The McGinty Legacy

By the night the biggest storm in twenty years had hit the forgotten McGinty place, the old farmhouse had been abandoned for almost nineteen years. Its roof sagged from years of neglect and wind and driving rain that the broken shingles let in by the bucketful during every summer monsoon. Mold and termites and water damage had left the interior a crumbling mess of cracked wooden floorboards and rotting plaster that a good sneeze from an old man could obliterate in an instant.

By midnight the monsoon storm was in full swing. Low-hanging clouds rode across the sky like waves in a stormy sea. Thunder crashed, echoing through the surrounding hills while blinding flashes of lightning illuminated the wind-blown and sand-scoured whitewash on the walls of the old house.

By two in the morning, the straining rafters on the west end of the house began to sag from the powerful wind that beat against the decaying gable. The roof, so lovingly built by the hands of its owner forty three years before, could only stand so many years without attention and its time had come to give up the ghost.

At 4:17 AM, the joists on the west end finally gave. The old wooden beams, heavy with water, sagged and pulled loose from their supports as the truss collapsed and crashed through the remains of the ceiling, tumbling in a heavy mass down into what was left of the dining room. The termite-eaten floorboards gave way with a crackling noise as the roof finally came to rest in the basement.

By 10:00 AM, sunlight reached into corners of the old McGinty house where it had never shone before. The bright summer sun blazed into a hidden area of the basement, only four feet wide, which had been hastily walled-up exactly eighteen and a half years before. Now, half-buried among roof joists and chunks of plaster and oaken floor beams, the half-clothed bones and the gap-toothed, grinning skull of a dead man were plainly visible through the hole in the floor. Pieces of yellowed, parchment-like skin still clung to the remains, and there, sitting in the middle of the denim-covered skeleton, was a decorative metal box that lay on its side; the heavy engraved padlock that gleamed dully in the morning sun locked the lid down tight.

As the summer heat warmed the painted metal, a series of plunking noises could be heard as the sides of the box bowed outward and then slowly relaxed, again and again, as if something inside were stretching out, testing its limits, fighting against its metal prison. Then, finally, the movement stopped, and the box fell silent once again.

At 1:00 PM, on the gravel path leading from the house to the long abandoned dirt road, a gleaming dark green Buick, fresh off the factory floor, rolled over gravel that hadn’t been disturbed in a decade and came to a stop at the front gate of the McGinty place. The motor fell silent as the ignition was turned off. Doors opened. Doors closed. The crunch of shoe leather meeting gravel and the snap of a rusting padlock being forced open broke the silence. The gate swung wide. The gate shut. Shoe leather squelched across muddy turf, and the sound of curses and shoe leather being scraped on wooden porch steps drifted across the yard. The front door gave way to a heavy sledgehammer. Shoe leather stepped across the threshold for the first time in eighteen and a half years.

At 1:09 PM, the Mouth of Hell opened wide, and screamed.
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