MFT - The Salem Gates (excerpt)

So I asked you guys which you wanted... poetry or an excerpt from The Salem Gates... and the majority of you guys tweeted me, asking for The Salem Gates! So here it is.



This is rough, but I tried to tidy it up a little bit for y'all.




The Salem Gates

(Excerpt)

"If you're looking for time to kill, go and explore the neighbourhood, we have our own tomb in the graveyard," Wren's mom said, oohing and wriggling her fingers at them.

"Graveyard it is," Kady said, rolling her eyes and turning to see Wren standing behind her. "Come on then."

Wren dawdled, flexing his own eyes at the thought of hearing more of Kady's voice. "Do you need any help mom?" he asked.

"No, we're not painting for a few days yet," she said, "go and learn something about our family."

"Like how they came to get such a huge house," Kady smirked, "that's the kind of stuff I want to know."

"They built it," Wren said. "Do we have to go to the grave yard?"

Kady shook her head and gripped Wren's jacket, pulling him out of the front door, down the path and out of the fence. "It's just down here," she said, pacing down the street.

They stopped at the thick iron fence at the bottom of the path. The gates were rusted shut. Kady pushed at them, slamming them with bottom of her hands, grunting and sighing as they didn't budge, she gave in to kicking them.



"Are you going to help?" she asked, swiping back her hair in frustration.

"Maybe it's off limits," Wren suggested, peeking through the iron bars.

"Or maybe it's where all the fun stuff is," she grinned, pulling at one of the rusted bars.

"Yeah—I mean, how much fun can be had in a graveyard!" Wren sighed. "We should go back and take a car, go into town, explore."

"Or," she said, smiling, "we try and get through here." She tried again at wielding the bars apart, figuring that she might be able to get through the slim space.

"Can't I jus—"

"Wimp!" Kady shouted, putting a leg through and then shimmying the rest of her body through, oohing and aahing until she popped out into the graveyard. "You have to come through now."

I don't have to do anything, Wren rolled his eyes and measured the small space of the gates. He tried to make the gap wider, but it didn't budge, and he didn't expect it to, it was worth the try though. He pushed himself through the gate, falling to his knees as he thrust himself through.

"All we need to do now is find the tomb," Kady said, looking at the field of gravestones.

Wren climbed back to his feet and walked down a small path to a huge clearing. The grass was mowed and colourful plants grew near the graves and making veins across the marble headstones, all of them in what looked like a table, neat rows of gravestones all white marble.

"Here, I found it!" Kady called, from across the graveyard, under several trees. "It's one of those walk in ones.".

Wren hurried over to the vault. By the time he walked inside, Kady had already started to light some candles.

"Why do you have a lighter?"

She rose an eye to him. "We're living off candles," she said, as if it had been blatantly obvious. She continued to light the rest of the candles that were already there.

Two statues, one at either side of the tomb, both of them were woman, similar in looks, although one of their heads was bowed, while the other looked angry.

"Is this great-aunt Dierdra and great-gran Carolyn?" Wren asked, touching the soft powder stone of the statues faces.

"Who?"

"The people who lived here when my mom was a child—and the amount of times I've had to do family trees is quite unreal," he chuckled to himself, starting a new school each semester he'd learnt how to do things more than once—his family tree was one of them.

"It isn't that big of a family though is it? And you don't know who your dad is—" she said, glancing up at Wren in the candle light, trying not to smirk.

"My mom won't tell me his name, she thinks I'll go searching for him when I turn 18."

"Will you?"

"Probably, I want to know why he left my mom on her own."

Kady snorted. "My mom told me a story about aunt Jen, she said, it was her own fault that she got pregnant when she did, and the man she was meant to elope with stood her up." It was true, Wren had heard the same story, but it had never been his mom's fault in her version of the story.

"Yeah well, I just wanna know why he did it," Wren said, brushing a patch of stone to sit on.

"Cause he's a jerk, that's -" before Kady could finish she was tossed across the tomb.




The ground started to shift, sending them both wriggling around and trying to keep still. Wren tripped over his own legs, falling into the bowing statue and tearing the stone hand from it.

Back so soon, faint whispers snapped at the back of their necks as they lay on the floor unconscious. Teach a lesson, learn something, another outburst caught them, slapping their faces with its breath. Take control, eh? It whimpered, see the sun, again.

Kady shot up as the voice chopped at her. She started choking on the dust as her throat hitched at the coarse air. She began cursing about what had happened, and then she touched her head and felt something warm. It was blood. She looked down at where her head had been to see a small pool of it. "Wren!" she shouted, seeing his body sprawled across the floor. "Oh, god! You better be okay," she said, shaking his leg.


What did you think?

Are you adding The Salem Gates to your GoodReads 'to-read' list?


-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.