The Voice in the Well

Daniel’s father didn’t want him and his friends to play all the way in the back yard by the concrete covered well. Naturally, it was the place where Daniel and his friends wanted to play the most. So they play there they did, near the capped off old well all the way in the backyard, past the locust trees and the catalpas, in the valley between the streets, far from the world of adults. Daniel remembered it clear as a bell, the first time he heard the voice inside the well. It was a fall day, not too cold, but crisp enough that he felt vibrant and alive. The orange leaves from the trees hadn’t all fallen yet and the grass was still bright green, burning off the last of the summers fuse.
            “You need to let me out Jimmy!” the voice said, echoing with reverberant resonance.
            Daniel didn’t know who the voice was talking to. He didn’t know anyone named Jimmy.
            It sounded old, like a recording on one of those tape cassettes his dad sometimes put onto the dusty boombox when he was working on the car out in the garage, crackling and antique.
            “Come on, I didn’t do anything,” it continued, and in desperation, “I didn’t say anything to mom, I promise!”
            It wasn’t just Daniel who didn’t know who Jimmy was. His friends Billy and Sam didn’t know who Jimmy was either. There wasn’t a Jimmy on their street or on the street behind them. They didn’t know a Jimmy from their games of kill the man or their games of freeze tag or their games of baseball in the field that brushed up against the expansive woods at the end of Orland Street.
            When the voice spoke again it had the quality of something heard in a dream, and they accepted it as a dream, as a voice heard so deep in play that not one of them questioned its reality, and on subsequent days they continued to play the new game of George Down in the Well. That was the name of the kid who did the talking, George, and he was pushed their by his older brother Jimmy after George told his mom what he heard when Jimmy was out behind the garage smoking unfiltered cigarettes he’d stolen from their grandpa. His brother was making a plan as he smoked behind the garage with his friend Gary. He was planning on sneaking into the school at night to pull a prank on the history teacher Mr. Fink. That was the real reason George had been thrown in the well, because when he told his mom about the conversation he overheard between Jimmy and Gary, their mom had sent Gary back home for the night, ending the spend the night, ending the plan to sneak out after everyone went to bed, ending the plan to go in through the window of the chemistry class they had left cracked barely open at the end of seventh bell on Friday. They’d climb up onto the dumpster, push it open and let themselves inside, take the snake out of the terrarium in the biology class and put it inside Mr. Fink’s desk. That would be payback for the week of detention Mr. Fink had given them for talking smarmy talk about Nancy, to Nancy. That would show Mr. Fink.
            But now Jimmy had another revenge on his hands. Or so the voice from the well whispered. George told them how Jimmy had waited until everyone was good and asleep, just like he’d been planning before his little brother narced on him. The old sweaty sock was in his mouth before he could scream and his brother straddled him, sat on top of him like a lump of coal, wrapped him up in a blanket so he couldn’t move his arms, and forced him out of bed and down to the back of yard, past the trees to the old well. The family only kept a heavy iron grate over it at the time. That was when Gary stepped out of the shadows. With a few grunts they pulled the grate off and pushed the little loser into the well.
            It wasn’t a far drop. Unless you considered one hundred feet to be a far drop. Jimmy didn’t know nothing, and he sure didn’t know how deep a well was. George’s screams were muffled by the sock in mouth, as he fell deep into the well those many, many autumns ago.
            That was the story the kids made up when they played all the way down in the valley between the streets, past the locust trees and catalpas, in the very back of the yard where his father didn’t want him to play.
            The following year Daniel couldn’t stand not knowing who George really was anymore, because he still heard the voice in the well whenever he went into the back yard. He broke down and asked his dad, “Who are George and Jimmy?” It was Labor Day weekend and they had gone out for one last swirl cone of ice cream at the whippy dip before it closed up shop for the season.
            “George and Jimmy who?” he asked back, though he knew.
            “There’s a voice in the well from a kid named George always talking about his brother Jimmy.”
            “I told you not to go down there,” his dad said, pulling the brim of his baseball cap down further over his brow to keep the end of summer sun out of his face. Flies and sweat bees buzzed around the garbage can that smelled of chocolate dairy and unfinished foot long chili dogs next to the picnic table.
            “Why not? It’s been capped.”
            “Old concrete isn’t always safe. In fact, I should fill that whole thing in.”
            “But who are they?”
            His father could have said it was all in his imagination, but he didn’t. “That well seems to hold old memories and just won’t let them go. Jimmy was a guy my dad went to high school with, until they hauled him off to jail, for what he did to his brother George. He pushed him down that well. Things didn’t go so good for Jimmy on the inside. After a few months in the slammer he found himself on the wrong side of a shiv. His parents sold the house not long after the incident, and it sat abandoned for many years. Nobody wanted it. People used to tell stories about this place all the time, when I was a kid. After I married your mom, houses weren’t cheap, in fact, just the opposite, so when I saw this one for sale as a fixer upper, I bought it up. We wanted to start a family and it was the only place we could afford. There’d always been ghost stories about the well, but I never expected you to hear them straight from George’s mouth.”
            The next weekend Daniel’s dad bought what must have been a ton of concrete and invited some friends over and they spent the day filling up the old well altogether. His dad knew a man who was a kind of priest, but not a priest, a person who knew things, secret things. He came and said a blessing on the well and planted a hawthorn tree right next to it. The voice in the well grew quiet for the most part after that, except on early fall days when the wind grows cold but the green grass is still shining, bright and alive. 

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Read my previous Halloween pieces of ghostly flash fiction:

Fresh Cut Flowers

A Lingering Sound of Steam