Grandmom’s Love

I don't know if anyone will read this, I don't even know if anyone will care, but I have to tell someone. It's too much to process right now, and maybe if I get some of it off my chest, it will make it easier to handle. I'm getting ready to go off into the unknown, and I feel like someone needs to know why. Someone needs to know how it came to all this and how I came to be a potential murderer/ avenging angel.

Above all else, I need to tell someone about Charlie.

I'd known Charlie since we were in grade school together. Charlie thought of us as brothers, since he didn't have any of his own, and loved us like family. Despite that, though, we never thought for a minute that we were the most important people in Charlie's life. No, the most important person in Charlie's life was his grandmother. Charlie's grandmother, he'd always called her Grandmom, was the one who raised Charlie since the day he was born. Charlie's mother died in childbirth, and his father died before he was even born, so without a guardian that just left Charlie and Grandmom, Grandmom and Charlie. Charlie's Grandmom lived out in the country in an old wooden farmhouse with a big backyard and acres of fields for growing things. She rented the land to sharecroppers and must have done pretty well for herself because Charlie couldn't recall her ever working a day in his life. Charlie didn't have any other family, none he'd ever met anyway, and for the first eight years of his life, it was just the two of them alone in the farmhouse. Charlie's said he remembered being sick a lot as a kid, and most of his early memories were of he and his Grandmom on the couch while she nursed him back to health from one thing or another. Grandmom would sit at home with him while he convalesced on the couch watching Sesame Street and ate whatever Grandmom could whip up for him in the kitchen. Most days, Charlie would just spend the whole day on her lap while she rocked him and hummed strange little Russian songs to him.

Grandmom wasn't originally from here, you see. She had immigrated during the "Second Great War," and she and his grandfather had moved out to the country because it reminded her of her childhood home. Coming from the old country, she had all kinds of folk remedies, good-tasting recipes, and strange little songs that she would sing to him as he drifted off to sleep or lay sick on the couch. One in particular that Charlie recalled fondly had become a ritual of sorts, a ritual that goes on to this day, I assume, that took on the normalcy of time and repetition. She would take him on her lap, pull his face close to hers, and place her hands on his cheeks as she put her forehead against his. Charlie recalled the bumpy, veiny skin there beneath his smooth baby skin as she did this and the warmth that always seemed to radiate from her skin. With their foreheads pressed together, she would sing a strange song to him in her thick Russian tones before releasing him and planting a kiss on his forehead.

"What does it mean, Grandmom?" Charlie would always ask, and the asking was as much a part of it as the ritual itself, he said.

"It means," she would say in her warm, gravelly voice, "Always together, even when apart, always a part of me, here in my heart."

Charlie had never thought it odd that he lived in relative isolation with his Grandmom, not until he started school. His Grandmom had tried to homeschool him for a few years, but her teaching wasn't up to the state's standards, so she had, grudgingly, allowed Charlie to attend public school. Here Charlie came into contact with other children and first learned how strange his situation was. The other children had very different home lives than Charlie, and the idea that he lived alone with his grandmother was weird to them. In class, they would do assignments or draw pictures of their families, and Charlies was always the smallest when put on the bulletin board with the rest. Charlie began to wonder why he didn't have any uncles, or aunts, or cousins, or any family besides Grandmom but when he asked her about them, she only shrugged and gave him the same answer she always did.

"Your Grandfather and I only had one child. Your father was not a strong boy, he was sick often like you are, and we were afraid to have another. By the time he was old enough to over his sickness, your grandfather was dead, and it was only your father and I."

That made Charlie feel a little better. His father had been like him, both of them sickly and alone with Grandmom. It couldn't be that strange. This didn't stop the other kids from teasing him, though. I remember Charlie when he first arrived at school, and the other kids had him pegged as an oddball from the get-go. Going to school in the early nineties, it was all about what was cool and how much of that cool thing was on your clothes. Charlie showed up the first day looking like the boy from the hot chocolate box my mom always bought. He wore suspenders and stockings, knee boots, and shirts with weird fringe on them. He stuck out like a sore thumb, and this, coupled with his odd way of speaking and stunted knowledge base, had him marked as slow and a dweeb. He came in for quite a bit of ridicule as I recall, and it was a hard couple of days before my friends, and I got involved.

This is where I came into Charlie's story, I guess. I had never taken part in the teasing, and over time I began to feel bad for him. I pushed some of my friends to invite him to play with us, and we were surprised to find not a dumb kid but an imaginative boy who joined our games eagerly. His grandma, sorry Grandmom, had taught him a little Russian, which we thought was just the coolest, and we gave him some of our old clothes to wear, so he didn't stand out quite so much. Together we played GI Joe or Superheroes or whatever the game of the day happened to be, and outside of play, we helped Charlie stand up for himself and make the bullies stop. As we got older, Charlie stayed a part of our group, and we really helped him come out of his shell and adapt to life outside his Grandmom's house.

After High School, we all thought we might get an apartment together, Zach, Tristan, Charlie, and I, so we could attend college together. Charlie was hesitant, he didn't want to leave his poor old Grandmom alone in the middle of the woods, so when he turned up at the house a few days later with a scant few possessions, I was pretty surprised. He had two plastic bags of clothes, a zipper bag of toiletries, and after some coaxing, he told me that he and his Grandmom had a really nasty fight about his moving out. This, too, surprised me because I had never heard of Charlie's grandma ever raising her voice to him in all the time I'd known him, and he seemed just as shocked as we were. She refused to give him any of his stuff, except what he'd brought with him, and told him not to expect her to send him any money or anything else; if he moved out now, then he was on his own. You could tell he was upset about it, poor guy, and we helped him out as best we could. He ended up sleeping on the couch until his first expenses check came in, but he made do as he always had.

