THE TOWN THE FOREST ATE

Haralambi Markov

 

If you walk through the forests of Bulgaria in the evening, and you hear singing, or see a beautiful woman with long blonde hair, stay away! You've encountered a Samodiva, a woodland nymph who spends spring through fall in the Bulgarian woods. They wear long, flowing gowns, often decorated with feathers. Sometimes they have wings. They dance through the night and enchant the unwary traveller with their beauty and power.

 

During the winter, the Samodivas live in the fabled village of Zmajkovo, but during the rest of the year they live in caves, hollow trees, and abandoned sheds, near sources of water. At night, they dance, and mortals who stumble upon their dance will be tempted to join in until the die of exhaustion.

 

Samodivas are usually harmful to people, either intentionally or accidentally. Men who see them fall instantly in love with them and will follow them through the woods while the Samodivas sap their life energy away. Women who see the beautiful Samodivas often kill themselves in envy. In some versions of these stories, anyone who sees a Samodiva is blinded. The Samodivas love fire, and cause drought, fires, and fevers. They steal babies and cripple people who fall asleep in the forest. Some legends say that Samodivas ride giant deer using snakes for bridles. When angry, the Samodiva turns into a giant bird that throws fire. It is not difficult to anger a Samodiva.

 

Samodiva are dangerous, but knowledgeable in the ways of herbs and cures for illness. Their hair has great power, so one can defeat a Samodiva by damaging her hair. Sometimes a Samodiva will give a lock of hair to a mortal lover to enhance their strength. They don't share their knowledge of magical herbs readily, but some brave souls have managed to cure their sick loved ones by eavesdropping on Samodivas until they mentioned the needed cure. In some legends, they comfort the dying and in others they are an instrument of death. They are the dangerous beauty of the unknowable forest.

 

***

“The forest called to him! The forest called to him!” Lublyana repeats it over and over, her fingers spread, palms slapping the concrete pavement where the town ends and the wild wood begins.

The other elders pat her up and down in a clumsy attempt to soothe her, but then her cries become theirs, and Valtchan and Matei must wrestle the five person pile-up apart. Control over our parents wanes faster than we can adapt, their minds are consumed by whatever ailment turns their skin to bark and their limbs to sprouts.

In a soft choir, Mara, Anna and Vanga hush the mewling husks of those who once were the care-givers, escorting them towards the meeting hall—the last habitable building. The last bit of land the forest has yet to claim.

I am the oldest among children who haven’t been children for a long time, and I head over to the gap in the fence of welded rusty car roofs, the fence which is meant to keep disturbing sights hidden from the elders. Within the breach Kucho has broken with his body, moss, wood and grass as tall as a man stare back at me. Lublyana will miss him, when she remembers. Above, where the wind teases the blades, faded cloth breaks the monotony of green, showing where all those who have answered the summons and gone before succumbed to their personal transformations.

The short branches, as gnarled and twisted as they are, still reveal the lines of human hands outstretched towards the sky. As if drowning; that’s how Mom described them, back when she was up to describing anything.

The mix of emerald and brown is overwhelming and it’s hard to believe there is a street beneath, with rows of blocky houses—white walls and red shingles, textured stone steps and vegetable gardens squared off with brightly painted ironwork fences. I try to reconcile my memory of Before with the wilderness in front of me. I’m shaken by the black blur that catches my eye.

The movement is sudden and jerky and it freezes my blood. Goosebumps burst on my skin despite the September high noon. The foliage rustles and sways against the weight of something big, which shuffles, undecided as to whether it wants to pounce or not. I think back on some of the old tales: of the bear, the wolf and the boar. Our guards that keep us in, isolate us, and maul any who try to escape the boundaries that have been set for us. Those are the stories the first ones to be touched by the madness told, as they screamed in the night about dark spirits, vengeful beasts, the things that came to exact a toll on us. It’s been a long time since anyone has bothered to ask why we are kept prisoners, and with each passing year I wonder: Does it matter?

I stand still and so does the grass. As long as I don’t try to cross the fence, the border between our worlds, don’t try to make it to the old road that once connected us to the rest of the world, the beasts won’t attack, or so legends have it.

“Lazar…” Valtchan calls from the once-elaborate entry of the hall. “Food’s on the table!”

