Blake Hollow Barn Novels & Stories

After an hour of driving they pulled up outside a cabin. Noticing Blake’s Hilux Melissa turned off the engine. It was the sort of cabin you saw in old horror movies, it had a chimney so a real fire was needed, it had a porch and a wicker swing chair. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as it looks.” Melissa said to herself as Brock went to get the suitcases out of the trunk. Going up the three steps Melissa knocked. There was no answer. “He may have gone hunting.” Brock said “Blake hunts?” She said incredulously.

Each stroke of the pedal takes me farther from the cracked wall, the trees closing in as the servants’ quarters fade behind me. The night breeze is cold, kissing my face and blowing my hair back every now and then. The moon is just a thin crescent tonight, barely enough light for me. But I know where I’m going. A while later, the bushy path ends and opens up into a stretch of empty wheat fields. Finally. After riding past the fields, I arrive at the old barn sitting abandoned at the edge of the property. The poor structure has been falling apart for years, abandoned by the Hartville family after they relocated to another pack.

The air smells like horses and male sweat, sweetened by the heather that grows in the surrounding mountains. A little way ahead of them stands James with a large white horse. Its mane is the color of moonlight. He’s looking away from his men, up at the sky. Not far from him, I spot Blake. He’s dressed all in black, and stands still among the chaos. The wind ruffles his dark hair. His expression is unreadable. A flash of anger surges through me. I walk to him, and tilt my head. There is no smirk on his lips. He emanates darkness.

The kind of smell that stuck in your nose for days. "Shit," Robin muttered. The barn stood against the tree line, old wood gone gray with weather. Light spilled from the open doors. Two men stood guard, rifles casual in their hands. They straightened when they saw Cole. We passed the chicken coops first. Empty. Then the sheep pen—handful of bodies piled in the corner, covered in lime but that wasn’t even not enough to hide the bloat. Goats next. Same story. Even a few cows, though those they'd dragged further out, probably because of the size.

My second was the strange quiet—the clubhouse wasn’t silent, but the roar of engines and voices had dulled to a hum. I sat up, rubbed my face, and pulled myself to the window. The lot below was busy already—men moving around the bikes, checking engines, voices carrying in short bursts of laughter and command. The smell of oil drifted up faintly through the cracked glass. And Blake was there. He leaned against his bike, arms crossed, posture casual but not really. His eyes scanned the lot like he was counting shadows, like nothing escaped his notice. I couldn’t hear his voice from here, but I could see the way men adjusted when he spoke, the way they listened without argument.

They each carried their flashlights with them as they made their way over there. A barn of the darkest brown, the sort that talked of home and hearth, rose merrily atop the verdant hill where free-ranging wild horses were a familiar sight. The barn sprouted on the hill among the grass and the meadow flowers as if one day it came up from some beautiful seed. This gave the appearance that the barn had sprung out of nowhere.

Today, it looked like something out of a dream I hadn’t let myself have until Colton Hayes fell into my life like a damn wildfire. White tents fluttered in the breeze, soft and elegant without losing the grit of who we were. Twinkling lights looped through the trees and along the fences. The path to the barn—newly painted and now more a community gathering hall than a place for tools—was lined with wildflowers in mason jars. Long wooden tables waited under a massive canopy, strung with greenery and glowing lanterns. And off in the distance, the lake shimmered like it had been summoned by a fairytale.

“If you can’t do it, don’t! You’re just causing trouble, a disaster waiting to happen. Look at what you've done to the peach tree that Emma loves so much. “If it dies, you could never repay its worth!” At the time, I hadn’t expected Noah to be so harsh. The peach tree was indeed my favorite, and I had personally planted it on the day I married him, but in the end, it was just a tree. I was about to ask him to ease up when Jill stubbornly spoke up. “Don’t worry, Mr. Lester. Even if I have to die, I won’t let anything happen to the peach tree!”

The booming echoes rolling back from distant forests turned the deer in flight and brought them galloping back toward us, the buck leaping right over our heads. Dropping into the dirt, we held our breath and listened, but heard only the wind flittering lightly through the trees, and mosquitoes buzzing around our ears. Seeing nothing, we advanced to the edge of the trees, then to the cars, and up a lane bordered by giant pecan trees. To our left we saw the silhouette of a sagging two-story farm house—dark, heavy with the sorrow of a century of tears, a porch stretching across its front. Straight ahead, there was a wide barn, easily forty feet high at its peak, its roof sloping nearly to the g

As they walked out the front doors and into the fresh air, she marveled at how good it felt to be walking out of this high school again—and this time for good. * Caitlin and Caleb walked across the Coleman property, the snow on the grass crunching beneath their feet. The house itself wasn’t much – a modest ranch set on the side of a country road. But way back behind it, at the end of the property, it had a barn. Caitlin saw all the beat-up pickup trucks parked haphazardly on the lawn, and could see the footprints in the ice and snow, and she knew a lot of traffic had headed towards that barn.