Member-only story
When the Tattie Bogles Come
First Line Fiction — Prompt# 27
He thought the old legends were just stories — until he found the cave. He thought caves were supposed to be on the side of a hill, not at the bottom of one. He expected to see a large, wide opening, a yawn frozen in stone. Todd MacKenzie stood with his thighs trembling, a hand clenched around a sapling oak, holding him at an angle as he leaned forward, staring into the crooked, gaping grimace, drinking in a turbid stream leached from a marshy bog somewhere up above.
Sweat ran icy cold down his spine.
“The hell I’m going in there,” he cussed to the trees. Todd knew he was out of choices and nearly out of time — the lines from the old book repeated in his head.
“It dinnae matter if ye cannae grasp what it tis. Look aroond to see what ye took an’ giv it back. When the Tattie Bogle has ye intae his gaze, it wonna stop until the moor echoes wi’ the last gasps of those ye haud dear.”
Nine months pregnant, Nicole had suitcases packed and stacked in the hall — not for a planned hospital stay. Their girls, Natalie, 12, sprightly and strong, who rarely backed away from anything or anyone, had hardly left her room and Felecia, 8, a more delicate flower, had freshly reattached herself to woobie — the baby blanket she’d finally weaned herself from two…
