Les Autres ( A Short Story )

The unexplained disappearance of the reclusive author had never been properly investigated,at least not to the satisfaction of his fans,his readers and most of all his adopted son,the wannabe reporter on the local rag.
For years this state of dissatisfaction festered amongst the interested parties,who if nothing else managed to commemorate the renowned scribbler’s vanishment with an annual pilgrimage of sorts.
Then one year with the weather being particularly inclement,even for the usually desolate Scottish lochs, only the reporter had made it to the venue,the deserted house.Whereupon finding himself alone resolved in an instant to make a foray into the abandoned domicile to perhaps, in his own mind, satisfy an unquenchable curiosity.
Nothing actually came of that quixotic foray,nothing that is apart from a chance discovery,in the drawer of an antique dresser of a manuscript.
A suicide note perhaps? may be not.A last will and testament? no one however questioned its authenticity when it was scanned and reproduced in the local weekly under the adopted son’s byline.The absent author alluded to his own ineluctable disappearance in the form of a poem.Simply perhaps to add to whatever mystery was bound to ensue from his vanishment.

When winter’s cadence sounds,
burn their pictures
the photographs of the dead
burn them,
so that they shan’t
trouble you again
when winter’s cadence sounds;

the gardens are shrouded
in snow
upon which no earthly foot
will fall,
and the door chimes dormant
hang suspended by a thread
of your own disbelief;

an imperceptible menace
waiting for a breath,
a snap of cold winter’s
air to cut the thread
and send it crashing,

crashing onto the floor,
where you shan’t hear it
except in your imagination’s
ear firmly fixed on the
sound of winter’s cadence.

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