Thank You
As a heartfelt “Thank You!” to everyone who has supported this endeavor thus far, I’d like to offer for your reading pleasure – the first chapter of Door to Altharia: Chapter One – Eyes. I hope this sneak peek gives you a better glimpse into the story of Alec Breen, and a feeling for who I am as a writer. Enjoy.
Chapter 1
Eyes
The sun swept over the rugged beauty of Amun Hills Golf and Country Club, highlighting the rich green of its fairways, sending dappled spotlights through the oak trees that stood proudly on its grounds. Now and then, a large blue-grey cloud would drag its shadow across the landscape, the momentary reprieve it offered much appreciated by the golfers and workers below.
Alec Breen glanced dully at his feet, noting how the morning’s dew had soaked past the soles of his shoes and was working up into the grimy mesh fabric. Only eight in the morning and already it was over eighty degrees out, probably higher when you factored in the humidity. He felt like a zombie. Wet and sweaty already, and three hours to go ‘til his shift ended.
He gave a sigh and bent over heavily, reaching for the broken tees that littered the grass between the markers.
Having a job wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
He remembered when he’d first applied at Amun Hills and the excitement he’d felt, even if he’d been careful not to show it to anyone. He’d lived his whole life next to the golf course and had long hoped to get a job there. As a child, however, he hadn’t spared a thought for how boring it might be.
Or how uncomfortable. He’d decided within the first week or so that Tim Cobbler was an odd fellow for a boss. Tall and lanky and no longer young, Tim had looked him in the eye with something bordering on sadness before shaking his hand and giving him the job.
At times, Alec wished he hadn’t. Tim didn’t trust him, he knew, and it didn’t seem like he could do much to earn the man’s respect. Merit, the fourteen year-old figured, had had nothing to do with his hire. Instead, it seemed that Tim had hired him out of pity. And that, of course, colored this whole working thing with a bitter tang.
Alec brushed the wet strands of hair from his forehead, fingers also slicking away the sweat that had beaded there.
Tee box by tee box, he’d go through the course every morning, prepping it for the first golfers of the day. He was small and young so Tim didn’t feel comfortable having him do much else. Sometimes he’d empty the garbage bins as he went, sometimes he’d fix the bunkers, or straighten the cart ropes, but generally it was the same thing, day after day after day, Monday through Saturday.
He’d started in late May when he’d gotten out of school and it was August now. His brain felt numb.
“Of course, your other option is being at home right now, Alec,” he reminded himself. “You probably don’t know how good you’ve got it.”
And really, that was this job’s saving grace. Cleaning and prepping Amun Hills might be brainless labor, but it meant he wasn’t at home.
As Alec hopped into his maintenance cart, and putted on down the fairway, he took a deep breath and looked around. Amun Hills was a rugged, breath-taking course, not overwhelming and yet captivatingly beautiful. Built on the old gypsum mines, it was a landscape that was comfortable with itself, strands and copses of trees scattered here and there, splashes of green vegetation that stood out in eye-catching contrast with the golden, grassy scrub that decorated the slopes. Part of the country club’s appeal was that it didn’t try too hard to be something it wasn’t. Never would it be confused for the regal prestige of the St. Andrews or Augustas of the world, but it held a charm all its own that just felt right.
He almost wanted to smile. This was his favorite part of the job – zooming between tee boxes and taking in the beauty of the golf course. The weather might be hot and sweaty and he could be coming off the worst of nights, but Amun Hills was usually a pleasant reminder that there were many good things in life too. He wondered how Gwen was doing.
The almost-smile faded.
Sometimes even Amun Hills couldn’t distract him from reality.
As he bumped back up onto the asphalt cart path, the young teenager’s face darkened, eyebrows lowering as his focus drifted away from the splendid scene around him, and unhappy thoughts settled into his mind.
Travis Mosley shook his head, unwilling to let it go.
“I tell ya, Tim, there’s something ain’t right with that boy! I have boys of my own, not one of them is that kind of scared.”
They were sitting at a table in the maintenance shop, having a coffee between jobs.
Timothy Cobbler looked into his mug one more time, not at all disagreeing with his friend, but not willing to get too worked up either. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation and he wasn’t sure what Travis wanted him to do.
“I’ve half a mind,” Travis was saying, “to sit him down and see what’s going on in his life.”
“I know what you mean about that,” Tim nodded, rubbing his face, “but I don’t think that’s likely to do too much. I’ve tried – you have to want help, and I don’t think he trusts anyone enough to want their help.”
Travis kept on shaking his head, frustrated and upset. “It’s just not right. Not right that a kid that young is so bitter and dark. And so afraid! You seen his face Tim, when you drive by? His eyes get all round, like a… like a little lamb, like you coming to hit’em.”
He stopped and scratched his elbow, deep in thought. “But I do know what you mean about trust. He don’t seem to trust no one. No one. You know his family, right Tim? What they like?”
