paragraph. So again, thank you all for reading. For those of you who take my writing seriously, I really appreciate it. Without further ado, here's the second part of the first chapter. Enjoy!

I rummaged through my pocket a bit more until I felt the icy touch of some forgotten loose change. I withdrew my hand. “Forty five years? What brought you here?”

“Curiosity, I suppose. Me and a few of my buddies would sneak over here. Just to get a look at the place. We were only dumb kids back then, ya know. But still…” Again, his voice trailed off as he absorbed the sight in front of him. “…it would amaze us every time.”

I stuck a hand into my other pocket. The first thing I felt was another set of keys. I smiled. This pocket held the keys to my Queens apartment, a small, one bedroom space that cost a mere $1000 a month. The other pocket contained the keys to my multi-million dollar mansion. It was as though each pocket represented a different world, a different life. Most people would probably toss away the former keys for the latter. I, however, didn’t plan on staying at McCormick Manor for very long.

At last, I found what I was looking for, buried beneath my leather wallet. My fingers closed on the slip of paper.  “I don’t suppose you ever got past this gate?” I asked.

“No, no. We didn’t dare climb the walls. Too high.” And after a brief hesitation, the cabby added, “And illegal too, of course. Besides, if we ever got caught, old man McCormick—I guess that was your grandfather—would’ve hung us by our feet from the highest window in the house!” His grin was reflected in the rear view mirror. “There were always the craziest stories about old man McCormick.”

“He was a tough man from what I’ve heard.” Though he couldn’t have been as tough as my father. I retrieved a clenched fist from the depths of my pocket and climbed out of the cab. The cold bit into my flesh and made me shiver. I sprinted to the main entrance. Just to appease my curiosity, I grasped the iron bars and pushed. The doors moved an inch before clanking to a stop. The gate’s lock was as secure as ever. My neck craned back so that I could glimpse the top of the gate. It towered a good ten feet above me. Well, nine feet and three inches to be exact. Even if the gate was unlocked, I doubt that I had the strength to push it open.

I hurried to the left column, where the intercom and key pad awaited. I could sense the security camera watching me overhead. It was like the eye of my father, glowering down at me with typical disapproval. I glanced at the piece of paper clenched in my fingers. 0523, it read. With shivering fingers, I punched the digits into the keypad. It felt…odd to hit those numbers. The code had always been 0124, my mother’s birthday. But that was eight years ago, before I decided to vacate the premises and never return. Never truly isn’t long enough…

The sound of slow, steady creaking drifted into my ears as the gate doors pushed open. It was then that I came to a sudden realization. I gaped at the paper, no longer aware of the cold, no longer aware of my emotions.

From behind me came a loud honk. Startled, I spun around to find the cabby waving me impatiently into the car. I followed his gesture and climbed back into my seat.

“Are you alright, kid?” He hit the gas, propelling us through the gate. Behind the right wall sat the vacant gatehouse, a shack that was probably nicer than most people’s homes. “What were you doing, just standing there?”

 I could hear the gate creaking shut behind us. Once the code was punched in, the visitor had about fifteen seconds to pass through the gate before the doors began to close. “Yes. I’m fine.” But that was a lie. Truthfully, I felt befuddled, lost. My father had never shown any indication that he loved me, not even a shred of concern for my existence. When his lawyer told me the numbers, it didn’t even occur to me that they coincided with my birthday. Does that imply that my father did in fact care for me? I stared at the slip in my hand, as if I were expecting to find the answer scribbled somewhere. Frustrated, I shoved the paper into my pea coat pocket, along with all of my thoughts and confusion.

“Holy shit. This place is huge!”                     

Huge was an understatement. I lifted my eyes to observe the land that I had never expected to see again. The driveway was long and wide, wide enough for two cars to drive abreast, and was comprised of red and grey pavers. But there was one thing that was sorely missing: the cherry blossom. It had been my mother’s favorite tree. In any other season, the cherry blossoms would stand on either side of the driveway, from the front gate all the way to the house. Their boughs, normally covered with gorgeous pink flowers, would converge overhead to create a sort of canopy. The cherry blossoms were almost like a welcoming party, ushering you into McCormick Manor. Their beauty seemed to promise the visitor happiness and good tidings. Unfortunately, the house had never given me much of either. But during winter, the trees were skeletons, bare and dead. There was a foreboding eeriness about them that made me feel like a trespasser, even though the house was now rightfully mine. And beyond these trees was nothing but acres among acres of brown grass, long and unkempt.

