(For Talenwolf; the editor who shows that anger builds as well as destroys and has been an insane level of support with this story - and a few others)
(Note: the start of this story is gory, involving a tale of torture and genocide. It is not too graphic but it is rough)
(There is a great deal of violence in this tale but I promise it will make sense before we are done. The 'hero' is no Conan the Barbarian – normally. Slapping girls and woman is very abnormal but I hope understanding will come)
(This is a VERY sex lite story. Other chapters will have more but this one is about introductions and conflict)
Why Am I Not Dead
To understand what happened with the Witches of Ravenrook I need to go back before the beginning; back to the Winter of 1778/9 when the American Revolution was raging in full force. Back then my family lived in the far western edge of the Crown Colony of New York, or for what had been the past two years, the Sovereign State of New York.
It was rebellion against the British Crown and a civil war that pitted frontiersmen vs. frontiersman and Iroquois vs. Iroquois. In late 1776, my ancestor with a party of his fellow farmers met with a group of Iroquois leaders and pledged an Oath. We agreed that no matter what our Great Leaders declared those in that one valley would not spill the blood of our neighbors. We swore on our oldest Bible, the souls of our children and by the sacred fires of our homes and lodges.
Until the spring of 1778, the pact held and both sides felt safe. In that spring the British and Colonials both sent out runners calling for men to fight. My ancestor called up a small militia and captained it; those who wouldn't fight for the Colonial cause stayed home to protect all the families, thus keeping the bonds of friendship with their fellows but also keeping their oaths to the Crown.
My ancestor met with the Iroquois chiefs. They would go north to fight along Lake Eerie beside their British allies while he would march east to fight with General Gates and his Colonials. That fall, the British lost in the North and General Burgoyne surrendered his British/loyalist forces to General Gate's Continental bluecoats in the East. As was the way of things; news traveled faster than the feet of soldiers.
When the loyalist and Iroquois learned of their twin defeats they became fearful of what my ancestor and his men would do upon their return. Fear led to betrayal as a small band of loyalists convinced the local indigenous people to rise up against the patriot families but, they were stymied by the Oath. A clever loyalist found a way around it. He and his companions went to the patriot households cloaked in friendship and seized the weapons then letting the Indians take the patriot families away.
They rounded up everyone in the settlement and herded them to a high cliff a few miles away. Until the first rush of Iroquois came at them, the patriot families had no idea they were all going to die. They were pushed off the cliff and fell to their deaths thus the Iroquois were able to stay true to the word of the Oath, if not the spirit, by not spilling patriot blood. Then they fired the village and farms as they left.
Their thinking seemed to have been that the patriots would bury their dead and, having nothing left, my ancestor and his men would return east to the Hudson River Valley and never come back. Nothing was left for patriots in the settlements and the Iroquois had kept to the Oath after all; only madmen would break it. None the less, few loyalists risked remaining; they moved their families to Canada in what they thought would be a temporary stay. When the British Crown finally prevailed they would return. Those were the ones escaped the hell that was to come.
When my ancestor's troops came home they were indeed gripped with a terrible fatalism but it wasn't one of surrender; it was a deathless rage. A small few who chose to grieve over, and bury the dead, turned away from vengeance. They stayed to bury all their dead including their leader's wife and infant son. What followed for the rest was not war and was barely vengeance – it was pure evil.
His men fell on the first few Seneca villages late at night, using only knives and tomahawks to avoid raising the alarm until it was too late. The Seneca warned them of the price of breaking the Oath then they pleaded for slavery (it meant something different to the tribes back then) and finally they pleaded for their families' lives. My ancestor killed the men by hacking them apart or tying them to poles and burning them alive.
They were the lucky ones; my ancestor became demonically creative with the women and children but his favorite thing was tying children to their mother and then tying heavy stones to their children's legs. Finally he forced the mothers to swim across rivers. They could save themselves if they untied themselves from their children. In the lore of the Seneca and Fox (the other tribe he waged his campaign on) no woman severed her bonds – they all were sucked under the icy flows, dragged down by the one's they truly loved more than life itself.
No good deed or great evil goes unpunished and eventually a small contingent of British irregulars, loyalists and Iroquois tribesmen ran my ancestor and his men to ground. To his credit, that man was not a coward. If anything he was insanely brave. Buying time for of few of his fittest men to escape – which is how I know this tale for one escaped then doubled back – he rushed his pursuers and killed so many that in the end what followed was inevitable.
