Bloodbath

Welcome to the House of Bart, for another tale of terror and woe!

It was a cold rainy night, some time after midnight - as is customary in horror stories. On the second floor, a small child cries.

Dog tired, I drag my butt up the stairs to check on Wolf. In the dim light coming from behind me in the hallway, I see that he is sitting on his knees in the bed. But there's something strange about his face and arms. So I switch on the light, seeing that he's awake anyway.

I'm struck by the horror of the scene. Wolf's face and neck are covered in blood, as are his hands and arms up to the elbows. He whimpers softly. As I pick him up to inspect, I see there's blood in his hair and on his sleeping bag, with a large spot under his left ear. His bed is covered in blood stains too; his pillow is practically drenched in blood.

'What happened', I ask him, but he doesn't answer. I look for a cut on his head - maybe he's fallen out of bed - but I can't find anything wrong. So I take him downstairs, put him on the cupboard next to the kitchen sink and start to wash his face and arms. 'My hands are red', he says.

When he's all cleaned up he looks like a little boy again instead of a  character out of a Hitchcock film. There are not cuts on his head after all, it seems he must have had a bloody nose.

I return to his room to put clean bed linen on his bed, while he plays downstairs. When around 2.30AM, I'm finally ready to put him to bed, he protests that he wants to play and not go to sleep. But when I put him in bed, it doesn't take long before he dozes off.

I on the other hand, have more problems to go back to sleep. That image of his bloodied up face and the shock of fear I felt still keep my adrenaline levels way up.