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The House on the Frontier
#WritcoStoryPrompt41
The mirror loomed over them as they traversed the hallways of the abandoned mansion. It was rumoured that no one came out alive from it...only silence endured in that place, and the echoes of the past foretold the tidings of his future.
The old lathe and plaster house had sat on the western edge of that forgotten town for time immemorial. Both the dwelling and the village itself were long forgotten relics from a time when even the most detailed of records were nothing more than colourful hyperbole. Knowledge of the forsaken town is scarce even in circles where such knowledge remains cherished and well tended. For all intents and purposes, that remote place and its opaque history has long since passed from all living memory. Abandoned at some distant point during the tumultuous birth of the nation, eccentric scholars assumed that the town may have served in some ancillary capacity during the war, in which war no one knew. No one could say. Such things are mere speculation as there were no documents pertaining to the settlement in any archive, on any map or land registry from those tumultuous times. Government land surveying expeditions completed during the early eras failed to note the township or any of the natural landmarks in the region. It was as if the place had never existed at all.
The few buildings that constituted the town proper stood as hollow guardians to some secret past, barring trespass to regions beyond this distant country. This was a place that remained perpetually still, a place where no wind danced and rustled through the leaves. Where no sparrows chirped amongst the boughs. This was a place bereft of the natural order of things. Whoever had built the place had chosen a remote and arid scrap of land, far removed from any conventional trappings or comforts of civilised society. The architecture and design, if this amalgamation of clapboard and shake were to be classified as such, was an eclectic mix of frontier utilitarianism and old world sentiment. The entire construction was hard on the eyes of a civilised man, but practical in every aspect. Old world gothic and frontier ruggedness formed an odd pairing out here on the fringe of the frontier wild.
Those with knowledge of this place and its existence assumed that they had built it on the rim of the frontier to serve as a waystation or supply depot to those headed west in the wilds. Built before the railroads and before the charge of the iron horses into the frontier where they broke the west and revolutionized the world. The town stood, as it had, unnoticed by the influence of man. Throughout all the various uprisings and conflagrations that consume and preoccupy the idle interests of power, it had remained unsullied. No roads passed through the place, no rail lines had ever served it, and no map had ever marked it.
To venture out to this remote and desolate region was an exercise in antiquarian detective work of a peculiar sort. Myth, legend and strange folklore lent a hand to those foolhardy souls seeking such a place. To this day the reason behind the construction of such a settlement, its purpose, its location or its founders have eluded all inquiry. And the myriad endeavours to search out its origins and its dim history have ended in even more questions.There was no mention of the town anywhere in regional archives. None of the hardscrabble locals had any knowledge of the place or its founding in all of their odd folk history. Its purpose was a complete enigma, and if there ever was a record of its utility, that knowledge is gone, lost to whatever remote things obscure fact and logic.
No record of the town’s original founders was to be gleaned in any document at any time in the nation’s history. Only strange fragments could be deciphered in the odd dialect spoken by the questionable and colourful local inhabitants. Not a trace of reasonable fact, logical assumption or clinical record keeping appear in any formal document. Mining, they supposed, was the purpose behind the settlement. Lead mines and coal pits were staples of industry that fuelled these regions, but no mine or pit or otherwise, lies within a hundred miles of the town. At any rate, there were no roads or rails with which to transport any ore from this place to the immense furnaces in the east. A mining town without a mine or a rail.
They had abandoned this place long before the oldest records had begun. Why the town had fallen derelict was speculation and fanciful conjecture by any who cared to investigate. There were no documents anywhere pertaining to a reason for the settlements abandonment. There were no records alluding to when such an event, if there ever was one, had taken place. All things regarding this town, including its name, are mouldering under the dust of decades, perhaps centuries of history. The ancient house stood as it had, for an age, overlooking that frontier, out to the west and beyond.
The old house on the west side of town had stood watch as the march of progress had reshaped the world. Rail had opened up the country and tamed its wild heart. Electricity had brought light to a world once dark, ushering in the age of science and wonder. The town was old as the first men broke the shackles forged by newton. To rejoice and soar like birds as the new gods of the earth. In time, the great iron behemoths rolled back and forth across the wild country on vast networks of tracks and rails. The house and the town endured as the lumbering beasts moved men and weapons and their machines of metal in their endless quest to further the ideals of the righteous. Still, the aged town remained. Eventually the alienists of man figured out how to converse with the secret god atom and they split the sky wide before them, all that were beholden to that strange god bowed in awe and terror.
