When I was in college I took a creative writing class. Part of our final assignment was to write a 10 page short story. I decided to do a modern retelling of the Scottish fairy tale Tam Lin. This is the "prologue" of my story. I welcome any and all constructive criticism, I am always looking to improve. Don't leave nasty comments, if you don't like my work just close the page, no one will be the wiser, thanks!
When Janet was a little girl she knew that no one could possibly know more stories than her GiGi. GiGi was old when Granny was little, she wore green all year long and made the worlds best peanut butter cookies.Every date night Janet’s Mama and Daddy took her to GiGi’s house to spend the night. Those were the best times; They would build a fort and defend it from Yankee soldiers, bake cookies and eat the dough; which Mama never let her do at home, finally it would be time for bed and Janet always asked for the same bedtime story; the story of Tom Allen.
Once upon a time, GiGi would begin. The whole of this land was wild. Indians lived right where we are now, Creek and Cherokee, and they were always fighting each other. They had their spirits, both good and evil and they had charms against them. Then the white man came. He brought with him industry and his own demons that the wise of both parties realized were the same as those of the cherokee.
Years passed, the land became more tame that it had been, but in the dark corners of the land still lurked the superstitions and the evil, waiting for a chance to return. Then a rich man with a gold pocket watch came to the land and in one of the dark corners he saw a way to make a profit by building a mill. It was at a bend in the river, where the water ran swift and deep,
All of the old people were against the project. The grandmothers told of children going to gather berries there and never returning, they said the evil fey folk took them because of their beauty and purity. The grandfathers said that young men were tempted by the beautiful fairy queen, who lured them into the swift moving water to their death. The Indians said that devils lurked in the water, and poisoned the riverbed so nothing could nest there and nothing could grow. The man with the gold pocket watch ignored all the warnings and set about building his mill, his young son Tom by his side.
Tom was the most good and handsome man in the land. He was tall with hair that was black with traces of steel blue. He was brown from working in the sun all his life, for his father, though rich, did not think it beneath him to send his son outside to work. He was gentle and he was strong and knew what was right. He stood by his father as he set about building the biggest cotton mill in the south.
The design of the mill was strange. It was thought up by the man with the gold pocket watch and he would not tell anyone, not even Tom, where his ideas came from. The mill was to take up both sides of the river. On one side were the sorting and carding rooms, on the other were rooms that turned out the cotton fabric. Connecting the two was a huge bridge with several water wheels attached to the bottom that powered the mill. No one had ever seen anything like it.
From the beginning things were strange at the mill site. Three crews were hired and then dismissed because of missing tools and machinery. A fourth crew was hired and then left the night after a body was found deep in the foundation of the building. The final crew was bossed by Tom, who would allow no superstition to spook his men and was able to finish the mill faster than any man before or after would have thought possible.
Finally the mill opened and for a while everything went well for Tom Allen and the man with the gold pocket watch; but the stories of the old people should have been listened to, for there was evil at Carterhaugh, it had been waiting and watching, it had seen Tom Allen and it wanted him for its own.
It happened one cold October night. Tom Allen, who had been put in charge of the mill, was checking the machinery, long after the men had left for the night. The stories say that as the midnight church bells struck a beautiful woman was seen by him on the far side of the mill. There was a small valley there and it was near the hills beyond the valley that Tom Allen saw her.
She beckoned to him, and he, struck by her beauty, crossed the bridge.
It was icey that night, unnaturally so. More than once Tom slipped and nearly fell into the river, but it wasn’t until he was opening the door to the opposite mill building that his boot caught on a board and he slipped into the icy river.
A large search party was sent out at dawn the next morning but there was no body found. Not a trace of Tom Allen has been seen since. His father went mad with grief and closed the mill, it stood empty for a long time before anyone noticed it didn’t seem to be decaying the way a wooden building normally does. It grows older and more grown over but it never falls into the river. The people of the land take this as a sign; that there is a great power at work at the Carterhaugh mills and stay away from it. They bolted the great iron gate that was at the start of a long dirt path and they told their children of the evil there.
“Is Carterhaugh a real place GiGi?” Janet would ask when the story was over. GiGi would smile, “You know it is little girl, it straddles the river in between the big hills and the interstate, it’s all grown over now, you can barely see it from the road.”
“And is Tom Allen real?”
“Some say they’ve seen him, by the river bank or over on top of the big hills, he rides every seven years with the fairy queen’s band.”
Janet would always be falling asleep at this point, but she would find enough energy to say, “I will find him, GiGi, I will save him from the Fairy Queen.”
“No Janet,” GiGi said with a fright. “No you must not go down to Carterhaugh, promise me!” But Janet was asleep, dreaming of fairy princes and didn’t hear her Great Grandmother’s plea.
