Estranged Stories Week 1: Ageless V1

Well, the last part of the past week had a combination of things that both made my creativity run dry, and made it difficult for me to even login into steemit. That being said, trough self-doubt and constant questioning of my words, I still wrote some things.

This story here followed a prompt from a list of ideas for fantasy that I got somewhere some time ago, but in the process of trying to do something I could consider decent, again, several different versions were started and abandoned. This is the lucky one that got finished.

But falling again in my old curse of rewriting, I had an idea: since I’m now part of a community that comments, appreciates and helpfully opinions, why not publish ALL THE VERSIONS?, so, as a self-imposed challenge, this will be made as an experiment to compare the process of my writing, and to offer different perspectives/styles on the same idea.

That being said, from now on, every week (hopefully) I’ll post a new short story, and one version of it on different days of the week. How many version a week?, ideally 3, but 2 versions are enough.

So, with this introduction finished, I present too you: “Estranged Stories Week 1: Ageless V1”

That neighborhood looked the same, mostly. Where before there was children playing in the streets while their parents did the housework, where the lush greenery said hello to everyone and even the morning chill didn’t erase the smiles of early birds, now there was just emptiness and memories.

This was the place where I lived as a child, and then some years into a teen. My New England town was already old in general, but these houses and its streets in particular held tradition, families with long history and stories. Mine was one of such, and maybe that is why I felt such a heavy contrast between my memories and the present view.

When did it become so?, I stare at the dust-covered door of my old house and picture my child self running around, my mother screaming at me to not bring any more cats home, and all my relatives joining us on holidays. Those were days of chaos and joy, of annoyance coupled with mischievousness when all the cousins formed teams for prank wars. But there was one person that we didn’t dare to touch.

Uncle Keith wasn’t exactly a black sheep, but he was definitely weird. Eccentric, and always one step ahead of our pranks, traveling all the time and only coming on holidays with strange and exotic presents for everyone. He was smart and charismatic, but truth be told, we children could never get any info about him from our parents. Who he really was?, sure, he told a lot of stories about playing with the other adults when they were younger, but no one ever talked about his parents, about where he lived.

He was a most interesting mystery, but we learned to let him be. And like that, it came a holiday after I got into college in which we didn’t saw him, and then another, and another. Uncle Keith had disappeared, but he left something with me, an old diary and a note that said “this family holds many secrets, some forgotten even by itself, don’t show the diary to anyone until you discover those”.

The diary was quite old, and seemed to have belonged to an ancestor of ours. It narrated how he came from the other side of the Atlantic with a group of pioneers that shunned him because “he was weird”. That ancestor had no last name, and no one knew about him, but he was a calm and skilled hunter and carpenter, so they let him be part of the community.

Months passed and the people managed to settle themselves, but they were surprised that they didn’t see a native tribe. While the area was somewhat isolated, they still feared the stories about how savage this people could be, and as such the anxiety for a possible surprise attack was big, but it never happened. Nevertheless, other strange and unexplainable things happened. Objects disappeared, food got eaten or rotted without anyone seeing, people got lost frequently, mysterious bruises and cuts appeared on their skin, and strange whispers and giggles could be heard in the middle of the night or inside the woods.

Bad spirits and demons. That was their verdict for the cause of those happenings, and in the middle of everything, only my ancestor seemed calm and unfazed. “They are nothing” he said, but “they” still were, so he only got more ostracized. Things continued that way, until some kids that had gotten lost before, never came back. The small village was in chaos, and no matter how times they searched for them, they found nothing, no bodies but bloody clothes. “I’ll find them” said my ancestor, wearing a serious face for the first time, and then he went inside the woods, more deep than anyone had ever dared before.

Three days passed. He came back dirty and bloodied, with all the missing kids. They were alive, wounded and weak, but alive. “They won’t be able to say anything, so don’t ask what happened”, he said. And so the people did, and from that day on, he was a true part of the community, always smiling and taking care of those he saved. The diary mentioned that “the teasing from them may repeat, I hope someone knows what to say”, but the strange happenings ceased.

With time he found himself a wife and had some children with her. But as the years passed, the children became adults and the adults became old, but my ancestor didn’t age. Whispers against him started again, and one day, before the difference between his appearance and supposed age was too big to avoid pitchforks and hanging, he disappeared, “back to home” he said in a letter to his wife.

The diary ended there, and apart from those brief recounts, it only contained some verses, written in a language that I couldn’t comprehend. I never showed that diary to anyone, and for a while, I started to investigate more about the subject. The local archives briefly mentioned someone like my ancestor, saying he rescued some children, but only a couple of lines didn’t tell me anything. But I found the verses were written in anglo-saxon, and that it was a tale from “The Old People”, telling something about how “true blood never runs dry”.

But time and daily life buried my curiosity and I became just another normal citizen at first. I was in my thirties, single and drowning in my work as a translator, but keeping a youthful face and behavior that everyone asked where they came from despite the tenuous activities. “Good genes, just good genes”, I though, especially when my family said that I looked a little like Uncle Keith.

The diary was left forgotten, and maybe if I had read it again I would have been somewhat prepared for what came. In the family house, again things disappeared, food got eaten or rotted without anyone seeing, people got lost, and strange whispers and giggles could be heard in the middle of the night inside the now-smaller woods.

Thieves, troublemakers. That was my family’s answer, but I had a feeling there was something different. One holiday night, I was restless and unable to sleep when I heard the whispers again, now clear: “true blood never runs dry”, in the same language than the verses in the diary. I got out of the house and into the woods, following a path that my subconscious mind knew.

The moon was bright and full, and it created dancing shadows between the branches while I moved, following a path that I hadn’t traversed since I was a child, until reaching a small pond. The whispers kept saying “true blood never runs dry” when I got on my knees and watched my reflection in the water.

I saw myself, but not quite, because at the same time I saw Uncle Keith, and someone that felt like my ancestor. The whispers mixed with giggles and grew louder. They said something, and I got the meaning even though the words were lost to me, they said “where to go now?” , and I answered “back to home”.

Now I’m here again, on a neighborhood that was abandoned, with my family scattered after the city’s development plans made the area unattractive, and watching myself in the only mirror that has been left intact, after cleaning the thick layer of dust that over fifty years had left.

I look exactly the same as that night in the pond, and I know why, and I also know why Uncle Keith disappeared. After a sudden journey back to Europe from which I never came back, I discovered that we are descendents of “The Old People”, those who never age and which voices echo trough time.

The ancestor from the diary had tried to start a life away from the then strong influence of their call by coming to the new world, but it wasn’t enough. Some generations are skipped, but from century to century, one of us gets the signs of the True Blood, and little by little, unchanged year by unchanged year, awakens to a world still alive between the shadows, one that soon will try to show itself again to the public.