James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

‘The angle,’ she groaned. ‘My God . . . I’ve discovered the angle!’

And it was then that she noticed Marta was beside her, with one of her dolls in her arms and a nibbled candy between her fingers. Marta went on being a lovely child. ‘You, Marta,’ she thought, ‘I can still look at you.’ And although the phrase struck her brain with another voice, with another intonation, with the memory of a loved one she would never again see alive, it was not that which jolted her the most, nor which made her cast herself on the ground and beat the tiles with her fists. She had seen Marta, Marta’s expectant gaze, and in the depths of her dark eyes the sudden understanding that something was happening to Julia.

Bram Stoker’s choice of Romania as the setting of Dracula was not accidental. The country has a rich folkloric tradition, full of terrifying creatures and legends. Yet Romanian horror fiction is a relatively modern phenomenon. Its origins can probably be traced to the ‘fantastic tales’ of writers like Mircea Eliade, author of the literary vampire novel Domnişoara Christina [Miss Christina] (1936) , and its contemporary practitioners include Marian Coman, some of whose work has appeared in English, and Oliviu Crâznic, credited with the first modern Gothic novel in Romanian. But perhaps the most significant is Flavius Ardelean ( b. 1985), who has published three collections of macabre fiction, some of which might be likened to Robert Aickman’s strange stories. The following tale, which appeared in Acluofobia (2013) , is set among the peasants of rural Transylvania. For many in that region, even today, the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds is not clear-­cut. Encounters with fairies or ghosts are not seen as out of the ordinary, and the notion of ‘bad places’ where one mustn’t venture is firmly ingrained. Transylvania’s aura of mystery and the supernatural pervades this story, in which several legendary creatures appear, including the ielele ( fairies ) , ştima ( spirit of the waters ), and the vâlva , an entity that inhabits mines and comes in two varieties – good ones who lead you to buried treasure and evil ones who punish you for removing it. To complete the glossary of terms used in the story, ţuică is a potent home-­brewed brandy, the equivalent of Romanian moonshine, and mămăligă is a dish made of corn meal, not unlike Italian polenta.

He had had a foreboding, but he had drowned it in a gram of tobacco and shot of ţuică . For courage.

The sun had not yet come out from behind the mountains when the four men got their cart out on the street and bridled the horse in whispers, each of them chewing a cigarette stump between his teeth – four fireflies floating between the houses. They did not talk to one another, they knew it from their fathers and their fathers and their fathers: when they set out before dawn they did not speak because sharp are the claws that guard the treasures of the depths, fiery are the eyes of the ştima , cursed is the voice of the fairies. So they were silent and took puffs from their cigarettes, three in the cart and one pulling the harness to the left and to the right, leaving the village and setting out towards the forests, towards the black chaos from which they would take the scrap iron that would allow them to live for another month.

They were kinsfolk – brothers, cousins. Stelică, the youngest, wasn’t responsible for raising any children, as the others were, but it didn’t matter, money is money, his wife wakes up tomorrow or the next day knocked up and what then? What then? he thought and put out the unfiltered cigarette against the wood of the cart before throwing it into the surrounding darkness. He took out a chunk of mămăligă , broke some off and passed the rest on. The others, fumbling in the darkness for the mămăligă , threw their butts away as well and spit several times to clear the bits of tobacco off their tongues. Then silence (only the horse’s hooves and the men’s munching). From time to time, Nicu lit the lantern and illuminated around them and only then could the men look into one another’s eyes and their looks all masked the same thought: the fire in the stove last night, just a few hours earlier, when Stere awoke from a nap and secretly told them that he had dreamed about his grandma telling them not to go there if their lives were dear to them, that Piele would get hold of them, and their women would never see them again . . . Insufferable women! the men thought, swallowing their mămăligă . They had no choice. Where would they get money? Eh? Where would they get money? The women usually kept quiet and didn’t gather in the doorways when they left to steal the old iron, but just knelt down before the icons throughout the house and whispered prayers. But this time they had not said anything to the women. They had no business knowing that they were headed toward the Turk’s Mouth, that accursed place, maligned by many, but whose riches were sought after by even more. But fear is fear, as grandfather Tache, dead now these forty years, used to say, and each of them had a morsel of fear in his pocket when he set off.

Stelică couldn’t bear the silence, which was casting him even deeper into black thoughts, and he cleared his throat to whisper:

‘Say, didn’t that guy Piele live around here?’

‘Shut up,’ Nicu’s voice was heard.

He lit the lantern, then put it out.

He couldn’t bear the silence, but what bothered him even more were the old men’s superstitions. They had kept him far away from the Turk’s Mouth for so long, but Stelică had decided to change things. If there was one thing he was good at, it was talking. Stelică could manage to convince anyone of anything, anytime, and any way. He had a gift, his mother said. He was a ‘hustler’, he said. So too he convinced the men to go to the Turk’s Mouth. The riches were said to be significant, and they were fair game; the entire structure had been left in disrepair after the decommission order, untouched by outsiders because of the curse of the bad place, in which the entire region seemed to believe since the story of old Piele.

Their lit cigarettes could be glimpsed in the night as the men entered the forest. The horse snorted, trod on rocks, somewhere a stream flowed. The men smoked and thought about their wives.

Stelică fell asleep and was awakened by Stere.

‘Get ready,’ he said. ‘Time to wake up – we’re there.’

It was growing light. The horse was agitated.

‘Come on, giddyup! What’s wrong with you! This way!’ said Nicu.

The horse took several steps back, the men held on to one another.

‘Hey!’ they all yelled and then they decided to jump off the cart and take the horse by the harness to calm him. The horse kicked and snorted, tried to flee, but the men led it aside and tied it to a tree.

‘Stelică, see what there is for him to eat. If anyone passes by, tell them they sent you from the town hall to do some cleaning up.’

‘Come on Nicu, what the hell! And stand here like an idiot, waiting for you all day? I was the one who told you that we should come here.’

‘What did you tell us?’

‘I came with . . . I said . . .’

‘Stelică, if you think that you led us here, you are mistaken,’ said Nicu sharply.

‘Then who, Nicu?’ asked Stelică.

‘Hunger,’ Nicu responded curtly and turned around.

‘And I can’t come in with the rest of you?’

‘No,’ said Nicu, going toward the mouth of the mine. ‘Next time.’