Day Seventeen : Officious - Breaking Curfew

Officious

Definition

1 : volunteering one's services where they are neither asked nor needed : meddlesome

2 : informal, unofficial

It’s true that, in their more rebellious years, many teenage girls will attempt (and succeed) to sneak
out of their parent’s house at night. However, to the best of my knowledge, most teenage girls would
then high tail it to the nearest party, hang out with their friends or go meet up with their current
sweetheart.

I don’t know of any other teenage girls that would , instead of going out and having fun, then spend
the rest of the night trawling round town, painting arcane symbols on major public buildings (such as
the library and town hall) and as many private dwellings as i could, where hopefully they wouldn’t be
seen and removed (I admit my i did my friend’s and family’s houses first - but I'm not an angel and I
did as many others as I could), as well as burying sacred totems at every cross road and town
entrance I could find. Our town may not have been particularly big but neither was it particularly small.
I knew that I hadn't managed to get all of them but I did as many as I can in the limited time I had.  

I had spent the last month preparing for what was coming, sneaking out at night, staying out till dawn
making preparations and dragging myself back to bed, covered in paint and gravedirt, for a few measly
hours of sleep before i had to get up for the day. It was, quite frankly, a miracle I hadn't been caught.

Which is exactly when the police siren went off behind me. 

Luckily they just caught me burying something at the start of the woods, near the edge of town. Since
it became apparent that I wasn't a, on drugs or b, drunk and hadn’t been burying a corpse, just a
weird, creepy doll thing they decided I was either a, mentally unwell and possibly sleepwalking or b, i’d
probably joined some sort of new age cult thing and this was a typical teenage rebellion type of activity
done to get back at my parents. 

Either way, they bundled me into the back of the police car and drove me home. At least they didn’t
put the sirens on.

Thank God they hadn’t caught me spray painting symbols. I’m sure graffiti was at least a minor
misdemeanour. My parents would have gone apeshit. 

As it was, turning up in a police car at 4 in the morning did not particularly endear me to them either. 

The policemen made a quick exit in the face of my mother’s fury and i almost begged them to take me
with them. The police station was one of the more heavily guarded buildings in town - and sneaking
around there to paint on the symbols had taken years off my life. 

After about two hours of shouting at me at how dangerous it was to wander about late at night, alone,
as a young woman, they finally got around to asking me why I'd been wandering about town at night. 

Since it was all supposed to go down tomorrow night, i mentally shrugged and told them the truth. 

It had all started a month ago, at school. We’d been assigned a project in history about looking into
the history of the town itself. We all drew themes for the project randomly out of a hat. Mine was the
various myths and folklore that had sprung up. 

I was a good student, and fairytales had always interested me, so I delved deep. And i found out
about the town’s ‘curse’. Apparently, when the town had first been created, it had encountered
problem after problem - live stock being taken, water being poisoned, sickness spreading  common
enough things for a new settlement. However, most of these things were blamed on ‘the beings in the
wood.’

I mean, I just assumed it was typical superstition or maybe xenophobia for the original inhabitants or
something right? 

Anyway, the leaders of the settlement and the people in the wood made a deal. The wood people
would stop messing with the town people and actually help them out instead and the town people
would offer a suitable ‘tithe’ in recompense. 

The tithe would be paid every 98 years on the night of the Harvest moon. 

It took me a long time to find out what the tithe being paid actually was. It didn’t actually surprise me
to learn that the tithe was, in fact, a portion of the town’s population. After all, didn’t all horror stories
go like that?

What actually surprised me is that someone had gone to the trouble to hide it in the first place. That
bothered me.

So I looked into it a bit more. 

I’m good at history. I enjoy it. What I also really enjoy, which labels me a right nerd amongst my friends,
is math. I like numbers. I like working things out. 

So what i did is figure out the rough date of when the town would have originated and started counting
out every 98 years from them. Once I'd figured out the first date, the rest were easy to count. 

Our town is super old and, although our record keeping is pretty good, not much survives from that time.
Just fairy stories really. There was no record of anything that happened 98 years after the initial founding.
Just a little footnote in the town meeting’s notes that the plague had been particularly bad that year.
Nothing particularly surprising given the medical aid available at that time. 

196 years after the founding of the town, raiders had invaded and many lives were lost. 

294 years after the founding, a fire broke out in the town and many lives were lost.

392 years after the founding, a bad storm swept through the town and many lives were lost. 

490 years after the founding, there was a gas leak that exploded and many lives were lost.

From the fire onwards, there was actually record keeping, a proper listing of the population of the town
and they’d estimated how many lives had been lost each time. 

None of the tragedies, as reported, were uncommon or even that unusual. Terrible things happened
all the time, even in the same place. All these events were perfectly plausible. 

However, like I said, I like numbers. Numbers, unless specifically bent against their nature, don’t lie.
Assuming that the reports were relatively accurate, given that no one could be 100% certain, then I had
the number of dead and the population figure prior to the accident. 