Tim took a deep breath, pursing his lips. Travis didn’t live in the area so of course he wouldn’t know about the Breens.
Walker was a small place, one of a number of small towns in West Michigan that kind of blended into each other, but it wasn’t so small that everyone knew everyone. That, however, was not the case for the neighborhood directly surrounding Amun Hills; O’Brien met Covell and Covell met Fulton, and within their boundaries there were few secrets.
The cloistered, cramped feeling of the neighbourhood was why Tim had chosen to move further to the west, nearer the big lake. It wasn’t good to know too much about your neighbors. Most people knew, for instance, that the Breens lived on Covell, backing onto the golf course. It was common knowledge the things that went on there.
“Not a happy story there, Travis,” he replied finally. “I’m a golf course superintendent, not a psychiatrist, so I don’t try my hand at diagnosing too many mental issues. But suffice it to say, there is no doubt in my mind that that boy is traumatized by his parents. Especially Tanner, his dad.”
He looked up, unknowingly gazing off towards the northeast where the Breens lived. “Tanner was always an angry sort; I was his football coach so I’d know a little bit about that. The girls always liked him – most of them don’t know the bullet they dodged when he chose Chelsea. They dated, got married, had one kid, then separated for a while. They got back together a couple years ago, saying Tanner had changed, and had another kid, a girl, I think.
“But I’m a fool if I’ll believe Tanner’s a better man now. More likely Chelsea couldn’t handle the shame of their separation and let him back.”
“So he’s a kid beater, huh?” Travis spat. “Beat his wife too?”
“No one knows for sure, or else you can bet the police would be involved,” Tim explained, hands spread wide. “Chelsea always denies it, even though you can hear the cussing and the yelling and the crying from a mile away. Personally, I never saw any marks on the girl, though I haven’t seen her that often. She’s broken, I think. Hardly leaves the house and when she does, she looks a mess.”
Travis breathed a deep sigh. “That’s awful, Tim.”
Tim nodded. “One of the saddest things I ever saw was that girl in the grocery store, hair all over the place, eyes red from all the tears. When Alec came and asked for a job, I said yes, hoping it would give them a little happiness. But I think they need a lot more than that, in the end. Don’t know where it’ll come from though.”
Travis was nodding sagely, dark arms folded. “Well, I think I’ll keep an eye on that boy. Check in on him now and then, see how he’s doing. Maybe, with a little time and friendship he can come around, hey? Build some trust?”
Tim stood up, pushing his chair back as he did. “If you want to take that on, Travis, that’s up to you. It ain’t going to be easy though. You might end up doing more harm than good.” He pulled open the door.
“Alec’s not an easy one to warm up to.”
What was it like to be normal?
He’d been wondering that quite a bit recently. He had friends from school – Jayce Hekstra, Cory Ondersma, Gordie Houweling. They all came from normal families, with lots of brothers and sisters, and parents that seemed normal.
Normal seemed to equal happy.
But maybe normal wasn’t quite the right word, because Jayce was anything but normal and his family was really odd but they still seemed happy.
“Maybe stable?” Alec muttered to himself, musing.
Yeah, that was probably it. Stable.
What was that like?
The other night he’d watched a documentary about a fisherman in Alaska who was thrown from his ship. They’d managed to get a rubber dinghy in the water after him, one of those round emergency ones, but the waves and weather got so violent that fisherman and ship were separated. After the storm passed, the man was adrift for 8 days. He had to make it on his own, with no food and only some emergency rations of water. He survived but was shaken by the experience for the rest of his life.
Most of the documentary had focused on the survivor’s torturous brush with starvation, but Alec remembered one scene especially.
Somehow they’d put a camera down where the man had been, among the waves, bobbing in a dinghy during a storm.
In seemingly every direction was a heaving, churning, towering wall of water, swelling up and down angrily. It was an incredible glimpse into what the sailor must have experienced. Some waves were the height of skyscrapers! Should any one of them crest and break, the man would have died, with no one there to help him or even witness his end.
Unknown to all, his dinghy would capsize and he’d be buried under a tumbling, crashing, Bering Sea monolith.
There was very little in the man’s story that Alec could personally relate to, but when he imagined that scenario and what must have gone through the man’s desperate, fearful mind he couldn’t shake the feeling that it seemed disturbingly familiar.
Dumping the splinters of wood he’d picked up into the back of his cart, he hopped back in and made his way to the next hole, keeping an eye out for fallen branches and other debris. This stretch, from Hole #12 to Hole #13, always seemed to have something that needed to be cleaned up.
“Hey, Alec! Wait up!” a friendly voice called, loudly in order to be heard over the putt-putting of his golf cart. He looked up to find Travis, an older worker who’d been at Amun Hills for fifteen years, driving towards him in a cart of his own. Travis’ black face was filled with a wide smile that looked more than a little forced.