I leave the overgrown field behind, pull my mind away from the beast I may or may not have seen, and set it on how to mend the fence.

Not that it matters: the forest always does as it pleases.

#

We hold hands at sunset, lying alone atop the hall’s roof—a moment of peace before the moaning and crying comes from the elders locked in the cellar; before night descends and their raving madness with it.

The wind chases away any warmth the sun left on our skin—a sure sign autumn stalks close by with long fingers and a sharp bite. If we live until winter, it’s going to be the harshest yet, even with old Kucho dead. I push the thought away. Instead, I twirl the wedding band on Valtchan’s left hand.

Between the callouses of his ring finger, the worn gold feels warm and smooth, feels like it belongs there. The bareness of my own fingers reminds me that, in his eyes, I don’t belong with him. I don’t like it. It shows.

“You’re still mad about the wedding.” It’s not even a question. He knows me too well. We all know each other too well. Therein lies the problem.

Valtchan squeezes my hand and pulls me in his embrace, a none-too-subtle move to pacify me. The dust and grit that serves as our bed groans and rumbles as we rearrange bodies so I can rest my head against his chest. His wiry beard scratches my forehead. Having these conversations with our eyes wandering over the trees and the shapes they draw in the skyline, is a habit. If we don’t look at each other, it’s easier, allowing us to communicate without raising our voices. If our emotions get out of hand, the elders latch onto them, fidgeting and causing more of a ruckus than usual.

Our days are hard enough as it is: subduing family and friends when so much work waits grinds down even the strongest among us. Daily routines tiptoe around those incapable of any labour, which is nearly everyone except the children. At least those among us younglings who survived when the forest came for us.

“I don’t even see why you’d agree to it. It’s pointless.” I turn away from the greenery when I think I see shapes moving inside the trees’ crowns, and focus on Valtchan’s rising chest. He’s grown thinner beneath the worn checkered shirts. This summer yielded the sickliest fruit and vegetables. Half the stock animals rot standing up. I wonder how long it will take for his ribs to jut out so I can play them like the ivories on the school piano, the one the elders chopped up for kindling when their madness first set in. How long before he, too, is called?

“It’s all we have left. Our traditions.”

“That’s bullshit.” I’m careful with my temper, but I still spit the words like locusts fighting for release. “We don’t even have a priest. Who are you doing this for? Our parents are dying, Valtchan. Mara finds earthworms in their shit. Fucking earthworms. They’re dead already. So who are you doing this for?”

I hear his heart beat faster as he’s working himself up to tear a secret from his lungs.

“I’m doing this for myself, I guess. I just wanted to be married. To capture something from the time before all this happened. Like how Mom and Dad were. I wanted to have that… to feel closer to them. But it didn’t work. This ring.” The arm he embraces me with is the one with the band and he makes a show of pulling it off. “It’s not real. It changes nothing.”

With a flick of his wrist, the gold blinks in the dying sun as it flips in the air and disappears over the roof’s edge.

Then why aren’t I wearing it? I wish you’d married me. Even a fake wedding would be better than this stolen thing.

I want to say the words, but I know better. I pretend to be content with the answer all the while imagining how pissed Ognyana is going to be when she learns her husband lost the ring a day after the wedding. A sudden gust of wind causes me to shiver and I wrap myself in the hooded cape mother knitted for me years ago. It still smells of wild flowers.

As the sun sinks beneath the horizon, moans from the cellar float upwards.

#

The unhappy noises cease only when dawn breaks. This door used to terrify me as a child, those first times our parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts insisted on being locked up. Now the key twists almost as an afterthought—a ritual I don’t even remember doing anymore. The cracked yellow paint on the walls and the rotting sweet smell are so much a part of me that I don’t need to be fully awake to prepare them for the new day.

I can pretend that this—seeing them squatting naked and bleeding something other than blood—is just a lingering nightmare. I can confuse the patches of bark for mere bruises and the twigs jutting from their backs as nothing more than shadows.

But my fingers cannot be deceived when I pass a wet cloth over their bodies—17 corpses-in-waiting, including the one of my mother, who’s not remembered me in several years. Dip the rag in the red plastic bucket filled with well water; scrape up their filth then rinse it off; the wipe-down that leaves my palms lacerated. Dressing them reminds me how alien their bodies have become; then the encouragement that everything is going to be all right, which is meant more for me than them (for mornings in here crush me so badly that I want nothing more than for the forest to call me so I can let it all go and drown in grass and bark and feel nothing ever again).

