I wrote a short story

Quiet Achiever

As per the title, I wrote a short story because I had time and wanted to see if I could.

I have absolutely no idea if it's worth reading or not but I'll throw it out there anyway. I read the charter and got the impression that this was why the forum was originally set up so I apologise if I am mistaken.

Read it or don't - if you do, feel free to criticise or even write off completely (It's under 4,000 words)

Dwelling
Looking up Church Street from the square of the village, which like a lot of village squares in the west consists of a pub lined crossroads that some years previously would have hosted a market for farmers from the area, you could make out the silhouettes of two young fellas speeding down the street on their bikes as the sun was setting on the crest of the hill behind them. As they descended the light hill and passed the church on their right they began to move into clearer visibility as their backdrop changed from the glowing orange of the setting summer sun to the dull grey of the old slab concrete street. There was a gap between the two riders, the rider in front being on a bigger and faster mountain bike than his companion on a little BMX. The ginger rider in front, Con, sped forward with his tongue poking from between his teeth and out the corner of his mouth, the corners of the mouth upturned in a grin and his green eyes glistening in excitement. His arse was high above the saddle, his freckled face down at the handlebars, and his feet peddled forcefully but such was his speed that he became aware that there may now be a distance between him and his friend and so he slowed down to a freewheel, straightened up on his saddle and looked around to see how his best friend Cathal was doing.
Cathal didn’t seem to be doing nearly so well, his face, which was usually quite tanned during the summertime, was white and his big brown eyes were like saucers which lent to the look of fright on his face. His BMX wasn’t capable of the same speeds as Con’s bike but he was doing his best to stay with him anyway; he hadn’t touched the saddle since they left the house and the little bike leaned sharply to the left or the right with each downward thrust of his skinny legs. He was in a fright and he was in a hurry but was approaching the safety of the town square and also closing the gap with Con whose hands now hung by his side since he had released the handlebars as his bike continued to slow, his head turned around to watch the young rider’s approach.
Cathal’s speed had not yet dropped, nor had his focus moved from his friend so he neglected to see the flatbed of the pickup truck emerge from the stone mason’s yard to his left. The mason did not see him either as his vision was obscured by one of the many cars that lined the streets of the village – the village was a lot busier back then. The driver inched out slowly, so as to give road users the opportunity to see him, but it seemed that Cathal had no periphery vision, his focus was tunnelled towards his fried who was beginning to raise his hands in warning, as the boy’s head met the corner of the flat bed, just above his left eye.
************************************
Earlier that evening, Con had called for Cathal in his traditional manner which was to cycle past his kitchen window and give it a bang. The both lived on the same little street and during the summer months would call for each other frequently. Cathal came out quickly; he had just had his dinner and was free until it was dark anyway given he was turning 12 this summer and was afforded more freedom.
“Did ya bring everything?” he asked as noticing Con’s bag as he mounted his little BMX.
“I did yeah, come on! That bike’s useless….”
They knew exactly where they were going; it was to an abandoned house almost a mile outside the village. Abandoned houses were common in their area. They may have been old farmhouses that were abandoned when the next generation farmer built a new bungalow, or it may have been there were no children to inherit the farm and the farm sold off with the house left idle, or there may simply have been a standalone cottage without any land where the owner passed on or emigrated. The house that they were going to had belonged to a family called the Noone’s that had emigrated some 15 years earlier and no one had taken the house since. It had been an old house when the family had moved in, and they had lived there for 10 years, so by the time they had left no one else had the appetite to take it on, and so, it was left idle.
