Freebie Mondays: The Most Mundane Curse (Prompt Novel Chapter 16)

For 2024, I decided to devote my prompt writing time to a novel. The twist is that the novel plot will be generated entirely by the writing prompts I chose to use for the project – which were rolled randomly using my trusty dice and a few online prompt lists. You can find the Table of Contents here.

For Chapter 16, the prompt was: “character has to get to the bottom of their family’s deepest secret”

Turns out I rolled a lot of prompts about secrets! This one was actually a new addition to the list when I realized I wasn’t going to have enough prompts to finish out a full plot.

We’ve had a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes of late, so this scene was a change of pace. I delved into some old library knowledge to write it, and I’m pretty pleased with how it worked out. Sometimes when you have a mystery to write, you work in reverse. This one came together nicely while I was in the thick of it.

If you’d like to see this chapter come together, you can watch the VoD on Youtube!
. . .

Ira loved libraries. When she was a kid, she would gladly have pitched a tent in the fantasy section and lived in this building if anyone let her. She felt at home among the aged spines of the books housed on these shelves in a way she didn’t feel comfortable anywhere else.

But as time moved on, it was less the words on the pages that held her interest and more the patrons themselves. These days, Ira didn’t do a lot of reading when she occupied library spaces. Instead she watched the people who shuffled through the door. She listened as they returned books and paid late fees. She noted the selections being carried toward the front desk and carted back to shelves to be resorted into their proper places.

Like the coffee shop in the simulation, Ira found most of the information she sought in the subtle movements of the people who passed her. The answers to her greatest curiosities were usually found in their tone of voice and the questions they asked. She noted the tolerant smiles of the librarians as they answered the same question for the dozenth time that day, and the exaggerated eye-rolls of the patrons after they turned their backs and thought the staff wouldn’t notice.

Ira was warmed most by the children who accompanied their parents into the space. Some of them dragged their guardians through the door and straight to their favorite section. Others tore free of their parent’s grip the second they entered so they could skip off to lands unknown, in a state of total bliss until it was time to return home.

But today, she had time for none of them. And every time stray movement drew her eyes, she quickly tore her gaze away and returned her focus to her task.

Ira never worried about the fact that she didn’t read much in public spaces. The information always got into her head somehow. Usually via the internet and often via audiobooks or podcasts – that freed her hands and eyes for other tasks. But today she had to focus on the old words scribbled across the transparent film projected on the screen in front of her workstation.

She couldn’t find the answers she needed on the internet this time. All the websites summoned by her query contained only speculation and wild exaggeration. She needed definitive answers – and dates wherever possible.

She needed to know when the Mawor moved into town and became a harbinger of doom. No out-of-towner could tell her that. Nor could the mass speculation of conspiracy theorists who had been charmed by some new cryptid they heard about on vacation.

Only those that lived near the small grove of woods by the old windmill truly understood the reality of the Mawor and the legend of his hunting ground. So only the history of her hometown could reveal the truth she so desperately sought.

Her sister’s story claimed that the Mawor was once a man. Or at least the version she told when they were children claimed that someone had undergone some kind of magical transformation that trapped them in a form half-man, half-beast.

And that was too close to her current situation to be ignored.

She sighed as she reached the base of the current projection without finding a single headline worth reading. It would take hours to sort through all these old newspaper publications, and that timeline was expanded by the constant need to unload and re-load the machine with the next set of films.

She tried to peer at the transparent slips before she put each into the projector, but the text was so small that it was a futile task. She wasn’t sure how far these old newspapers went back or when the chronicle of the town’s history began in earnest, but if she didn’t pick up the pace, she could be here for weeks.

Without delay, she slid the new film into position and flicked the switch on the projector that would allow her to begin her scroll. Luckily, she could gain the gist of most headlines at a single glance, which allowed her to move steadily through each pack of preserved projections.

She knew what she was looking for, and she expected that to aid her task. But she hadn’t been certain of the dates, and that slowed her down.

She knew that passing through the Mawor’s grove had become something of a rite of passage at some point in the distant past. Every time a child of the town reached a certain age, they would be dared by their peers to walk from one end to the other of the grove sometime after nightfall – usually on a moonless night – with the trek ending at the base of the old windmill.

Originally it was only boys that undertook the challenge but, as time wore on and perceptions changed, girls often undertook the challenge as well. Parents tended to look the other way, mostly because they had performed the same ritual in their youth and considered it all nothing more than harmless fun.

That all came crashing to a halt shortly after the turn of the millennium when a trio of teenaged boys turned up dead on the edge of the grove. They had clearly been on their way to the old windmill, and all their friends confirmed they had been bragging about the challenge for days before they went missing.

