Creative Writing: A Hero's Journey

Another day was so much like the one before, and the many before that. He walked the house and grounds, slowly, letting time pass as it must. Alone, present but not present, for can one truly be there if no one knows of it? Like the saying he’d heard more than once over the unmeasured time of his existence: If a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? He ambled through the back yard, pausing under the tree from which he’d been hanged, cursing his tormentors, vowing to haunt them for all time. But it was he who was cursed, trapped here for eternity.

At least the old woman had been entertaining, after a fashion. Family visited over the years, a husband came and lived and died. In the final years, she had even talked to him, well, at him at least. Just as she talked to many people who weren’t really there in her growing senility. Did she really sense his presence, he wondered. She’d spoken to him by name sometimes, but also calling him Rasmus or Rupert or Reginald, not Rufus. Just a crazy old woman, finally failing and passing peacefully in her sleep. He’d seen her spirit rise and fade into the next plane, a journey he was denied by his curse.

There had been others who seemed to detect him over the decades. The time the mistress of the house brought in a ‘spiritualist’ for

The old woman had been gone for weeks, but passing through the front walls, he saw a vehicle driving down the worn dirt road toward the house. The grounds had been visited twice since the old woman’s death, officials of one sort or another, looking the grounds over, inspecting pipes and furnace ducts. But this ‘car’ towed a trailer behind it, packed with boxes and odd pieces of furniture. The driver of the car was a lone young woman, and as he observed her features and form, he felt something he had not felt for decades: the desire for her companionship, her