It wasn’t long until those same ideals spurned on the hardy and intrepid men toward the greatest conquest of all. The town remained unchanged as the alchemists and the great sages called out to a nation of unrest in need of salvation. The hordes took heed of their call and stood united at long last. They re-ignited the vast foundries of war; they breathed life into their forgotten armories and they stoked the very fires of hell in their pursuit. Men of steel and mettle rejoiced in the flames of industry and departed as missionaries and emmisaries on a tide of fire. They broke the barrier forged by the hand of creation and entered realms unknown, and still the house on the edge of the frontier remained. The chosen few, those champions of humankind, had set out to touch the void itself, and commune with whatever gods lay in wait beyond the realms unknown. That old town went unnoticed through it all, and the world moved on as it always had. The house stood on the edge of a great and wild frontier, unchanged as it always had. Hollow and vacant, it endured, as the march of time and the march of man moved relentlessly forward. It was a remnant of some strange age in the nation’s history, or it was something else entirely. That house looked on with its hollow window-pane eyes as all the ages crumbled and the will of man reached down ever deeper and out ever farther.
I stood at the threshold of the old lath and plaster house; it wasn’t decrepit, but neither was it well tended. This was the case for much of the town proper. Standing upon an ancient wooden porch, at the entrance to that old house, I paused in thought. As much as I tried, I couldn’t seem to recall the reason that had brought me to this place. What had set me on this maddening quest in the first place? For the life of me, I could not remember why I sought the town and the house that sat on the frontier.
Anything prior to this moment was nothing more than a distant memory, some vague occurrence that lacked any fine detail. All thought was becoming less clear as the moments passed. My memory had become singular in nature and consisted entirely of this town and it’s ensuing search. I couldn’t discern a single moment or memory before this.
I must be tired, I thought. I shook my head in a quick side-to-side motion, hoping to snap out of this unneeded reverie.
“At any rate, it didn’t matter”. I gave up searching for a reason that adequately explained the driven and singular obsession I had developed with this place. I could use a cigarette. The thought played out in my mind for the four hundred and eighty-seventh time today, and I noticed my left hand toying with a package of cigarettes in the left pocket of my wool jacket.
“Did I purchase this recently”, the jacket looked new and showed no signs of wear. I couldn’t remember where I had picked it up. Pausing for a moment, I decided I wouldn’t give that much thought either. I reached out with my free hand toward the doorknob. A plain brass affair, with a lustre that bespoke of thoughtful care and not the decades of exposure it was sure to have endured.
Suddenly, an old man appeared on the threshold. Materializing where the antique door had been moments ago. The age of the woodwork and the well-worn state in which the door presented itself, was in contrast to the silence with which it opened. A well-oiled and cared for set of hinges they must have been, to open a relic such as this with quiet ease. The sweet smell of tobacco wafted out of the old house into the dry sun bake afternoon. It was a pleasant fragrance, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where I had smelled it before. The aged man, unremarkable in all aspects of his character, motioned that I enter, at which I readily obliged. I stepped out of the dry arid country air into his sweet smelling but spartan old home.
He leads me past a bare room save an old rocking chair and a single window facing west. I couldn’t make out the landscape to the west as he ushered me into an adjoining hallway. It was narrow and dim, with a door situated at the far end. I noticed a long mirror on the ceiling that ran the length of the corridor. That’s odd, I thought, as the old fellow stood and beckoned from the closed doorway.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“That answer is not part of this story", the gray old man replied with a clear and present voice that belied his age.
“What is in that room?” I stammered under a nauseating wave of dizziness.
“What you came to see”. He grasped a brass doorknob and slowly turned it clockwise. The old house seemed to waiver with the elderly man’s actions.
“Take heed, my words, Friend”. The old man motioned in my direction.
“For they are at once an invitation and a warning. Through this door lies the source. The current that governs all things.” The old man opened the door and light, a color only the mind can describe, washed over the old man and I.
Immersed in that liquid light was a sensation beyond all description, as colors from the mind ignited every optic cell and pleasured each neuron in my cortex.
“Behold the great river Causality”. I could barely make out the old man’s heraldry, as the rushing sounds of a deep and torrential current coursed through my body.
“To look upon it, is to look upon all things”. The old man continued his sermon in a voice that was gaining volume and presence. He seemed unphased by the effects pummeling every nerve of my being. A resounding aura of light and sound slammed into me like a colossal pneumatic hammer, repeating at speeds that would surely confound the very laws of physics. I could barely think as a scene began forming within the now colorless light.
“All things ebb and flow on the tides of causality”. His voice boomed like a titan, crashed within the vacant rooms of the old house. The man continued, though from where I couldn’t tell.
