The woman rushed in and slammed the door. As if trying to keep the devil himself out. She clutched her baby to her breast, kneeling by dying embers in the hearth. She blew on them but a flame didn't start. Her baby started to fuss.
"Hush now, shh... it'll be..." she stopped mid-sentence.
The chandelier above her was spinning. As if some unnatural force had caused its light to rotate around the room, like tiny ancient searchlights. She heard something slithering in the shadows by the well.
Yes, the well...
The chandelier flickered, and the woman spotted a silhouette at the corner of the room.
"Please, devil... leave us be...," she whispered.
The shadow stepped into the light.
It was as if the man had been turned inside out. There was not one inch of skin on his body. What she was looking at was burnt, and exposed flesh. The woman watched in horror as the man approached her, his eyes filled with an insane blood lust.
"You mistake me, woman." he said, "I am no mere devil, I am the bringer of doom and the master of death. The lord of carnage. I am BloodLust." His voice was guttural, unnatural.
"But my child, not my child... She is innocent..." she whispered.
"So you say." he said. The baby started wailing. BloodLust smiled.
"Please," begged the woman, "Kill me instead."
"I will," he replied. "And then, her. And your husband and the rest of your children, and all the brutes who brought you here." His filthy smile grew wider. "Or, you will occupy yourself otherwise and not interfere. I will take her and you will live, and those of your other children — in whom I take no interest."
The woman looked down at her baby again. She kissed it and set it down. It bawled.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..."
She turned away from the baby. Faced those dying embers. BloodLust crawled over to the baby, and the crying cut off sharply. The woman nearly fainted as she heard the sound of a snap inside the well. Her expression changed. Fear. Denial. Grief. Acceptance. And then nothing. Simply a glazed look. As if nothing horrific was happening behind her.
DeleteCreated with Sketch.
I woke up in my bed, my heart pounding. Outside, rain was drumming against the window, the sun peeking over the horizon. Was it all a dream? Or did it really happen? I walked to my parents room.
They were asleep in their beds.
My friend Ryan Carrelli came the following morning. Ever since we were in middle school, we always walked to school together. It was always astonishing to people how me and Ryan could be friends, because we were both polar opposites of each other. Ryan was somewhat outgoing and extremely talkative, whereas I was more quiet and introverted.
Even our physical appearances were completely different; I had wavy dark-brown hair, and Ryan's was straight and black. I had gray eyes, and his were a deep brown, like his hair.
However, Ryan had been having issues ever since he'd entered middle school. He had been acting strange, rarely talking to anyone. Even I wasn't able to talk to him. For a while, I was unsure what his issue was, until he finally told me: he'd been diagnosed with depression. He started distancing himself from everyone, and many weeks he would even skip school.As I tried to talk to him, one day, I found out he was cutting himself. Everyone had wondered about the cause of the bandages that were still wound around Ryan's arms; he told us many contradicting things, once it was a paper cut, another time he blamed it on a broken arm. When I had discovered him in the school bathroom holding a bloody shard of glass, I uncovered the truth. Thankfully, I talked him out of it, and months later, he recovered and everything went back to normal.
