Portal House - Chapter 1
A Short Trip
I don’t know why I never look where I’m walking.
I slammed the car door and locked it while fishing my phone out of my pocket. No notifications on the lock screen except one missed call with a voice message. I dialed my voicemail inbox, positioning the phone to my ear, then I tripped. I spilled my leftover lunch from work all over my sidewalk. I cracked the screen on my phone. A gust of autumn breeze blew a stinging pain into the fresh scrape on my elbow. It was damp with blood. My stomach growled at the scent of marinara sauce and meatballs that I’d planned to finish eating.
What the hell did I trip over? I looked back, and there it was. For a third time this week, the stupid little wooden chair moved from the edge of the porch to the middle of the sidewalk. I brushed myself off, picked up my phone, and left the food on the sidewalk. Maybe they were hungry, too. Do they even eat?
“What happened to you?” My brother asked with a stifled laugh in his voice.
“Nothing. I tripped over my feet,” I lied, walking around him to open the first drawer on the kitchen island. I glanced at the stove hoping for dinner, but no such luck. “What did you eat?”
“Noodles. Why do you smell like pizza? Did you bring me any?”
I sighed. “It’s spaghetti, and it’s outside. Help yourself.”
Before I looked up again, he was already out the door, cursing my name.
I followed him out, saying, “Do you want me to bring you a fork? Or a shovel?”
“It was the chair, wasn’t it? I told you it moved on its own and you didn’t believe me,” he said, crouching in the grass to inspect it.
“I never said that. I said I didn’t want to talk about it, and I still don’t.” I picked up the takeout box and scooped up both of my soiled meatballs and the majority of the grassy spaghetti. “Here’s your pizza,” I said, handing him the box as I walked back to the door.
“Why?”
“Because the more attention we give them, the more they seem to want to mess with us.” I sighed, turning the ice-cold handle.
He frowned, approaching the porch. “They? So you think it’s multiple ghosts?”
I tried the handle again, but the door didn’t budge. I looked back at him, but noticed the chair wasn’t knocked over by my fall anymore. It had waited until we both weren’t looking to right itself, as if inviting one of us to sit.
“I think…” I started to say, but my throat tightened.
He followed my glassy-eyed gaze to the chair behind him, then ran to the door, swatting my hand off the handle to try it for himself.
“I think they locked us out, buddy.”
To Be Continued…
This is great. It reminds me a bit of a great podcast about story-telling, I think it's The Story Grid, specifically the episode about the 5 commandments of story-telling. You hit on all of them.
1. firstly you have your inciting incident, the trip and fall, it arouses a reaction from the protag. From that the incident creates...
2a.) escalating conflict, and it does it quickly. The fall isn't just a fall, the spaghetti is spilled AND the phone is cracked...and then you have
2b.) a reversal of audience expectation resultant of this, where the source of the fall is a wooden chair in the middle of the road, one of the last things your reader expects to be the source of the conflict.
3. From there you introduce your crisis, which is a deliberation moment for you protag: either a best bad decision or a good irreconcilable decision. I think in this instance its best bad decision: either he ignores the haunted chair, or he investigates the haunted chair, which he does a little bit of both.
4. Climax = an active answer to the crisis. If there was any doubt that nefarious entities were involved, this is the first time its palpable. Where we didn't see a chair move before, we were just introduced to it in a weird spot. This time we see both actors react to a chair that is upright by itself.
5. Resolution. The chair is no longer the issue, a new scene and inciting incident (being locked out) is introduced.
Well done, close to the perfect scene from a story-telling standpoint.
This was a fun first chapter! Just enough mystery to intrigue me to keep reading. Great job!