“All things are causality, and all things are bound by its course.” I struggled to maintain a focus on the scene before me as the old man delivered his words, ringing louder and louder with each second.
“All things are born from its waters and all things succumb to them”. I shook with the astounding energy and sensation assaulting me, but maintained focus on what was congealing in that strange light. A scene unfolded of man’s ancestors from the dark regions of prehistory. Before Neanderthals and Homo erectus, before all the known genealogical branches of primates man had established. Existing in the dark history of geologic records and archaeologic archives, these prehuman beings were evolving as I looked on in wonder. They changed into every sub species of ancestral primates before my very eyes. In an instant, modern man had transformed into something beyond human, different in a way I cannot discern. Changing and changing yet again into beings wholly unfamiliar and alien. My faculties failed. The last I saw of the metamorphosis playing out before me was a distant being on some far-flung plain, shifting and shimmering with light. Its color was a shade I could never describe.
“Go now”. The old man motioned toward the river of otherworldly light. I couldn’t discern any detail of the coursing river.
“Rejoin the great river causality, as you have always done and always will.” It was all blinding colour and energy. There were no other details or sensations present, only raw unharnessed power and knowledge.
The last thing I remembered was leaning forward to place my hands in the great river……
“For you are the cause and the effect.” The old man finished his sermon turned and closed the well used but strictly maintained wooden door. He walked with a familiar gait through the narrow corridor. It brought him to the west end of the old house where a bare room with no furnishings waited. Nothing, save an old mahogany rocking chair. It faced a large window, segmented by twelve panes of cloudy aging glass. At the bottom of the window, one over from the left corner, a pane had fallen out. So long ago now, the old man couldn’t recall, though he struggled with that memory each time he saw that missing pane.
He sat in the old rocking chair and withdrew a package of cigarettes from the left pocket of his worn wool jacket. Closing his eyes, he drew deeply of the fragrant tobacco and gazed out the window. There was a knocking at the door. The old man didn’t give it much notice.
“There would be plenty of time for that.” he creaked forward and back on the ancient mahogany rocker. By the window in that ancient house, the old man took another pull of the fragrant tobacco and gazed upon the strange vistas in the west. He looked to that unknown country and that wild frontier.
© ChrisCrow
The mirror loomed over them as they traversed the hallways of the abandoned mansion. It was rumoured that no one came out alive from it...only silence endured in that place, and the echoes of the past foretold the tidings of his future.
The old lathe and plaster house had sat on the western edge of that forgotten town for time immemorial. Both the dwelling and the village itself were long forgotten relics from a time when even the most detailed of records were nothing more than colourful hyperbole. Knowledge of the forsaken town is scarce even in circles where such knowledge remains cherished and well tended. For all intents and purposes, that remote place and its opaque history has long since passed from all living memory. Abandoned at some distant point during the tumultuous birth of the nation, eccentric scholars assumed that the town may have served in some ancillary capacity during the war, in which war no one knew. No one could say. Such things are mere speculation as there were no documents pertaining to the settlement in any archive, on any map or land registry from those tumultuous times. Government land surveying expeditions completed during the early eras failed to note the township or any of the natural landmarks in the region. It was as if the place had never existed at all.
The few buildings that constituted the town proper stood as hollow guardians to some secret past, barring trespass to regions beyond this distant country. This was a place that remained perpetually still, a place where no wind danced and rustled through the leaves. Where no sparrows chirped amongst the boughs. This was a place bereft of the natural order of things. Whoever had built the place had chosen a remote and arid scrap of land, far removed from any conventional trappings or comforts of civilised society. The architecture and design, if this amalgamation of clapboard and shake were to be classified as such, was an eclectic mix of frontier utilitarianism and old world sentiment. The entire construction was hard on the eyes of a civilised man, but practical in every aspect. Old world gothic and frontier ruggedness formed an odd pairing out here on the fringe of the frontier wild.
Those with knowledge of this place and its existence assumed that they had built it on the rim of the frontier to serve as a waystation or supply depot to those headed west in the wilds. Built before the railroads and before the charge of the iron horses into the frontier where they broke the west and revolutionized the world. The town stood, as it had, unnoticed by the influence of man. Throughout all the various uprisings and conflagrations that consume and preoccupy the idle interests of power, it had remained unsullied. No roads passed through the place, no rail lines had ever served it, and no map had ever marked it.
