About Benjamin McTish and the Door Through the Grandfather Tree

The Excerpt

Well, that’s very odd, thought Benjamin.  He had never noticed the peculiar looking key, hanging from a very worn and tattered green ribbon, on the rusted nail in the garden shed before. The garden shed was not a traditional shed in the least.  Even though the walls were constructed from very old worn out wood, the interesting element was the solid glass roof.  It was a very unusual version of a greenhouse, and the permanent home of the most rare and beautiful of begonias, grown by his grandmother Emmagene. It also doubled as Benjamin’s secret hideaway.

The design was one of a kind, built by his grandfather, Owen McTish, way back before Benjamin was even born.  The wood came from an old abandoned farm on the outskirts of town.  The remnants from the farm had sat in the big fields on the edge of the Gilley Forest for close to a hundred years or more now.   The property was part of a long forgotten estate that had iron clad deeds and legalities making it impossible to tear down.  Save for some wood that was sold off at auction, (which was now the main body of structure to the McTish garden shed), along with some rusted antique barnyard  equipment, nothing had been touched in all these long years.  The passed down rumors of the mysteries surrounding the Chickering farm was still local legend with all the residents, but especially with the children, in the small town of Grandlochcheshire.

And here he was now, sitting in the garden shed built of the same wood that had housed the infamous Chickerings all those long years ago, staring at a mysterious key.

Benjamin sat upright from his perch on top of the pile of burlap bags that covered the mound of hay his grandmother stored in the shed for new seedling cover and stared up in utter disbelief at the mysterious key.

His grandmother enjoyed the smell of fresh hay, as it reminded her of her youth on her family’s horse ranch.  This resulted in her always keeping much more hay than she truly needed under the burlap, making this a particularly cozy little spot for Benjamin to lounge about.  As an added attraction, it also happened to be in direct sight of the door and most of the surroundings, and proved to be the perfect lookout for any uninvited guests.

Benjamin whipped his head around quickly and scanned the shed for any movement.  Nothing out of the ordinary, no one else around, no sounds of any kind, he thought.  He sat still and stared into the air before him, going into his deeper mind to hunt down an answer.  After a moment he continued his search around the room.

The light coming in from the glass ceiling was soft and dark grey as it was about to rain.  This added a touch of anxiety to the moment, as Benjamin’s all too familiar feeling of questioning arose.  Everything appeared to look the same as it did every other day that he could remember…except for that confounding and peculiar key!  The hairs on Benjamin’s arms stood straight up and a flush washed over his entire body and he knew something big was about to happen.

Benjamin had the ability to know things that other people never realized.   He knew secrets about people, their inner workings, even before they knew about it themselves.  It wasn’t like he could see dead people, or tell you what you had hidden in your pocket, or anything like this.  It was more about sensing things.   He had gut feelings, but in a bigger more expanded way.  He was rather good at telling you when your Aunt Gertie was going to show up at your door, or where to look for the lost cat. However, he was really good at knowing if something was significant or not, if something needed a further or deeper exploration.

It had always been this way for Benjamin.  When something was about to occur he always had a warning it was coming.  The hair on his arms stood up and an extremely powerful tingling from the bottom of his toes would rush up over his body.  His heart would pound and a little sweat would instantly gather on his face and neck.  His breathing would speed up and his eyes would widen in anxious search of the source of his alertness.  Many times these sensations came with lightning rapid visions and sounds.  And always attached to these pictures was a deeply felt emotion clinging along for the ride.

Benjamin hesitantly turned back around slowly, like he was moving through thick syrup and stared at the hanging piece of tarnished metal.  He had a very uneasy feeling about this key.  In all his years of living with his grandparents he had never seen the key dangling in the shed.  Nor, in fact, had he seen its equal or anything remotely close to this anywhere in the whole of the household.

He estimated the key was somewhere around nine inches in length and looked as old as the hills…Or the Gilley Forest, came the distant thought to Benjamin for an unexplained instant.  It was intricately designed with marks that Benjamin couldn’t make out from where he was sitting.

An impending alarm flooded Benjamin’s mind as he began his slow concise descent off the mound of burlap covered hay.  He inched his way toward the foreign old relic of a key.  The key with a worn out tattered green ribbon to match, that hung from an equally rusted old nail pounded soundly into the beam of the garden shed, that was home to Benjamin McTish and all that he knew.

As Benjamin approached the key he couldn’t take his eyes off of it.  It was like a magnetic beam was pulling him closer and closer to his target.  Benjamin reached up on his toes and removed the key from its mysterious home on the old nail.  The weight of the key surprised Benjamin, he hadn’t expected it to be as heavy as it was.  He turned it around and around in his hands, studying every line of the design.  When suddenly, by accident, he noticed that at a certain angle when he looked at it almost sideways there appeared to be…words!

Words and symbols in some kind of extraordinary language that Benjamin had never seen before.  Benjamin’s heart started racing and his breathing grew louder.  His eyes widened and he quickly took the key over to the potting bench in the middle of the shed.  The bench stood immediately under the huge expanse of window ceiling and in between two other tables that were filled with pots and dirt.  He laid the key on the top near the corner, in the strong growing light of the imminent storm.

