The Old One

By Todd Brabander

A man finds himself stranded in a small Pacific Northwest town when a landslide blocks the highway.
Over the next few days he meets the locals, learns about the area's history, and discovers a terrible secret in the woods.
A horror story in the tradition of King and Lovecraft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Todd Brabander
• Release date: Jun 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458003287

Todd Brabander

Todd Brabander is an author, musician, and artist from Portland OR. His projects range in style from comedy, to absurdist, to horror, and usually have a Pacific Northwest flavor. His work aims to capture a twisted and often humorous view of the normal world. He has been in several music groups, had his writing published online, and has publicly displayed visual art. He is a big fan of the Oxford comma.

Book preview

The Old One

A Pacific Northwest Horror Story

TODD BRABANDER

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 Todd Brabander

www.todd13.com

License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Table Of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

The Storm

Day One: Wednesday

Day Two: Thursday

Day Three: Friday

Day Four: Saturday

Day Five: Sunday Morning

Day Five: Sunday Evening

The White Room

The Truth

The End

About The Author

Dedication

~ ~ ~

For Dad.

You probably would have liked this story.

Acknowledgements

~ ~ ~

I want to thank all my friends who have been so encouraging, but specifically Steve Maguire, Kaebel Hashitani, Jason Tselentis, Dustin Erickson, and Summer David who have been extremely supportive and know this is what makes me happy.

Thanks to Todd Hutchinson for giving me honest feedback.

Big extra thanks to Mom for remaining supportive even when my ideas are crazy.

The Storm

Until that damp October afternoon he’d never been afraid of anything in his whole life.

In order to be scared, you have to care about something. You have to have something to lose.

He didn’t really have anything to lose. He was simple. He travelled light. He’d never been well-off and never cared about material wealth. Friends were something that came and went in his life. He’d lost a few, but knew that others would come to take their place. He never knew his father, and his mother died when he was ten. He wasn’t close with his grandparents.

Some people fear losing their spouse. He had always thought this was silly. If you’re with someone long enough they’re eventually going to die, and if you don’t see them die it’s often because you'd died yourself. Neither ending seemed very happy. That’s what he would tell people. He did get married once. She died in a car accident. He never bothered to remarry.

Sometimes parents see their children die. That’s a very sad thing. Many parents probably worry about their children everyday, but he had no children to worry about.

Often when we die we don’t see it coming, and so he never cared about that, but it all changed on that Thursday afternoon. He saw what was coming. He saw the end of everything. Everything. And he saw how it all hung from the most delicate of threads, and how easily anybody could come along and plunge us all into death.

Wednesday

Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree

-Isaiah 55:13

Mudslides had taken out the highway. It was one of those big slides that make it look like a giant had peeled the top of a hill off and laid it across the road, trees and all.

Everyone in the roadhouse stared at the small TV suspended from the ceiling in the corner. It looked something like a high school science classroom. The small TV was the teacher telling the hypnotized students about runoff and ground cover. No one really cared why this was happening. They just wanted to know when we could get on the road again.

Some poor reporter named Rex Tanner was on the TV. He was standing on the side of the highway trying his best to look professional. It looked like he was standing in the shower even though he was outside. The wind rattled his microphone as he swayed from side-to-side with the gusts. It was bad out there. The news was doing their best to sensationalize everything with a round-the-clock storm watch that replaced the normally scheduled programming. The anchorman at the news desk looked like he’d slept in his suit.

The storms weren’t uncommon this time of year, but they were especially bad this year. He recalled previous years when slides had snarled traffic and cutoff small towns. He had always lived much further inland, so they had never been much of a problem. The landslides were always just stories on the news, but now he was very much a part of it.

Everything smelled like pancakes. It was 10pm and the place still smelled like breakfast. The white-haired bartender sipped from a coffee cup and occasionally refilled it without ever breaking eye contact with the TV. Every so often he’d make a loud comment, hoping to amuse or comfort the crowd with his anecdotes.

Well, at least no one was hurt.

Boy, what a mess.

Sure glad I don’t have to clean that up.

The man sat and stirred his cocktail. He pushed the small straw through the small ice.

This is a cheap drink, he thought. But it was good enough, and so was the next one.

He had accepted that he wasn’t getting to the coast today. He had made it as far as the little town of Myrtle before he hit the road closure. He had hoped he might catch a break on one of the small side roads, but they were just as bad, if not worse.

He thought he was close to the beach