Short Stories...
The Silo (A man finds an old silo in a field by itself that he had never noticed before. What is it and why is it there?)
I will release this piece by piece as I write it ... since it is almost done
The Silo (By Michael Batey) ©2006
1
“Listen, it’s not going to be that bad, don’t be such a little girl,” Ben said to Holly while driving down the deserted road. “Think of it as an adventure.”
Ben first saw the silo while driving to work two weeks ago down the same road that he was traveling on now. He had been listening to the baseball game through the static on his AM radio, he had thought about getting satellite radio surface, but was still a couple of raises away from that luxury. The Tigers were getting their asses kicked, "nothing new there", when he casually glanced to the woods on the driver’s side of the truck. The silo was standing out in the middle of a field some 500 yds from the edge of the woods. Ben’s first reaction was that he couldn’t believe that this was the first time he had ever noticed the structure. He had driven past it at least a thousand times in the past two years, and he was just now seeing it. " Weird stuff. Man it looks creepy. "
Ben had thought it was a building at first, some improbable tower in the middle of nowhere. Ben half expected there to be a big breasted blonde princess at the top, protected by a moat filled with gaiters and pirana. It would have been one hell of a dark fairytale though, much more Grimm Stoker than Mother Goose or Disney. The building looked to be roughly four stories tall, looking ominous sitting on its small hill. It was a dark grey and had two black square discolorizations near the top. The woods protecting the sight were light at best, not providing much of a shelter for it.
"That’s what makes it so god damn weird that I’ve never seen it before, it’s like it just fucking appeared the other day."
While Ben didn’t believe in a magical appearance, he did know that he was now obsessed
with it. Every time he drove by the silo, he nearly veered off the road onto the shoulder because it grabbed his attention. After the seventh time passing it, he stopped on the side of the road, put on his emergency lights, and got out of his Ford F150. He ventured into the woods to get a better look at the structure, as he had no idea what it was at the time. After coming out on the other side of the sparse trees, he determined it was a silo by the cylindrical shape and that the top appeared to have no roof. Ben thought that by seeing it clearly and not though a shroud of trees, it would make the thing seem less “wrong and creepy.” This was not the case. It snared him even further because of its unexplainable location and unkemptness. That’s not it though, Ben thought, "I can feel it out there. I can feel something powerful in the distance like that feeling the air has before a storm."
Ben had returned to the car to find a policeman had pulled up behind him, lights flashing. Embarrassed, Ben had explained to the cop that he had not been relieving himself as he had thought, but instead was looking at the silo out in the field to see what it was. The cop had looked long and hard in that direction and had said “Huh, funny, I’ve never seen that before.”
“No shit huh?” Ben said, “that’s the same exact thing I was thinking, and I’ve driven this route almost everyday for two years.”
“Yeah. Just making sure that you weren’t out there doing anything, unnatural,” the cop had replied.
"That’s funny, there’s nothing more natural then taking a piss in the woods", Ben had thought, trying hard to keep from laughing. The cop had then given him a wave and gotten into his car and driven away. Ben, who had been in love with horror stories and movies all his life knew that he had to go out there at night and check the silo out. What he didn’t admit to himself at that point was that he desperately wanted company on that adventure, because he was a little scared of it.