I run a private campground. It's old land and much like old houses, old land has its quirks. I have a set of rules to help people navigate these peculiarities. If you're new here, you should start at the beginning and if you're totally lost, this might help.
I know some of you may be losing track of time, so let me remind you that it's now May. And guess what's in May?
Pentecost!
But also Rusalki's week.
I've told you that my campground closes for significant times of the year. Christmas was certainly exciting and frankly, it's the most exciting time of the year. However, Pentecost is coming. And the week leading up to Pentecost?
That's called rusalki's week.
Normally rusalki are created when someone dies from drowning, suicide, or from unbaptized infants. The usual. The week before Pentecost is special, however. Anyone that dies during that week - anyone - is at high risk for becoming a rusalka. There are ways to hopefully ward off such a fate, but it's really not necessary unless your family comes from an area where rusalki are naturally found. These inhuman things - and the circumstances that create them - tend to stay close to their origin.
Unless, of course, there is old land to settle on.
The things I know aren't exactly a secret. I learned them through books and anyone else could do the same. Most people know more than they realize (rule #3, anyone?) and the only thing they lack is conviction in their knowledge. For many of those, my rules are a clever joke - until they meet something from them during their stay. Then, when they survive (and they often do, for they read and remembered the rules), they understand that the stories they've read still apply in our modern age. And they often continue to come back to the campground, despite what they've experienced, because there is something here that they didn't think they'd ever see.
A touch of the inhuman.
Unfortunately, very very rarely, I get a camper that knows too much. And then, instead of marveling at the tiger from a distance, they begin to wonder how much its hide will sell for.
They come here to exploit my land.
Rusalki's week wasn't always dangerous for us. We have a family in town of Slavic origins and they did attract some of their native creatures, but it wasn't like the rules that governed their bloodline transferred to the entire campground. We used to be open all through rusalki's week without issue. That changed when I was in highschool.
It was the year I got my driver's license. My dad taught me. My family only owned cars with manual transmissions and so I had to learn how to use a clutch and I stalled the engine over and over while my dad tried to explain what I should do and how the car should feel. He told me, a few years later, that his goal had been to teach me to drive without making me cry.
He failed. But I got my license, despite the tears.
My mother taught me something that year as well. Just another step in becoming an adult, much like learning to drive, leading me to the point where I came of age by strangling my former best friend with my own hands.
In the week before Pentecost my family was woken in the night by a phone call. I heard one of my parents answer on the phone in their bedroom, their voice muffled by the crying of the little girl outside the master bedroom window. I swear she was crying louder on purpose just to make eavesdropping difficult. I stood in the doorway and waited until my parents emerged, dressed and ready to leave the house. My dad carried the shotgun.
"That was the sheriff," my dad told me. "They've found some bodies in the neighbor's lake. Stay here in case the sheriff calls back."
Then they left. I knew what it meant that they were being called away from the campground. There was something unnatural happening. I didn't sleep for the rest of the night, just sat in my bedroom and waited for the phone to ring. It finally did close to dawn and it was my father, exhausted, telling me that it didn't look like anything from our campground that'd done it. We were dealing with something new. I was to inform the staff so they could keep an eye out for anything unusual during their shifts. For the next hour, I made a lot of phone calls to our employees.
And through all of this my brother didn't even stir. He'll sleep through fire alarms.
My parents got back right at sunup. They sat in the car on the road, just short of the driveway. I waved at them through the window, they waved back, and then the beast arrived and I let the curtains fall so I didn't have to watch it dragging the little girl away.
My parents spent the day tracking down information about the deceased. There were four, all women. They'd been bound and then drowned. No one said so, but I knew what my parents were thinking.
This wasn't how anything on our campground worked. Either we were dealing with some new creature that could enter and leave our land or this was done by mortal hands.
The next day we got another phone call from the sheriff. Yes, the sheriff I rescued from the vanishing house. The bodies were gone, he said grimly. The door to the morgue was found hanging open and the four murdered campers were gone.