To venture out to this remote and desolate region was an exercise in antiquarian detective work of a peculiar sort. Myth, legend and strange folklore lent a hand to those foolhardy souls seeking such a place. To this day the reason behind the construction of such a settlement, its purpose, its location or its founders have eluded all inquiry. And the myriad endeavours to search out its origins and its dim history have ended in even more questions.There was no mention of the town anywhere in regional archives. None of the hardscrabble locals had any knowledge of the place or its founding in all of their odd folk history. Its purpose was a complete enigma, and if there ever was a record of its utility, that knowledge is gone, lost to whatever remote things obscure fact and logic.
No record of the town’s original founders was to be gleaned in any document at any time in the nation’s history. Only strange fragments could be deciphered in the odd dialect spoken by the questionable and colourful local inhabitants. Not a trace of reasonable fact, logical assumption or clinical record keeping appear in any formal document. Mining, they supposed, was the purpose behind the settlement. Lead mines and coal pits were staples of industry that fuelled these regions, but no mine or pit or otherwise, lies within a hundred miles of the town. At any rate, there were no roads or rails with which to transport any ore from this place to the immense furnaces in the east. A mining town without a mine or a rail.
They had abandoned this place long before the oldest records had begun. Why the town had fallen derelict was speculation and fanciful conjecture by any who cared to investigate. There were no documents anywhere pertaining to a reason for the settlements abandonment. There were no records alluding to when such an event, if there ever was one, had taken place. All things regarding this town, including its name, are mouldering under the dust of decades, perhaps centuries of history. The ancient house stood as it had, for an age, overlooking that frontier, out to the west and beyond.
The old house on the west side of town had stood watch as the march of progress had reshaped the world. Rail had opened up the country and tamed its wild heart. Electricity had brought light to a world once dark, ushering in the age of science and wonder. The town was old as the first men broke the shackles forged by newton. To rejoice and soar like birds as the new gods of the earth. In time, the great iron behemoths rolled back and forth across the wild country on vast networks of tracks and rails. The house and the town endured as the lumbering beasts moved men and weapons and their machines of metal in their endless quest to further the ideals of the righteous. Still, the aged town remained. Eventually the alienists of man figured out how to converse with the secret god atom and they split the sky wide before them, all that were beholden to that strange god bowed in awe and terror.
It wasn’t long until those same ideals spurned on the hardy and intrepid men toward the greatest conquest of all. The town remained unchanged as the alchemists and the great sages called out to a nation of unrest in need of salvation. The hordes took heed of their call and stood united at long last. They re-ignited the vast foundries of war; they breathed life into their forgotten armories and they stoked the very fires of hell in their pursuit. Men of steel and mettle rejoiced in the flames of industry and departed as missionaries and emmisaries on a tide of fire. They broke the barrier forged by the hand of creation and entered realms unknown, and still the house on the edge of the frontier remained. The chosen few, those champions of humankind, had set out to touch the void itself, and commune with whatever gods lay in wait beyond the realms unknown. That old town went unnoticed through it all, and the world moved on as it always had. The house stood on the edge of a great and wild frontier, unchanged as it always had. Hollow and vacant, it endured, as the march of time and the march of man moved relentlessly forward. It was a remnant of some strange age in the nation’s history, or it was something else entirely. That house looked on with its hollow window-pane eyes as all the ages crumbled and the will of man reached down ever deeper and out ever farther.
I stood at the threshold of the old lath and plaster house; it wasn’t decrepit, but neither was it well tended. This was the case for much of the town proper. Standing upon an ancient wooden porch, at the entrance to that old house, I paused in thought. As much as I tried, I couldn’t seem to recall the reason that had brought me to this place. What had set me on this maddening quest in the first place? For the life of me, I could not remember why I sought the town and the house that sat on the frontier.
Anything prior to this moment was nothing more than a distant memory, some vague occurrence that lacked any fine detail. All thought was becoming less clear as the moments passed. My memory had become singular in nature and consisted entirely of this town and it’s ensuing search. I couldn’t discern a single moment or memory before this.
I must be tired, I thought. I shook my head in a quick side-to-side motion, hoping to snap out of this unneeded reverie.
“At any rate, it didn’t matter”. I gave up searching for a reason that adequately explained the driven and singular obsession I had developed with this place. I could use a cigarette. The thought played out in my mind for the four hundred and eighty-seventh time today, and I noticed my left hand toying with a package of cigarettes in the left pocket of my wool jacket.
“Did I purchase this recently”, the jacket looked new and showed no signs of wear. I couldn’t remember where I had picked it up. Pausing for a moment, I decided I wouldn’t give that much thought either. I reached out with my free hand toward the doorknob. A plain brass affair, with a lustre that bespoke of thoughtful care and not the decades of exposure it was sure to have endured.
