The dark stone house on Donevan’s Hill
seemed to swallow up the sunlight.
A foreboding place where the
ancients sacrificed to
evil fallen ones.
A gateway place
where this world,
connects
to
that
filthy
land beyond.
Where demons lurk
and wretched souls scream.
Drawing the worshipers,
of the old gods of the deep.
to sacrifice lives and dead souls
in the shadows on Donevan’s Hill
From my window only darkness
in the nearby cemetery.
Then I hear the jackals,
howling in the night.
Sheets of lightning show
dark silhouettes of ghostly trees,
broken headstones, tangled creepers.
Then in my dreams,
I hear it still:
the echo of barking
through an impenetrable jungle.
a pack of jackals still pursues me,
fangs barred, ears pricked,
eyes yellow, amber, gleaming.
These are the spirits of the dead.
Dogs of the underworld
hunting, howling, at dawn and dusk.
Lovers, dancing cheek to cheek.
Outside, snow drifts
pile against walls and windows.
Fingers of moonlight touch
snow-dressed trees,
pools of darkness
flood the lonely house.
The music quickens,
the tempo, throbbing, insistent.
He holds her closer,
whirling past skeletal chairs,
while rags of black curtains
flap against broken shutters.
A bare bulb hanging from
a dark cord, swings madly,
casting crazy splinters of light
over the mold-covered walls.
The dancers, now silhouettes,
become one shadowy outline,
Twisting, twirling
caught in
the mad crescendo
of music,
blind to dead, eyeless faces
pressed to cracked windows.
He feels a stab of pain.
Sharp incisors
piercing, biting
into his neck,
tempting smooth skin, blue veins
Music screaming, darkness descending,
blood running freely.
Valentines, vampires
blood lovers, brothers,
dancing cheek to cheek.
Do you see the shadow people?
Out of the corner of your eye?
Lurking,
watching,
waiting.
They are always there,
but never when you look.
Just a shape that moves,
and escapes your gaze.
Creepy-crawly critters.
That spider across the floor;
now on the wall.
Never really seen.
The thing in the tree,
smiling at you,
with fangs and drool,
till you look for sure.
The black dog following me,
late at night,
but never really seen.
Did you see the bat,
swoop past your head?
Was it real?
Or shadow life?
Visions from
beyond the veil.
Spirits spying,
watching,
waiting,
to pounce
at the midnight hour.
Sherm Bullers was waiting for me outside on the porch of the Coolbrook General Store. There isn’t a lot to the place, Coolbrook, maybe a dozen houses, a couple of churches and the store, right in the middle. It was still mostly dark, with a glimmer of gray out over the treetops toward the east. Early morning quiet, five AM quiet. The flasher on his cruiser was off, which surprised me a little. Bullers likes flash and glitter, the way a baby likes shiny things. He’s an oaf, a burly man, forehead like a slab of beef, black flattop, thick, black eyebrows.
“Hello, Billy,” he said. “My, don’t you look darling this morning.”
His idea of high humor—my name is Darling. I ignored it, like I do every morning. “Did you get a call?” I asked.
“Nope. Just driving by. With everything that’s been going on, I figured I ought to check, make sure everything was hunky-dory.”
“But it wasn’t. Neither hunky nor dory.” I could see our breath, ghosts of words in the early morning gloom.
“The door was unlocked,” he said. “I figured something was wrong.”
Then he’d gone in, as we did now, and played his flashlight around the room, as we did now. And seen Dolly Craven hanging from a ceiling beam, her dress ripped, her face battered and bloody, swollen tongue sticking out of her mouth like an apple. As we did now.
Sheriff Foulkrod arrived. He’s a God-fearing man, doesn’t care much for swearing. We all—all of us tough deputies—watch our language around him. When he got there, he took one look at Dolly, ran a finger over his hairline mustache and said, “God damn.”
She’d never looked smaller or frailer. One puff could blow her away.
We got her down. The sheriff picked up one of her arms, like picking up a stick in the woods. “Defensive wounds,” he said. Dolly’d put up a fight.