Alec wasn’t enthused. He’d wait till the man spoke, but he could feel himself tensing up.
“Hi, Travis.”
Travis looked at him as if watching for something. “Uh, how you doin’ this morning?” he asked.
“Good,” Alec responded, face blank. The following silence was awkward, but he didn’t mind. “Why?”
A flicker of a frown crossed Travis’ face. “Just wondering. You seemed a little down. I, uh, thought maybe something was up.”
The teenager waited, allowing silence to settle between them again. Why was it always like this? “Nope. Doing good.” His voice was even, flat.
Travis didn’t seem to do well with silence. Pulling off his ball cap, he wiped his forehead. “Well, not tryin’ to be nosy, just… if you find you’d like to talk to someone, about anything, I’d be ready to listen.”
Alec rested a forearm on his steering wheel and nodded. “Kay. I’ll keep that in mind.”
That seemed to satisfy the man. “Alright… you, uh, have a good one then. See ya ‘round.”
He paused, waiting for a response in kind, but Alec was already driving down the fairway.
As he rounded the bend from the green to the tees on Hole #13, Alec shook his head.
That was weird.
But, strangely, not that far from the norm.
It went back to his family. Almost everyone had heard the rumours; the Breens were dysfunctional, a mess, a disaster in the making. Tanner Breen was a wife-beater, a child-beater, and an alcoholic.
As far as Alec knew, only one of those rumors about his father was true. The others were just gossip, people talking about things they didn’t know. His dad had never beaten Alec or his mother. He yelled plenty and he was definitely a drunk, but it had never come to violence. So those rumors were wrong.
But that didn’t mean everything was okay either.
They seemed to hate each other. His mom and dad. Not a day went by that they weren’t yelling or fighting about something. Most of their arguments he didn’t understand and didn’t really want to. Most of the time he’d take care of Gwen and wait for them to run out of words to hurt each other with.
It was like living under a storm cloud, waiting for it to break open and thunder and shake and destroy, never being able to relax and live normally, always running around covering furniture and plants and wondering how much damage the storm would do when it finally exploded.
He laughed to himself. Stability. What would that even look like?
Stepping out of his cart, he climbed to the top of the tee to move the markers, but when he bent over to pick one up, he felt something odd. At first, he ignored it, as the sensation barely brushed across his consciousness.
But when he reached for the second marker, the feeling came again, resting in between his shoulder blades at the base of his neck, like an unwelcome spider.
He was being watched.
He stood bolt upright, looking behind him, expecting to find Tim or some golfers. There was no one there, nothing but the thick vegetation of a forested area that separated the hole he was on from the next one over.
But the feeling didn’t go away. In fact, it strengthened into a suspicious yet certain resolve.
He peered into the woods tentatively. Was someone in there?
He craned his neck, trying to worm his eyes past the heavy screen of greenery into the shadows beyond. While he searched, he began to realize that, past its initial wall of growth, this particular forest seemed thicker, deeper than the other ones on the course. He couldn’t see through to the other side; instead, he could see only still deeper shadow.
As his eyes delved into the darkness, doubt wriggled in his mind, like the feeling one gets when standing on the edge of a high cliff and peering cautiously over. He shivered.
It was so dark – anything could be in there and he wouldn’t know it. He began to wonder if perhaps he should get in his cart and drive away.
But as fear grew in his mind so too did curiosity, and he remained there, rooted to the spot, standing, staring. The shadows seemed to swirl, morphing this way and that, shifting into different sizes and shapes, teasing his questioning mind. His eyes began to sting and water, but just then something seemed to resolve in the darkness.
Two glinting orbs, set closely together at the same height, gathering and reflecting what little light was able to pierce the gloom.
Eyes.
His heart dropped in shock and he felt the beginnings of panic set in. Still the reflections remained steady, trained on him, unblinking.
Alec lifted a hand to his forehead and rubbed his eyes quickly, but nothing changed.
He was rattled, he could tell, knees trembling, hands shaking. He began to try to convince himself of what the eyes really were: a humidity gauge nailed to a tree, an old metal spike perhaps, a couple of old rusty nails. A bird feeder?
Each thought came and went, quickly discarded as wishful thinking.
He became aware that his breath was becoming raspy, rattling a little in his chest, but he didn’t care.
Go away, he thought, whatever you are, just go away. Alec squeezed his eyelids shut, hoping.
After counting to twenty, he opened them again cautiously. He scanned the area carefully for a minute, then another, before finally heaving an unrestrained sigh of relief.
The shimmering orbs were gone, melted away into the shadows.
…and there you have it. Thank you for reading!
Give me a little time and who knows – maybe more is on the way 😉
Until next time!
~ Martyn McGrath
Like it a lot..;)
Thanks! Chapter 3 will be coming out soon 🙂