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What would you sacrifice to keep a secret from yourself?

Mason Riley knew death lay behind that old cellar door in the woods. He'd known it since his tenth birthday, when his father handed him a hammer and told him to drive his first nail. "We hold it back," his father said all those years ago. "To protect the family." He met death again when he was sixteen and in dire need. Now his father is dead and Mason has a son of his own. It's his decision whether to carry on the tradition, or to let it die with his father. That is, if the door lets him choose at all.

Excerpt:

"Mason Riley stood among the brambles in the old patch of woods behind his family home, a hammer in one hand and a six-inch nail in the other. His arms lay bare and bore the evidence of the thorny brush in red chicken scratch, lines drawn shallow on his skin and barely deep enough to bleed. They were the kind of scratches country kids got and didn’t think about for a second—the body’s payment for a day in the trees. You didn’t blame the zebra mussel for slicing your foot open as you walked the riverbed looking for clams to skip. Instead, you walked on and tended to it later.

Normally Mason wouldn’t tend to them at all, but his father warned him about the brambles that grew around the old cellar door.

“They took the evil in them,” he would say. “Can’t help it, I suppose, being so close to that place. When you cut yourself—and you will cut yourself—burn it out with something strong. I keep a bottle of old whiskey in the shed for just that. When you go to the door, you count your scratches, but don’t be turned away. You hold that nail like a crucifix, even if it cost you a nickel at the general. You hold it tight and do your duty.”

The cellar door lay only a short distance away, but through the brambles he knew it would be several minutes of painstaking progress. He checked his phone. The signal was spotty out in the country and non-existent in the deep of the wood. He’d have to trust he had no messages and he wouldn’t be missed.

He pushed the thick brush aside, some of it dry as bone while some still bled clear from red thorns. He held the nail tight and raised his leg, pushed down on branches that resisted like they knew what he was there to do. A thorn whipped back and scratched the back of his hand, but it didn’t stop.

Before long he stood before the double doors. They lay at an angle in the stonework around them, leading a path straight into the earth below. Moss coated the wood and rust ate through the handles that would be so easy to pull upward were it not for his life’s work.

Nails framed the doors, some straight through into the casement while others held great bars to seal it closed. Rusty spikes bent over in places from when he was young and inexperienced with a hammer—a fault his father would soon fix, training him with the tool once a week until his next birthday came and the next nail was driven in.

No voice came from the door—a painful reminder of what he had done so long ago. He’d heard them when he was sixteen, a rat shit kid locking his sins away. His father explained them away as the call of night birds, and Mason held the lie tight to his chest. Only when they returned from the woods did he see the shake in his father’s hands. Even back then, before age took his sturdiness away. He was a brittle man then in Mason’s eyes, just as he would someday become.

Mason put a foot on the cellar casement and looked to it as an old acquaintance. Never a friend, but something which had been with him through the years. He scratched his shoe along the edge, brushing off age-splintered wood.

“It’s just me,” he said. The door didn’t answer. “You should feel real special.” His words cut straight-edge through the woods. “You had a place in his will. It said, ‘To Mason I leave our duty.’”

Continued inside...

The House of Forgotten Things

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