Suddenly, an old man appeared on the threshold. Materializing where the antique door had been moments ago. The age of the woodwork and the well-worn state in which the door presented itself, was in contrast to the silence with which it opened. A well-oiled and cared for set of hinges they must have been, to open a relic such as this with quiet ease. The sweet smell of tobacco wafted out of the old house into the dry sun bake afternoon. It was a pleasant fragrance, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where I had smelled it before. The aged man, unremarkable in all aspects of his character, motioned that I enter, at which I readily obliged. I stepped out of the dry arid country air into his sweet smelling but spartan old home.
He leads me past a bare room save an old rocking chair and a single window facing west. I couldn’t make out the landscape to the west as he ushered me into an adjoining hallway. It was narrow and dim, with a door situated at the far end. I noticed a long mirror on the ceiling that ran the length of the corridor. That’s odd, I thought, as the old fellow stood and beckoned from the closed doorway.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“That answer is not part of this story", the gray old man replied with a clear and present voice that belied his age.
“What is in that room?” I stammered under a nauseating wave of dizziness.
“What you came to see”. He grasped a brass doorknob and slowly turned it clockwise. The old house seemed to waiver with the elderly man’s actions.
“Take heed, my words, Friend”. The old man motioned in my direction.
“For they are at once an invitation and a warning. Through this door lies the source. The current that governs all things.” The old man opened the door and light, a color only the mind can describe, washed over the old man and I.
Immersed in that liquid light was a sensation beyond all description, as colors from the mind ignited every optic cell and pleasured each neuron in my cortex.
“Behold the great river Causality”. I could barely make out the old man’s heraldry, as the rushing sounds of a deep and torrential current coursed through my body.
“To look upon it, is to look upon all things”. The old man continued his sermon in a voice that was gaining volume and presence. He seemed unphased by the effects pummeling every nerve of my being. A resounding aura of light and sound slammed into me like a colossal pneumatic hammer, repeating at speeds that would surely confound the very laws of physics. I could barely think as a scene began forming within the now colorless light.
“All things ebb and flow on the tides of causality”. His voice boomed like a titan, crashed within the vacant rooms of the old house. The man continued, though from where I couldn’t tell.
“All things are causality, and all things are bound by its course.” I struggled to maintain a focus on the scene before me as the old man delivered his words, ringing louder and louder with each second.
“All things are born from its waters and all things succumb to them”. I shook with the astounding energy and sensation assaulting me, but maintained focus on what was congealing in that strange light. A scene unfolded of man’s ancestors from the dark regions of prehistory. Before Neanderthals and Homo erectus, before all the known genealogical branches of primates man had established. Existing in the dark history of geologic records and archaeologic archives, these prehuman beings were evolving as I looked on in wonder. They changed into every sub species of ancestral primates before my very eyes. In an instant, modern man had transformed into something beyond human, different in a way I cannot discern. Changing and changing yet again into beings wholly unfamiliar and alien. My faculties failed. The last I saw of the metamorphosis playing out before me was a distant being on some far-flung plain, shifting and shimmering with light. Its color was a shade I could never describe.
“Go now”. The old man motioned toward the river of otherworldly light. I couldn’t discern any detail of the coursing river.
“Rejoin the great river causality, as you have always done and always will.” It was all blinding colour and energy. There were no other details or sensations present, only raw unharnessed power and knowledge.
The last thing I remembered was leaning forward to place my hands in the great river……
“For you are the cause and the effect.” The old man finished his sermon turned and closed the well used but strictly maintained wooden door. He walked with a familiar gait through the narrow corridor. It brought him to the west end of the old house where a bare room with no furnishings waited. Nothing, save an old mahogany rocking chair. It faced a large window, segmented by twelve panes of cloudy aging glass. At the bottom of the window, one over from the left corner, a pane had fallen out. So long ago now, the old man couldn’t recall, though he struggled with that memory each time he saw that missing pane.
He sat in the old rocking chair and withdrew a package of cigarettes from the left pocket of his worn wool jacket. Closing his eyes, he drew deeply of the fragrant tobacco and gazed out the window. There was a knocking at the door. The old man didn’t give it much notice.
“There would be plenty of time for that.” he creaked forward and back on the ancient mahogany rocker. By the window in that ancient house, the old man took another pull of the fragrant tobacco and gazed upon the strange vistas in the west. He looked to that unknown country and that wild frontier.
© ChrisCrow