Now we were dealing with something unnatural.
The sheriff handled looking for the four missing bodies. We all knew they'd wind up at our campsite eventually, but he hoped to intercept them before they encountered any campers. There were no signs as to what they'd become, so my father compiled a list of possibilities while my mother prepared weapons. And the staff kept watch, but we were outmatched then, as we are now. There is a lot of land to cover and these creatures are canny at evading humans when they don't want to be found and we don't have enough employees.
We didn't find them before they found our campers.
I wonder if perhaps they were trying to find their way home. Disoriented by their death and transition, no longer human, but human enough to remember certain things. The familiarity of voices. The safety of warmth and light. Yet inhuman, wild things, prone to capriciousness and subject to instinct. They drew to the light of a campfire like moths, and like insects, they did not fully reason through the consequences of their attraction.
One of them went running into the circle of the campfire. She went straight past the campers that sat around in a circle drinking, and threw herself onto the fire. The water on her body and in her hair extinguished the blaze and for a moment the campers were dumbfounded at the sudden appearance of this woman with green hair belly-flopping onto a roaring fire. She rolled around in the embers, entirely unaffected by their heat, laughing uproariously.
Then they heard the laughter of the other three surrounding their circle and panic settled in. The raw fear of a herd that realizes it's flanked by wolves. Someone screamed. Another grabbed a fire poker to use as a weapon. One tried to flee. And the rusalki stopped laughing because the tone had changed and this was no longer games, but a hunt.
Some prey know to hold perfectly motionless, hoping to betray the hunter's gaze that is searching for movement. I wonder if they had done that, if they'd just remained there and waited for her to leave, if they'd all been okay.
Instead, they drew out the predator in the rusalki and the one on the fire rolled over into a crouch, her hair falling to hide her face in shadow. The night pressed in on the assembled campers, their vision blinded by the sudden disappearance of firelight. They heard rather than saw what happened to the one that tried to flee.
A sharp bark of surprise - then brief struggling. A muffled scream. Then a wet pop - a crack, a crunch, like a pinecone being stepped on. And the heavy sound of a body hitting the ground.
I know all of this because I eavesdropped on the survivors as they spoke to my parents and the police in the campground office. And I know what happened to their companion as I saw the body as the paramedics took it away, with the head twisted all the way around.
The rest of the campers fled. All but one got away. Two of the rusalki seized one woman and she twisted out of her jacket and they were distracted by that, quarreling over it as the campers ran into the surrounding darkness. One rusalka, however, grabbed hold of another camper who had no jacket to discard and pulled him to the ground, then dropped over top of him, straddling his abdomen, and proceeded to tickle him.
It's a big campground. People can't maintain a prolonged sprint if they're not trained for it. Worse, the campers were disoriented from the darkness and their confusion. And this was before cellphones were commonplace. No one is really sure just how long they wandered before they found another campsite and then those campers pitched in to help find a staff member. Then the staff member radioed us and my mother grabbed some supplies and headed out there to dispel the rusalki. Suffice to say this all took long enough that when my parents found the camper that hadn't escaped, he wasn't breathing anymore.
My father started CPR as soon as the rusalka ran off into the night, chased by my mother brandishing a switch of hawthorne. My mother chased them for some distance into the woods and when she returned, she found the camper gasping for breath and coughing and my father looked up at her wearily, illuminated by the flashing lights of the approaching ambulance.
Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes we save one.
There wasn't much we could do other than wait out rusalki's week and try to drive them off. We burned an effigy, we sent a maiden out into the woods (me, actually, and it was uneventful). In the meantime the sheriff kept trying to find out who murdered the four women. We had their identities, for their campmates had reported them missing the next day. There wasn't much else to go on.
Then the sheriff got to talking with my neighbor - the one that owns the lake - over a beer at the local pub. Someone said something in just the right way that it jarred my neighbor's memory. He'd seen something floating in the lake the week prior, he said. It'd bobbed there a few minutes and then vanished under the surface. It hadn't sunk. It'd been pulled under. He assumed it was the shulikun as it looked almost like a head and there was a point that might have been the spike on its helmet.
