Week 1: Storytelling--The Echo of Tommy Lin

There once was a little boy named Tommy Lin who lived on a farm.  Now this little boy was not your typical, somewhat-meddlesome but rather well-behaved child.  No, Tommy Lin was the kind of boy who would sneer at you and cause shivers to roll down your spine and goosebumps to pebble on your skin.  He was the boy who you would turn around and watch as you walked away from him so as to never turn your back to him.  He was the boy whose laughs seemed to echo on forever as he mocked you.  He was the kind of boy who brought you nightmares.

And yet, somehow, Tommy Lin always seemed to maneuver so that adults never saw him act out.  While even they refused to turn their backs on him, nothing could ever be proven against him--and you can't do anything about a child who simply gives you the creeps.  But that all changed the day Echo, Mr. Lin's barn mouser, was found drowned in a well.

You see, Tommy Lin never did like that cat.  He was always locking it out of the house, giving it spoiled milk, or kicking it if it got too close.  Then one day poor old Echo raced right into a baited trap Tommy Lin had left for him; I mean, have you ever known a mouser not to chase after a live mouse?  Echo was only doing what he was supposed to, and he wound up dead.

In fact, it was not until later that evening that Echo was discovered.  Mr. Lin ran outside to find his dog Pioneer whining at something in the farm's well, and upon investigation found a strangled, waterlogged cat floating on the top of the water.  Yet Echo had done one final valiant deed before his drowning--he had scratched Tommy Lin across the face, marking the boy for his murder.  When confronted by his father, Tommy Lin only laughed; he laughed all the way to the correctional center and behind padded doors.  And, to this day, his laughs still echo through the fields of his father's farms, along the roads of the town, and in the cell where he stands grinning through the bars. . .





Author's Note.  This story is based on the nursery rhyme "Ding, dong, bell," which can be found in The Nursery Rhyme Book, edited by Andrew Lang and illustrated by L. Leslie Brooke (1897).  The original rhyme is written as follows:

Ding, dong, bell,

Pussy's in the well!

Who put her in?--

Little Tommy Lin.

Who pulled her out?--

Dog with long snout.

What a naughty boy was that

To drown poor pussy-cat,

Who never did any harm,

But kill'd the mice in his father's barn.

I decided to take a risk (and a new storytelling route for me) and create a mini horror story out of it.  Now to find a dying campfire on a farm and wait for a dark, cloudy night. . .

Image Information.  A photograph of a farmhouse ruin in the winter.  Photographer Peter Dargatz. Source: Pixabay.