carcharadon Thread

Went to visit a friend for the weekend when I was around 10, who lived on plant and flower farm, with dozens of greenhouses spread across more than fifty acres. Left entirely to our own devices for the entire day, every day, we explored. On a hill by the woods at the end of the property, there was a very old barn used to store hanging pots in boxes. This barn was so old that the original builders used wooden pegs instead of nails in the construction. There were hundreds of these boxes stacked high into the air on both sides of the main floor, and a old, hempy looking rope strangely tied to the main rafter about forty feet in the air, going straight down through a small hole in the floor at the center of the barn.

Though forbidden from playing in or around the barn, we were quite alone, and found that the boxes would support our meager weight to the point we could climb them like cardboard mountains, and then got the bright idea to try and swing from one box mountain the next using the lonely rope, which looked plenty strong for the task. However, trying to free it for the task by pulling it out of the hole wasn't working. It was either tied off, or was bearing too much weight with whatever it was attached to, and couldn't be freed.

Plan B was to try and free it at the source by entering the 'basement' which was the lower area of the barn beneath the main floor, potentially accessible from three sides (the entrance was a ground level). Walking around the barn, yielded only one entry, which had been sturdily boarded up. Not recently sealed with rotten with plywood scrap like an old window, this portal (smaller than a normal entry way, but clearly meant for people, perhaps of shorter stature when the barn was built a century or more earlier) was sealed with railroad tie-sized beams, and heavily constructed beyond our wildest hopes to attain access with simple tools.

Foiled, we returned to the main barn, and set about trying to obtain the rope for a final time. Cutting it wasn't an option since we didn't know what it might be suspending, and weren't supposed to be there in the first place. Facing each other, shoulder to shoulder, with all our four hands holding tightly and lifting with our legs, we realized there indeed was some give. Whatever it was attached to was heavy, but could be lifted with a combined effort. For several minutes, we used all of our strength to essentially yank the rope, banging whatever was attached against the floor(or ceiling) in hopes of dislodging it. With a final, sweaty heave, there was a pop, and the rope came free of its burden. With another final tug, the bulky end squeezed through the hole and popped out, flinging its corded mass onto my back.

At the terminus was a large, cartoonishly perfect and ancient looking, thirteen-coil hangman's noose, gritted with age and exposure, and no longer attached to whatever it had been suspending in the sealed dark below.