The Children of Rath

Leo knew it was one of his mom’s bad days as soon as the bus pulled up to the cul de sac. All the tell-tale signs were there. The opened garage door. The random items strewn across the driveway, the collections of empty beer bottles on the front porch looking almost like they were being intentionally saved for some kind of art project. (That’s what he told his neighbor Aubrey when she asked him about it on the bus a few years ago, anyway.)

He never quite knew what a “bad day,” would entail, but he knew a bad day when he saw one. This was definitely one of them. God, it was so embarrassing! Didn’t she know what people said about her? About them? About him?

As he walked toward his driveway from the bus stop, his backpack slung half-heartedly over his shoulder, he heard the yelling from within. He’d long since learned it was useless to ask his parents why they were yelling. They’d just tell him it wasn’t yelling, it was a “loud discussion,” and the adults were handling it. Besides, he already knew what they were yelling about. As he stood in the driveway debating his next move, his dad’s voice came from somewhere inside, “Dammit Val, I’m just trying to help! Why do you have to be like this?! YOU. NEED. HELP!”

His mother’s response was a little too quiet to make out all the way, but he knew that it was her same old excuse about how she was doing just fine, but today had been hard and she’d just had a little slip. He knew what the rest of the evening would hold: seemingly endless phone calls in hushed tones and hours upon hours of tense silence as they each retreated to a separate room to suffocate slowly under the weight of this bad day.

As he stood there dreading the evening ahead, his thoughts were interrupted by a crash from inside. It sounded like someone had dropped a plate or a glass. Or, perhaps thrown it.

Fuck this, Leo thought to himself. He grabbed a water bottle, a soda, and an apple from the garage fridge and tossed them in his backpack atop the textbooks and binders. He pulled his bike off the rack his dad had built, and he was off.

Leo couldn’t pedal hard enough as he shot out of his driveway through the quiet streets of his development. He rode past the rest of the cookie cutter houses that looked like they probably didn’t have psychotic parents who did things like remove all the seats from the car to look for a pair of sunglasses that were on top of their head the whole time. The kids that lived in these houses probably never had to come home to find that their mom had started a cleaning project that for some reason included having to disassemble all the dining room chairs. He imagined these families going mini-golfing, or hiking, or getting through an entire movie without someone getting angry and storming out of the room, slamming the door so hard it rattled the framed photos on the living room wall. The photos on the walls of these other houses probably didn’t feel like a lie the people in them could never live up to.

As he rounded the corner to the main road, Leo paused. No cars to be heard in any direction. He quickly made his way down the stretch of the main road to the trailhead that led into the woods. He was headed to the place that he’d carved out as all his own. He was headed to his cemetery.

As he entered the woods, he dropped his bike in the usual spot and continued on foot down the tree-lined trail with its roots and dirt and fallen leaves. The familiar crunch felt and sounded to Leo the way he always imagined coming home to a normal family would.

“Hi sweetie, how was school?” the rustling trees asked him.

“Do you have much homework tonight?” the bubbling stream unseen through the dense forest cooed.

As he walked, the backpack began to feel lighter as the weight on his shoulders dissipated. Here, in the embrace of the woods, he didn’t have to worry about his mom or his dad or what the neighbors might be saying. Out of sight, out of mind. It had been on another bad day that he’d first discovered the cemetery.

He’d been traipsing around these woods for as long as he could remember, sometimes with his parents and, later, on his own. During these solo adventures he’d grown bolder and ventured away from the clearly carved walkway. He went a little further off the path each time, and one day he found it. A clearing that held about two dozen headstones, most of which were too weathered to read.

He had so many questions: how long had this place been here? Did it predate the forest? Who were the people buried here, and what had happened to the loved ones who used to visit them? Clearly nobody had been here for a long, long time.

Over the years he’d started coming out here to get away from the chaos, and this started to feel more like home than his bedroom had. At one point he’d even set up some fallen logs and branches to make himself a sort of multipurpose structure that could be used as a bench or a table or even a bed if he laid very carefully. As he became more curious about the names on the headstones, he started to pull the vines and underbrush away from them, wiping them down with his hands and moss and sometimes his shirt if it was warm enough. It was really a space he’d made his own. Nobody else was using it, so why not him?

As Leo’s feet felt the familiar incline telling him the cemetery was close, he absentmindedly gathered flowers from around him. It was his own tradition. He figured if he was going to visit a cemetery he should bring flowers. Besides, the people buried here had embraced him in a way he’d never quite felt before. He would never tell anyone else about this place. It was part of the pact. The cemetery kept his secrets, so he kept theirs. And he always brought them wildflowers and bouquets of plants from the woods around them.