Looking around old abandoned houses was a favourite pastime of the lads. They could be found out any of the four roads of the village and if you took the side roads, or the old bog roads, then there were more again. Very often they sat in a field with no windows or doors with maybe the roof missing, often they were used for cows and sheep to shelter, but sometimes they would discover a house that was reasonably untouched. They had once found a house in a forest beside a bog that, although freezing and damp and full of mice and rats, it was as if no one had entered since its owner had departed. It had a kitchen table and chairs, old mouldy furniture in the small sitting room beside the kitchen, and even a greened brass bed in a room off that. The paint and wall paper were peeling off the walls but there still hung religious icons in every room. That was an amazing find and the lads used to go there quite regularly to smoke some fags and have a mess about but they could see by the ceiling that the roof was about to cave in soon and it did that winter.
And so, they had been on the lookout for a new HQ when they first heard about Noone’s house. The house was one that they had unknowingly passed a thousand times before until an old man from around the village made them aware of it.
“I see yer house is no good to ye anymore” he said to them from a pub doorway in the square as they were cycling past one day.
“What house?” they guardedly replied as they circled around to face him.
“I used see ye when I was working in the bog last summer, heading in the road to Geraghty’s auld house, the roof is gone in in it now so ye won’t be using it anymore”.
“Sure there’s plenty more houses round here anyway” Cathal bravely said.
“Well, I’ll tell ye one house ye shouldn’t go to…” and he proceeded to give clear and concise directions to Noone’s house knowing full well that they had made up their minds to go there as soon as he told them they shouldn’t.
“Lads”, he called after them as they began to set off on their bikes, “Just so ye know, there was a young lad killed in that house, that’s why the family left. He's haunting it…”.
He laughed quietly to himself as the lads cycled on.
As the lads cycled on in silence each began to feel that nausea of fear. Fear from all of the ghost stories they heard growing up, the subconscious recollection of the fear and how their stomachs felt when they were dared to run through the graveyard at Halloween, and fear from knowing that they couldn’t make an excuse to turnaround for fear of losing face in front of the other, for which they would be unmercifully slagged and humiliated.
Noone’s house was exactly where the old man said it was – down a little boreen past the old national school. It had been cycled past many times before but there were so many whins and briars enveloping the front garden and garden wall that it was never noticed. They left their bikes at the ditch and were able to kick, stamp, and break their way through the wet and sometimes sharp growth until they got to the front door which opened with a kick.
The house was in good condition, relatively speaking, insofar as it had all of its windows and doors and the roof seemed to be holding. There didn’t seem to be as much foliage at the back of the house and so the light was able to shine through the back windows, but with a green hue from the ivy that framed and almost covered them. The smell was the same earthy organic smell you got when you peeled a big clump of moss off a rock and there as over a decade’s worth of small animal droppings on the floor. They stood in the hall and could see through the open door of the kitchen straight ahead, there was a sitting room with some musty and dusty furniture on their left, and a corridor beginning a few paces up the hall on their right.
They explored the house, taking the hardwood and cloth cushioned chairs from the dark sitting room and bringing them into the brighter kitchen that could maybe serve as their main base. There was an old dresser there that would be useful for storing their cigarettes and whatnot and there was a kitchen table also. There was also an old sink which the taps had been removed from, and also a big old fireplace where a stove might have been, the base of which was now littered in twigs and moss from birds nest built in the chimney over the years.
They crept down the dark corridor, brown patterned wall paper peeling down either side, noted a bathroom with a smashed porcelain toilet facing them from the end of the corridor, and saw that there were two bedrooms on the right hand side of the corridor. The bedrooms were very dark as the windows were at the front of the house and completely obscured by growth. The first one was unremarkable except for a Child of Prague statue on the windowsill and a rusty old bicycle against the wall. The next room did feel rather eerie though and all it contained was a standalone wardrobe which stood in front of the window. They both jumped and gasped door which they had opened slammed behind them after they entered the room with a loud shriek from the hinges and a slam that felt like a slap to the back of the head.
They stood in the middle of the room, hearts fluttering, observing the outline of the wardrobe from what little light fought its way in through the window it almost totally obscured.
“Open it…”
“**** off, you open it!”