He looked at me and Bullers. “Go knock on some doggone doors.”
There were a lot of grumbles and cusses when they first opened their doors, but they were quickly forgotten about when they found out why we were there. We didn’t come right out and say it in so many words, but they could figure out what it was pretty easily. They figured the worst. People like to figure the worst. When it happens to somebody else, it’s one less worst in the world that could possibly happen to them.
Elma McIlhenny was real put out, whether because of Dolly’s tragic end, or the tragic closing of the store, well, who could say? Now she’d have to drive seven miles into Hartsgrove to buy her cigarettes. Elma hadn’t seen a thing. Nobody I talked to had seen a thing, or heard a thing, but Bullers got lucky. Her grandson had been bringing old Hattie McKillip home late last night, and they noticed a car in front of Dolly’s store. It stood out. They didn’t see a lot of two-tone cars, so they remembered it. It was, according to her grandson, a Buick. A Buick Special, to be exact, black on the bottom, white on top. A car that sounded familiar. Real familiar.
***
The week before Dolly was killed, Bullers and I were sitting in the bullpen waiting for the morning roll call. Greene, another deputy, came over. “I don’t know if this is a coincidence or what,” he said. “I stopped this guy last night for a busted taillight. You want to take a guess what his name was?”
“Puddin’ ‘n’ Tain,” Bullers said.
“Ask him again,” I said. “He’ll tell you the same.”
“You guys are funny as a hemorrhoid. It was Smathers. LeRoy Smathers.”
That got our attention. “Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty,” Bullers said.
“Is that so?” I asked. “I didn’t think there were any Smatherses left.”
“There’s not, not around here,” Greene said. “He’s from up around Dagus Mines, from what it said on his license.”
“Dagus Mines?” Bullers said. “He’s got to be one of them, all right.”
“Yeah,” Greene said. “I was figuring he’s got to be some relation to your Curly Smathers. Probably saw in the papers what happened to Curly.”
“They’re a real mean, nasty bunch, them Smatherses,” Bullers said.
“Suppose he was just passing through?” I asked.
“Hell of a coincidence,” Greene said.
“Well, if he’s not passing through, what’s he up to?”
Greene shrugged. “Find out more about what happened to Curly? See what’s going to happen with Dolly Craven?”
What had happened to Curly Smathers wasn’t so much of a mystery, not anymore. For a long time, it had been. After his bones had finally been found, Dolly’d confessed to blowing him away, but she wasn’t going to do any time for it. She’d got off on self-defense. Curly’d come sashaying into her store for a cold Coca-Cola the day after two little girls, the McCracken girls, had vanished up in the woods—this was about three years ago. Showed up calm as a can of peaches wearing a rag wrapped around his bald head, a rag made from blue cloth with dark butterflies, ripped from the sundress Mary Lou McCracken had been wearing when she’d disappeared—Dolly had sold her mama the material. What was a woman to do? Her husband, Chester, gone, the shotgun under the counter loaded and handy—nobody could really blame her for exterminating that cockroach when he said yes, yes, it was the little girl’s dress but she didn’t need it no more, then made a move toward Dolly.
“He’s driving a ’49 Buick Special, black bottom, white top,” Green said. “I got the tag number.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Tell you the truth,” Greene said, “he didn’t look real Smathersy. Looked almost normal, wasn’t hardly even drooling or foaming at the mouth. Forty maybe. Wore glasses, had on a clean shirt. And—get this—he had a book of poetry on the seat beside him.”
“Poetry?” said Bullers, his face knotted up. “He can’t be no Smathers, then.”
“What do you mean, poetry?” I asked. “You mean like dirty limericks or something?”
“Nope,” Greene said. “I picked it up and took a look. Wasn’t nursery rhymes neither. Horseman, Housman, something like that. Grown-up stuff.”
“Maybe he’s here to see a man about a horseman,” Bullers said.
