"The Rusted Gates of Avalon"

A chapter from Avalon Summer

Each year, as July reaches its final days, I always feel like summer is slipping through my fingers. August is on the horizon, but August is the final act, the last hurrah. At the end of July, I’m caught in a paradox of desires: to start the summer over AND to welcome the beginning of fall. Both feel urgent, making it hard to enjoy these last few weeks of true summer. Embracing the now, basking in late summer’s glory, is necessary. Otherwise, it will slip through my fingers, and by September, I’ll wonder what happened to these fleeting days.

As a reminder of early summer (both this year’s summer and summer’s of long past), I’m sharing a chapter from my new novel, Avalon Summer. This is a bit of a departure, since I don’t normally publish fiction here on the newsletter, but I thought I’d experiment this month. Maybe if this sort of thing gets a good response, I’ll do more of it. Short stories, chapter excerpts, etc.

Anyway, here’s the chapter. Enjoy!

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The Rusted Gates of Avalon

The woods shivered and lurched from side to side. The branches shook their leaves, rattled their bones.

The wind felt good in the hotness of the heavy thicket.

“Avalon is ruled by nine queens. They rule it with terrible magic.” Sarah trudged through a sea of brown leaves, her knobby knees smudged by dirt and nicked by scratches from thorny brambles. She pushed a strand of brown hair behind her ear, a nervous habit.

Alex followed. “What’s the magic do?” His dark eyes were like shining marbles peering out from his coffee-colored skin.

“Puts people to sleep. Does enchantments and stuff. It’s powerful.”

“So we have to fight the witches?”

“The queens.”

“Okay, queens.” Alex looked up above the shaking trees and caught flashes of blue sky, his narrow chin jutting out with slight defiance.

“We have to save the knight. The Oak-Hearted Knight.” Sarah pushed back branches, bounded over tree trunks.

“He’s got an oak heart?”

“No, it just means he’s, like, good and stuff. He’s strong and helps his friends.”

“Okay…”

Alex made a face, but Sarah didn’t see. She was resolute, quixotic. She marched through the woods with one purpose, one mission: the gates.

“Anyway,” she continued, “he went to Avalon to find his lady love, and the queens trapped him in a magic sleep.”

“That’s it? We have to wake up some dude?”

“That’s not it!” Sarah stopped and swung herself around to face him. “We have to break the enchantment!” Her eyes flashed, her heart beat faster. She had to make him see that this quest was worthy of their summer, that it was something special. “And that means fighting the nine queens. Each one has a different magic, and they want to trap us too. Keep us forever in Avalon.”

“Okay, fine, but how do we fight them? We don’t even have swords.”

Sarah knew his frustration. She longed for a sword too. “We’ll get swords. My grandpa said he’d make them.”

“Yeah, but he hasn’t yet. Let’s just go back and go swimming. I’m hot.”

The heat was measurable by the number of bees that swarmed through the woods. With every step into the heart of the forest, their numbers increased tenfold. Sarah bit her lip and tried not to see the bees or feel their buzzing against her neck.

“Is this all a story from a book?” Alex asked.

“No,” Sarah answered, “not yet.”

“Look!” Alex pointed across the creek.

They had been following the banks of the water since they came into the woods. Now they met the bridge that would take them across.

An old oak had fallen: wayward soul, unadmired lord of the forest. It had lain itself across the waters of the creek. A tree bridge to carry them on their quest.

A beehive hung low in an ash tree on the other side.

The bees came in and out of the hive, a dozen at a time.

“Let’s go back,” said Alex.

Sarah put her foot on the tree bridge. “We’re doing this.”

Inching forward, tennis shoes met with slick moss. Bark flaked off with each footfall. The creek below ate the pieces, gushing in a torrent of brown silt and algae, crashing through the silence like a thunderstorm.

The bees were the only other sound, buzzing like saw-blades thirsty for skin. Sarah’s skin prickled, and the heat flushed to her face. Bees surrounded her. Her feet moved unconsciously across the log. She floated. She walked the tightrope. Tennis shoes at last met heavy, sodden earth. She almost fell to her knees when she made it across.

Instead, she stared at the beehive, hypnotized by the swarm, waiting for their stingers, wondering if she would die.

“Go, go!” Alex shouted from halfway across the bridge. He barreled forward. Sarah ran, brushing past the beehive and the ash tree and galloping up the hill beyond.

Alex followed her, close on her heels, and the buzzing of the bees faded, mingled with the echoing sounds of the creek, until they were at the top of the hill and the silence of the sun was the only thing they could hear. And the trees were thinner. A clearing up ahead. Almost like someone’s backyard lawn. The musty leaves of the forest floor were gone. Disappeared. Brambles too. Replaced by sunshine and green grass and open air. But it was no backyard, just a clearing: an empty, flat, unremarkable clearing.

And in the center of it were the gates.

Cold and iron, dark as shadows, they were shut and locked, two heavy, silent sentinels that guarded no one and enclosed nothing. They weren’t attached to any wall, they didn’t block any path. They simply rested in the middle of the clearing, sprouted up from the ground like a line of weeds. Wrought iron and ancient-looking, they made no sense. Just a pair of gates for a house unbuilt, for a park unfinished, for a property unclaimed. Or they were made by fairy hands. Or by witches.

“It’s the only way to Avalon,” Sarah whispered.

