When I was growing up, hayrides were popular among the church youth groups in Louisiana and Arkansas. We usually had them in late autumn when the night air was cool and nightfall came early. Someone would load a flatbed trailer with bales of hay. The kids would bundle up and bring blankets, and the driver would pull us through dark farm roads or lonely backroads that wound through dark stretches of forest. We would stop somewhere to sing songs or tell stories around a fire and roast hot dogs and marshmallows. When I think about those old hayrides, I feel a warm sense of nostalgia and a cozy kind of spookiness. I also feel an edge of teenage angst because there was usually a girl I wanted to be sitting with, but I was a shy lad so that never quite worked out. I was nineteen when I wrote the first draft of The Sign of the Sword so those feelings were still very fresh. Even though I substituted a horse-drawn carriage for a flatbed trailer full of hay, The Sign of the Sword is really a long hayride through a fantasy forest.
Here is a sample:
If it had not been for the glow of the carriage’s lamps, the darkness of night would have swallowed the carriage. Inky shadows hung on either side of them like dark curtains. Other than a tinge of ambient light from the crescent moon overhead and a few patches of gray where snow shone, the forest was pitch dark. The night was damp and full of dripping noises, and a fog was starting to rise.
“Hoohoohoo,” a strange voice called out from the gloom.
“What was that?” Angie asked.
“An owl, probably,” Chris said.
Arthur rubbed his nose. It was numb from the cold. The carriage rolled past the shambling remains of a towering oak tree that had been killed by lightning years ago. Twisted branches and sharp limbs gave the tree a wicked look. It looked like a giant monster guarding the trail.
The trail sloped downward for the next fifteen yards. The carriage lamps showed a wooden bridge and a small creek winding through the forest. Fog swirled in the flickering light of the lamps as the carriage creaked over the bridge. The fog was getting thicker and whiter by the minute.
“I used to have nightmares about these people that would appear in the fog,” Chris said. “It was like they were dead. They’d walk around like zombies, and just when you got close to them…they’d just disappear into the fog.” Chris was quiet for a moment. “I was always afraid they’d come back and grab me, maybe pull me into the fog and make me disappear along with them.”
You can see the dark forest and the edge of spookiness. You can’t really tell from this short piece, but Arthur has an unspoken attraction to Angie too. I got the part about the “fog people” from something one of my friends said when we were that age. I think it was from a dream he’d had. Wherever he got it, it was eerie as heck and too good not to use—especially since my characters were about to vanish in the fog themselves. (Oh, no! Tim! Now I’m too scared to read it. What if I have nightmares?) Relax. There aren’t any actual fog zombies in this story. Better luck next time.