Sheriff Foulkrod knew the sheriff of Jameson County, where Dagus Mines was. Jim Embry was his name. He’d been a sheriff for a long time too, though not as long as Foulkrod. He wasn’t a bad fellow, the sheriff said, except for some nasty cigars. When we called, Embry said sure, he knew LeRoy Smathers. He gave us some background. A lot of it the sheriff already knew, but the rest of us didn’t. Embry told us about the settlement in the north of the county, up in the hills past Dagus Mines, where the Smatherses and a few other families, the Allens and the McKennas among them, had sunk in their roots and spread out like poison ivy. Stillville, they called it, because at one time just about every shack had its own still. After years of in-breeding, bad moonshine and no schooling to speak of, Embry said, the average IQ up there was just below the average temperature in February. Every now and then an undamaged gene or two slipped through the cracks by accident, and that must have been what happened in LeRoy’s case—not only could he button his own shirt, but he could read and write to boot. Those rare skills had elevated him to a leadership role—sort of the unofficial mayor of Stillville—by default. He had his own taxidermy business that seemed to have made him a little more prosperous than it ought to have, and he hired his own kin, took care of his friends and family. Never served any time. Didn’t have much of a record at all to speak of, though he’d been looked at plenty—assaults, batteries, burglaries and more than one missing person and mysterious death, where this witness or that recanted, or there was no witness at all to be found. LeRoy Smathers was a bad actor.
“Who’d have figured?” I said after the call. “The Poet Laureate of Dagus Mines.”
“Let’s get him in here,” the sheriff said. “Rope him with his own lariat.”
Then we found Dolly.
***
Next day we took a ride up country, up toward Dagus Mines, to see what we could see. Just me and the sheriff. He took me over Bullers, Greene, and all the other deputies. It was becoming a habit. He seemed to be grooming me. I’d become his favorite somehow, even though of the six deputies, I was the newest. I think I knew why. Sure, I was doing a pretty good job and all, but I was still the rookie. I think it was simple as baseball. The sheriff was a baseball fan. I was a baseball player. A good one. Fireball Billy, the papers called me, a hot prospect. I was damn good before the war, showed a lot of promise—then along came Der Fuehrer. After I was discharged, I picked up right where I’d left off, and was climbing my way up to the bigs, and getting close. But then, in North Carolina, pitching for the Sanford Spinners, cruising along, I blew out my arm. Unconditional release. I’d come back home to Pennsylvania. I’d been an MP in the army, so I caught on with the Sheriff’s Department. Once I rehabbed my arm, I started pitching again for the hometown team, the Hartsgrove Grays. Often as not, I’d see the sheriff in the bleachers. He’d played quite a bit in his younger days. He liked talking ball.
Let’s face it. Twenty-eight is not young for a pitcher. It is for an officer of the law. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but sometime over the past couple of years when I was looking the other way, my dream of making the Show slipped away, despite the smokescreen of hope I hid behind for a while. Baseball is a boys’ game. After I found out about men’s games in the war, baseball was a welcome diversion, a delaying tactic, a chance to be the kid again I’d been before the war. I didn’t know it at the time, but the dream died the day I threw my arm out. And there I was again, for the second time, giving up a boys’ game for another kind of warfare.
Balls and strikes for life and death. Although sometimes, with some fans, there seems to be a mighty fine line between the two.
A ride in the country was all it turned out to be. One thing I missed when I was overseas and down south was the Pennsylvania countryside, the green rolling hills, the forests and pastures and farms, old, weathered barns and silos, particularly in the late spring sunshine, like that day. But after we passed through Paine County and then north on up into Jameson, the landscape changed. The closer we got to Dagus Mines, the uglier it got. Strip-mining country. Mile after mile of scarred land, where strip mines had gouged the countryside, leaving nothing but slag heaps, cleared forests and hillsides scraped bare.
We met up with Embry, a deputy, and a couple of state troopers and set off in three different cruisers for Stillville. Smathers’ shop, according to the sign scrawled on a couple of planks above the porch, was called Beaver Run Taxidermy, and was all locked up, no signs of life. No sign of a two-tone Buick either. After stopping and questioning a couple of neighbors, we drove through Stillville, not much more than a sprawling bunch of shacks on an overgrown slag heap, but we never saw the car. We questioned a couple of folks who were gawking at us from their doorways or alongside the rutted mud road—one old fellow stooped and stared in at us, spit in the dirt and never said a word. We might as well have been from Mars. Or, more like it, we might as well have been sporting pitchforks, horns, and cloven hooves.
