Shadow of the Beast

Skeletons

I sat staring at the screen, not knowing what to say. Aunt Kate got up and poured herself a shot of whiskey, and sat back down next to me. 

'S-so... William Wilk is my grandfather? He molested my grandmother?' it felt worse to say it out loud, and I had a sickening feeling in the put of my stomach. 

'Well,' started Kate. 'it's not as cut and dry as that. There are some secrets your grandmotger took to the grave, and the truth about this is one of them.' 

She started to explain the story, and as she did, images floated in my head as I tried to make sense of what it all meant, and what the truth could possibly be. 

William Wilk was a friend of my great grandparents. My great grandmother worked with his wife, and through their friendship, my great grandfather and him had also become friends. They would have dinner parties at each other's houses, and William would play board games with my grandmother and her twin sister, Kate's mother, and tell them about all the animals he treated at his surgery, and some of the wild animals that he'd treated out in the woods. 

He and his wife didn't have any children of their own, although they had wanted a family, but because of the times, no doctor had been able to figure out why. He treated my grandmother and great aunt like his own, and had never done anything untoward to either of them, as far as anyone in the family was concerned. 

My grandmother had apparently developed quite a crush on him, which her parents laughed off as teenage hormones and the fact that he was so good to them all, manifesting in her developing confusing feelings for him. They also realized quite early on that she was a 'strange girl', but did not seek help for her odd behaviors for fear of her being sent away. 

When she fell pregnant, she had hidden it from them for many months, until her belly had become too big to hide. She refused to tell her parents, or even her sister, who the father was, and just stated 'you wouldn't know him, he's from out of town.' When my mother was born, she was asked, quite forcifully by the midwife, to update the father's details for the birth certificate, and that was when she wrote William's name. 

When my great grandfather found out, he was ready to pummel William into the ground, but my grandmother had begged him not to, stating that she had only put down his name because she had felt pressured to name someone, and his name was the first one she thought of. She had argued that since William and his wife couldn't have children of their own, she thought that putting his name on the birth certificate would allow him and his wife to raise Celia as their own. My great grandparents had taken her word, and later had my mother's birth certificate amended to state 'Father: Unknown', but the original had been kept in a record vault, which my mother had stumbled upon years later and drawn her own conclusions from. 

William and his wife remained close with the family, and my aunt and mother knew him as 'Uncle Billy'. When my mother found the old record of her birth certificate, she'd distanced herself from the family, saying that they had protected a child molester, and insisted that he was, in fact, the 'beast from the woods' that her mother had always warned everyone about. 

It was a lot to take in. This was a mystery that I wanted answers to, and if I had to, I would speak to the only living person who knew the truth.