A Boy from the Woods

On the last day of the dark and gloomy October, Ada brought something home from the woods.

She had this strange habit of bringing all sort of things back home after her forest adventures: sticks, stones, tadpoles, mushrooms, lost cats and dogs, and sometimes even wild animal babies. Sticks and stones were hardly a problem, but time after time they would have to tell their daughter to not bring home animals - especially wild animal babies, as this would only make it harder for their parents to find them later on.

But Ada hardly listened, and countless of times her parents would have to make her turn back on her tracks and return the animals to forest before coming inside for a dinner.

This time, however, it wasn’t an animal that Ada brought home.

It was a boy.

He was small, light build and miserable looking with torn and tattered clothes, dirty face and dark circles under his eyes, making him appear younger than Ada, being 14 herself.

“Who is this?” her parents asked as they watched the soaked, dirty boy in front of their porch; he wasn’t even wearing shoes, bare feet muddy and full of small scratches.

“I don’t know,” Ada replied. “I found him from the forest, hiding under a large tree trunk.”

“What is your name, son?” father asked, but the boy didn’t answer. Instead he would look at the floor and sniffle a little, shivering in cold. Then, finally, after an awkward silence accompanied only by the sound of the falling rain, he whispered: “My name is Rose.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know you were a girl,” Ada’s mother apologized, but the boy shook his head a little, his tangled up, curly hair going from one side to another and sending water droplets on the porch.

“No, I’m a boy. Rose is the name of a flower; my parents simply named me after it,” he explained with a quiet voice. “Mother was a gardener.”

“Then, where are your parents now?”

“Gone,” the boy answered.

Rose was then taken inside where he was offered a warm bath and a meal to shake off the cold and stiffness. The boy didn’t talk much, but after cleaning himself he looked like a different person: fair faced and light in complexion. Ada and her parents couldn’t help but wonder if the boy was, in fact, a runaway noble boy - there was no way a commoner would have such a light and smooth skin that had clearly been taken care of.

When he was asked about his other relatives, Rose claimed he had none: the recent flu epidemic in the nearby city had robbed the lives of all of his relatives, leaving the poor boy to fend for himself - and it didn’t seem to work, given how unruly and starved he had looked upon arriving, and how unsuited his clothes were for travel.

With no living relatives and no place to go, Rose remained with the family for a while: Ada was happy to have a playmate, and Rose himself looked so weak and pitiful there was no way they could send the boy away into the wilderness again. And so, with the mutual agreement from the parents who had always wanted a second child, it was decided that Rose would join the family.

Oddly enough, when they went to the local church, no records of the boy could be found from anywhere. It was assumed Rose was an illegitimate child, born outside of marriage and thus not recorded by the church. It was certainly a setback, but only a minor one: after all, as nobody seemed to recognize the new child in the village, the family figured the boy’s past as someone’s love child was no real concern to them or their reputation.

And so Rose became an officially adopted son to the family.

He got adjusted to his new style of life fast: Ada liked him and enjoyed playing with him outside, delighted to finally have companion on her forest adventures, and their parents were more than just a little infatuated with this well behaving, sweet boy. He didn’t have problems at school, hardly ever fought with anyone, never argued with his parents and all in all was a child so well mannered that other villagers started to get suspicious of him.

“He must be a stolen child,” they would whisper to each other, not caring whether the family would hear this or not. “Such a sweet, well-behaving and beautiful boy can in no way be just a mere orphan; I don’t buy it.”

What was even stranger than Rose’s good manners and kind nature, however, was the fact that people had started falling ill after the boy arrived: many would faint in strange and unexpected places, odd wounds found on their skin when later examined on. Some would suffer from anemia long afterwards, as if part of their life force had been sucked out. While there were no casualties recorded related to the incidents, people started getting uneasy and scared: who would be the next to wake up with unsettling wounds on their skin?

It didn’t take long until the villagers started making a connection between Rose’s appearance and the unusual cases of fatigue and anemia.

“It must be a vampire,” Rose once heard one of the boys of his class talk before the teacher had arrived.

“My dad is a doctor and he said it’s because we haven’t had a good harvest this year: people don’t get enough food, and so they fall ill. That’s why they become forgetful,” another replied in an arrogant, matter-of-fact tone.

“Oh yeah? Then how about those bite marks? How do you explain that?”

The previously cocky boy went silent, but a third boy turned over to them:

“My dad says they’re animal bites, snakes and suchs. They take a bite when they see an easy prey.”

A girl turned over to the boys now, and with an angry voice she stated: “My mum is a hunter and she has seen the bodies, and those sure as hell aren’t animal bite marks! They belong to a human - a human child!”

As if to add more fuel to the fire, the girl continued: “And just who arrived here just before this whole thing started?

They all fell silent, and when one of the boys noticed Rose was standing there and listening to them, they all turned around with such a hurry one of them fell over with his chair.

Back at home, Rose walked over to his adopted mother, who was sitting on the couch and reading.

“Mum,” he asked quietly, and the woman lifted her gaze from the book.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“Do you think I’m a vampire?”

She looked at the boy with a startled expression: she had wished to keep Rose completely out of this and not to let the poor boy know of just what kind of terrible, truly awful accusations people were throwing around about him.

“Of course not,” she finally replied and her expression softened. She leaned closer to Rose and extended her arms, lifting up the light boy on her lap. She hugged him gently, and the boy responded to this by leaning closer to the woman’s warm chest, taking a hold of her shirt and clutching it in his small hand.