All three of the boys had been murdered. There were knife marks in their bodies, as well as the claws and teeth of numerous animals. Man was almost certainly responsible for the deed, but the Mawor gained all the credit.

Local police insisted that the tradition of wandering the old forest after dark should be discontinued because the practice was so well-known, it made it easy for predators to take advantage of children. Everyone feared a serial killer would stake out the area near the old windmill and take full advantage of the steady stream of innocent children wandering into their path.

Ira had been just old enough at the time the triple murder occurred to be aware of the fear and anger spread among the adults of the town at the time. They acted as if an entire generation would be obliterated by this malevolent force, and there had been more than one witch hunt to search for the responsible party.

But the murderer was never found. And banning the practice of passing through the Mawor’s grove only made the ritual more popular. Because now children weren’t just sneaking off in the dead of night to perform a courageous and thrilling act, they were doing so without their parents’ permission, adding to both the thrill and the glory.

The end of the tradition had been easy to find. Looking back, Ira was now fairly sure the murder took place the summer before she met the strange women on the mountain trail and started on this crazy journey.

It was the start she was looking for. She had skimmed the 1980’s, thinking she would find mention of the town tradition written by some tongue-and-cheek journalist experiencing a slow news day. But she was most of the way through the 1970’s, and she still hadn’t found a mention of the Mawor that didn’t read as if the adults of the time were poking fun at the antics of children.

She had discovered a shocking number of murders. She was fairly sure she was up to fourteen at this point, but she hadn’t bothered to read much about them.

Just because bodies were found in the Mawor’s grove didn’t mean he put them all there.

She flew through the 1960’s as the day wore on and the shadows grew long. And she was midway through the 1950’s when she finally found what she was looking for – an article titled Local Children Begin Traditional Passage into Adulthood.

The article was dry and mostly uninteresting. It had probably only been included in the paper because there hadn’t been anything else going on. So someone decided to say, hey, look at this cute thing these children are doing. Isn’t our local area fun?

Once she found the proper date range, it was easy to spot what she was looking for. There were dozens of mentions of strange activity in the grove by the windmill – which was quite a bit less old at the time of writing. Local children had always flocked to that area. It was relatively isolated section of forest occupied by nothing more dangerous than the occasional deer. So parents had never really worried about letting their children run amok there. There was no deep water, nothing that could unexpectedly flood and send children to their doom. Plus the trees were all relatively solid and unlikely to fall out from under an enterprising climber.

If not for the endless rumors about a strange creature living at its center, that chunk of forest would have been uninteresting aside from the appeal it represented to the local youths.

It wasn’t like there was a lot to do in a town this small, after all.

The stories about the Mawor were fairly consistent. People claimed they spotted something half-man and half-beast moving through the trees beneath the light of the moon. Usually, the creature was described as tall and hunch-backed with wicked, curved claws at the ends of its fingers. Many of the earliest stories compared the creature to Bigfoot, which made Ira assume that was the origin of the small town tale. But the closer she came to the present, the more the Mawor was described as bird-like, with a ruff of dark feathers at his neck and a twisted face that bore a long, hooked beak.

She ran out of daylight before she was satisfied with her research. She was forced to return all the old films to their niches and abandon the projector to the library staff so the doors could be closed for the day.

She could come back tomorrow – and the next day, and the next – if she thought that would help. But she was wondering if she had once again hit the limit of what her town’s history could tell her.

She spent the evening on the internet. Work offered an easy excuse to hide from her family and, believing in her purpose, her husband served as her co-conspirator, engaging her parents and the rest of their guests in a board game so that no one would wander into the midst of her research.

She closed her computer and set it aside when the rest of the household retired for the evening, but she didn’t go to sleep. She knew if she tried, she would simply lay in bed and stare at the ceiling, as if the sky beyond could impart some revelation to her awareness.

She wandered the corridors of her childhood home, easily avoiding all the floorboards that might produce a creak. And she was only mildly surprised when she padded into the kitchen and discovered her nephew, Wendell, silently fishing the water pitcher free of the fridge’s interior.

They settled across from each other at one end of the large family table. Ira lit a candle, and the flame flickered between the two of them, both warm and foreboding on a night like this. Wendell sipped water and Ira sipped tea she made for herself by the dim light of the singular candle.

When they had both settled, they stared into the darkness, maintaining the silence. It wasn’t an uncomfortable situation, but it had to end at some point – and they both knew it.

At last, Ira cleared her throat and fixed her nephew with a look she hoped was both kind and stern. “You promised you would tell me more about what happened the day you disappeared.”