Finally, my eyes settled onto the main attraction. I didn’t want to see it, but we were now so close, or maybe the house was just so big, that it could no longer be ignored. The mansion had been in my view since the bottom of Pleasant Valley Road, like a permanent fixture in the horizon. Why anyone would want a house so large was beyond me, though I did know the who, how, and when of the story. Built in 1907, the mansion was the birth child of a lucrative oil business, a monument that was resurrected by Charles McCormick for Charles McCormick. The establishment stood daunting and humongous on approximately 3,000 acres of wasted land. The amount of trees that had to be chopped down in order for this monstrosity to exist is both astronomical and obscene. The house was constructed in a chateauesque style. Its steeply-pitched roofs and towers were grey, its walls a stucco beige. Some of these walls had a cylinder appearance, others rectangular. Its plethora of windows was dark as pitch, making the house seem gloomier than usual. But its most enormous attribute was its absurdity. Beautiful though it was, the house was a colossal joke. It was too huge for any normal mind to fathom, which would adequately explain my cab driver’s amazement.

“This is...I mean …excuse me, but holy shit…wow…” He shook his head and chortled, at a loss for words.

The dead cherry blossoms dwindled away as we reached the end of the driveway. It was a giant cul-de-sac with a fountain right in its center. I always thought of the fountain as creepy, especially now, without any water streaming down it. At the very top sat a little cherub figure who was anything but adoring. He had a mischievous grin and eyebrows that were as steeply-arched as the roofs of McCormick Manor.

The cab swung around the fountain and came to a stop at the front doors. I stared at them reluctantly. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew that the driver had joined me in my gaze. “This is really some place you got here. I can’t even imagine having something like this. You’re a lucky man. Hell, you must be one of the wealthiest people in the country!”

“I suppose I am.”

I suddenly felt the cabby’s eyes on my face. The faint stench of rum wafted into my nostrils. “Well, that’ll be $44.75. I bet that’s nothing more than a penny for you, huh?”

I retrieved the wallet from my jeans. I pulled out $100 before slipping the leather item back into my pocket. “Don’t tell anybody that you took me here today.”

The driver shot a greedy look at the money before focusing back onto me. “Kid, I don’t even know your first name. What is your name anyway? You another Charles?”

His assumption caused me to say, “No. I’m Andrew.” The greatest gift my father ever gave me, one far better than this oversized mansion, was not making me Charles McCormick IV. Although, I suppose I should really be thanking my mother for that. She despised the name Charles.

The driver took the money. “Well Andrew McCormick, you have nothing to worry about. I won’t tell no one that I brought you here, not a soul. You have my word on that.”

I thanked him, even though I knew he was lying. I was just about to exit the vehicle when the driver cried, “Hey, wait! How am I supposed to get out of here? I don’t have a code or anything.”

“The gates open automatically when someone approaches it from the inside.”

The cabby seemed both impressed and enlightened. “Ohhhhh. Got ya.” After wishing me good luck and mentioning “If you ever need someone to housesit, or if you ever just want to give away a million dollars, call me!” and handing me his phone number, I climbed out of the taxi and closed the door. I walked to the rear of the car to find the trunk already popped. I pulled out the navy blue suitcase, set it onto the red and grey pavers, and shut the trunk. Almost immediately, the taxi took off. It went around the fountain, around the cul-de-sac, back up the driveway, through the dead cherry blossoms.

I was now alone. Alone with the house and all of the memories we shared together.

I grasped the handle of my luggage and turned to face my old nemesis. The weather was cold, but I was in no rush to enter the house. Instead, I just gaped at those immense oak doors. They were like the jaws of a predator waiting to swallow me, its prey, whole. With a deep breath, I took my first step forward, and then another, and then another. Before I knew it, I was walking, walking toward the entrance. For reasons I couldn’t understand, my heart was hammering in my chest. I stormed out of those doors eight years ago, absolutely certain that I would never return. And now here I was, about to walk through them again, as if I had never left.