***
I didn’t put it together right away. But then, nobody else did either. Embry said he’d keep an eye on Smathers’s place up in Dagus Mines and give us a holler if anything turned up, but we weren’t holding our breath. We were back to square one.
That night, Bullers and I went down to Jum’s on Main Street to mull it over with a couple of Iron City’s. Sherm had just left when this grizzled old fellow with gray hairs sprouting out of his nose came up and wanted to buy me a beer. Elvin Fenstemaker. I knew him a little, mostly from Jum’s—he was a big Grays’ fan too, always giving me a good game after an outing. He lived out on Jimtown Road, not far from where the McCracken girls went missing a few years ago, just across the hollow from the old Smathers farmstead. A while back, the sheriff told me they found Curly’s old man there, Vern Smathers, his throat cut for him. Turned out, Curly must have done him in the same day he murdered the two little McCracken girls. And that was it for the Smatherses. Old Vern was the last one left around these parts. Elvin told me how much safer he felt now, knowing what had become of Curly, knowing he wouldn’t come creeping back around. He thought us boys had done a terrific job putting it all together and solving it. He said he sure did feel a lot easier now.
But he wasn’t acting like he felt a whole lot easier.
He leaned in close. One bushy old eyebrow hoisted up, the other one drooped, like he was letting me in on a secret. “You did solve it, didn’t you? You’re sure about it, ain’t you?”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“What about Dolly?” he said. “Who killed ol’ Dolly then?”
“We’re working on it,” I said. “We got some good leads.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t Curly then, come back around?”
***
That’s what started me thinking. Next morning, I drove out to Jimtown Road. Seeing as how the old Smathers farmstead was isolated—like an ideal hideout might be isolated—and seeing as how it was the Smathers farmstead, and, last time I looked, LeRoy’s last name was Smathers, and seeing as how he must have felt he was close enough kin to Curly to avenge his death, I figured it was worth a shot. A hunch. A long shot, sure. But investigators—yep, I was an investigator now—check out every shot, long, short, and in between. Particularly, the hunches that come to you overnight, in your sleep, when you wake up with blinking neon arrows in your head pointing toward the old Smathers farmstead. And the battered ghost of poor Dolly Craven saying, Check it out! What have you got to lose?
I drove past Elvin Fenstemaker’s place. At the bottom of the hollow, just past the plank bridge where the brook was the color of rust, Smathers Road forked off Jimtown Road, heading up the hill through the deep, cool shadows of the forest. On either side, the banks were knee-deep in ferns. Leveling off toward the top, the road followed cleared pastures to more woods, even thicker, the southern fringes of the Allegheny Forest. A couple of miles up, the woods thinned where the first of the No Trespassing signs were nailed to old-growth trees with rusty nails, old, torn, faded signs you could barely make out. What used to be cleared fields were being reclaimed by the forest—saplings and evergreens, thick undergrowth. Further up, the road dead-ended at the old Smathers farmstead.
A ruin. No signs of life. I pulled up where the road ended and a bountiful crop of weeds and crabgrass commenced, near the burned-out relic of a barn. The farmhouse itself was a wreck, boards weathered raw, tin roof curled to rust. A few scraggly, splintered apple trees were all that was left of an orchard. Beyond the barn, a scramble of roses gone wild. I got out for a look.
You couldn’t ask for a finer first day of June. A cool, fresh breeze herded a flock of white clouds across a clear blue sky at a leisurely pace. Even after all those years, there was still a trace of a singed odor in the air from the burned-out barn. In the yard, the weeds were knee high already. By August, you’d barely be able to hack your way through them with a machete. I eyed the ruined house, the scene of the old crime. Had anyone been in it lately? That was what I’d come to find out. I was getting curiouser and curiouser.