The sheriff finished his beer and excused himself and returned to his office where he called my parents. He told them about something floating in the neighbor's lake and then asked if that was significant to them in any way, especially since he'd also gotten a report that someone's ram had been found decapitated in the field around the same time.
Vodianoi, my father said. The male counterpart to the rusalki.
Certainly, the vodianoi could have drowned those women. It's what water spirits do. However, there was the fact they'd been bound first and then the ram's head that'd been thrown into the lake. That's an offering. An offering made by a mortal hand in exchange for power.
The four women were offerings as well. Wives, if the vodianoi desired.
I told my mother that this wasn't fair, that women could be murdered and given as wives to this creature. She turned and looked me full in the face, the corners of her mouth tight as they often were when she was angry.
"It isn't fair," she said.
She told me that the more I looked around, the more I'd see the unfairness. It languishes in the open so brazenly that most people have grown used to it and they no longer recognize it as the ugly thing it is. The rest fight this unfairness with words. But I am a daughter of an old land and I will use weapons.
Perhaps this is why I am quick to kill those that oppose me or endanger others. We become our parents, in some ways.
We set a watch. During the day the neighbor monitored the lake. At night, my family took shifts. I stood watch with my mother. We kept each other awake through the long hours of the night, hidden up on a ridge overlooking the lake. On the Friday before Pentecost we finally saw someone approaching the shore. He carried a bundle under one arm and a bottle in the other. Food, my mother whispered, and vodka. Another offering. Trying to curry favor with the vodianoi.
My mother went down to him. I followed a little more slowly, staying a safe distance away. We caught up after he'd tossed the bundle of food and the bottle into the lake and now he stood on the shore, watching the water and waiting. She introduced herself as the wife of the owner of the lake and asked him what he was doing here. Just admiring the water, he said. He was camping here. Wasn't this part of the campground?
No, it wasn't, my mother replied with a smile. He'd crossed the road. This was private property. He apologized for trespassing. Then my mother asked if the vodianoi had granted him its favor yet or if he intended to murder more women to give it yet more picks for its bride.
The man said nothing else. He turned to go, walking quickly. My mother let him walk a few paces and then drew her pistol and shot him in the lower back. He dropped with a cry.
It's not fatal. Not immediately.
She had other questions. She stood over him, pointing the gun at his head. She asked where his family was from. Finland, he sobbed. That was generations ago, though. The eastern part?, my mother demanded. Karelia? He didn't know. It didn't matter. It was close enough. Someone had to be the catalyst to turn those women from water-logged corpses into rusalki and his ancestry would do the trick.
Under my mother's questioning he admitted to his motives. He wanted the favor of the spirit in the lake. It brought good fortune and he was local enough that the vodianoi should be able to influence his life, but not so close to the campground that he'd be recognizable by anyone in town. My mother considered a moment and I knew what she was thinking - the offerings of food and the ram's head were enough. So why the rusalki?
"One last thing is bothering me. You couldn't have killed those women alone," my mother said grimly. Her grip on the pistol was unwavering. "You're working with someone else. Someone that already has its blessing and is looking for something more."
He blanched but said nothing. His gaze was fixed on the ground in front of him and he shivered from both pain and fear. My mother demanded he answer again and still he did not.
So she shot him in the knee.
Then, once he was done writhing and screaming and could suck enough air into his lungs to speak, she asked him a third time. Whose idea was it to murder those four women? Who was making a pact with the vodianoi? There was great power to be had from the unclean dead, my mother said, and he'd helped create four of them. Was there ever any mention of sharing the power he'd helped procure?
Between the pain, the promise of more pain, and the hint of betrayal he cracked. He gave us a name. He couldn't give us anything else.
