His eyes glimmered in the firelight, rimmed in darkness. The life was gone, but I could still see the defiance in his gaze, the utter refusal to admit defeat. He was a brave man, my father, even the face of his greatest failure.

I looked down at my hands, the same hands as my father’s. He taught me to be rough, to toil and struggle and work to survive. Since the age of ten he put me to work on the same fields he plowed, farming the same fields his father had died to defend during the war. I could see the lines of history in my hard, calloused hands.

Only fitting, I did think, that my father’s blood should be on my hands as well.

The rain would wash it away, I thought. Or if nothing else, I could walk down to the river. My clothes were ruined, because no matter how hard you tried, it seemed near impossible to get those kinds of stains out.

Oh – I wasn’t worried about the law. No one took much affair with our kind and my old man would not be missed by many in that old town. No, I was not worried about anything but one thing.

The book.

Yes, I needed to find that book before sunrise. My need for it had led me back to this accursed house with the madman I had once called “father.” It was the only thing that could have led me back here, for I knew that to come back would mean that I would have to kill him. He refused to give me the book, not because of its value, but because it was something I wanted.

He had never even looked at it. I had argued with him about how he couldn't even read, but he did not care. He said he liked the pictures. The damn fool had no idea what he had been holding in his gun closet all these years, what his father had picked off of some old corpse in a battlefield in Pennsylvania. Even I did not know, until I had finally left the farm and much later joined with the honorable society of whom which I now have the letters "G.D." enscribed in ink upon the underside of my forearm.

I have to admit, even though after a certain age I never loved my father, some sick part of me enjoyed his personality. He was always so conceited, so very sure of his dominance over the world. I had always wanted to prove him wrong.

In killing him, I had failed to break his spirit. He somehow seemed to feel vindicated in being a brute all his life by what I had become. I thought to myself, rubbing his blood off my hands and onto my shirt, that maybe it would be fun to see just what kind of real brute would he be if I could bring him back?

The book would show me how.

Author's note: I'm thinking about making this a horror/ supernatural story taking place around the turn of the 20th century. I usually only write modern-day or future setting stories, so this should be different for me. I might make it an alternate-history... let me know if you have any suggestions.