The Inheritance

Some legacies are better left unlived. A fantasy thriller.

Although my dad never hit us, I wish that he had. The bruises could eventually heal, but the emotional effects of his drunken, delusional ramblings marked me permanently. Those frequent tirades rang in my ears, up until the present day, where I sat at the kitchen table of my childhood home with my sister, Julia, lamenting the man we should have loved. A man we were glad was now dead.

There would be no funeral. He was cremated, his ashes scattered unceremoniously around the foundation of the back shed by the funeral director. This happened days before we arrived, poignantly highlighting the last remaining connection my dad had in life. Not to the funeral director, but to the shed. It was not a place of solemn significance to be laid to rest. It was my father stating a fact. This much I understood.

“Jonathan, I don’t want to keep the property,” Julia said. She was nervously fiddling with a set of keys to the house, its rooms and the lock on the shed.

“It has to go through probate anyhow. Seeing as how dad was behind on the mortgage, I don’t think we have a choice,” I said.

“If we didn’t have to sell, you still would though, right?” Then to emphasize her feelings on the matter, “I hate this place.”

“Yes. I would sell.”

The house hadn’t been kept up for years. A thick swirl of cigarette smoke and dust still hung in the air, a bright light through the window illuminating the fog of ages. The sink was full of dishes, crusted on meals eating away at the porcelain. I doubt my dad ate anything except TV dinners in the last few months. The dirty pots and pans were now an archaeological remnant of a time when he still had a thimble full of sanity remaining. The yellow wallpaper was dingy, its pattern all but faded away, and the carpet was full of dust mites.

“I don’t think there’s anything I want here. I suppose one of us should check the shed. Maybe there’s some of mom’s old things,” Julia said.

It wasn’t what she really wanted to know, if mom had things, keepsakes, any sort of trinkets to remind us of better days. We left with only the clothes on our backs one night while dad was in the shed. There were no screeching tires, kicking up of gravel, or a forlorn father running after the car, begging for forgiveness. We’re going for a trip, my mother would say. She never mentioned it would be one way. We knew.

“If you want me to look, just tell me,” I said.

“Fine, I want you to look. Who knows what’s in there. What if it’s something awful? I couldn’t handle it. Not now, not even after all these years,” she said, starting to cry.

“Jules, it’s okay. I’ll look. For the both of us. Then we can leave all this in the past.” I took the key ring from her and made my way out the door.

The shed was at least fifty yards past an old chicken coop and dried up well, standing amid the tall wheat grass of a neighborless rural landscape. It had maintained its integrity through the decades. While many of the boards were splitting and rotten at the bottom, it still loomed large over the property. The sun had faded the original red, which was mostly weathered to reveal the dinge of a mature red pine.

This structure was no comfort to my dad. He didn’t visit the shed to sleep off his drunkenness. There were no animals to grant him solace, a therapy of sorts for an old farm hand. The shed was his own personal turmoil, a place of sober misery, from which he returned with darkened eyes and a broken soul. It was then that he would drink, followed by the ravings of a lunatic. Like a high priest he would chant mantras loudly, Jim Beam and Jack Daniels his communion wine.

There is only bloodshed! Every night I see it clear as I see you now. Jonathan, my boy, you will carry this burden when I’m gone. Julia will be your acolyte. Death is coming! The end is nigh! Death is coming! The end is nigh!

I stared up at the shed’s peak, wondering if I, too, would be possessed by the same foul spirit simply by opening the door. Fiddling with the keys, I tried every one, at last coming to the one that would unhinge the lock. What he felt it necessary to protect gnawed away at my insides, churning my stomach. For a brief moment my courage gave way, and I wanted nothing more than to turn and run. I finally swung out the large door and gazed into the darkness.

With every overturned tarp, box moved, or swept aside piece of trash, my resolve began to solidify. Old farm equipment rusted, without frame or wheel, was scattered throughout, a tomb for machinery. Could it be he simply came here to think, to ponder a squandered youth? Maybe the shed held secrets for him deeper than I could imagine. This was his boyhood home as well. As a child, was he the product of a hardened and emotionless father, an abusive grandfather I never knew?