My mother put her pistol away and moved closer. She knelt beside him and put a hand to the back of his head, shushing him as if he were a child. He sniveled helplessly, tears and snot coating his cheeks and chin. It was good that he was honest with them, my mother said. She appreciated that.
However, he still killed those women. Her voice turned hard. And she could not permit that on her campground.
He hadn't seen her slip the knife out of her pocket or how she unfolded the blade. Not until it flashed in the sunlight, seconds before she slit his throat open.
Then she cleaned the knife on his shirt while he twitched and gurgled, blood pumping into the dirt, and turned around to face where I stood watching. Her expression was calm. There wasn't even a hint of satisfaction in her face. This was merely something she had to do, like washing the dishes or mopping the floors.
"This isn't about justice," she told me. "He endangered all of us. And when an animal is a threat to everyone around it... you put them down."
The other man that had helped murder the women was harder to track down. He'd given his accomplice a fake name and while we verify via a driver's license when people check in, my staff are not canny enough to spot a forgery. We're a campground, ffs, not a bar trying to avoid serving alcohol to minors. His license plate was similarly fake, when the sheriff ran the number from the paperwork.
We had, at least, a list of criteria from which to create a profile. Someone that was relatively local, camped here routinely, and was unnaturally successful in a profession that had some connection to water. After months of work, the sheriff found a potential match. The owner of a fishery about an hour and a half out from the campground.
I gave his picture to my staff that worked the front desk. The next time he checked in, they set his registration aside and discreetly sent a staff member outside to take note of the license plate of the car he got back into. The license plate didn't match the one he'd given. Nor did his driver's license match his real name. It was different than the prior year, so he'd at least been smart enough to change his fake identity after his accomplice vanished.
Not that it helped. We were looking for the discrepancy, after all.
My parents called a town meeting. We needed to banish a vodianoi, they said. But first, they wanted to make sure that the person benefiting from the vodianoi's presence and who was responsible for the murder of four women was gotten rid of.
The town was more than happy to help. The banishment of the spirit was necessary, after all. While the person with the spirit's favor would prosper, the rest of us would suffer the small misfortunes that came from the presence of someone that had a pact with it. No one was sure when this all started, but it certainly explained a lot of the little incidents over the past few years. And killing the man responsible? Well, we don't take kindly to people who make bargains with evil things.
You know what they say. Cheaters never prosper. The town was willing to ensure that remained true.
We got a volunteer from someone that didn't work on the campground and wouldn't be recognized. Now, if a friendly stranger (with a shadow) happens to find themself walking next to you on the road and you get to talking and they offer you a drink out of their flask - you'll accept, right? Now if that flask is actually drugged there's not a whole lot you can do about it after you've ingested, except let yourself be led off into the woods by that same stranger because you're too sick and confused to fight back. Then it turns out that the friends of that stranger are waiting for you in the woods with charms to ward off evil powers and they leave you tied to a tree deep in the forest, after first stripping you naked to ascertain if you had a tail as a mark of your pact. (he did) I guess after that all you can really do is regret your choices and wait to die.
Some of the creatures in this campground are drawn to helplessness. They smell it on the wind. None of them are friendly.
The lack of outward trauma to the body when I retrieved it the next morning makes me hopeful that it was the rusalki that got to him first.
They come back, sometimes. The four dead women. We do the rituals to drive them off but they don't always work and they certainly are less likely to work during bad years. I fully expect them to show up this year and well, I'm going to try something different this time. See if I can get rid of them permanently.
I'm a campground manager. Some of you reading these posts have expressed a desire to overcome or dominate the creatures that live on this land. Others have indicated that they've got the same sources of knowledge as I do and while I hope that their intentions are good, I cannot be certain. So consider this your warning. If you try to make bargains or coerce or command or do anything with the creatures that inhabit this land that puts everyone else in danger... if the inhuman things don't get you first, then myself and my staff will.
And if we can't kill you by deceit... well... the road to the campground runs by a nice, open field and the old sheriff is a really good shot.
Posted by u/fainting- - goat