STORY TIME

OK so it's been decades (and by decades I mean 7 months) since I've blogged, so I figured I'd give it another shot. Here is the first 5 pages to one of the new books I'm working on. It has no title yet. And I'm not going to tell you what it's about because where's the fun in that? Enjoy!

Chapter 1

            It was never my intention to return to my father’s house. The old mansion was filled with bad memories and shattered promises. I lost so many things in there, so many precious belongings. It was there that I had lost a piece of my heart.

When I left for the last time, or what I thought would be the last time, I stormed out those humongous oak doors without ever glancing back, not even for a second. I was seventeen back then, a mere child, alone and frightened. Now I’m twenty-five, a man, and I’m still alone, still very frightened, though I knew there was no reason to be. There was no longer anyone in that house to hurt me, no one left to fear. My father was dead, and his old house belonged to me.

            The cab driver at the train station didn’t believe it when I first told him. “108 Pleasant Valley Road, please,” I said, slamming the door shut behind me. The interior of the car was warm but not warm enough. I rubbed my palms together, trying to ebb the winter cold from my hands. When I left my Queens apartment, I got that dreadful, suspecting hunch that I had forgotten something. It’s a normal fear, one that I believe everyone experiences before departing on a long trip. However this time, my emotions were speaking the truth. I had forgotten my black leather gloves, a horrible thing to forget in the middle of January. Luckily, I had a black pea coat and a gray beanie, both of them woolen, to shield the rest of me.

            “108 Pleasant Valley Road?” The driver turned to look at me, one hand glued to the wheel, the other around his passenger seat. He was an older man, probably in his late 60s, with coarse stubble that ran along his jaw, cheeks, and upper lip. There was long, gray hair protruding from underneath his red beanie, which was pulled down to his bushy eyebrows. Dark bags sagged below his eyes, and in his breath were faint traces of rum. The stench should’ve sent me running, but I remained in my seat. “Is this some sort of joke?” he asked, scowling. There was something in that deep, gruff voice of his, some unidentifiable factor, that told me he was uneducated.

            “What’s so funny about it?”

            “Well…nothing. But you said 108 Pleasant Valley Road.”

            “Yes. That’s where I need to go.” ‘Yes,’ my father would always say. Never ‘Yeah.’

            The man gave a brief pause. “Why?”

            Again, I should’ve exited the cab. The man was being boorish and intrusive, but instead, I chose to counteract his rudeness with my patience. “I live there.”

            The driver wrinkled his red, vein-broken nose with confusion. “You live there? You actually bought that place? Didn’t you hear what happened there?”

            His questions were leading me to a conversation that I didn’t want to have. My identity was something that I had always sought to stray from. It was an overpowering shadow. It was one of the reasons I left home. However, in this case, I decided to make an exception. I needed someone to bring me to my destination, and this was the only taxi at the train station. “I didn’t buy it,” I explained. “I inherited it. Can we please just get going?”

            “Inherited it?” Suddenly, a mixture of understanding and intrigue illuminated the driver’s face. “You’re related to Charles McCormick? Who are you, his son?”

            I sighed and reached numb fingers for the door handle.

            The driver lifted his hands into the air, as if conceding.  “OK, OK, I get it. No more questions. No need to get feisty. I’m just curious, is all. Just sit back and relax. I’ll bring you to the house.” And so I withdrew my hand and away we went.

We traveled in silence, though it was never truly quiet. My head was buzzing with troubled thoughts and painful memories. From the darkest corners of my mind, I could hear my father’s voice bellowing at me. I spent the entirety of the trip staring out my window, but every now and then, my peripherals would catch the driver glancing at me from his rear view mirror. I’m sure his head was buzzing noisily as well; buzzing with questions and curiosity. Thankfully, he never spoke. The next time he did was to tell me that we had arrived. But I had already known that several minutes prior, after we made the right onto Reid’s Hill. Whenever I glimpsed that street sign, I always knew…I was on my way home.

After making that right turn, my stomach contorted until it felt exactly how Reid’s Hill looked. The cabby followed the street’s twists and curves, winding this way and that. There were times where I was certain that the rum would cause him to veer off the path, into the trunk of a tree. Luckily, he managed to keep us on the street.