It wasn’t a door she wanted to open. Thinking about it awakened the demons of her own past. They loomed over her shoulders, great, hulking shadows illuminated by brief flashes of light and sound. She shuddered every time they skittered through the back of her mind, and she threw up every mental barrier she could imagine to keep them at bay.

She could only imagine what it was like for this young man, still barely more than a child, to open the likely still raw and bleeding door of his memory to peer into the not so distant past. But to her surprise, Wendell offered her a tired smile and said, “I wish there was more I could say. It’s all still a bit of a blur.”

Ira knew that her sister had tried everything from gentle meditation to hypnosis to pry the truth out of her son’s memory. Ira was familiar enough with all the methods to know that none of them entirely worked – at least not in a way a person could trust. So she simply nodded and said, “Do your best. Tell me everything, no matter how uncertain it seems.”

“It was a dare, of course,” Wendell admitted and bowed his head. “I always told myself I would never give into them. That they were all just foolish childhood bullying. But there was a part of me that wanted to prove I could do it.”

“I know,” Ira murmured.

Because she felt exactly the same when she stood on the edge of the grove. Her heart and soul had known that she should turn around and walk away. Yet her mind had driven her legs to the edge of the foliage and, once she crossed the boundary, she couldn’t turn back. Pride wouldn’t let her.

“The moon was out so I could see pretty well,” Wendell continued, taking her words for the gentle encouragement they were meant to be. “I took my time and placed my feet carefully. I thought the biggest danger would actually be falling onto something I couldn’t see or running into a tree. I think I had been at it for about fifteen minutes when I heard a twig snap somewhere off to the side. I was surrounded by trees by that point, and I knew I was alone. Or should have been.”

Her nephew fell silent for a moment and hung his head. Ira knew he was searching his brain for some logical explanation of what happened that night, something that would fill in the blanks and make it all seem reasonable.

She also knew he wasn’t going to find anything. So she simply waited until he felt ready to move on.

“It gets fuzzy after that,” he admitted. “I didn’t really think. My mind conjured the image of the Mawor and I shot off in a blind panic. In the light, I know those woods like the back of my hand. I know every twist and turn that would take me to the old windmill lightning fast. But in the darkness, nothing looked the way it was supposed to, and I think I ended up instantly lost.”

Ira closed her eyes. She could see the forest paths by night. The undergrowth suddenly seemed like grasping vines that tore at her ankles as she passed, and the tree bark suddenly seemed to be made of barbed wire that stabbed her palm every time she set a hand against it. She remembered the sound of her own breathing and the rapid beat of her own heart.

She remembered the footsteps behind her, forever gaining ground, and it took effort to push it all back out of her mind when she opened her eyes again.

She would not wish this experience on her worst enemy. Certainly she wished she could spare her beloved nephew from it.

“I fell,” Wendell admitted, his voice shaking. “I tried to catch myself but I think… I think I hit my head. After that, I don’t know. I woke up in a different place. I vaguely remember being dragged. I can’t really trace where I was or how I got there until I opened my eyes again and noticed light. I pushed up and realized that I was laying in the woods again. It took a few minutes and a couple of turns, but I realized where I was and I just bolted. When I got to the road, there were police cars.”

The young man shrugged as if to say, that was it. They brought me home.

Ira considered for a moment before she questioned the kid. Anything she asked could be another potential barb that would stick inside him forever, and she wanted to make sure she didn’t cause any more harm. “You never saw anyone?” she asked softly. “Never felt anyone’s hands on you?”

“I’m sure I felt something grab my ankle a couple times,” Wendell replied without hesitation. “But a face? I never even saw a head. Whoever was near me, I think they always moved behind me so I wouldn’t be able to see. And I don’t know how they knocked me out but I think… I don’t know. I think they kept me unconscious. And I also think they made a mistake. I don’t think they intended for me to wake up alone in the middle of the woods. It just kind of happened.”

With the entire area swarming with police, it was hard to believe anyone would be foolish or bold enough to take their victim back to the exact place that had been under intensive investigation for weeks. But Ira had also long since learned not to question the irrational acts of people.

People were not logical creatures, after all.

It was three in the morning. Ira sent Wendell back to bed, doused the candle and resumed her wandering. This time, her feet carried her up the stairs to the small attic room she used to share with her sister.

This was where she first heard the story of the Mawor, despite trying her hardest not to.

He was once a man, her sister’s voice informed her from the dark depths of her past. And her research on the subject seemed to confirm that. Most people seemed under the impression that the Mawor was once a camper, come to take shelter or find solace in the little patch of woods on the edge of town before it had been isolated from the larger body – which was eventually cleared away to build this town.

