Chase Shustack

Siskin always had the mill.

It was more of a novelty, a tourist attraction mentioned in a footnote in pamphlets for its historical value.

Back when the town thrived on its lumber industry, in the days when America was still rosy-cheeked and young, the Siskin Mill had been popular.

It's hard to believe that the crumbling collection of rotten wooden structures, nuzzled up alongside the riverbed, used to be a source of pride.

rather than a half-forgotten eyesore now serving as a shelter for vermin and derelicts.

No one in Siskin paid the mill a second thought.

They knew it existed, to be sure, but it was more like an antique, a rusted classic car you'd see on cinder blocks in some overgrown yard, or a nice old house that you'd loot for broken furniture.

There was talk about tearing it down, maybe developing homes along the riverfront.

These aspirations never amounted to anything but bluster.

People quickly forgot about them for more pressing current matters.

The only ones who paid attention to the mill were some of the local teens, if the childish, crude graffiti and beer cans that littered the cobwebbed lumberyard were any indication.

And of course, the town council's mysterious correspondence.

In short, the general populace ignored the mill.

It sat along the river, dark and cold and teetering on its own destruction, like a body that refused to die.

Through most of the year, the mill was quiet, its machinery ancient and rusted, its blades worn by years of weathering, and the lumber still loaded into its chutes rotting into fungi-ridden pulp.

One humid summer night, a night like many before it, the mill woke up.

From somewhere within its deep, filthy interior, rusting machinery coughed to life as the saws ground and gnashed their dull teeth.

The building shook and rattled with an ungodly amount of noise, breaking the morning stillness with a cacophony of grinding, rattling, and cutting as it convulsed violently like a sick dog.

Fifteen minutes of terrible, agonized industry passed before.

With a loud, unceremonious thud, a single canted log rattled its way down the chute and came to a stop in the collection bin.