The eerie cast that the light makes when it is so bright, yet dark at the same time, gave illumination to the key on the table’s edge.  The table was a perfect height for Benjamin to scrunch on down with his hands on his knees at eye level with the key.  He marched back and forth, squatting and repositioning himself for every possible discoverable view of this curious relic without actually touching it.  This small, yet significant, distance gave solace to Benjamin as he went deep into dissecting thought.

Just as he was about to pick up the key to examine it closer for details, the door of the shed flew open.  A burst of exuberant and animated voices came at him so fiercely that he jumped from the sudden fright, scratching his shoulder on the edge of the table behind him.

“Blast it!” he groaned.

Quickly recognizing the voices of his two best mates, Annabel and Mathilda, he grabbed the key with stealth speed and put it in his back pocket.  He pulled his jumper over the protruding end of the key to hide it and turned around to see what the commotion was about.

There was Annabel in her familiar flower-printed rubber cowboy boots and her younger sister Mathilda in her ever more familiar lavender tutu, with today’s addition of a yellow, red and green plaid rain slicker and hat.  All her wild orange curls were peeking out everywhere around her face and she held something tightly in her closed up fist.  The girls were in the middle of a heavy debate.

“….and it always does,” Mathilda was saying in mid sentence.

“That’s not true,” Annabel defended vehemently, “Where do you get these ideas from anyway, you’re just too weird for words Tildie.  I mean it.  You really are starting to bug me.  I just wish you would find some friends your own age already, as if anyone would be friends with you, and leave me alone!” shouted Annabel with force as she kept walking towards Benjamin.

With this, Mathilda stopped dead in her tracks and looked up as her sister walked away from her.  Her eyes began to instantly fill with huge blinding hot tears.  Benjamin could see Mathilda beginning to lose it completely and he could also see the rage in Annabel’s trudge towards him.  He made a small gesture with his eyes for Annabel to turn around.  However, before Annabel could understand what Benjamin’s coded expression meant, Mathilda’s sweet little round face was rapidly contorting.  With this her little shoulders were bouncing up and down from the weight of her silent wailing.

This was the kind of crying that one makes when the hurt is so sudden that your brain can’t react as fast as your body.  Instantly your eyes fill up and closed all at once.

Unprompted, Mathilda’s clenched fist opened and the three gum balls that had been held prisoner, loosened their stickiness in slow motion and fell to the ground, leaving dots of candy flavored red, green and white imprints on her sweaty palm.  She held her stiff sticky little rainbow colored hand open like it was something defective and unattached to her.  Her rain hat was falling down over her forehead from the jiggling of her bouncing shoulders.   And then with all the force of her tiny little person…it came.  A huge pile of hurt rushing out of her mouth and filling the room, instantly covering Annabel in shame.

When Annabel finally turned around and saw the incredible anguish of her words, her heart practically popped out of her body.  She ran with urgency back to her sister and fell to her knees.

Wrapping her arms around Mathilda she urged, “Oh Tildie, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it…really, I didn’t mean it.  Please Tildie, you know I love you.  Please stop crying.”

Benjamin stood behind Annabel and attempted to help the situation by reassuring Mathilda that she was indeed his best mate, equal only to her sister Annabel, and he couldn’t imagine one without the other.

“Blimey Tildie, we’re the THREE Muskydeers ein’t we?” offered Benjamin.

Finally the gentle coaxing of love from her sister began to slow Mathilda’s seemingly relentless sobbing.  Now she had hiccups mixed in with gentle sobs and loads of snot.  Annabel took her own sweater sleeve, spit on it a little, picked up Mathilda’s sticky hand and wiped it. Mathilda whimpered through a very runny nose and all the wetness of tears and snot caused a big slobber bubble when she spoke, making the word gum balls come out gum bowls instead.

“I di.dent know…B.Bellie…I just…oh no! I dr..dropped the gum bowls…I’m s..sorry Bellie…”

Attempting not to giggle, Annabel assured her baby sister with a small smile, “Ssshh Tildie, it’s okay, we can just wipe them off, it will be fine.”

Benjamin nodded in reassurance from his end.

Annabel wiped her sister’s tears and her profoundly running nose with the back of her sweater sleeve and propped her rain hat back up on her head.   Then the sisters leaned in, resting their foreheads against each other, they looked deeply into one another’s eyes for a very long moment. Slowly a small smile started to grow between them.  With this Mathilda threw her arms around Annabel’s neck and Benjamin exhaled a deep breath of relief.

The Wickcliff girls were the most truest and best mates that Benjamin ever had, without exception.  It had been almost a year since he sat in his bedroom window and watched in curious amusement as the moving van unloaded the entirety of the Wickcliff belongings into the two story cream house with the forest green trim, next door to his grandparents.

About the Author:

June lives with her soon to be husband and best friend Ray, his youngest son and their two dogs, seven chickens and two ducks, in Santa Cruz Ca. Ray’s two older kids live respectively in LA and San Francisco.

June spends her days writing and sometimes painting her well known series of Rock n Roll icons.This series of work, the McTish characters, are a part of June in every sense of the word. “This work brings a deep sense of joy and passion for me in a very profound way, like nothing else that I do.”
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