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    The Blooding
    The Blooding
    The Blooding
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    The Blooding

    By Richard Seward

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    About this ebook

    To escape the Holocaust of Romania during World War II, a father secures from a mysterious stranger passage for his family out of Europe and across the Atlantic to America. To seal the agreement, the stranger scratches the desperate father with a raven's claw, and the father then learns that with the drawing of his blood, he has unwittingly acquired a debt, the cost of which is a fiendish curse on his family for generations to come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781543933970
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      Book preview

      The Blooding - Richard Seward

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      ISBN: 9781543933970

      To The Wife.

      Look what I made!

      The tribal ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage, burial, installation, and so forth, serve to translate the individual’s life-crises and life-deeds into classic, impersonal forms. They disclose him to himself, not as this personality or that, but as the warrior, the bride, the widow, the priest, the chieftain; at the same time rehearsing for the rest of the community the old lesson of the archetypal stages.

      — Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)

      "I become ocean, mercury, silver

      shimmers, fairy tales, fascinated."

      ― Helene Cardona, Life in Suspension: La Vie Suspendue

      Living men are bound by time… Thus, their lives have an urgency. This gives them ambition. Makes them choose those things that are most important, cling more tightly to that which they hold dear. Their lives have seasons, and rites of passage, and consequences. And ultimately, an end. But what of a life with no urgency? What then of ambition? What then of love?

      — Seth Grahame-Smith, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

      "That is not dead which can eternal lie,

      And with strange aeons even death may die."

      — H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

      Table of Contents

      Author's Foreword

      ~ 1 ~

      ~ 2 ~

      ~ 3 ~

      ~ 4 ~

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      ~ 18 ~

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      ~ 21 ~

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      ~ 24 ~

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      ~ 31 ~

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      ~ 33 ~

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      ~ 36 ~

      ~ 37 ~

      ~ 38 ~

      ~ 39 ~

      ~ 40 ~

      ~ 41 ~

      ~ 42 ~

      ~ 43 ~

      ~ 44 ~

      ~ 45 ~

      ~ 46 ~

      ~ 47 ~

      Epilogue

      Afterword

      Author’s Foreword

      ~

      This story began with a single line without any conception of the narrative to follow. As the words appeared on the digital page, it became clearer I was writing a fictional memoir of sorts. Memoirs are strange beasts, for as reflections of lives already lived they defy the primal rule of fictional narrative: show don’t tell.

      I wasn’t at all surprised by the story beginning in Romania. It is a fascinating country. Many will recognize the region of Wallachia as the region ruled by Prince Vlad Țepeș, or Vlad III, or Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula. He was the inspiration, of course, for Bram Stoker’s seminal novel, Dracula, which was composed in an epistolary style, a style not so far removed from the memoir. Romania is also the birth place of one the pre-eminent scholars of religious studies, Mircea Eliade. I began this story with some vague notion of wanting to make central in some way Eliade’s myth of the eternal return. The cycle of death and rebirth, in all of its literal and symbolic forms, is rich in narrative possibilities, so that is where I thought I was headed. However, much of the initial writing was done on the fly, researched as immediately necessary, and without a vision of the inevitable denouement. As I wrote blindly, ideas evolved and changed until they finally took the shape of what you hold in your hands or squint at on the computer screen.

      For me, such beginnings are not unusual in my approaches to storytelling. I love beginnings because of the promises they hold. Many of my works in progress began (and likely will continue to begin) with the vaguest of ideas or an imagined scene.

      The town of Millers Gap might as well be my Castle Rock or Derry (for you Stephen King fans). It figures prominently in three other novels-in-progress, Godfall, Spirit Black, and 199. The latter took me to a discovery of the concept of liminality, which is a fancy word encompassing many concepts, such as duality and threshold moments. The former revolves around Creation myths and the concepts of time and interdimensionality. All of these, in one form or another, reverberate in The Blooding.

