Bloodwalker

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Grandfather sent me every night to the edge of the field to peer into the woods to see if there was a sign from the cabin. Before me, my father had been the lookout and checked for the light each night.

It was five years ago, the week after I turned twelve, that father came into grandfather’s house with his face ashen. The candlelight is burning, he said to grandfather.

Grandfather sat in a quiet reverence before he stood up and walked over to father. He clasped his left hand on father’s shoulder and with his right drew the dagger from the sheath on his belt. He turned the handle toward father and as he handed it off told him it was now up to him. With that, father looked at me, started to say something, but held in his words and turned back out the door.

The flames in the fireplace flared as grandfather sat down on the wooden bench in front of the mantle. He beckoned me over to the seat beside him. I sat silently as I waited for him to speak.

When his gravelly voice started, I jumped, “Your father may or may not return. If he does survive, what he sees in that cabin will change him forever.” He paused as I took this confusing information in before he began speaking again, “If he fails we will never see him again and the task of being a lookout will fall to you with his death.”

We sat by the fire the rest of the night waiting for father’s return. Grandfather would get up and throw more wood on the fire, but never looked out the window.

Dawn’s light began burning up the sky over the woods that held the cabin. Grandfather patted my back as acknowledgement that the worst had happened. “Get some rest,” he said, “tomorrow we start your training and tomorrow night you start your first watch as a lookout.”

As devastated as I was about my father not returning, and through the fog of answerless confusion that I found myself in, I felt the need to ask Grandfather, “What about tonight? Won’t someone need to be on the lookout tonight?”

Grandfather’s head sagged, “Not tonight, the Bloodwalker will be sated for now. We never know when he will return. Your father is just the latest in the family to be taken by this curse we earned. Before him it was my own brother Nicholas, before him my father was taken, before him his uncle Tobias, and it goes back for dozens of names.”

Before I could question him he cut off my thoughts, “It is your burden now, every day I get to train you is one day more you will be better prepared.”

For five years, everyday Grandfather trained me with the dagger. The silver dagger with its razor sharp blade became an extension of my hand. Grandfather read to me the inscription etched on the blade die Unsterblichen zu töten, “to kill the unkillable”. He taught me how to strike and evade. Each day I would condition my body, building my strength and endurance.

Finally, after a year of training, Grandfather told me it was time to know what I faced. The Bloodwalker was a geist, a malevolent spirit that had haunted our family for generations. Our ancestors had settled this farmland in America hundreds of years ago seeking to find prosperity and escape the family curse. Only half of their goal was achieved, through hard work the farm grew and prospered, but the geist had followed along with them. It settled into the cabin built by the first generation that came to live in the Pennsylvania farmlands. No one knows where it goes between appearances or why the time it is gone is not a fixed period.

Grandfather says maybe it is a curse on many different families. All that is known is that a candle is lit in the cabin when it returns and someone must face it. None have ever lived to tell what exactly the Bloodwalker is. Grandfather is worried about my chances and asked Uncle Leonid to send his son James to live with us to begin his training if I should fall.

Now I walk back to the house to tell my grandfather the cabin light is burning.