“Don’t worry about the things people talk out there,” she then spoke to Rose and rubbed his back with gentle movements. His body was cold, just like it always was, but this small, cold frame belong to her son, and she would protect that boy with all she had - a vampire or not.

“Mum, I’m scared…” Rose whispered quietly. “What if they hurt me? What if they come to hurt you?”

“I won’t let them,” the woman replied sternly, and momentarily stopped rubbing the boy’s back. “I absolutely won’t. They have no right to, and even if they somehow had, I would stop them.”

“Even if I were a vampire?” the boy asked, sniffling sadly.

With much softer voice, she patted the boy’s fluffy hair and spoke: “Vampire or not, you’re my son. I’d do anything to protect you, and if it was blood you needed, I would get it to you.”

Rose didn’t say anything, just softly cried against his mother’s chest, warm tears staining the white shirt.

But despite her words of reassuring comfort, the hatred and fear of the villagers only grew stronger.

It had been a year and a half since Rose had become part of the household, but the strange illness and wounds had not gone anywhere. In fact, people who had already been bitten would experience the same again: waking up in a strange place with small bite marks and scratch wounds on their body. Sometimes the wounds would even be tended and patched up, and while this was a sweet and thoughtful gesture, it also made it clear for everyone the perpetrator had to be a human - or rather, a demonic creature pretending to be a human.

“Can you turn me into a vampire?” one of Rose’s classmates, a boy around his own height with brown hair and charming freckles, asked while they were walking home from school.

“I’m not a vampire,” Rose answered and attempted to ignore the boy, clutching his backpack while trying to walk faster, but the other boy followed.

“Come on, everyone knows you’re a vampire,” the child insisted. “The only reason nothing has been done to you is because there is still not enough proof yet.”

“Hey!” a voice called out from somewhere, and Ada appeared seemingly out of nowhere. She was older now, much taller than she had been last year, and had an intimidating exterior of a girl who was physically strong, and well aware of it herself.

“Leave my brother alone,” she continued speaking to the boy with a warning tone. “And he is not a vampire.”

“He has sharp teeth!” the boy insisted.

“So do I,” Ada said and opened her mouth, revealing sharp fangs. “There is nothing weird about that; some people just naturally have sharper and bigger fangs! We’re not that different from wolves and other beasts, you know?”

Before the boy got to say anything else, Ada stopped him: “Besides, see that sun?” she pointed at the sky where the sun was shining happily. “If Rose was a vampire, how do you explain him walking under it?”

“W-well, I,” the kid muttered, but upon realizing there was nothing he could use to argue against Ada’s words, he turned over and dashed off.

“Honestly…” Ada sighed. “Won’t these people ever leave you alone?”

“It’s fine,” Rose whispered, looking at the ground beneath his feet.

“It’s not fine!” the girl insisted.

“What would you do if I were a vampire?”

Ada looked at her younger brother and laughed.

“If that was the case, I’d gladly let you drink my blood! It’s not like anyone has died before, no? And nobody has been turned into a vampire either as far as I know, so it should be fine!”

“You’re a really good sister,” Rose smiled softly, although with a somewhat sad expression. “I hope you know that.”

“Anything to my little brother!” she said and patted Rose on the back so forcefully the boy almost fell down.

But as the winter finally arrived, things changed.

One of the male servants of a rich household suddenly started claiming he was attacked when he was working at the stables, further claiming that one of the horses had been bitten and died as a result. He claimed it was a vampire, and that it had to be caught so that whoever was hiding it would pay for the horse, and that the vampire itself would be killed accordingly.

Of course, there was no truth in his words: instead, the servant had accidentally fed the horse hay with a piece of metal in it. The horse had soon perished after its internal organs had been damaged by the metal it couldn’t digest, but there was no way he was going to admit having done such a grave mistake. Instead the man had carved two marks onto the horse’s neck, and with some tools made makeshift bite marks on his own skin as well - a painful but a cheap price for not becoming jobless and homeless during the winter. Now he was all ready to shift the blame on someone else, and with everyone suspecting Rose and his family, it was easy to convince the other villagers to join him to blame Rose for it.

And on that day, when the villagers came marching behind the doors of Rose’s home, the boy vanished.

Upon examining his bed they would find blood on the sheets, as well as torn and tattered clothes; a clear indication that a fight had taken place inside the boy’s room.

“He was taken by the vampire!” the mother cried out in agony, clutching the bloodied, small clothes against her chest while crying so sadly that even the other people found their eyes watering. Everything about the scene that unfolded before them, the weeping mother and comforted by his husband, was so heartbreaking and pitiful most of them started to believe Rose had, in fact, not been the vampire. Perhaps he had been in cahoots with it, but the boy was innocent, possibly even taken advantage of by the vampire - and now had to pay with his life.

However, Ada knew better. Adjusting the collar over her bitten, sore neck, she knew Rose had been forced to escape by the wrath of the villagers.

And in order to do so, Ada had given him a parting gift so that he would be able to stage the scene and have enough power to escape. She had always suspected, she was his sister after all, and eventually found out Rose’s secret, but never mentioned it to the boy before this: she knew Rose would never hurt anyone intentionally, and that drinking blood was a necessity for him rather than a way to cause harm upon others on purpose.

She leaned over her crying mother to comfort her, spoke soft words of comfort to her; of how sad Rose would be if he saw his mother crying like this. Eventually the family was left alone by the villagers who had expected a bloodbath, but only witnessed a tragedy.

With Rose gone, peace finally returned to the village. But the small boy was dearly missed by many, and even those who had never liked him in the first place found that something was missing now with the boy gone.