Excerpt: McGleeder

Prologue
The house stood on top the steep rocky hill near the edge of town with a small path leading up to the small wooden door. It was not a grand house at all, in fact, many people would refer to it as an unoccupied shack instead of a house. Nevertheless, the local townspeople referred to it as a house because they knew who lived there. It was Old Man McGleeder as everybody called him. No one knew his first name, or even what he looked like. All they knew is that he stayed up in his tiny house, never coming down the hill or showing his face. His house almost always stayed dark with all of the window shades drawn. Every once and while a light would shine through the drawn shades proving that someone did actually live in the house, but that was not often. On a rare occasion his silhouette could be seen in the late hours of the night walking around his small yard, stopping at his garden every now and then.
No one in the town dared venture near the vicinity of the hill. A fence was clearly built around the base of it accompanied with a sign that read: Keep Out, McGleeder’s property. That sign was obeyed as if it was the highest law in the constitution itself. Both the fence and the sign were in poor repair having been there as long as any of the town’s residents could remember. It would appear to any visitor to the town that the hill had an invisible shield completely around it forbidding anyone to come near as there was never a single person seen anywhere near it.
For the majority of the time, the house stood silent. Not a single noise or movement ever occurred. There were some nights that the mayor received complaints of “unnecessary disruptive behavior” from the residents near the hill. They reported loud clanking noises, bright rapid flashes, and lightning coming from a cloudless sky above the house. At first the mayor thought nothing of them. The record of the house was perfectly clean. He himself had never seen any action come from the house nor had never heard a noise. The complaints he received were so outrageous that he could not take any of them seriously. He put them all aside in a folder labeled “junk” that was merely a temporary stop for his unimportant papers before a visit to the local dump. He almost never had to deal with the complaints, but when they started coming in, they all came at the same time and from everybody around. After multiple nights full of complaints months apart, he decided that the next time he received any complaints about the residence, he would see for himself what all of the commotion was about.
It was an overcast night the next time he received a complaint. As he had vowed to do, he hopped in his car and drove all the way to the edge of town to see what was happening this time. He was astounded when the hill started to come into view. It was just as previous complaints had described. There was not a cloud in the sky above the hill despite that the entire rest of the sky was overcast. Lightning was coming down consistently crashing into the roof of the house, but no damage was caused. The clouds around the hill were slowly spinning in a spiral around the lighting as if it were a black hole about to suck everything in. The windows inside the house shown brightly and strange noises were abundant. The mayor had his radio cranked up almost at full blast, but he could hear the noises coming from outside. He shut off his radio and rolled down his window. The noises were unbearable and unbelievably loud. There were sounds of clanking metal, high pitched screams and shrills that should have broken every piece of glass around, along with every other terrible sound imaginable.
He drove at full speed to the hill while calling every available town authority and telling them to drop what they were doing and get over there; he needed reinforcement. Soon a whole mob of government officials were behind the mayors back. They stormed the house while the whole neighborhood watched what they could from below. Suspense filled the air as nothing appeared to be changing and no one was coming back down. After and hour of waiting, the mayor could be seen descending down the path with everyone trailing behind him; the lightning and clattering continuing to disrupt the otherwise peaceful night just as if nothing had even just happened. The looks on all of their faces made them appear to be dumbstruck. They all left in their cars without saying a word to the anxious crowd waiting for news on what had happened. The event was never mentioned to the public by the mayor or any of the other officials who had been there that night, not even a small space filler in the newspaper about the event. It was as if it had never happened. The mayor’s secretary, desperate for details about what had happened, snuck into the mayor’s office to look through his “junk” folder, but it was gone.
Nights continued in the future with the clattering and lighting and at first the mayor continued to receive calls of complaints. He didn’t give notice to any one of them and the message soon became clear; such events were to never be mentioned again. The residents gradually learned to become accustomed to the events eventually coming to a point where they were as an everyday occurrence that soon received no attention from anyone, not even the neighbors.
The old man on the hill became an unspoken town mystery. Although they never talked to others about it, each and every person in that town wondered and desperately wanted to know what was happening in that little wooded shack. Jokes were made about the place, and for teens it became a place for many pranks and dares on their other friends or newcomers to the town. No matter what age, the house on the hill was a place to be avoided.