Drowning for eternity; surely it must feel better than this.

Easier.

Back outside…

Back outside it still feels as if I’m in the cellar. Still buried beneath the burden of earth.

The weight nests in me as I tend to the chickens and gather eggs for breakfast. It distracts me from noticing how none of the poultry move or how heavy the eggs feel as I pick them up. I fail to see the other birds—swallows and owls, rollers and doves, cuckoos and sparrows, tits and larks—perched on every high point around the pen. Until, that is, they sing with human voices.

“These men: they slew the maiden.

The fair maiden that they slew,

Hair of silver did she have.

Hair of silver and the kindest heart.

The heart, child, they ate.

The skin, child, they kept.

Her flesh, they tossed aside.

Her clothes, child, they stole.

From her bones, a crib they made.

From her hair, a cape.”

They sing with purpose and they sing with accusation I’m meant to understand. As each verse rings, the eggs in my hand and basket crack and burst, gurgling vile fluid from the fractures. I turn side to side to find a break in the circle, but I’m surrounded and the birds close in, hopping from their perches to the ground. A giant owl breaks off from the choir with a screech and flies at me.

Then all goes black.

#

I work the scythe through the grass, cutting a corridor into the overgrowth up North to where the oldest trees stand and the sedge has no sunlight to grow as tall; this is the only way we’re allowed to go. Behind me, Ognyana tills the soil with a hoe to stall the roots from shooting up and swallowing the path. Each excursion lasts three to four hours out of precaution. No one is to go alone in the forest—such is the cardinal rule of survival. The second is to protect the hunter; die for them if need be. That’s the sole reason I’m with Ognyana, our only living hunter.

“Valtchan could have come, you know.” Ognyana starts once we’re at the mouth of the woodland. We stick our tools into the ground so they form an X to mark our position. “Or are you afraid I might really take him from you?”

At that we both laugh. As if anyone can make Valtchan do anything other than what he wants.

“It’s been two days since I fainted. I can’t stay in bed anymore. I feel useless.” I also don’t want to go anywhere near the chicken coop. How did no one see the birds? Hear them? In my life I’ve never heard anything louder. Louder than the church bells when they still rang, louder than the screams of the first to try to escape the town when things got bad. No one mentioned them, just like no one mentions my face. Are the bird scratches I see there not real? They sting like they’re real.

Is this how the sickness starts? I’m 28 now. I could be the next to be called. Ognyana doesn’t look at me, so I check my skin for any deformities, and sigh in relief when I find nothing.

“You can’t do everything around here.”

“Wasn’t aware there’s a quota on how much I’m allowed to do.”

“What I’m saying is, leave some of the work for us. You’ve earned the right to take it easy for a few days at least.”

But that’s not what I want. To be ignored like I’m one of the sick. Out of sight, out of mind. What I want is for someone to ask me what happened, why I fainted, how I got my face cut in so many places. Even Valtchan pretends nothing is out of the ordinary; as if he doesn’t feel the lacerations when he kisses me. Because I do and it hurts, more in my heart than my skin does.

The path winds deeper into the forest, punctuated by trunks splashed with orange paint to mark the way to the clearing where the most rabbits come. Ognyana leads, knife in her right hand and a makeshift spear, part ironwork and part window frame, in the left. In the sunlight, her hair reminds me of dark tea. Her gait reminds me of Death.

I’m tired of pretending, of not asking, not knowing.

“Do you think they’re still here?” I ask.

“Who?” she responds as she places one careful foot in front of the other.

“The monsters.”

She pauses for a split second—this rattles her—then resumes her prowl.

“I don’t know. The monsters were a long time ago, Lazar. Maybe. Why do you ask?”

“I think I saw something the day Kucho died…” I’m not sure I can bring up the birds.

“Now’s not the time,” she interrupts, and points at the blood splatter that competes with the garish paint on the trees. It grows heavier as we reach the clearing.

“God.” It’s the only thing Ognyana manages.

Before us lies the biggest bear we’ve ever seen. It’s been gutted and the glade floor looks as though it holds all the red in the world. We slosh through the blood, chunks of meat, and torn strips of fur, to the heaving body. The bear’s eyes spin like bees caught in a glass. A mouth as wide and dark as a well gapes at us, adorned with teeth that could plough the earth.