      ~ 1 ~

      With a name like Nick White, you likely would not jump immediately to the conclusion that I was of Polish-Romanian descent. However, shortly before the rise of the Antonescu regime during World War II and the subsequent Holocaust of Romania, my paternal grandparents fled the country they loved to avoid the bloodshed and oppression that loomed darkly on the horizon. They had lived in a small village (its name escapes me) situated high in the Prahova Valley, a mountainous expanse in the region of Wallachia. Prahova Valley is now home to several ski resorts, but back then, it was a hard, unforgiving land peopled by equally hard, but God-fearing, peasants. I do not know all of the details regarding their self-imposed exile, except that the journey was one fraught with peril and, ultimately, great loss. My grandparents had four children, but only two survived the eventual escape to America, those being my father, Andrei, and my aunt, Sofia, who were around ten and six years of age, respectively. A mysterious man, Koschei, who had aided several other families in escaping from behind the darkening shadow cast by the iron curtain that closed across Eastern Europe as Communism and Fascism spread, facilitated their escape. My grandparents spoke little of this man who was forever marked with a great scar carved down the left side of his face, and they rarely even uttered his name. It had been clear to my father and aunt that their parents did not trust him, yet despite that distrust they chose to cling to a tenuous faith in the promises he made. Only later did grandfather discover the true cost of their passage and the details of the debt ultimately owed to the strange man.

      In time, Koschei found them passage to America on a decrepit freighter riddled with so many small holes and fissures in its hull that it was a blessing it had not sunk to the bottom of the ocean before successfully crossing the Atlantic. They had huddled below deck, seeking as much warmth as could be had in the cramped quarters to which they were unceremoniously assigned. It was late winter, or so my father told it, and the warmth of spring was like the tantalizing fruit just out of reach; that season taunted them with a promise of renewal while they remained mired in the cruel, biting cold of a winter punctuated by the specter of death.

      Then one overcast day, Ellis Island and Lady Liberty rose slowly on the horizon like unreal beacons of hope. America. The promise of freedom.

      ~ 2 ~

      My grandparents, father, and aunt had not had the opportunity to mourn properly the deaths of their kin, and they had not the opportunity to do so until they were installed in a rat-infested neighborhood in the Bronx. Still, they felt only partial comfort in rightfully grieving their lost loved ones as they had no bodies to inter according to their Romanian Orthodox faith – only trinkets of remembrance that they buried surreptitiously in a small, nearby park. In hindsight, this probably proved fortunate given that the cemeteries and graveyards native to the burrow received minimal attention and maintenance, emboldening grave robbers who often brazenly targeted them for whatever they might dig up and sell. Moreover, rumors ran wild of remains relocated to mass graves in order to make room for incoming residents, whose final resting places proved to be as false and fleeting as those of the former occupants in whose graves they, for the time being, now reposed.

      According to my father, those first years in this new country, away from the one they still clung to as home, were difficult ones. After several years toiling at failed jobs, grandfather eventually managed to find work at a small laundry and textiles manufacturer owned by a neighboring Jewish family. The Kowalewicz’s had had the prescience to recognize the direction in which the events in Europe during that time were headed and had fled their Warsaw home shortly before the 1939 German invasion of Poland. Upon reaching America, they committed what remaining savings they had to starting their business and working their way out of squalor. However, even as business owners, they still grappled with local prejudices and suffered much abuse from the mostly covert German sympathizers that infected many neighborhoods like a sickness. Despite their hardships, the Kowalewicz’s had managed to establish for themselves a good name in the neighborhood. And they were more than happy to have grandfather as an employee, more so following the afternoon grandfather had interrupted a pair of German youth who had confronted their daughter, Susan, with obvious nefarious intentions. They felt forever indebted to grandfather thereafter.

      ~ 3 ~

      Father always told me that grandfather did not speak much about the incident, but the stories told of him facing the two boys – they hadn’t been much older

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