Alex didn’t care about the silence or the solemnity of the place. He marched up to the gates and rattled them.

“Locked,” he said. He turned back to Sarah. “I don’t get it. Are we supposed to open them? Why not just go around?”

“That’s not the point.”

“What do they do? Take us to this other place?”

“To Avalon.”

“Good, let’s go.”

Sarah had the key out of her pocket before she even knew it.

“A skeleton key!” Alex leaned in. He gaped at the strange object.

Sarah held it like a relic, something holy, something true. It burned with unseen fire, but Sarah held it fast. It was the first piece of magic she’d ever held.

“I found it in my grandpa’s garage. Just lying there in the bottom of his toolbox.”

“But it can’t work, can it?”

It would. Sarah knew it.

But when she pushed the key into the lock something stopped her from turning it. She looked back, saw Alex’s face, saw the sun shining high in the empty blueness of mid-June. The heat from the sun was too hot, the woods too full of afternoon insects. And Alex’s face was too unbelieving. He looked at Sarah and the gates as if they were nothing more than a game, like freeze tag or hide-and-go-seek or ghosts-in-the-graveyard. Somewhere, far off in the subdivision up the hill, past the woods, a garage door clanked open and drew with it the faint sound of car doors opening and shutting. The sun was a spotlight now, a glaring voyeur, an unkind face. The trees around the clearing swayed, their leaves humming with a warning.

“We can’t go in,” she said, taking the key out of the lock. “It’s the wrong time.”

“Wrong time? No way, Sarah! We’re not leaving without going through. We came all the way here.”

“We can’t.” She turned her back on the gates. “Gotta be at dusk. The key doesn’t work without the moon and the sun both in the sky.”

“You just made that up.”

“Did not.”

“You did, and this game is stupid.”

Sarah didn’t answer. She knew Alex was wrong, but she couldn’t explain why. The gates were real. Avalon was real. She knew it had to be.

“Fine,” she said, putting the key back in her pocket. “Let’s go swimming.”

“Or play space army?” Alex was eager.

“Fine, I’ll play space army with you.”

Alex straightened his shoulders and took charge. “We’re using guns.”

“Fine.”

Neon-colored squirt guns sprinkled the grass with misty streams of water. Vast alien races fell beneath the onslaught. Alex stood triumphant upon the bricks of Grandpa Ray’s fire pit, while Sarah’s eyes flitted every so often toward the edge of the woods. She thought she heard the buzzing of bees.

Somewhere, in that vast deepness of greens and browns and dark shade, the gates waited and kept watch. The skeleton key rattled in Sarah’s pocket. It almost whispered to her, and she watched as the sun fell lower in the sky and dusk made its slow creep into the world.

The space victory had been won. Alex wiped sweat and cold water from his brow and a bright grin peeled its way over his lips. He looked up toward the black and white house on the hill, saw the place where his bike rested against the garage wall, let his squirt gun drop to his side.

“Gotta go,” he said, then rushed up the hill in a mad, breakneck sprint.

Sarah followed, legs charging, but her heart seized up. Her lungs tightened. She felt the sting of regret.

She told herself: There would be another dusk, another chance. The gates would wait, the magic would hold. But still, she swallowed her regret.

Bats flitted above them in the tree tops, and soon Alex’s feet found the pedals of his bike. Sarah waved as he peeled away down the long asphalt driveway. Dreaming of ancient queens and sleeping warriors, Sarah ran in the opposite direction. The skeleton key rattled in her pocket, and then the screen door banged shut as she let it fly.

Grandma and Grandpa were already on the living room couch watching an old black and white Sherlock Holmes movie with Basil Rathbone. Grandpa had his bowl of popcorn resting on his lap. Grandma snored a little.

Sarah ran upstairs to her bedroom and shut the door. The room was empty; her brother must’ve been playing his video games in the spare room. She sat on her bed and caught her breath. Outside, through her window, she could still see the trees of the surrounding woods, darkened and forbidding. The fireflies had come out and danced on the lawn. She sat on her bed for a long time, holding the skeleton key in the palm of her hand.

The gates would wait. And she would be ready.

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Blog Posts of Interest

If you’re wondering what else I’m writing these days, my Works in Progress July 2023 post will explain what’s going on with my fiction.

And I’m happy to say that Avalon Summer is part of a trend: Short books are in this year! In this post, I muse a little on whether fantasy can be/is part of this trend, or if the genre and its fans are content with longer/longish books as the norm.

Over at The Paperback Picnic, Will Greatwich has a great essay about Pauline Gedge’s novel Stargate, a book I’d never heard of before but now am excited to read. (Warning: If you subscribe to The Paperback Picnic, your reading list will grow.)

J.Q. Graziano at Rediscovered Realms has a wonderful look back at an old D&D computerized board game from the 1980s that I had never heard of, reminding me of my nostalgia for the old Dark Tower board game.

And fellow SPFBO9 contender Ben Spencer’s Top Five Reasons to read Many Savage Moons convinced me! It may also convince you!

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And if I may convince you, both Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion are available in ebook and paperback format, so please consider checking them out!

Both are short books, so you’ll be on-trend by reading them!

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That’s it for now! Thank you for reading! And please consider buying my books HERE, or my short stories HERE.

And if you enjoyed this post but can’t afford a monthly subscription, you can always buy me a coffee. Thank you!