“How is it alive?” Ognyana nears the bulk of angry shredded flesh and prods the beast with the spear’s tip. The jaw snaps, making her jump away. Its eyes focus on us.

“Humans.” Loud enough to be heard, hard enough to be an insult.

“It speaks. It speaks!” Ognyana screams, but is silenced by the bear’s roars, louder than any mountain storm.

“Humans.” It groans. “Monsters. I wanted to watch you starve into nothing before I died. At least I die knowing you will pay for your sins.”

“Monsters? We did nothing! You’re the monster!” Ognyana yells and sinks her spear in its side. It seems the bear is beyond pain for it barely reacts.

“Yet you’re the one tormenting a dying creature. You’ll pay for what you did to her, the forest’s daughter. The madness is doing fine work, and it’s slow, but you’ll die from something else. Soon at that. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil the surprise. It’s less than you deserve, murderers. I feel blessed to have delivered news of your punishment.”

“But what did we do?” I ask, but the bear says no more and its eyes roll back slowly in its head.

#

I pace the room that belongs to my mother and me, from one wall to the other. I drag air into my lungs as if there’s not enough in the whole world. Death isn’t coming; it’s here.

The bear said so, the bear promised; how can you question the veracity of a creature that should not exist? Then the tales are true. The beasts are still are out there and want to keep us in, but they’re not the only ones. There’s something else, even worse, dangerous to even that bear, that wants us dead now. What else could the bear’s words mean?

Weapons and traps and walls.

That’s all Ognyana talks about on the trail home, the original point of our expedition long forgotten. But how do you kill something that butchers a monster?

You can’t. You don’t. You die.

Death has hung over us, close and closing in, for so long. We’ve seen it in the dwindling animals, rotting fields, and shrinking well. But this, this not knowing when the end will come. How it’ll come.

Each day is like coming to terms with your mortality over and again and I don’t think I can face it one more time.

I stop in the middle of the room and pull the cape around me; it’s all softness and flowers.

That’s when I hear Mother singing in the hallway and lose my grip on the fabric. I stare at the entrance, waiting.

“From her bones, a crib they made.

From her hair, a cape.”

Her voice soars high, each syllable unspooling in a ribbon of sound, undulating one into the next. She enters the room and I see certainty and purpose in the way she moves as she takes place in her favorite armchair, the one that belonged to Father, the one that now resembles a heap of trash. Her melody winds down to a gentle hum, then nothing.

This feels like the one chance I have to know. Be the first one to ask the questions and learn what happened to us. I wrestle with myself, the fear of knowing sewing my lips shut, but before the silence stretches further I approach her with my practiced, even voice. I don’t stare directly, but observe her face from the corner of my eye.

“Mom, what are you singing?”

“Nothing.” She stutters and keeps looking as far away from me. “No one’s singing here.”

I can’t let this slide. Not this time. The need for an answer burns through me, so I drop to my knees and grab her shoulders. She shrieks and pulls back into the chair, but there is nowhere to go.

“Don’t lie to me, Mom.” I coo to calm her, but I make the edge in my voice known. “Don’t lie, Mommy. I will know and if you lie, I will bring you through the hole in the fence. We’ll go down the road out of this town. You know what happens to those who escape, don’t you?”

“No, no, no, nononono” she moans and fights. Her pinches and kicks do nothing to dissuade me. “No one is singing. I am not singing.” I squeeze harder and lean over until I hover over her ear, the one that’s still good.

“I’ll bring you to Dad, Mom. I know which tree he is. I wonder… Is he alive? Can he speak? What will he tell me?”

She stops her struggle and just breathes, defeated. For the first time in years, she meets my gaze and looks me directly in the eye when she replies.

“I’m singing of our sins, my son.” Her serenity scares me more than her words. Her words mark her liberation, but I feel they open the doors of torment for myself.

“What sins, Mom?’

“Ah, my boy, all the things we did wrong, all the things that rain down on your heads now.”

“What did we—you—do??” My voice shakes, but I stare straight at her, looking for the madness. “Does this have anything to do with the forest?”

