Once in a lifetime, after the rain is gone
#7 of WritingGroupChallenge
We bought a farm house, in a rural county, out in the waaaayyyy out boondocks. But the house didn't have a well. What? How can you have a farm and house without a water well.
So we started drilling for water. ... it did not go, ... Well.
This Week's Writing Challenge: "An opportunity like this only comes alongonce in a lifetime." Due date is 04/28/2020.
once in a lifetime, after the water's gone...
and you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
If you drill a well you will hit something: rock, clay, fossils, sand, coal, oil, and water and sometimes gases of various types.. Sometimes more rock than water, sometimes more water than rock, but if you find anything more than those two things, it could be an adventure.
We bought a big farm house and the surrounding land, because it was adjacent to her parent's property. Her parents were new to the county, and of course we didn't know anyone in the area either, yet. When they found out which property we were buying the neighbors were,... kinda stand-offish, we didn't know why at the time.
Now, the county was not a poor county, there were some drawbacks; there was no cell service, and the local phone company wasn't a real company, it was a guy who did all the installations, ran the wires up to the house, inside the house, installed the phones, satellite link, and hooked everything up, at the other end. It was going to be about four weeks before he could get a contractor out to run the posts, or if we wanted, we could run it underground in a trench.
Then the other thing was, having the water trucked into the cistern. The people who lived there never bothered with a water well. Sorry, could you think about that for a minute? 157 Acres of land with NO well? How does that even make sense? But wait, the roof was basically built upside down, inverted, so that any rain, snow, hail, any water that fell was collected and stored in the cistern.
But why no well? Her folks had a well at their spread, what's the problem? Basically most of the property was Sea-Level plus forty meters. That's not even a deep well, that's nearly a surface well. Closing on the property and house happened at the bank, we all shook hands, and the bank had the deed, the sellers got their money, we had the mortgage, and the everyone walked away happy.
We started moving truck loads of our furniture to the new house. And phoned a drilling company for a well.
They came out, gave us a good quote and started in on the drilling. It was a Friday, and they said it would take all day, then Monday return and put the curb and the cap on, then pump it clean.
His crew got to work while he told me horror stories about unmarked graves, hitting oil drilling for water, drilling for oil and getting water instead, and how fracking was wrecking the water table way up in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. That was when the drill bit broke at eight and a half meters. It was ok, they had a spare bit on the truck. They drilled one and a half meters then that one broke too.
It was supposed to rain over the weekend, and we had the purifier still hooked up that came with the house; at least there'd be clean water, and they'd finish drilling on Monday.
That night I saw her for the first time.
She appeared to be by the foot of the bed, leaning forward, urgently mouthing and gesturing, trying to tell me something. It was like she was very far away, and I was seeing her through a fog, or mist. Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her make a sound, I heard nothing but the normal sounds of a house cooling off after sundown. One might guess, that I'd wake up - see an apparition -and scream, nor would one be wrong. I screamed like a little boy whose feet slipped off the bike's pedals. Of course my mate screamed because I had scared her with my scream... we didn't get much sleep that night. I explained what I saw, but the "ghost" was gone. Saturday's and Sunday's nights went about the same. She'd show up, try to tell me something and fail, I'd scream, she'd leave, rinse repeat.
I couldn't wait for Monday, to have them finish the well...
They came out Monday morning at 7:00 am, laying out rods and pipes. At 7:30 they knocked on the door and shouted up, that they were starting. Well, shouting up that it was their intention to start. But the big diesel motor for the drill rig wouldn't fire-up. They had to call a mechanic out, who spend all day fixing it. He finally got it running 15 minutes before quitting time.
Monday night she appeared, but while she seemed clearer visually, she was just as animated, and just as soundless.
Tuesday went better and they cleared the overburden, then the first clay layer, then sandstone layers, and hit the bedrock hard. Hard, as in, "they took it hard when the pipe casing shattered." Of all the things that happed Tuesday, that the casing broke above ground was the only good thing. They removed the broken casing and continued drilling. They made fair progress, almost three meters through solid rock. I went to bed an hour after dinner to try and make up for some lost sleep because; being awakened by a ghostly apparition/spirit/spooky thingy leads to lack of sleep. And as usual, the thing did appear; but this time was articulate, and spoke... er,.. said somethings that I 'heard'.
One, I had been expecting it to show up.
Two, it's speaking didn't wake my mate.
And three, it started off so quietly that I couldn't tell what it was saying.
When it got loud enough to hear, what it was saying wasn't in a language that I knew, and then it changed over to English at some point - it was still mumbling, still soft spoken, but giving a definitely scary warning: She/it said, in condensed form: "mumble, mumble, I harbinge for a "Power of The (long ago) Age." "You," she said, pointing at me, "Stop drilling here, drill anywhere wanted, but not near the house, if you continue to drill here- there are consequences -- of some amorphous but terrible form, involving a "Power of The Age." And although out loud she said, "Power of a (long passed) Age," to me it sounded something like: Late Holocene Soul Devouring Elder Spirit Vengeance.
An opportunity like this only comes along once in a lifetime. I mean how many times have you received a warning from a harbinger for an elder god? I smile when I think of it now. "Power of The (long gone) Age" doesn't sound evil, scary, eldrich, or threatening, but I swear to you, when she said it, I broke out in a cold sweat, and pictured something like Cthulhu! No kidding!
We ended up drilling farther down the hill about a quarter mile away from the house, near a 'sometimes' creek which showed up in only in the rainy seasons. After drilling through five meters of overburden and wet sand, we hit a layer of dense clay one meter thick and then solid limestone for two meters, wet sand and then clay. Then at 39.6 meters we hit a confined aquifer of uncontaminated water, called an artesian saturated layer.
We didn't even need to buy a pump.
1347 words