Con being the bigger and the braver stepped forward, lit his cigarette lighter and grabbed the handle of the door. It yielded after a sharp tug where the flickering warm glow of the flame revealed what appeared to be a little tweed suit for a boy, covered in cobwebs, hanging on it's own, motionless, ghostlike. Their thoughts naturally and immediately returned to the old man’s warning of the boy who had died in the house and their blood chilled.
“Oh Jesus Christ, I’m getting out of here!” Con said as they turned on their heels scrambling over each other until they got out of the house and onto to those bikes and back down to the safety of the village.
That was at the beginning of the summer but it didn’t take them long, no more than a week, to regain their courage to enter the house again. They still needed a HQ after all. It was Con who pushed for it more than Cathal because, and this he didn’t tell Cathal, when he went home in a fright that night he asked his Dad about that house and if a boy had died there. His father told him about that the Noone’s who had lived there had lost their son to leukaemia before moving away. So Con knew the old man’s story was just some story typical of the type of story heard in the west of Ireland, which loves a good ghost story, and this fortified his resolve to return to the house.
The house became their new HQ and they went there nearly every day, just to have somewhere to go as young fellas tend to want. They even cleaned it up a bit; they pulled the peeling wallpaper off the walls, swept the dusty floors, and they pulled all of the twigs and debris from around the kitchen fireplace away so that they could light a fire. That didn’t work as well as they had hoped as the smoke came spilling back down the chimney but all in all the place looked pretty decent.
And so on this particular summers evening, Con called for Cathal and they set off for their little house where they were planning on spending a couple of hours. What Con had in his bag was a few aerosol cans; they had discovered that if you sprayed the aerosol across the flame of a cigarette lighter you would get a pretty impressive flame. It was their plan, or at least Cathal’s belief, that the plan for the evening was to torch a few plastic bottles and the likes; melting stuff provides endless entertainment for bored young fellas. What Cathal didn’t know was that there was also a scrabble board in the bag. And he didn’t know that this would serve as a Ouija board.
Con had recently heard about the Ouija board from his brother, who went to boarding school, and he had told him how they had played it at night in the dorms and how, one night, the devil spoke to one of the students who became so afraid he had to drop out of school and hadn’t spoken since. He knew his brother was trying to frighten him, and it worked, but now he wanted to frighten his friend which is another great source of entertainment for bored young fellas.
“Cathal, have you ever heard of the Ouija board?”
“Yeah…”
“Do you wanna play?”
“No, we don’t have one…”
“We do, I brought a scrabble board with me, we can turn it upside-down and use it.”
“Why do you want to do that, it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid, it’s safe. Maybe we can see if we can talk to the boy who died here, find out what happened. I promise if it gets scary, we’ll stop…”
And so he continued for a short while until he convinced Cathal to enter the little bedroom with the wardrobe again and he set up the pieces of the board, lit a little candle, and placed a smooth surfaced pointed stone in the centre as the planchette. They kneeled either side and placed their fingers on the stone. Cathal was petrified. Con was also scared, even though he had engineered the situation, but he was also excited and full of devilment.
“Is anyone there?” Con asked aloud.
First nothing, then slowly the pointer moved its way to Y…. then E….. then an S as Cathal’s dark eyes widened and reflected the flickering flame of the candle.
Con, not one for wasting time, called out “Are you the boy who died?” and again the stone moved to indicate the affirmative, with some persuasion from Con’s finger.
Cathal began to ask that they stop this now, it wasn’t right he pleaded. There was panic and real fear in his voice. His friend pleaded with him that they’d ask one more question:
“What do you want from us?” he challenged as he almost immediately began to guide the stone to I………………..…W….A….N....T.............…Y….O….U………………...TO……………D………I…….
“Run!!!” Cathal screamed just before the pointer reached the letter E and he jumped up, tore the door open, bounded down the hall and out the front door towards his bike, followed by his friend who was having difficulty breathing from laughter. Cathal, too frightened to notice his friend’s amusement, mounted his bike and set off for the safety of the square and Con mounted his bike after him, resolving to overtake him along the way so he could better him once more.
Con couldn’t have realised that minutes later, after besting Cathal twice that evening, Cathals life would end and Con would be become acquainted with the finality of mortality.

