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

He stood with one foot in the room in which his brother had been swallowed up and the other in the main gallery, peering along the length of the tunnel and directing his lantern beam from time to time towards the edge of the well.

‘I’m here, my brother. I’m not leaving you.’

The warmth was flowing out of his body, leaving him, making way for the cold and the darkness and the stench of wet and rancid earth. In the blackness above, lights floated and then disappeared. It was cold and dark again. The pain jabbed at him in the darkness, from below, where his legs should have been, jabbed and bit, tormenting the flesh and scratching the bone. Light, once again. In the distance he heard a voice, softly, as if in a dream. But it wasn’t a dream, and if it had been, it would have been a nightmare. He recognized the voice, it was Nicu’s, his brother’s, it was coming from above, from wherever the light was coming from, from time to time through the fog. The pain rose to his arm and his hearing focused. He could clearly hear Nicu, how he was trying to reassure him. It’s all right, he was saying from the darkness, it’s all right. Yes, Nicu, it’s all right, thought Stere, but I can’t move and I can’t scream. It’s all right, you say.

Again the darkness.

Now light.

Darkness.

Nicu’s voice.

Something moved above him. Clods of earth broke loose from the walls of the well, struck him. Something was descending towards him. He would have liked to yell for Nicu, to tell him to come, to get him out of there, to shine his light down below, into the abyss where he lay broken. But he couldn’t . . .

Something was descending, sliding along the walls of the pit, the dirt crumbled, a loud scuffling sound, then nothing more.

Silence.

The fog returned. The warmth banished the pains of flesh and bone, the torpor dripped on his skin like warm honey. He was sleepy. He closed his eyes, but the darkness was just as black as outside, as in the world. He no longer felt pain. Now he was warm. There was something beside him, he knew it, but it didn’t matter, he was warm and fine, he no longer felt his legs. Whatever was beside him drew nearer and sat on his chest. He felt the burning skin of its thighs and buttocks on his chest and abdomen. He felt the rough hair swooshing down over his face, the fingers caressing his throat, his ears, his temples, his hair. He felt the warmth of the stranger’s body heating him and flowing through him towards his legs, down there where his body had become darkness, felt it catch fire in the small of his back, he groaned, writhed. He rose to embrace the creature and to caress its sweaty skin, his palms slid down, all the way down towards the edge of the world, into the darkness, he groaned and cried and knew that he was dying.

Stelică burst into the house and looked at the women kneeling before the icons, their heads covered in scarves, sighing, weeping. But he said nothing and left to search for rope.

‘How did the horse act?’ Valeria’s voice was heard.

Stelică stopped and turned around.

‘When you arrived there, how did the horse act?’ the woman repeated.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think.’

‘I don’t know, he struggled.’

He was ashamed to look the woman in the eyes. He looked somewhere above her, through the small window in the wall, through the small curtain, through the small garden, through the world that all of a sudden was too small.

‘It was the vâlva of the mines,’ said the woman. ‘The horse saw the bad place and he did not want to stay there.’

‘Come on, cut it out! There’s no time for fairy tales!’

‘Are our husbands dying, Stelică?’ asked Ana in a weeping voice.

Stelică didn’t know how to respond, so he turned around and entered the other room.

‘Well, boy,’ said Valeria, ‘you do not want to believe. You are young and believe yourself safe from the darkness of our ancestors. You walk through the town, you drink and you eat, and you think what we old people say is just fairy tales. But they’re not fairy tales, Stelică. It is the way of things for us. And for you, whether you like it or not.’

Valeria was talking alone, but she knew that Stelică was eavesdropping from the next room. He was listening, but he didn’t want her to know.

‘My granny took me by the hand when I was little,’ the woman continued, ‘and led me to the back of the courtyard. And do you know what was there, Stelică? Do you know?’

Ana was trembling and crying beneath the icon.

‘It was the măiestre , Stelică. They were playing there in a circle, under the moon. My eyes were heavy with sleep, I thought I was dreaming. But the next morning when I went to the back of the garden, behold the grass was all trampled down. My granny said then that I should never go out alone to look at the fairies, for alone we are weak, Stelică, there is only strength in numbers. God help us, for alone we can do nothing. Have you said a prayer?’

‘I have,’ Stelică’s voice was heard on the other side.

‘Are you listening to what I’m saying, Stelică?’

‘I’m listening, since you never keep your mouth shut,’ said Stelică, coming out of the room with a long rope wound around his left arm.

He went out into the courtyard and yelled towards the neighboring house.

‘Ion! Hey, Ion!’

‘What is it?’ could be heard from behind the fence.

‘Do you have work?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Let me give you some.’

‘OK,’ said Ion and started towards the gate, happy as could be because he could leave the yard for a little while.

Valeria crept up behind Stelică’s back and put her hand on his shoulder.

‘Stelică, you have killed our husbands,’ she whispered. ‘You have pushed them to do what should not be done. Stupid men! How could they have listened to you, you silly fool . . . Sins were committed there, boy: a man slept with children, may God forgive me! A place is not made bad only through magic or fairies, but also through crime, and crime is what Piele did there. There is war waging in the pits of the earth, and you had better pray hard that you can bring our men out of that darkness.’

The woman’s threat stung him like a cold slap across his cheek. He blushed and lowered his head.

‘God grant that place does not harm you,’ the woman went on, and then withdrew slowly into the house, from which Ana’s stifled sobs could be heard.

Ion entered the courtyard and asked him, ‘What is it?’

‘Will you come with me to the Turk’s Mouth?’

‘No way, man, get out of here!’

But Stelică didn’t say anything more, he just looked him straight in the eyes, deep, really deep, and in his eyes Ion saw the abyss, the precipice and the wind, and he understood that it was bad, very bad, that something had become twisted in the world, and that he would find out soon whether it could be put back into place or not.

‘Stere, they’ll be coming any time now,’ yelled Nicu so that he would hear him from the well, but saying it was one thing and feeling it was another.

He was a full-­grown man, middle-­aged but sturdy, tough and powerful, and yet he felt fear, as if something were circling around him and blowing on his skin, but there was nothing; he saw it too, when he pointed his lantern around and thought about grandfather Tache and how right he had been. From time to time he lit up the edge of the well in order to reassure Stere, or at least that’s what he hoped.

‘Stere, keep your eyes open! After we get you out of there, well, we’ll have food and drinks and dance, and have the biggest party anybody’s ever seen. You hear me?’

He was trying to keep him awake somehow, but only through words. It seemed he no longer dared go near the edge of the pit, it was horrible there, seeing Stere bent over backwards with his legs broken in all directions, with reddened eyes and an empty gaze, groaning absently in his pain. But it seemed as though the groans had increased recently, thought Nicu, yes, that’s how it seems, he told himself. They were longer, more slippery, like fish in spring, deeper, like the groans in the darkened streets at night, when the young girls sleep badly and the young men don’t sleep at all. And so he fell silent, listened, and directed his lantern towards the well. Stere groaned longer and more often, his wheezy breath heaving in blood-­filled gasps. Nicu felt a shiver and suddenly imagined himself descending on a rope to hoist up a corpse, cold and purple, its hair full of dried blood.