I had expected that would be the end of his closeness with his Grandmom, but I couldn't have been more wrong. After a few weeks of silence, she went back to calling him every day, and to our astonishment, he made plans to have dinner with her and help her with her shopping. She would send him money sometimes, and he would go over several days a week to eat dinner or lunch, and slowly, things began to return to normal. She still wouldn't let him take any of his stuff out of her house, but he got new stuff, and by the time his first semester was done, he had everything he needed.

Things went on in this way for about three years until last Wednesday. Charlie and I had just got back from class when he got a call from his Grandmom. His face fell as they talked, and you could tell that Charlie was barely holding back tears. She hadn't been doing well for several years, nearly from the time Charlie moved out, and I personally thought it was a guilt trip to keep her grandson close to home, though I'd never say that to Charlie. He talked to her for a few minutes and then immediately went to his room and packed an overnight bag. He told me to tell his counselor that he had a family emergency and needed to go home to be with his grandmother. When I asked him what was going on, he told me that she was dying, and she wanted him to stay with her until she passed. I commiserated with him and told him to give her my best and to stay in contact, so we knew when he'd return.

That was a week ago, and it was the last time anyone ever saw Charlie. His car is gone, his overnight bag has vanished, and Charlie has disappeared without a trace. I drove the hour to his Grandmom's house, hoping to find some clues as to where he went, only to be greeted by a stranger when the door was opened. A tall, dark-haired woman answered the door, and I was sure she wasn't someone I'd ever seen before. Her clothes were drab, her hair was lank, and her stomach was swollen as though in the last month of pregnancy. She claimed to be a distant relative that had inherited the house from Charlie's grandmother after she died. She didn't seem to speak English very well and was completely unsure of not only where Charlie was but who Charlie was. We quickly lost patience with each other, and she yelled at me to leave before she called the police. I seethed all the way home, but I wouldn't get any answers from her.

I got my answer later that night.

It was around two in the morning when something woke me from a deep sleep. My legs were full of pins, and it felt like someone was sitting on them. I rolled over, thinking one of my roommates had wandered in drunk only to find Charlie sitting on my bed. Even in the dim light, I could tell something was wrong. Charlie looked bad, withered somehow, like a grape that gets left in the crisper drawer for too long and somehow turned into a raisin.

Or a corpse after it's dried out in the grave.

He spoke to me, his voice a rattling rasp in my ears, and told me what had happened to him.

He'd went to be with his Grandmom. He'd arrived to find in her bed and said she looked close to death as he approached. He'd slumped, weeping, by her bedside, and she reached out with her wrinkled hands and touched his face. He lifted up a little, so he could see her, and she asked him to put his forehead against hers so she could say the words one last time.

"She was my Grandmom, and I loved her; how could I deny her anything?" he said in a voice racked with pain.

So he let her draw his face to hers, and she said the words as she always had, "Always together, even when apart, always a part of me, here in my heart," but when she kissed him on the forehead, his lips already starting to ask what it meant, he felt something change.

"It was as though she were taking everything from me. My breath, my blood, my bones, my seed, and all with that single kiss on my forehead."

As she had taken all of it from him, he had crumpled into a dried husk as she changed before his eyes. Her hair darkened, her skin tightened, her eyes sparkled, and he said that her belly had grown large even as her breasts grew heavy with milk. When she stood over him, she was fifty years younger, a girl of twenty, and I realized that she was the woman who had opened the door for me. She stood over him, cackling at his desiccated form, and her face was devoid of the love he had always found there.

"Now you see why I have kept you close all these years. Now you see the fruits of my labor, just as your father did before you and your grandfather before him", she said, looking down on Charlie without pity or remorse.

"Why?" he asked, and even then, he voiced the least of the questions that sprang to my mind, "Why have you done this?"

"Why? This is the fate that befalls all of your line. Males for centuries and centuries, males from the first of your name to crawl upon this earth. He told me I was ugly, he spat on my love, and he promised me that I would never have him. I promised him that I would have all those of his line, bare them and break them, and so I have from that time on. Your son," she said and gave her belly a little stroke, "will be no different." and as she stood cackling over him, Charlie died and passed into the void that waits beyond.

He told me all of this as I sat huddled by the head of my bed but promised me that she was wrong. She would have no more from his line; the cycle would end with his son. He told me some things, things he understands now, and called his grandmother a Ved' ma, which is the Russian word for Witch. He also called her a Strigoi, but he hopes he's wrong about that. "A mortal man may kill a Ved' ma if he is very lucky," he told me, "but a Strigoi is another matter entirely." He made me promise, promise if ever I called him friend, to rescue my son and to kill his Grandmom once and for all.

It will be dark soon, and he says that tonight will be the night of her delivery, which will make her weak. I'm leaving this here in case I don't come back, in case someone out there might save Charlie's son if I fail. I have the things I need, and midnight will be here before I know it. I hope I'm strong enough to do what must be done.

I pray I don't come to my friends in the night with a similar request.

I pray I can break this curse and make Charlie it's last victim.