‘Stere, just a bit longer, okay.’
He decided to go to the tunnel, to leave that narrow room and watch for Vasile. In fact, he hated it there, in the darkness of the earth. So he left. He stopped at the entrance to the main gallery and looked towards the exit. At the end of the tunnel the white light was totally undisturbed. Not a silhouette, not a sound, nothing.
‘Where are you, Vasile? God damn you!’ he sighed and remembered Stere.
He cast his lantern’s light towards the well.
‘Look, Stere, I’m here, stay calm, I’m not leaving.’
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 arou
nd 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.
‘Hey, don’t you even think about dy—’ he said and took the three, four long steps that were necessary to reach the edge of the well and shine light into the pit.
But he couldn’t finish what he was saying. The lantern cast waves of light on Stere, but Stere was not alone in the pit. On top of him was seated a pale woman, with red, disheveled hair, naked and filthy with dirt. She was crouched up on Stere’s chest, with her head thrown back, looking at Nicu with a crooked smile on a chipped face. A loud hissing rose up from the woman’s throat and her black pupils slid upward, disappearing into her head, leaving visible only the total whiteness of a pair of dead eyes.
‘What . . .’ Nicu said, but he didn’t have time to say anything more, because the woman shot out towards him and in three movements had arrived up beside him.
One: her right hand embedded in one of the walls of the well.
Two: her left hand embedded in the opposite wall, higher up, lifting herself, hurling herself towards Nicu.
Three: her right hand caught the edge of the well and the woman leapt toward Nicu, taking him by the T-shirt and dragging him furiously into the well, throwing him alongside Stere.
As he fell, Nicu saw the lantern hitting the sides of the well, and then darkness all around, before the great darkness from within his head, in the moment in which his skull shattered, his neck dislocated, and the blood shot out of his mouth.
Stere felt the shock. Nicu’s body was lying breathless beside him, his head crushed in the impact with the ground. He was terrified at the woman’s strength and his fear sent a wave of blood to his head and his limbs, waking him. He couldn’t see anything, but he was beginning to understand what was happening. He was at the bottom of a well and Nicu was beside him. Probably dead. Someone had been next to him, a woman. Now she was no longer there. She had dragged Nicu, well no, she had thrown him headlong into one of the walls of the well. Probably. Then the woman had gone. It was quiet. They were alone. Probably. He tried to move, but the pain stung him in both legs. He tried to shout. He choked. Coughed. Tried once more and a weak sound issued from his throat. He tried again. Louder. He gave free rein to his voice, fighting against the pain, and screamed. The echo traversed the galleries. He fumbled in the darkness to his left and wet the tips of his fingers in something warm and sticky, thick, pasty. Stere then prodded the indentation in Nicu’s skull, from which a steaming broth was flowing. His hairline descended into a little valley filled with liquid and bone chips, then rose again and descended at the back of his head. Stere was gripped with a feeling of powerlessness and tried to stop his tears, clenching his teeth and hitting the ground under him with his fist.
He cried out. The echo was broken by the walls. A cry of fear. A cry of fury, of impotence. A cry of death.
No one responded, there was only the echo striking the walls then dying away.
Crying, he began to sing, softly, in a whisper:
I saw my dear lover,
Five demons were beating her,
Red blood flowing like a river . . .
And then he heard footsteps. He was quiet and listened: the scuffling of dragging footsteps above. The steps stopped at the well’s edge. He heard breathing – heavy like the wind through the valleys of his childhood. A snarl, then silence. His heart pumped blood, too much and too quickly, and Stere felt that all that blood must be flowing out of unknown orifices in his body, somewhere in the darkness, into the black earth beneath him. Another snarl and Stere heard clumps of dirt breaking loose from the walls of the well as the creature slid slowly into the pit.
A thud and the creature was beside him. Stere wanted to scream, but he no longer could; his jaws were clenched with fear, so he began to cry and squeezed his eyelids shut, but in vain: the darkness in his head was just as black as the darkness outside.