Curiosity killed the cat, I thought. Not a particularly appropriate thought.
It morphed into an old rhyme from grade school: The gingham dog and the calico cat, side by side on the table sat… A poem? Poetry? I could see where this was going.
I headed up through the yard. A few steps into the weeds, something caught my eye off to my left. The blood in my head gave a rush. What caught my eye was the car parked out of sight, hidden behind the barn. A two-tone car. A Buick Special.
Shortly after, Alexandru flutters his fingers in goodbye and slips out the back door of the abandoned house, Vasile takes the bus to Old Town, struggling under the weight of their luggage. He checks into a hotel and leaves most of their things there, then wanders down to Vărzărie, paying for a coffee he can’t stop stirring as he stares out the window. To kill time, he imagines passersby are dhampiri or valve pădurii that have come out of the forest—even if he isn’t the one who believes in folk magic.
The sun begins to set slowly. Vasile’s drink has long-since gone cold, and a man two tables over has started smoking, the acrid tobacco stinging Vasile’s sinuses. Anxiety has his leg bouncing under the table as the sky grows darker—cloudless cerulean turning to cobalt, then navy.
There’s no need to be worried, he tells himself over and over. Sometimes Alexandru is late to things—he’s easily distracted by feeding pigeons, or chasing after fairies he thinks he’s seen, or picking up fallen feathers, sure they’re a trail to something better.
The sky starts to fade to black, the frail hands of the wire clock on the wall twitching higher. Uneasiness stirs at the bottom of Vasile’s stomach as the first star ignites faintly above. Alexandru hasn’t appeared on the sidewalk—hands in the pockets of his felt coat, hair bouncing wildly behind him.
Jittery, Vasile leaves his coffee untouched, the spoon lying heavy in the still-swirling liquid. He catches a waitress and tells her that if she sees a short woman in her late twenties who dresses like a man, please tell her to wait here. Then he leaves, struggling to hold two violin cases in one hand and a small bag of valuables in the other, catching the bus back to Donath.
Alexandru can’t be found in the abandoned house when Vasile creeps through the building, nor has anybody on the street seen him.
Heart beginning to beat harder, Vasile forces himself to loosen the white-knuckled grip he has on the violin cases. Alexandru is fine. Alexandru can take care of himself. Alexandru has likely made up with Wadim—because that’s just the kind of person he is—and has asked to stay the night because it’s gotten too dark too quickly.
Wadim, Vasile knows, lives outside the city limits, where stray houses meld slowly into small farms just south of the Pădurea Hoia. The rutted dirt road trailing out to nowhere is scattered with stones that bite through the soles of his shoes. As he leaves the lights of Cluj-Napoca behind, more stars appear in the sky like holes poked in a closed box to let an entrapped animal breathe.
Vasile can hardly breathe: the night is too hot, and his skin too tight. The only noise is the crunch of his steps on gravel and the rush of his breathing as he speeds up, imagining movement behind him. A small fence has picked up on the right side of the road, silver wires like the tails of falling stars trailing from one wooden post to another. Ahead, a pale owl perched on one of the stakes swivels its head.
Spooked, it takes off silently.
With a glance behind him, Vasile quickens his pace to a jog—and then a run, his feet pounding on the hard ground and jarring his bones. The violins and the bag are boulders, his shoulders screaming and lungs burning.
Eventually, his body forces him to slow. He glances around, panting. A faint, beaten path leads off the main road, where the wires have broken between two posts—trampled grass leading to the looming shadows of the Pădurea Hoia, a field away.
Ahead, a solid shadow leans heavily against the fence, the wires pulled taut under it.
The barn owl alights there momentarily, notices Vasile watching, and takes off again.
After a hesitant glance down the path, Vasile continues down the road, eyes on the thing caught on the fence. A sickly feeling begins to rise in him, stroking the back of his throat. The darkness is coalescing into a clear shape: the body of a human, crucified, hanging limp and still, arms spread wide like a soaring bird.
Vasile drops the duffel with numb fingers.
