Schlachten Woods

WORKING TITLE
By: Serenity Olson


1


        They say the Schlachten Woods is a cursed place, full of mysteries and despair, but on this warm spring day it looked beautiful and inviting. With sun beams playing across the forest ground and birds calling merrily back and forth, no one would think twice about stopping here for a picnic.

        Through the edge of the wood, one could barely make out the beginnings of a path, and it was down this path that a little girl skipped happily picking wild flowers. She looked around five or six years old, much too young to be out by herself in the forest, but she seemed more than content with giggling and humming to herself as she wandered farther and farther down the twisting path deep into the woods.

        Soon a small cottage could be seen along the path, and the child stopped and looked at it curiously with her large trusting green eyes. With her mind made up, the little girl crossed to the front door and knocked lightly. The sounds of many clicks, scrapes and clanks could be heard from inside the door and a moment later the door opened a tiny crack. From the pitch black interior a big, bloodshot, blue eye poked out. The little girl stared at the eye, unfazed. A smile crept across her angelic face.

"What is it?" a grumpy voice issued from somewhere behind the glaring eye.

"Excuse me Mister, I seem to be lost and I'm ever so tired, if I could just come inside to rest a bit I promise I'll leave before it gets dark." The little girl then clasped her hands together as tears started to well in her eyes.

The eye narrowed and quick as lightning a saber jabbed out of the crack in the door and skewered the small child clean through.
Slowly the saber retracted and the little girl, still impaled on the sword was drawn into the cottage depths.

As soon as the body was brought inside it started to change. The body of the little girl was now a mangled black creature. Long and spindly with sores covering its body, oozing and festering. The face was long and beak-like, bald with still staring yellow eyes.

"Is it dead?" a frantic voice asked.

From the opposite side of the room a match struck and lit the face of a grizzled man with piercing blue eyes. He lit a cigar hanging from his mouth and inhaled deeply.

"Yeah," he growled as he exhaled the smoke, then he turned and lit a small lamp on the wall.

A soft glowing light enveloped the small room, making the two figures blink rapidly and squint away.
The first was a small boy with a pale, anxious face and mussed, straw colored hair. He was huddled in the corner of the room, peering between his fingers at the hideous creature still attached to the sword.

"Is it really dead?" the voice asked again, a little higher in pitch, this belonged to the second figure.

"Calm down girl! That thing ain't gonna be bothering nobody no more," the old man rumbled.
The girl, slight and meek, kept running her hands through her short black hair, over, and over, and over.

"H-How did you know...?" the girl whispered, wide-eyed

"Ta kill it? I didn't. It was just too fucking sweet." He spit on the ground with a look of disgust and took another drag from his cigar. "Anyway, I want you and Hunter to go down in the cellar and grab the emergency supplies."

"But Russell, you can't just go killing little girls! What if you made a mistake?"

"No back talk Colette! I don't call survivin' a mistake. Now go get the goddamn supplies!"  He bellowed at the small woman and she shrank back, darting for the door in the corner and grabbing Hunter by his collar on her way out.