The only place left to check was the loft. I expected to find our old bikes, rusted winter sleds or even trunks of moth ridden clothing and quilts. After climbing the old wooden ladder, what I found was a curious emptiness. The area was swept clean, the interior lumber in a much brighter disposition than the rest. Only two objects resided in the space – a mat long enough for a full-grown man to lay upon, and a long-handled scythe, hanging above it.

They would not have been out of place, except that the tool was immaculate. No rust marked its black blade, no cracks in the handle or scratches or nicks. There was nothing of great interest about it, as it was unmarked by time. I crawled over to it in order to get a better look, careful not to bump my head on the cross beams. Kneeling on the mat before it gave me an odd sensation that this area had been set up as a place of worship, sacred, to be revered. The only thing I knew to do was to remove the scythe from its supposed place of honor.

Touching the handle shocked me into a trance, pulling me into a pit of despair, granting me sight into every passing second of death’s threshing floor. I bore witness to the irreversible cessation of biological functions for every piece of humanity across the expanse of the world. The vantage point was not mine to behold, but theirs, every one of them, all sensations of pain and suffering shared. There were train wrecks, murders, fires, starvation, overdoses, an incalculable number of afflictions to behold. When awareness of my present reality finally returned, I released the handle.

Unaware of the true passage of time I laid on the mat, a cold, anxious sweat forming on my body. I wearily pulled myself up to a crawl, tears streaming from my eyes, climbed down the latter and slowly made my way through the back door of the house. Julia was staring out of the kitchen window, then turned, wide eyed, knowing from my bloodless cheeks that I had discovered the truth.

“Oh no, what is it? Are you okay? I shouldn’t have asked you to go. I knew I shouldn’t have asked. Tell me, what did you find?”

There was only silence between us, a penetrating anticipation that grew thick. I would have to tell her something, but how to explain. She could only see for herself. So I grabbed her by the wrist tightly, and pulled her out the door, her resistance a futile exercise. She was saying something about not going, about not wanting to be exposed to whatever atrocity was in the shed, but it was only a murmur in my deafened ears. With quickness we were standing in the shed.

“Go up to the loft,” I commanded as she looked down at her feet.

“Please, don’t make me. Whatever it is, I’m sorry I made you go. Let me go. Let’s both go and never come back.”

“You can’t understand without experiencing it yourself.”

My choice of words unsettled her further, and she looked up at me, frightened and trembling. This was something to experience, which meant it couldn’t be put into words, or simply explained away at a later date.

“Okay, fine, if you insist, I’ll go up, and I’ll never be the same again,” she whispered.

She climbed up the ladder slowly, over the edge and into the abyss. I waited, wondering if she would scream out, have a nervous breakdown or worse yet, carry herself into the same dark places as my father and I. A few moments passed, then, in reverse she came the way she went, climbing slowly down the ladder. When she reached the bottom, a sadness overtook her.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“What do you mean? You touched it, right? The scythe?”

“I did, but it’s just a tool. Did dad… do something with it? Jonathan, what does it mean?”

“You felt nothing? You saw nothing? You must know. Death is coming! The end is nigh!”

Julia stared at me, and her sadness turned to pity. I realized she was not held captive by the same visions. It was only for me. It was only for dad. It was our burden to bear. There was nothing more to say.

Julia hugged me and started sobbing.

“I know it’s hard. We’ll get through this. Sometimes not knowing is worse. Maybe that’s the way it has to be,” she said.

I would not be able to convince her otherwise, so I wrapped my arms around her and held on tight. We walked out of the shed together, death at my back. I needed a drink.

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Dear Reader: This story was declined for publication, but I received positive feedback from the editor requesting that I submit again in the future. The Inheritance was written in a single sitting in a few hours, and then edited over the next several days. It was a joy to write, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.