He makes an involuntary, whimpering noise as he creeps closer. Sweet blood sings in the air, and he recognizes the ripped turtleneck and tailored slacks before he sees Alexandru’s face—and the deep gash on the side of his neck yawning, open and twisting his head lifelessly to the side so that he stares sightlessly ahead.
Vasile screams.
And screams. And screams.
Alexandru’s fingers are pinioned open against the wire like the feather tips of spread hawk wings, dark streams of blood twining down his arms and throat. His pants have been yanked half off, tangled around his knees, and there are bruises on the insides of his thighs, linked by thin rivulets of dark liquid smeared by foreign fingerprints.
Vasile stumbles off the road into the ditch, dog rose thorns scraping at his skin, the violins falling from his grasp. As he gets closer, the smell—cloying and rancid—makes him gag. At the sight of Alexandru’s dry, glassy eyes and the severed muscle at his neck, graced by the delicate flash of white bone, he gags and turns aside just before he throws up.
“No, no, no,” he moans, spitting the string of bile trailing from his lips and wiping his mouth. He can’t look Alexandru in the face, where tear tracks have cleaned trails through the dirt and blood smudged there, so he yanks at the rough knots of rope around Alexandru’s swollen wrists until his fingers are numb. Alexandru’s skin is cool and stiff, and when Vasile frees him of his bindings, he falls heavily to the ground with a chilling, solid thud.
Vasile crumples beside him, drawing Alexandru’s head into his lap, not caring about ruining his slacks. “Sandru!” he cries. “Sandru, iubițel, iubițel, dragul meu, Sandru.”
Alexandru’s gaze is fixed on some far point in the sky, his lips parted in wonder.
“Say something,” Vasile pleads, his tongue too thick, rocking back and forth. “Come back to me. Come back to me. I’ll do anything, please. Please! I’ll play folk with you. I’ll follow the birds with you. Anything you want—anything, Sandru, my Sandru.”
He buries his hands in Alexandru’s tangled hair, doubles over, and screams.
And screams.
And screams.
“Sandru!”
He screams to the sky and to the stars and to Romania, as if he can imprint Alexandru’s name upon them and force them to acknowledge whom they have forsaken—the people they turn their backs on so many times they no longer notice when the bodies begin to fall.
“Sandru.” Vasile’s voice breaks, the last syllable silent, as he gently smooths Alexandru’s hair away from his face, pulling stems of dog roses over them as a blanket, not caring about the thorns that tear at his palms. When he tries to speak, his lips and tongue shape the words, but no sound comes out.
Te iubesc. Te iubesc, te iubesc, promit, mereu, micul meu virtuoz.
He closes his eyes and weeps. Blackness comes to sweep him up in its arms, and he buries his twisted face in its shoulder, his throat crushed by tears.
“Vasile?”
He flinches at the sound of his own name.
There’s a man on the road leaning forward to see him better—stocky and simply dressed, a lamp glowing orange in his hand. The sudden light makes Vasile recoil; it glints, oily, off the silver cross that hangs from the man’s neck, flashing like a star.
“It is you,” the man says.
The hair raises on the back of Vasile’s neck.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
As Vasile’s eyes adjust, he sees the beard and the deep-set eyes under thick eyebrows and the short scar on the man’s left cheek—a perfect match to the photo Alexandru had shown him once. A warning: if you ever saw this man, run the other way.
Wadim.
Vasile was cold, his fingers numb, but something suppressed and unrecognizable was pumping through his heart, viscous and burning.
“She said you would come. She screamed for you.” The words curl ugly through the air. “I want you to know you’re too late. Hope is only a prayer for the living—but it’s useless when heathen gods won’t save you, isn’t it?”
The man steps into the ditch.
Sudden fury bubbling over, Vasile leaps for him.
They crash to the ground, the lantern shattering, flame bursting up where oil spills to lick at the sky.
Vasile smashes his fist down on Wadim’s nose. There’s a hideous crack, and Vasile howls soundlessly at the pain that bursts through his hand.
Wadim bellows—then another man is hauling Vasile back by the collar of his shirt, choking him. The man tosses him aside and whips a kick into his stomach, cracking Vasile’s ribs and driving him back into the bush. He tumbles over the violins, wheezing in agony.
