Scratch Well

The well outside Rooksbridge was redundant. There had been a lake surrounding it for all of Kara’s life, and judging by the size of it, the lake had probably been there for all of her grandparents’ lives too. People called the structure in the middle of the lake the Scratch Well. Of course there had to be a creepy story to go with a name like that.

Long ago, just at the dawn of electricity, a demon by the name of Rusio had been cast away into the Well while the soil around it was exorcised. Nothing from any hell could touch that soil and survive without the presence of a maiden. As the story went, Rusio could be heard clawing his way up from the bottom of the well every full moon in the hopes of meeting such a maiden. Hence the name, Scratch Well.

Kara frequented the lake since her late teens but had never heard any scratching. With the great lake around it, scratches from inside the well wouldn’t have been heard by anyone on the shore. Nevertheless, nobody else dared to go near it especially at night. They didn’t know if the lake stood to protect them from whatever could come from the Well’s depths.

There was something about the dim loneliness of Scratch Well that made it picturesque. Kara wanted to draw it. She sat at the edge of the lake one day as the sun was beginning to set. She had just learnt about the Cubist art style and there was enough light to put it into practice with the Well as her subject. By the time she was nearing the end of her drawing, streaks of moonlight had begun to glisten on the ripples of the lake.

A slick black skull slowly emerged from the Well. It wasn’t a full moon… but realistically, why would a demon wait when his maiden was right there? The shift of the light that reflected off of Rusio’s head caught Kara’s attention immediately. He slipped into the water with all the elegance of a thicc lizard and swam across to her. He never did fail to make her heart flutter.