主妇丈夫倡导的户外生活

"Take me with you."

Blank begged and begged, but he was only pushed away and told to go back. Erik looked like all that energy and kindness was snapped out of his face....

And all that was left was that unbearable sadness and emptiness that he had within him for a long time.

Harker would often see that expression on his father. His sadness was really different from the others he had seen. It was like Howard and Erik were just born to lament over themselves and the world itself, and suffered misfortunes that just hit the final nail on the coffin.

Blank had that too, Harker thought. He had noticed it when they met, but he chose to deny its existence. After all, he could be seeing things that weren't there. Or more accurately…..

He just didn't want to see it on the person that supposedly saved him, the one he could rely on when he himself was in trouble.

After all, who would want to latch onto a weak and broken rope while climbing on the side of a cliff? We'd rather be hopeful that it won't snap and convince ourselves that it would hold on much longer.

But how long? That was always the question.

"Please! Take me with you! I know why you took their life!" Blank said. "It is because you do not want to die alone, that you do not want your soul to travel with no one by your side! So take me with you, and we can journey into the afterlife together."

Erik just looked at him blankly as he tied a loop around his neck. "And so what if that was my reason? That is not a rational way of thinking. It is abnormal, and is not acceptable in the eyes of the people."

Blank gripped onto his shirt. "What do I care about what people think? In their eyes I am not even human. I am simply a barbaric redskin, or a demon's spawn. I am scorned from the day I was born, but I do not want to die alone. I know how you feel. You have taken those boys with you, but you wouldn't even take the one who adores you the most by your side?"

"It is because I adore you that I cannot take you. I do not believe in Hell, but that may be the path I'm headed for. If not hell, then there is only the dark abyss. I have taken the boys with me into the pit as company, but I will not do the same to a beautiful soul like yours."

Blank collapsed to the snowy ground, begging on his knees. "Please, Erik.... If hell or darkness awaits, then it is no different from this world I am in. So I would rather be there than this place with the 'people'. And I'd rather be there with you."

Erik looks at him for a long time. Then, he wrapped the end of the rope around Blank's feet.

"I will climb the pine tree and jump from this branch. Once I do, your body will be pulled up as my body goes down like a pulley, and you will be hanging upside down. It will take a longer time, but blood will pool at your head and your organs will be crushed from gravity."

The student was not expecting this agreement. He was indeed skeptical if this would work, but he was hopeful that Erik really did want to die with him. Their bodies would be found tied together, a poetic end for them both.

But as Erik was about to jump from the tree branch...

He pulled out a knife and cut the connection between them.

Blank's eyes widened, and he tried to quickly climb the tree. But Erik moved fast, tying the loose end to the branch and securing it before taking the fall.

"I shall travel with the souls of those boys within me. But you must make your journey alone, lad." He said. "I will not consume your soul."

As expected of jumping from that height, his neck made a sickening sound as it snapped.

Blank punched and kicked at the tree. Erik lied to him, and…

He even wore a smile on his face that remained in place as he died.

"WHY!? Why did you leave without me...… Why...."

He wept and wept by that tree. The hours he spent crying would have been enough to cause him to die from hanging upside down by now. Erik just remained there, his body swaying softly from the cold winds of winter.

The police found him and the body, but the rest was a blur for Blank. He was like an empty shell, a zombie moving without purpose or awareness.

He was interrogated, but did not even pay attention to what he said. Everything in front of him was like they were being filtered by a blinding white. All he could see was the snow, and sometimes…..

All he could see was him. His smiling face.

Blank stayed like that for a long time, especially during the funeral. He then saw the child...

And knew just from seeing that child's lonely eyes alone that he would grow up bearing the same curse as his father.

That never-ending lament. That fear of solitude.

From the stories that the wife exchanged with the other mourners, he learned that Erik actually grew from the poor household in the middle of a war. His parents did not expect his birth, and never liked that he was born because of the hardships they were already experiencing.

Erik grew with death and carnage around him. But what the little one could never bear, he told his wife, was the silence of it all.

Walking the streets with no sign of life. His feet bare, his stomach empty.

More than the hunger for food, he had to bear the hunger for love. He never received it from his parents, and once they died, he never received it from anyone either.

He somehow survived, and was taken by the soldiers to be taught in school out of pity. But that was not the same as love, and he had only first experienced it when he met his wife.

When the woman asked how he survived those days of hunger and thirst, she just shrugged.

"He would not answer. He simply says that 'I had the spirits of the fallen men within me. Those were the only ones that gave me strength.'"

Upon listening to this, Blank suddenly had an epiphany.

The bodies of Erik's victims were taxidermied, and nobody could locate the missing organs. They had seen the bag that had all the bloody clothes buried under the spot by the creek. But nothing else.

'I will not consume your soul'. Those were his last words.

Blank suddenly had a plan. He went into the body in the casket about to be buried tomorrow…..

And cut his wrist, feeding his blood onto the mouth of his beloved.

"I know what you are now, Erik. Please come back to me."

And yet his blood wasn't enough. So the next day, he took the body....

And ran with it, several policemen chasing after him. He went to the only other place he could hide, and that would be his tribe. Of course, they questioned why he would be carrying a dead white man's body, but upon hearing that the authorities were after them, they packed their things to leave.

And the wendigos came. That wasn't part of Blank's plan, as he just wanted to bring him back by feeding him the bodies of the dead people from the fights between the tribe and the white men.

But the white soldiers were the ones that turned, and Erik never returned. They chased after the village every night and finally…..

They managed to catch them. Only the unbearable silence remained as no one survived.

Not even the harbinger of wendigos himself.