The Eternal River

The scent was faint, though I am unable to forgot the memory of when I heard the sound of blood dripping down the small cracks and crevices of the wooden floorboards. The house was eeriely quiet, in the cool, dead of the night I remember how dry my throat felt as I tried to swallow the saliva building up in my mouth. Clear beads of sweat formed at the crest of my hair and gently trickled down the sides of my cheeks. I recall faintly how breathless I felt.

I was peaking my, very small, seven-year-old head over the edge of the window to see if he was still there. I remember dread gripping me in that brief moment when I had been unfortunate enough to peer through the glass to find his eyes stare back, madly, into my eyes from the other side of the window before he disappeared again. I like to believe we both knew this was a game of cat and mouse.

There was a time before this very moment where I also remember crying. I had started only after we have moved to the cabin in the woods, far from the reach of the city. My mother and father had urged me that I was only scared because we had moved to a new place so far away from our old home. My only regret is that. I wish they had believed me more.

Maybe my mother had begun to start to notice how strange the cabin was beginning to feel and my crying, which was almost each night, seemed to exacerbate her fears further. It was hard to recall my father letting me know just how worried he was for us.

"Natalia, is it that nightmare again?" My father would often ask me, very gently as he scooped me up into bed.

"He was there again." I remember telling him, "Sitting on the roof beneath my window. I woke up and he was staring at me. We spoke through the window. He said... He wanted to come in, again." I told my father. I didn't realize the dread that gripped him but I remember his heart was pounding as my mom returned to the bedroom after checking on my little brother. Her lips were pursed tight as she signaled to him with a grim expression that all was well despite not feeling that way.

'It's fine.' She would mouth to him before climbing in bed with us.

"What does the dark man want?" I asked my father and he clutched me closer, hugging me tighter, so much so that I almost could not breath before he let me go.

I think he had told me it was time to go to bed, but what concerned me most was that he never answered that question. I wish he had...

Everything all came back to that moment before the havoc started and it was all so freshly ingrained in my mind. I was feeling absolutely mortified. The panic in me was high and made my throat squeeze till it felt like it had closed and no air escaped! Between the panic, I cried internally for my parents that night as I shook violently and ran from one room to the next, wishing I could return to that place of comfort in their room but he was inside now... Here with me.

I had never wished so hard for a time that I wanted to be between their arms, in the middle of their bed. It was safe there. I had always felt warm and comforted, so much so that I desperately wanted to go back there but that place was gone.

It had all started with my little brother, who had opened the front door after we had all gone to bed. My mom, who had checked on him, as she usually had, was snuggled close to me. Our parents had both fallen asleep but I was somehow roused awake, crawling down to the foot of the bed before tiptoeing out into the main hall. The fresh boards wouldn't creak as I walked, but you could still hear the low shuffle of my slippers as I walked down past the kitchen to the front door.

I could see Lukas reaching for the handle on the tip of his toes. I remember my mouth dropping open as the door slowly swung in and he stepped back to look up at the dark and towering figure. How would my three-year-old brother know what he would have done next? My throat squeezed as I screamed and I heard my parents startle awake. Lukas turned to me, away from the man, who invited himself in and grabbed him by the back of his neck.

I jerked forward, almost running for him but I felt a cold grip wash over me as I saw that sinister smile spread across his dark face. My little brother turned back to look and I think even he knew something was wrong.

He didn't get a chance to even scream.

I was, at first, tempted into running to my parent's room almost screaming for them in complete terror, but at the time, all I could think was to hide! The sound of my brother's head hitting the door frame startled me into moving my feet. I shuffled out of the hall into the nearest door, stumbling through the service porch back into the kitchen. Somewhere between it all, I think I had glimpsed him the moment before he caught Lukas where he pursed his lips to me and ran a finger between them as if telling me to keep quiet.

His simple gesture gripped me so terribly firm that I had believed that this very night I would not only potentially die here, but maybe even live through longer to see more horrors before finally passing on. I didn't expect to live on after this. My mind could only begin to process the scene over and over before I realized that it would come to haunt me forever.

All I could think was, 'I don't want to be stuck here alone with him!' but it was that way anyways! It was just the two of us then, all alone in this old cabin in the woods and I was running from the service porch back to the kitchen, trying to hide with tears pouring down my face. His footsteps we're loud and slow. I could hear him advance straight down the hall past me and to the back. There was a stifled yell and I whimpered at the thought he might kill my parents.

No longer did the parted trees in the woods separate us. No longer did his carefully parted, yet silent, thin lips and bold eyes stare down at me from the roof outside my second-floor, bedroom-loft window.

I didn't want to believe that but I couldn't help but remember the sounds of my father gurgling something out not long after the dark man got to the bedroom. I remember there being a lot of other unsettling noises coming from their bedroom and I think I heard the start of my mother screaming for my dad.

I stupidly scrambled upstairs during the ruckus to hide till the noise stopped. When it went silent, I looked up and slid myself out from beneath the bed. My slippers caught the edge of the doorframe as I tried to peek out my door back down stairs.

Silence. Only unnaturally calm, silence.

My hand gripped my chest as I finally managed to come back downstairs. This was only after the ruckus had long since past. After tiptoing down to the first floor, I stopped by the very first room at the bottom. My parent's room. I wanted to try to pass my parents room, thinking of escape but my curiosity only had stopped me in my tracks. I knew I was trying to get to the front door on the other side of the house, but I couldn't help but stare. I had caught sight of the thick line of blood running down between the white sheets. The mattress was bright red and I could see two bodies lying in the center of it. My stomach clenched at the silence as my eyes traced down to my mother's hand as it dangled there, off the side of the bed, lifelessly.

Honestly, I believe the shock of it all hurt me so terribly that I can't recall their faces at all since that time. I wish it all ended here and I just died in these woods after days of starvation but it wasn't over for me. It was only the beginning of a game for him.

It didn't stop. Things only seemed to get worse. For the first time I became painfully aware of the silence that death brought. My sensitive ears could only listen in dumbstruck silence of the awful sound of blood smacking against the floor. My eyes focused on it and I felt a clawing in my stomach that felt akin to revolting disgust and a hint of hunger.

My parent's blood had been flicking droplets into the larger pool on the floor only because the sheets had become drenched in their untimely death. I hate how I could hear it so clearly and smell it... I never realized how odd it might be that I didn't have to go inside their bedroom to know what that smell was. The blood had an aroma to it that made me think of tainted copper but a different scent wafted into my nose. A smell where it was most strongly - or how I thought - sweet. Why had something so terrible smelled so sweet?