The road, which was as narrow as a road could possibly be, was in the boondocks, in a desolate, wooded area that sat on the outskirts of town. It was, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere. The nearest store was a thirty minute drive, though cars were seldom seen here. The road spanned approximately twenty miles and held only five houses, all of them humongous. And one of them now belonged to me. Besides that, there was very little life on Reid’s Hill, save for the abundance of trees that ran along either side of the street. Back here, there were no neighborhoods, no street lights or traffic lights, not even a stop sign. The only other road in the area was the one I was now heading to. There were no cyclists or joggers, no neighbors on an afternoon stroll, no children playing in the street. Every now and then, we would pass the opening of a driveway, which eventually led to one of the five mansions. Other than that, it was a dead, vacant place, especially during winter. Without the greens of a summer forest, the area appeared dreary and foreboding. The trees reminded me of black skeletons, their empty boughs reaching out like gnarled, groping fingers. Living in this area, I always felt as if I had been shunned from society, like my family and I had been exiled into the forest for some horrific crime.

Up ahead, on the side of the road, I spotted the decaying carcass of a male deer. Presumably, most people would turn away from the sight, too disgusted to look on, but I was infatuated by it. One of the animal’s legs had snapped clean off, as if it was more no more than a brittle twig. Its mouth was gaping but not as much as the enormous hole in the deer’s torso, where it was rotting from the inside out. I absorbed it, engraved the image into my memory for the entire ten seconds that it took us to reach the carcass and drive past it. Perhaps I would use the visual for one of my stories. The next sight to meet my eyes, however, was one much more unsettling. It was the end of Reid’s Hill. Straight ahead was only a blockade of woods. There was only one way to go now. Left would lead me to my destination. It was the road back to the hell that I had escaped several years prior. Pleasant Valley Road. Home sweet home.

The driver made the left onto the street, though truthfully, I had never really thought of it as a “street.” This path took you directly to the front gate, to the only house on the paved trail. Because of this, I had always perceived Pleasant Valley Road to be a continuation of my driveway. “Well, we’re here,” the cabby informed me.

And so we were. It was another narrow path, straight but precipitous. The taxi climbed up the steep hill, up to where the only thing that awaited me was a dead end. The mansion lingered ominously in the distance while at the same time looming closer and closer with every second. Even from the bottom of Pleasant Valley Road, the house was still in scope, its many towers and spires reaching for the darkening sky above. My body shuddered, though not from the cold.

The cab slowed to a stop before the main entrance. For most people, this was the barrier, the spot where Pleasant Valley Road ended and the driveway to McCormick Manor began. It was a fifteen foot tall, wrought iron gate, as black as the approaching night. The doors were held firmly together by a horizontal post. The gate’s bars were twisted extravagantly into a black sea of iron swirls. On the left door was a large, golden “C” imbedded into the iron, on the right a golden “M.” It was the original gate of Charles McCormick I, my great, great grandfather, with a few technological features that had been added by Charles McCormick III, my late father. The gate was stuck in between two stone columns, each of which was topped with a black lamppost and a security camera. The lights wouldn’t flicker on until 7 PM—that was how my father had set it—but the surveillance cameras were always on, always watching.

The columns on either side of the gate stretched out into walls, stretched and stretched until they enclosed the entire estate, as if being in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a gigantic forest, wasn’t reclusive enough. In the right wall was a second wrought iron gate, a smaller one with a keyhole. It was the entrance to the gatehouse. There, the guards would sit and wait and watch for any approaching visitors. But that was long before my time here, before the guards’ jobs were made obsolete by the features on the left column: a key pad and an intercom. Now these were from my time.

When I glanced into the rear view mirror, I could see the astonishment in the driver’s eyes. “So what now? You got to enter a code or something?”

“I do. Hold on.” I reached a hand into my left jeans pocket. My fingers groped a set of approximately three dozen keys, one for each car in the house. But the most significant one of them all was the master key.

“I haven’t been this close to this place in about…” The cabby took a second to reflect on his last visit to McCormick Manor. “…forty-five years.”