They hated him; they hated him so much they attempted to repay him tenfold for the misery he had caused, for the Oath he had broken and for all their dead that would never find peace because of the way he knowingly killed them.. They fed him pieces of his own men, forcing the flesh down his throat with scalding water. They skinned him alive but his hate refused to let him pass out from the pain, which must have been beyond imagining.
In the end they shattered every bone in his body, starting with his toes and they uttered horrific curses upon his spirit that they would never cast upon a living man for they did not believe any descendant was still alive. When they crushed his skull, they knew they were damned forever but they also knew that the curses would die with them because the line of my ancestor died with the Bastard.
The problem was they did not know his wife, the ancestor of all the Vandemeyer that where to come. She knew she was going to die and she knew that even if she shielded her son from the fall with her body they would smother her infant when they heard his cries of cold and hunger. She tore open her blouse and shoved her tit into that little boy's mouth and when the press of bodies pushed her off the cliff (suicide was a terrible sin so she could not jump), she pressed the infant tight.
When the loyalists searched the bodies at the base of the cliff the child remained silent because he still fed from her corpse milk. The bodies the loyalist rolled onto him by accident kept him warm enough that he was found alive by the small band of patriots that had come down the cliff to bury their dead. They assumed initially that the others would return, their vengeance quenched but it was late winter before a pitiful few staggered back home. The one patriot who had stolen back and witnessed the infant's father's death told the others of the madness, savagery and final eradication.
That man took the boy to his Great Uncle who was childless and chose to raise the boy as his own. The boy grew up rich and strong and had a family of his own but he ended up brutally perishing to brigands in Ohio at the age of 43. His son died at 40 in the Civil War when a cannon ball tore off his leg. His last sights were of so many men of his regiment dead or dying around him. Even as he was dying, he ordered his men to take him, place him on a litter and together they took a place called the Bloody Angle at the Battle of Antietam.
The sons died and they died and they died; all between the ages of 39 and 45, all in violence and usually in anguish. It was the family curse. If there was an upside, the Vandemeyer's lived fully and richly in the short time allotted, they did notable things, gathered wealth, engaged in dangerous dalliances, feuds and were often heroic in their own way. Nothing – no act of contrition – would save them so they made the most of what they had.
I was told this story and the litany of my many mangled ancestors on my tenth birthday. We didn't believe in mystic curses, but like the first one to bear that foul taint, we grew fatalistic about the seemingly random chances that haunted us all and that gave me a fearlessness that my father carried and he told me his father carried as well in his time. There was going to be no Happy Endings for me, only a painful one; so why not live freely while I could?
What I didn't know was that a hundred dead Vandemeyer and several hundred dead Seneca and Fox Indians were all sitting around me, waiting for me to die without an heir because, I was the last of my line and none of them could cross over to whatever waited in the afterlife while I drew breath. Oh, those Indians were regretting curing the Bastard now because their curse had followed their sons as well. Even the Bastard was getting awful tired of waiting for Hell's flames. The edge of Oblivion, were all lost souls gather, had long lost its appeal.
The moral that came to me at the end was if you're going to put a Death Curse on somebody make damn sure every last one of the sons-of-bitches' relatives are dead. Your children will not forgive your sloppiness; believe me, I know. And the biggest bitch of a Death Curse; the dead can't do anything directly or indirectly, to end the curse.
They originally entered it willingly, by their actions, or by the crushing evil that led them to that end; so they actually had to help me stay alive. See, Lost Souls have power and while they would happily let me meet my preordained fate, they had to keep me alive until then. How wrong is that? In retrospect, Death Curses are stupid; just kill your enemy and walk away.
The Story Itself
My name is Richard Vandemeyer – a twenty year old not-quite-a-man who probably is the victim of too much snobbery inspired inbreeding and a Blue Blood's sense of social and civic responsibility. I base much of my actions and plans on what I think I'm obligated to do as opposed to what is in my own self-interest or something akin to common sense.
In other words, I don't keep my head down and I don't run away from trouble. My cultured veneer encased a rather savage primal core it seemed.
Ravenrook is an exclusive college situated on an isolated island off the coast of Maine. It was founded in 1890 as a school for concentrated study for Masters Programs for the leading universities at the time. The island was large, scenic, rocky, and tree covered but only had one small cove for egress and exit.
