Knock Three Times

Prologue

        ANALOGOUS TO THE CALM before a storm, an unsettling silence lingered over every street, beneath every bridge and within every alley and minuet crevice of a small mountain village, east of the Netherlands. The town was damp this night, thick with a heavy fog which crept like a stalking predator through the surrounding forest brush and rigid mountain face. The air was hauntingly still, lacking so much as a gentle breeze, the hoot of an owl, or the chirp of a single cricket, as silence often screams louder than anything. Moonlight glistened off the cobblestone streets and tiled rooftops, every surface still slick from a recent rain, reflecting the pale white form of every building, stark against the night sky. A deep crimson moon watched over the town with an ominous glow, like a villain plotting revenge.

    Light footsteps broke the silence, as a young man wandered through the street by his lonesome, looking down upon a calm river which flowed from the mountains to the east, splitting the town through the middle. Its gentle stream could have been running with blood upon first glance, the red reflection of the moon glimmering off its rippling surface. The child used to play by the river almost every afternoon, countless days of fond memories passed, but would never be again.

    The tainting of the river had marked the end of a prolonged suffering amongst the once humble villagers, a mortifying nightmare from which nobody believed they could wake. Though the boy was barely twelve years old, he had seen his share of death, on such a desolating scale no child should ever have to endure. Merely a year prior, he found himself stuck at home, his mother refusing to let him leave the house, not even to attend school.

    Children were growing ill within the populous, an untreatable illness pushing the escalating rate of fatalities spiraling out of control, with no end in sight. Before the mysterious plague had come, the town was bustling like never before. The Protestant population was flourishing, despite the relentless calls to war from across the Mediterranean Sea. A new power was rising in the South—a seemingly merciless sect which would claim the preposterous and downright blasphemous: that God Himself led their ruthless charge across all of Europe. The Elders of this quaint mountain town refused to bend the knee to this insurrection of power-hungry governance, insisting on their stance of neutrality in the holy wars of the age.

    And so it was, that many of its more superstitious citizens worried that the plague had come as a harsh discipline for the unfaithful—a divine justice set upon the defiant, rebellious town, some would say.

    The sickness took only the young and frail, assuring no child could surpass their adolescence, and a town with no children was a town with no future. Every victim of plague brought more than sorrowful mourning but fanaticism to the people of the village, and a frantic surge of accusations would have would-be witches both innocent and otherwise burning at the stake.

    Had God truly cursed them? Many of the elders wondered in those days. These were the common thoughts voiced with an uneasy tone in every conversation throughout the village—every corner of the local pubs, every merchants stand along the river and dinner table.

    The boy was one of a diminished population, a little more than thirty-threescore children left remaining of a once overpopulated and promising youth. So many of his friends had met their demise; youthful faces who would never grow old—never smile, nor greet him again in his lifetime. They would never see another sunrise—never live to have children of their own. The youthful dead were now a memory amongst countless faces taken by the plague, mere ghosts of a once promising future now turned to ash in their mouths. He would never forget the odour of burning flesh that carried with the breeze from the mountainside above, upwind from his home where they piled and set ablaze the infected dead.

    Of course, that nightmare had seemingly ended a year prior to this very night, in the late fall season.

    Never again would he be forced to say goodbye to his friends and loved ones, worried that it would be the last he would see of them. There would be better days ahead, as the town moved forward from the desolating pandemic, looking forward to a brighter future. There was only one obstacle standing in their way—a promised threat that had yet to come to fruition.