The percentage of the dead, the portion of the population that had been taken, was the same every time. 

Now that was impossible to cause by accident. Twice could be a coincidence, but four separate,
completely different events that i could definitely prove, and possibly an additional two with no records,
had the same proportionate death toll? No way.

How could anyone have not noticed this? I wondered. I mean, i knew it was 98 years apart but surely
someone would have picked up on it. Maybe that’s why they picked the figure of 98. Centennial
anniversaries tend to be remembered and celebrated - tragedies occurring every time would have been
suspicious.

Unless, people did know and they hid it. There’d been no photographs in any of the reports. Maybe the
stories of the fires and gas leaks and so on were just a cover up?

I felt a chill. 

The gas leak had been 98 years ago. The Harvest Moon was in a month. 

I spent the next month constantly researching anything that could protect those i cared about (and others
i cared much less for but my mum had always raised me to be caring and considerate so i didn’t want to
let her down). Every piece of knowledge i could get my hands on i used to protect the town, spending
my nights painting warding symbols on everything, burying protective totems to try and keep whatever
they were out, i spent my afternoons typing up helpful pamphlets regarding protective measures you
could take if supernatural beings invaded and shoving them through people’s doors. I made protective
amulets for all my friends and begged them not to take them off. They all thought i was crazy. I did think
about trying to explain myself but who would believe me? I barely believed myself. In the end, i said that
i just had an incredibly bad nightmare about something really bad happening the night of the Harvest
Moon. i said i knew it was crazy but please could they wear them - just until after the moon had come and
gone, then they could take them off. It’d just make me feel better. 

They were good friends. They clearly thought the stress from the coming exams had sent me over the
edge, but they cared about me. If wearing tacky jewellery would make me feel better, then they’d wear it
24/7 for me. They even read my pamphlets. 

I’d done absolutely everything I could think of and i knew it still wasn’t enough. But it was the best I
could do.

As I finished, my parents looked at me in silence, expressions of shock and worry etched on their faces. 

Mum was the first one to break the silence. “Honey, I know that I mean you’re clearly having a difficult
time right now, perhaps a visit.”

I held up my hand to visit her. “I tell you what mum I will absolutely go to the doctor’s on Monday and
listen to whatever he has to say. I would be more than happy to do that and anything else you and dad
might want to suggest. Can I just ask that as today is now Saturday, can I just sleep today as I've barely
had any sleep this month and can you and dad please, please, please not leave the house until Monday.
There’s plenty of food in here, we don’t need to go out and I know this sounds crazy but it would really,
really make me feel better. Come Monday, I promise I'll do anything you need me to in exchange.”

My parents looked at each other and nodded. “Ok darling. If that makes you feel better.” My mum
reached over and stroked my hair from my face. “You go get some rest now love. We’ll be right here for
you. We won’t go anywhere”

I brightened and dragged some protective bracelets from my pocket. “Will you also wear these?” I asked.
“Only til Monday.”

My mum immediately put hers on but my dad looked at his doubtfully. 

“Jeez, two days dad, two days. You’re not even leaving the house so no one will see it.”

He put it on sheepishly. I kissed them both on the forehead and trudged up the stairs to my bedroom.
Behind me, I heard them whispering anxiously to themselves. However, my promise to go to the doctor’s
on Monday had clearly alleviated any immediate need for action - and at least now my parents were
forewarned about tonight.

I fell face first onto my bed and sunk into a deep and dreamless sleep. 

I woke to the sound of screaming. Night had fallen and the big and beautiful Harvest Moon was
illuminating my bedroom. I looked out the window into a world gone mad with blood and terror. 

So that’s what the wood people look like. I thought to myself calmly. Absolutely terrifying. 

I hurriedly checked my phone Most of my mates had already messaged me in a blind panic asking if this
is what i’d dreamed of. I texted back, reminding them not to go outside, unless the house looked to be in
danger of collapsing or something. Their houses were warded so they should be safe, but grab a
weapon just in case. DO NOT take off their amulets. 

The amulets marked them as ‘inedible’ - either they showed up as poisonous or just not food or
untouchable, i don’t know. As long as they worked, I didn't care.  I sent them a picture of the wards I had
painted on their houses, just in case they wanted to paint them on the upstairs of the house too.
I thought the ground floor wards should cover the whole building - but it didn’t hurt to be careful.
I also thoughtfully posted it on the town’s website - just in case it helped. 

I reached down under the bed and pulled out the axe from the shed i’d stashed there a week ago. 

I hurried downstairs to where my parents were staring out the living room window in horror.
My wards were working I was happy to see, none of the creatures came nearer than five meters to the
front door. 

In the distance, I could see dark clouds of smoke rising from somewhere. There were blood splatters on
the street were people had been caught out and clearly tried to make a run for it. The sky was dark, the
moon hidden now and the air filled with screams and eerie growls. 

“You know,” I said, causally hefting my axe, “I hate to say I told you so, but……”