Smeagol Blues

By Clint Westgard

The house looks like any other, ramshackle and worn by too many harsh seasons on the prairies. David cannot explain his obsession with it, what draws him to its well-hidden secrets.

What he will find is an ever-deepening mystery, involving a man who disappeared thirty years ago and a possible fortune he left behind. His efforts to solve the riddle of the house will lead David to betray those he loves and forsake all that he has in the world.

For the house possesses a terrible power beyond his reckoning, and once he is trapped in its thrall he will never escape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lost Quarter Books
• Release date: Jun 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9780991928729

Clint Westgard

Clint Westgard is the author of The Shadow Men Trilogy and the science fiction epic The Sojourner Cycle, the first volume of which, The Forgotten, was published in 2015. In addition, he has published a work of historical fantasy set in colonial Peru, The Masks of Honor, and a retelling of the Minotaur legend, The Trials of the Minotaur. Clint Westgard lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Book preview

SMEAGOL BLUES

CLINT WESTGARD

Smeagol Blues

Published by Lost Quarter Books

2013

Smeagol Blues by Clint Westgard is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

ISBN: 978-0-9919827-2-9

Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SMEAGOL BLUES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY CLINT WESTGARD

1

David could remember, with exact precision, the moment he became aware of the house. His mother had been going into town to run some errands and had taken both he and his brother Eric along for the ride. It was the year before she fell ill, the last time that he would see her as she had been, not as what she would become in those agonizing final years. He would have been seven years old. It was early July, the grass still bright and green from the June rains. He had seen it a hundred times or more of course, for they passed it every time they went into town. He was always left to wonder why, in that moment, it had seized him.

It was known as the Faulkenbourg Place after the Swede who had homesteaded the quarter. He had ordered the house from a catalogue for a couple of hundred dollars in the early twenties, a prefab from the Canadian Aladdin Company, their Edmonton model. In David’s memory the house always had the same ramshackle look to it, in need of a coat of paint, the same remnants of past owners littering the surrounding yard, and the grass overgrown around it. That was how it looked in that moment, and later, through all the changes, the coats of paint and trees planted, the new roof, when the image of it came to his mind it would be of that first moment of awareness.

There was no sense to his fascination, both then and later, it was simply a thing that existed within him which he did not question. He wanted to see the house up close, to feel what it was like to be within its confines and to know all that there was about it. That such a foreign entity, for it seemed very alien to him, could inhabit a space so near the familiar of his home, just a mile down the road, was part of its appeal. His world was very small then: the farm yard, the lands his father owned, the town, and the roads taken to visit these places. All were infinitely and reassuringly familiar. The house was something else entirely, standing apart from all he knew.

The next year his father purchased the quarter the house was on and his summer was spent in, what he conceived as, a grand adventure of discovery. His father wanted the house fixed up for a farm hand he was planning on bringing on for the harvest that fall, so the entire family was enlisted in whatever spare moments could be found to tame the abandoned yard and paint and repair the house. For David each moment offered the thrill of the new. There were the overgrown remnants of an abandoned root cellar, here the rusting spine of a broken