A curl of wind brushes over him—a warning—and he looks up.
There’s a third man. Stretched tall—so tall he could have reached the moon—an axe raised high like salvation. As it comes down, Vasile barely manages to scramble out of the way. It slams into his black violin case, the instrument inside splintering with an excruciating crack.
Wadim pushes himself to his feet. He wipes the blood from his nose, inspecting his hand almost apathetically before his gaze snaps to Vasile’s.
“I’m going to make you regret that.” He holds out his hand to the third man, who yanks the axe out of the earth. “I’m going to make you regret all of it—taking her from me, making her sick in the head!”
Vasile scrambles back. His hand hits Alexandru’s body, waxy and still.
I’m sorry, he says, only sibilant breath hissing out. I’m sorry, Sandru!
As Wadim lifts the axe, Vasile lunges for Alexandru’s violin, still sleeping in its case, and bolts down the ditch back the way he came.
“Why are you staring? Let’s get him!” Wadim screams.
Gravel scatters behind him, and Vasile forces himself faster, tripping over woody plant stalks and scrabbling up in a panic, rushing onward.
He leaps the fence where the wires had snapped, scrambling up the hill to the Pădurea Hoia—toward the paths he’d wandered with Alexandru a lifetime ago. Angry shouts follow close behind.
He clutches Alexandru’s violin tighter, he flies through the dry grass, ignoring his terror at the darkness that looms ahead beneath the canopy of thick leaves bristling in the wind.
Someone barrels into him from behind, felling them both, the violin case pitching from Vasile’s grasp.
“Găozar!” snarls one of Wadim’s men, crawling forward to grab Vasile by the ankle.
Shoulder blazing with agony, Vasile stomps down on the man’s face with the desperation of an injured animal.
With a cut-off screech, the man’s grip disappears, and Vasile shoves himself to his feet, grabbing the violin and limping on. Pain flares with each step as he urges himself into a run again. His lungs rattle, burning, distracting him from the fritz of electricity that dances against his skin as he crosses into the forest, blundering between tree trunks, vision blurring with tears as he hugs Alexandru’s violin.
He doesn’t see how the branches move behind him as he goes—dipping low, growing across—new, fat leaves unfurling, obscuring his blind path with vibrant green.
His lungs feel as though they’re ripping open, blooming with thorned pink flowers, when the trees end abruptly, giving way to a round, empty clearing. Moonlight shines brightly on short grass. Along its edge stands a small white cottage with a towering straw roof, its doors and windows watchful, dark eyes.
On the porch railing, the barn owl alights.
Vasile staggers toward it.
A woman stands out front—heavyset and hunched.
Waiting.
The black apron atop her white dress is embroidered with animals: foxes and bears, goats and eagles. Her face is round and split by deep wrinkles, one eye opened wide and the other lidded—uneven and warped, the farthest thing from perfect that Vasile has ever known. Her nose is long and angular, her lips thin, her hair gray and straggling under her white basma, the red fringes of it dripping over her broad shoulders.
“He’s gone,” he tries to tell her, gasping raggedly for air between the words—whether from his tears or from his escape, he does not know. He’s gone. He’s gone.
“I know,” she rasps.
A strangled, soundless wail ekes out of him. He thinks he might collapse, but she reaches up, cupping his cheeks with thick, strong fingers.
“I know,” she says again, her voice thick. “I am sorry. I am so very sorry.” Her thumbs swipe roughly against his skin, her callouses drying his cheeks. Her grip is tight, tethering him to the ground. “But you are not alone. Do you understand?”
He shakes his head, choked by the tears blurring his vision. He’s gone. I’m alone, I’ve never been so alone.
“You will be safe with me, Nicolescu Vasile. You will see—there is more to this world than you think. You are not the only one.”
She grasps his shoulder, then his upper arm, and he can feel each finger pressing through his shirt.
“Come,” she says. “It is dangerous to stay here.”
He goes, because what else can he do?