*****************************************

It was a decade later that Con’s car drove through the village square up Church Street and the hill that was etched so clearly in his mind. He hadn’t been in the village for some eight or nine years as his family had moved away after his father was transferred with work. They had been back to visit a few times initially, as they still had friends there, but Con stopped going pretty quickly. He had begun to enjoy his new town and he had made new friends. And he wanted to forget.
He never told anyone the details of the evening that Cathal was killed. As far as anyone knew they had just been cycling along the street as usual; though the distraught mason was adamant that Cathal was distracted because he couldn’t have been looking where he was going. Con got a lot of sympathy he didn’t want and he said very little over the following months and was happy to learn they were to move.
He got on well in his new town, had a lot of friends and had a lot of fun, but there was always a sadness there that never let him forget. He knew there was guilt but wouldn’t let himself think about it. Regardless, the guilt often fought its way in, usually at the most inopportune times like in the middle of someone telling a funny story or the middle of a bit of good banter at school, and this would cause his smile to drop and his brow to furrow which earned him the reputation of being moody.
He matured early at secondary school and went away to college where he became more introspective, thinking a lot about the day his friend died, what his contribution to the event was and he began to laugh at the whole situation. The utter ridiculousness of it, firstly that such a stupid little joke caused a death, and the petrifying knowledge that everyone is quite fragile and that he and everyone he knows was going to die some day and no one seemed to care! He couldn’t understand why people weren’t panicking at the terrifying prospect of their own mortality when they could see it happening all around them every day. He supposed it was because he actually adored life so much that the prospect of losing it terrified him so.
And so it was a decade later, after he had finished college, got a job and bought a car, that he was able to travel by himself back to the village he grew up in. It hadn’t changed much but seemed a lot quieter and grayer. A lot of the shops had closed. The stonemason’s was gone. He had decided he was going to visit that little house again for something that he wasn’t sure of, but he felt the urge to do so. It was as if the thought and the guilt and the feeling of the entire day was always resting above and around his head, for a full decade, and he wanted to see if he could resolve his feelings and his fear and to move on.
He drove to where the little house was and made his way through the heavy growth and through the front door. There had been a path beaten through the grass and whins so it looked like somebody had been going to the house. The house was still intact such was the shelter provided to it by the tall trees all around. He could see empty beer cans in the sitting room and kitchen indicating why there was a path to the door. It was probably still used from time to time by kids, maybe even sent by the old man, if he was still alive. It was darker than it used to be as there was more growth at the back and little light coming through the windows.
Con made his way towards the corridor to where the bedrooms were. The door of the first room was open, the old bike was on the ground as was the child of prague statue, in pieces. The door of the second bedroom was closed. He was keen to see if the scrabble pieces they had used for the Ouija board were still there. He pushed the door, which must have warped by the damp as it was difficult to open, and saw that the room had barely been touched. The scrabble board and pieces looked to be kicked over to the wall , though he couldn’t tell if that was from when they ran. Everything was covered in fine dust, as was the suit which still hung in the open wardrobe. Con was incredibly surprised to see everything was pretty much as they had left it. Maybe it was because the door jammed shut and the kids who went into the house had not bothered opening it, or more likely it was because once they saw what was in there they jammed it shut and decided to stay away from it, especially if they had heard rumours of the haunting.
Con picked up the board and the pieces and placed them in the wardrobe under the suit. He felt a strange serenity and he also felt amused. Amused at how stupidly fragile life was, amused how it was a couple of ghost stories that triggered all of this, and amused at how much fun he used to have with his friend. He hung around and tried to have a little cry. He wasn't sure why but he felt like he should. He couldn't anyway and after a fairly shot space of time he decided to leave. There was no big moment in the little dwelling like he had kind of expected, there wasn't much of anything and that kind of worried him. Was he cold? Did it not bother him that, in the chain of causation, he had a part to play in Cathal's death and he never even told anyone about it? But the reality was he just felt a sense of closure; this thing happened, it was unforeseen, it was a secret but what did it matter. There were secrets everywhere and life was fleeting so what's the point in living life feeling guilty.
He left the house and climbed back into his car. He felt like he had got a weight off and began to drive away smiling. As he did so he noticed three young lads walking down the boreen, eyeing him up suspiciously. He could see one had a bag and knew from their shifty expressions that they were headed for the house.
He pulled down the window and said “Whatever you do, stay away from that house lads. A young fella was killed there. Then, and sure you probably know this, a few years later two lads tried to talk to them with a ouija board and one was dead within an hour…”
He laughed to himself as he drove away at the look on the lads faces, their efforts to suppress their fear by and outward display of hardness and bravery. And he thought that maybe that was the best memorial he could have paid to Cathal; memories of people that have lived will fade but, in the west of Ireland, a good ghost story will last forever.

Quiet Achiever

Apologies as I seem to ave lost the space between paragraphs in posting and I am unable to edit, am just getting a blank screen...

holy guacamole

Some constructive criticism:

There may be a good story in there somewhere but its obscured by overly descriptive passages. Even in a full-length novel its important that you don't allow the narrative to suffer at the hands of excessive detail, but doing so in a short story is criminal.

Here's an example of what I mean, just by editing out the unnecessary detail from your opening paragraph you can make it flow so much better. Like this:

Looking up Church Street from the square of the village you could make out the silhouettes of two young fellas speeding down the street on their bikes as the sun was setting on the crest of the hill behind them. As they descended the hill they began to move into clearer visibility as their backdrop changed from the setting summer sun to the grey of the street. The ginger rider in front, Con, sped forward, the corners of the mouth upturned in a grin. His arse was high above the saddle, his freckled face down at the handlebars, and his feet peddled forcefully. But he became aware that there may be a distance between him and his friend and so he slowed down to a freewheel, straightened up on his saddle and looked around to see how Cathal was doing.




Always remember that less is more. Most new writers will attempt to over-complicate things and maybe try and show their writing ability by adding extra flourishes. But simplicity is key.