He paused, as he always did, at the edge of the clearing marking the boundary of the cemetery. He breathed a sigh of relief, and stepped across the threshold. He was as home as he ever was. As he made the rounds, laying a flower or two on each of the stones, brushing away any newly fallen branches, a familiar and somewhat uncomfortable feeling welled inside of him. Why couldn’t he just stay here? He was already grieving the moment he’d have to leave. Here, in this clearing and these woods with this small cluster of people long-dead, he was sheltered from the outside world; but it was still waiting for him. Being here didn’t break the cycle of his daily life. Being here simply allowed him a break from that cycle. It was a blessing and a curse all in one.

As he settled down against the large headstone in the middle, his back hugged by the cool granite, he pulled open his backpack and grabbed the apple and soda. He ate in peace as the birds chirped and the trees rustled and somewhere nearby a small critter scampered through the dead leaves. He tossed the apple core aside as an offering for the animal grounds-keepers, and pulled out his algebra folder.

As he opened the folder, a gust of wind came from out of nowhere, and the papers scattered. He caught all but one of them and stuffed the folder back in his bag, springing up to chase after the one that got away. As he reached the paper, the gust of wind blew again. He chased after it again, and just as he was steps away from picking it up, another gust of wind pushed it a little further. “Seriously!?” he yelled in exasperation. Maybe he imagined it, but he could have sworn the trees laughed at him.

Finally he caught up with the runaway worksheet, and reached down to pick it up. As he did so, he realized the rock it had gotten caught on wasn’t just any normal rock. It was too structured. He moved some of the vines and plants that had grown up around it apart with his fingers. Was this...? He pulled and tugged and ripped at the weeds some more. It was! It was a well. How had he never noticed this before?

He stood up and looked around. He was no longer in the cemetery, although he could still see it about 50 yards away. He rushed back and stuffed the paper into the backpack with the rest of his homework and returned to the well. After what felt like hours of ripping up weeds and peeling stubborn vines away from its surface he had uncovered enough to look down into it. He wondered how deep it went, and if there was still water in it. He wondered if it had been used by the same people who once visited the cemetery before the woods took it over.

As he peered down, he swore he heard the laughter again, coming from the well itself. As he stared, a face emerged from the darkness. Was it his reflection? He looked as closely as he could, and it didn’t look like him. But maybe it was distorted? If the water was rippling that could be a thing, right?

He kept looking in awe as the face rose higher in the well. This couldn’t possibly be real! It wasn’t a human face. Whatever this was, it had antlers. Was it a deer? Had a deer somehow fallen in there and become trapped?

The face continued to rise higher, and he could see that it looked like a kid wearing a costume - a really good costume. Hollywood special effects makeup artist level stuff.

The creature’s face rose up the well until it was just about five feet below him. Leo didn’t believe his eyes, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to look away. And then the creature blinked and smiled.

"We are the Children of Rath," the nymph-like creature from the bottom whispered up at him. With its antlers like a stag, a feline muzzle, and deeply human eyes that seemed bright with mischief, it grinned.

"Wrath?!" Leo said, alarmed.

"Not the kind of wrath you are thinking of, I don't think, but yes. We are the Children of Rath." Its shining face seemed to know more than it was telling. Was this a riddle? Leo didn't know. "Do you want us to come out and play with you? We're very good at games," it said. It seemed friendly enough, and Leo had encountered plenty of creatures in the time since finding the cemetery. But they’d all been... well, normal. Animals and birds and butterflies. Nothing like this. He'd come to think of this place as his cemetery, but maybe it wasn’t his at all. Maybe it was theirs. Maybe that’s why he intuitively knew he had to bring a peace offering when he visited. Because this place belonged to someone else - to these so-called children of wrath.

"No thanks...." He said as politely as he could. "That's okay. I should be going home soon," he said.

But then he thought of what awaited him at home, and realization struck him. He sank down next to the well in defeat, unsure what to do. "I think maybe I’m a child of wrath, too," he whispered to himself with a resigned sigh.

"Yes," the creature said from the well. Leo looked back down at it, startled at its response. He hadn’t realized it would be able to hear him. And he still didn’t really believe that what he was looking at was real.

"And that thing you thought earlier," it said, a glint in its eye, "that thing about this place belonging to the Children of Rath?" The creature paused, seeming to expect some kind of response. Leo nodded. "That's true, too,” the creature continued. “You may be a child of wrath, my beautiful, sad little flower boy, but WE are the Children of Rath..... And this place. It is ours!"

And with that, the creature reached up to Leo, lightning quick, and grabbed his arm. Before he knew what was happening, Leo was falling.

Before he could inhale enough air to scream, the falling stopped. It didn’t stop with a thud or a bump or anything that felt bad at all. But somehow he was on solid ground again. The creature was nowhere to be seen, and as Leo looked around him, he saw only the woods where he’d been standing moments ago. He looked back at the cemetery and his backpack was right where he’d left it. He turned to look down into the well again. It was gone.

Standing in front of him where the well he’d just fallen into had been moments before, was a door.

“No way,” Leo gasped, his head spinning.

The trees laughed.

He walked around the door, debating. Only the side he’d originally been facing had a knob, so he returned to where he’d started. He stood there staring, counted to three in his head, took a deep breath, and opened it.