He lets her pull him past tables on the porch holding crates of apples and pears. Candlelight flickers through the white lace curtains in the window, reflecting off the leaves of potted plants scattered across the deck. He thinks he sees a red stag—one antler missing, its stub bandaged—sleeping along the side of the house next to two jackal pups, before he catches sight of the barn owl again, a ghost against the night.
The silent tears return, tripping down his cheeks at the memory of Alexandru’s ribs under his fingers that morning, and his dark, soulful eyes; the pen marks of freedom under his chest—half from Vasile, and half from Alexandru himself.
“Vasile,” the old woman says.
He clenches his jaw until it aches; if he opens his mouth, he’ll cry.
“You can do this. You will persevere—you’ll see. In the meantime, we will go far from here.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, throat aching too harshly to speak.
She hobbles up the stone steps of the porch, unlatching the front door and pushing it open. From inside, Vasile hears the scrape of a spoon against a metal pot and the soft sighs of the house as it mourns for him, reaching out with warm air in attempted comfort.
Further in, someone is crooning Sus în vârful muntelui through the crackle of a wood-burning stove.
Tightening his grip on Alexandru’s violin, clutching it to him like a shield, Vasile steps inside.
The old woman enters after him. She pushes the door closed behind her and sets the rusting latch in place, sealing away the outside.
The yard out front is still, wind whispering through the leaves of the potted dog rose to the left of the porch steps. On the railing, the owl ruffles its feathers, head swiveling.
On the outskirts of the sleeping city of Cluj-Napoca, the Pădurea Hoia rustles. A small cottage flickers and, between one second and the next, disappears—as if it had never been there at all.
Just then, a stocky man, bearded and with a broken nose, stumbles out of the trees into the circle of the Poiana Rotundă.
He lurches to a stop and doubles over, breathing hard. Wiping his forehead, he looks around.
From a tree a hundred meters away, a barn owl takes off, gliding across the clearing before disappearing into the dark.
There is no one else there.
Dean Shawker hails from Bracknell, UK, and now lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Dean is co-founder and editor of Black Hare Press.
Having found that his BSc in Bioengineering and BA in Digital Media were as useful in real life as calculus and geometric proofs, Dean now works in commercial non-fiction during the day and moonlights as a minion of the hell hare, Captain Woundwort, in the dark hours.
He writes speculative fiction and dark poetry under the pseudonym Avery Hunter, and edits under the name D. Kershaw.
You’ll usually find him hanging out with the rest of the BHP family in the BHP Facebook group, or here as a servant to the Stygian Lepus.
Small town Utah is where Jodi calls home. She spends her days in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse, reading, writing, editing, and mentoring other writers. Her daily companions consist of her rambunctious and adorable six-year-old grandson and two rowdy dogs, all of whom bring her great joy.
Jodi has had a love of books for as long as she can remember. As a child, she filled her backpack weekly at the library, devouring story after story and returning the books early to trade for a new stack. She wrote her first adventure at the age of nine, a fanfic Boxcar Children story, and since then, has let her imagination be her guide.
As an author, Jodi writes time travel romance and dark speculative fiction. As an editor, she works on anything and everything that finds its way across her desk. Some of her favorite stories to read, write, and edit include; post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopian stories, and end-of-the-world adventures. She also enjoys dark romance, time travel romance, historicals, and horror stories, particularly the psychological kind. Above all else, she’s a sucker for a great character.
Kara Hawkers is a poet and author of short, dark fiction.
As Editor-in-Chief, Kara devotes most of her time to operating The Ravens Quoth Press, along with her partner.
If left unsupervised, you’ll find her dabbling in other arts.
Just three ravens in a trench coat.
Janet Wright lives in the wilds of North Yorkshire, UK, where foxes shriek and owls hoot at the bottom of her garden.
An avid reader since childhood, she loves nothing better than to curl up on the sofa and lose herself within the tactile pages of a physical book. She’s open to any genre, though her favorites are historical crime, time travel, and Gothic horror.
She writes short stories and micro fiction under the pseudonym Rosetta Yorke.