No one agreed what happened. Some people compared the Mawor to a werewolf, suggesting some form of bite caused the man to transform into the wicked creature he now was. Some even believed he walked the town by day in a normal form, unaware of what he became beneath the light of the moon. Others insisted he was aware of his curse or even inflicted it himself, embracing the twisted thing he had become.

The only point that popped up in every version of the story was that once the transformation took place, it could never entirely be undone. The Mawor would be the Mawor forever, and all anyone could do was live with that fact.

Ira shuddered as the voice of her sister continued to relate the story, over and over, though Ira had always tried to cover her ears and avoid hearing the words.

The only definitive thing she managed to pluck from her research was that the Mawor had not always been here. He was not an ancient legend passed down from the first moment settlers arrived in these verdant lands to carve homes for themselves. Surely there had been bogeymen of some kind that the locals whispered about in the time before electric lights and regular police patrols. But if so, those spirits had been laid to rest long before the Mawor came to be.

As far as she could tell, the legend started just a few short years before the tradition of gallivanting through the grove in the dead of night. A singular whisper caught fire and became a legend passed from father to son and mother to daughter, until it became so ingrained in the history of the town no one thought to question it.

Ira padded across the small attic until her face pressed to the single circular window. She had to crouch so that her eyes could be level with it, unlike when she was a child and had to lift onto her tiptoes to see anything through the glass.

Beyond the house, the night was dark. Oily blackness clung to the trees as their long, thin branches attempted to scratch at the solid walls.

Light flashed in the back of Ira’s head again, and she saw the woods by the old windmill spread out in front of her, behind her and on all sides. Her hands groped as she attempted to claw her way through the undergrowth, and breath fled her lungs as she heard another snap of a twig behind her.

She kept glancing over her shoulder that night when she ran. She knew better, knew it would slow her down. But she couldn’t resist. Her sister had been fascinated with this creature for so long, she had formed a solid image of it in her head, and she needed to know if it was remotely accurate.

That experience was always with her, always lurking just beneath the surface of her thoughts. But it was never more noticeable than when she let her thoughts linger on it. Talking to Wendell dragged it all back to the surface, making it feel fresh, as though it happened only yesterday.

In her mind’s eye, it was all crystal clear. The hiss of the beast as it reared behind her, the gnashing of teeth and the scraping of claws across tree bark.

It didn’t matter that no one could find signs of the attack in the morning. It was all cemented in her head.

She started this search believing she would find magic, like the spell cast by the trail witches that now clung so deeply to her skin she could never be rid of it. But as she thought about the characteristics of the creature as described in his legends and compared each to the image that still flitted through her mind, she was forced to admit that none of it made sense.

She remembered grasping limbs line tree branches clawing at her hair. She remembered a flash of yellow eyes and a glint of light off of a too-pale face.

It felt as though she was always running from that beast, the memory so clear and sharp that it was etched into the skin of her feet. They were always bleeding just beneath the surface, waiting for another round of restlessness to tear the old wounds open.

She had spent her entire life shuddering and shying away from the visions that haunted the darkness. But now that she pushed past the fuzzy edges, she noticed something she hadn’t before.

There wasn’t a hunched back or a ruff of feathers. There weren’t long claws or a snapping beak. There weren’t yellow eyes either. And even the hissing, gnashing sounds that followed her seemed suddenly suspect.

What if she wasn’t dealing with the supernatural? What if this thing that had stalked her family all these many long years could be contributed to the most mundane of curses – that of an intrusive compulsion that was impossible to ignore.

What if the police were right? What if they were dealing with a serial killer?

The lightning flashed in her mind again. There hadn’t been a storm that night, just the rapid oscillation of her flashlight and the shifting of the moon between clouds. But she remembered it as though someone turned a spotlight onto her flight for just long enough to illuminate the thing that stalked her.

The frightened child huddled in the back of her mind insisted that it was a monster, a form so twisted beyond recognition that she dared not look at it. And when she had been a child who believed in the monsters her sister spoke of, that made perfect sense.

But when she looked back through the eyes of an adult that had rejected that old story of nonsense, she saw at last with the clarity of unhazed vision a human face and human arms.

She even heard a human voice call her name.

And she realized with a start why she had spent so much of her life shoving that moment to the back of her mind and holding her thoughts at bay with images of a monster beyond all comprehension.

It was because when the light flashed again and the image at last became clear in her head, she realized that she recognized the face of the Mawor. And not just in passing; he was a man she had spoken to dozens of times.

The realization tore through her with such dizzying force, Ira pushed away from the attic window and fell to her knees to retch.