The creature bent over him and emitted a disgusting stench from its open mouth. Then it left Stere and went over to Nicu. Stere listened in the darkness: a sound of ripping – Nicu’s T-shirt was torn in one motion. Then a powerful blow and Stere could hear Nicu’s ribs crack noisily. The creature dug around in Nicu’s innards and Stere could almost imagine it all and vomited. He smelled the scent of warm, fresh blood, and that of urine and feces almost made him faint. He turned around part way, dragging his legs and whispering through his sobs, no no, please, no . . .
He felt a hand, a human hand, twisting his back around. The creature had taken his shoulders with both hands. Stere raised his arms and groped at the body: human back, chest, hips. The creature sat on him and Stere felt its thighs around his hips. The creature let go of his shoulders and after a moment of silence pounced with both fists in his chest. Stere let out a broken sound, emitted from his mouth at the same time as a gush of blood.
In his last instants of life, Stere felt a dull pain in his chest, heard his ribs cracking, and felt the flesh tearing beneath the creature’s fists, heard a loud ringing in his ears and felt something warm flowing from his ears. The creature burrowed its head into Stere’s body and began to tear at his flesh with its teeth. With the last of his strength, the man raised his arm and set his hand on the head of what was devouring his body, a head covered in short hair, with large, sharp ears, with a bloody muzzle and big round eyes: the head of a dog.
Stelică jumped off the cart first and rushed towards Vasile. He found him pale and trembling.
‘Vasile, you didn’t go back in? What are they doing in there alone?’
The five men untied the horse from the cart and started off towards the mine’s entrance with ropes and shovels, with long boards and lanterns. Stelică and Ion had gathered them from among the neighbors, whispering through the doors so that the women would not hear, careful not to be seen by too many people on their way towards the mine.
Vasile didn’t respond, he was ashamed to say anything, to confess his cowardliness, to tell them what he had seen in the tunnel.
Stelică wanted to rush towards the entrance, but Vasile stopped him, without saying anything more. Stelică looked at him and understood all. Something had happened in his absence, Vasile had seen or heard something, the earth had caved in, or gas had come to the surface and exploded. Something had happened there, at the entrance to that hell, but Stelică was too afraid to ask anything, or even to say anything, so he was silent and turned towards the Turk’s Mouth mine. The Devil’s Mouth, as he had heard Valeria saying, when he departed through the gate accompanied by Ion and left the women alone in the house, crying and clutching at their scarves under the icons.
Stelică made a sign to the men not to enter the mine. They stopped and looked at him dumbfounded.
‘Hey, there’s men dying in there, isn’t that what you said?’ one of them said.
But Stelică didn’t look at him
and didn’t answer him. He climbed the hill with his left hand raised to the right side of his chest, forgotten there after he had made the sign to them to stay where they were. Like that he arrived at the mine’s entrance, where he stopped and let his hand fall limp at his side. He stopped there, looking into the distance, into the blackness of the tunnel, and his glance received a response: a pair of eyes looked at him from the darkness. There was no life in those eyes and yet they moved – the creature took several steps towards him and Stelică observed what it was: a white ram with milky eyes looked at him and blew out thick steam like smoke.
Stelică didn’t take another step, he turned around and looked at the men. He wanted to signal to them to leave, to go back to their own world, but he stopped with his hand in mid-air, the gesture cut off as if in forgetfulness.
It began to rain. Somewhere, in the forest, there was the sound of a woodpecker drumming at a tree.
Translated from the Romanian by James D. Jenkins
Tanya Tynjälä
The Collector
Peru does not seem to produce a great deal of horror literature. Indeed, in his recent book on 20th-century horror fiction, Jess Nevins identifies only two Peruvian writers, both of them rather obscure, and we were unable to locate others. Tanya Tynjälä (b. 1963), whose works include novels, short stories, and works for young readers, describes herself as a writer of fantasy and science fiction, but the following story seemed to us a perfect fit for a volume of unsettling tales. ‘The Collector’ – the original Spanish title, ‘La coleccionista’, makes it clear that the titular character is a woman – is a creepy modern-day updating of the Calypso myth from Greek mythology. First published in 2017 in the author’s collection
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Page 12