KNOCKOUT

PROLOGUE

       IT ALL HAPPENED SO QUICKLY, the townspeople didn't know what to think. One day they were having picnics on the prairie, and the next, houses were being set aflame.

The year 1878 came and passed with little notice from the town of Ryefield. A small coastal town situated in East Virginia, it's not like anything exciting ever happened, really, but the summer of 1878 was particularly dull—even by their standards.

As always, families immigrated into the quiet little town on a quest for "The American Dream," and emigrated out for the same reason. No one stayed in Ryefield for long. Most treated it like a pit stop—a place to rest on the way to the real destination. So no attention was really paid when two young men arrived on a boat from Europe with nothing more than a suitcase in hand.

Best friends since they were five years old, Leon Nikephoros and Titus Templeton arrived with a dream to start their own business. The two boys, however, were polar opposites. Leon was outgoing while Titus was more introverted. Young and ambitious, together, they were quite the team.

So business bloomed and eventually Leon and Titus fell in love with two women, got married, had kids. Life fell into a routine: work on the weekdays, family picnics on Saturdays, church on Sundays.

Then, one night, in the middle of the worst blizzard ever seen in the history of Ryefield, everything changed.

If you asked Titus what happened, he would tell you that he came back from work and found Leon Nikephoros's knife in his youngest son's chest. That Leon, his oldest and dearest friend, was not who you thought he was. That he was a cold-blooded murderer responsible for the death of an innocent child. That he was well within his rights to burn Leon's house to the goddamn ground, and would do it again a hundred times if he could.

If you asked Leon what happened, he would tell you Titus is nothing but a fraud and a liar. He'd swear up and down and all around that he didn't kill Titus's little boy. He didn't know who did. He would say that Titus, being the fucking psychopath he is, burned down his house. He would be grief-stricken as he said the last part, because his wife died in the fire. She didn't make it out before the house collapsed on itself.

But no one ever had the chance to, because after that night, no one ever saw Leon or Titus again.

Years later, if you asked any of the townspeople about the old, run-down house next to the empty piece of charred land, they would shake their heads solemnly, and begin to tell you about these two boys, whom were friends since childhood, whom everyone adored. They would tell you about the beautiful wives they brought home, the raging parties they threw. They would tell you about that one night, during the worst blizzard they'd seen in decades, when they spotted a house ablaze in a fire that burned so violently it seemed to defy the laws of nature, how it kept burning and burning through the ice, until it consumed the everything entirely.

They would shake their heads again as they told you about the two graves they found the next morning—one small and one large—and the abandoned house where no one lived in ever again.

                                            A HUNDRED THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS LATER