“With everything.” She smiles, sadly. “We should have told you long ago, but oh the shame closed our mouths. Fear that our children would hate us for this secret.” She shakes her head and fidgets in her seat.

She is more bark than skin. One eye milky all over, hair tangled in white streaks and green leaves. Yet, she looks more human now than she ever has.

“Your father killed her deer. Biggest deer anyone in town has ever seen, big enough to feed us for a month or more if we were careful. It took ten men to drag its body back. That’s what started everything.” She stops there. I’m scared she’s going to revert back to her maddened state, so I press on.

“What does the deer have to do with anything?”

“Oh, the deer is the most important thing of all! It belonged to her, the samodiva.” She smiles again, puts her teeth into it. “Back then no one really believed in those old folk stories anymore. Not even here where these spirits make their homes. But when the samodiva started kidnapping the children and blinding the oldest folk in revenge for her beast, we had to believe.”

She draws a sharp breath and tears fill her eyes.

“We had to kill her. The police laughed at us. The journalists laughed at us. Everyone laughed at us and we had no way to protect ourselves. So, our men hunted her, killed her. Each took a bone as much for good luck, as to try to confuse the spirits to what they’d done, and built it into the cribs for their children. As we all did, but your father did more. He kept not only her bone, but took her clothes, skin and hair. The hair your grandmother and I wove into the cape you’re wearing.”

Repulsion fills me and I tear the garment from my shoulders. The fabric doesn’t rip, just smoothly drips to the ground.

“What about the skin and clothes, Mom?”

“In the bottom of that trunk right there,” she says and points at the dower-chest next to my bed. “I should have thrown them out. Oh, child. My poor, poor child. Oh what I did to you. Oh…” Her voice melts into mewling and she begins to pat herself all over. The brief period of sanity is done.

But I’ve stopped listening, concentrating on the brown dower-chest alone.

I only know I never want to step inside this room again.

#

It’s been four days since meeting the bear and the moans reverberate through the walls as they do any other night. Tonight Valtchan and I contribute to the noise, though our groans hold no more hope than those from the cellar. Between me and Ognyana, he’s exhausted and as soon as I kiss him and roll over to catch my breath, his snores add a new note to the evening chorus.

Sleep never comes though, not for me. Not since I learned of the samodiva, her skin and hair. The thought of it stretches through my mind until it’s the only canvas I can paint my thoughts on.

I run my fingers through Valtchan’s chest hair and breathe the scent of him, which is even stronger now that he’s sweated through sheets and blankets. I feel his chest rise and seek to lose myself in its rhythm.

Bring the skin. Bring the clothes. Bring the hair.

The voice is the sound of wind through leaves, the creak of boughs. The whispers have been in my head every night since my mother’s attack of sanity. First time it I heard it, I thought it was one of the girls. Perhaps Mara, asking for a favor with her soft timbre, but now I fear it’s someone else speaking in my head.

Bring the skin. Bring the clothes. Bring the hair.

All I can think of is the skin from the dower-chest, and the cape I have worn all my life, feeling it around my shoulder and face. This is how the madness starts, but every inspection of my body reveals nothing to suggest I have the same illness as everyone else. I’m still flesh, scars and callouses. Yet, I’m compelled by the voice.

Bring the skin. Bring the clothes. Bring the hair.

I’m out of Valtchan’s bed and I stand against the wall, soaking in the elders’ moans. Nothing will happen if I stand here and drown the voice out. My room is down the hall on the same floor, right after Ognyana’s. I’m relieved there is one person separating me from the chest with the samodiva’s belongings, but I’m worried.

Bring them to the forest. Bring me back.

I don’t recall moving, but I’m in my room, sitting on my haunches. The chest is open and the skin lays in my lap. After all these years, it’s still soft.

It still bleeds.

Bring the skin.

The cape sits wrapped around me against the chill, and I face the opening in the fence we’ve yet to rebuild. The night is dark, but I still see shapes dancing. In one hand I hold the skin folded perfectly. In the other I brandish a knife I don’t remember picking up.

Bring me back.

I catch myself following a path that is not a path. I don’t know where I am. Grass surrounds me; its rustling has become one with my thoughts. I want to run, but I can’t.

Wear me.

White light pushes against the black of the woods and I see it’s the samodiva’s white dress shirt that glows in the dark, offset by the multicolored sash set across the waist. The light spreads on the ground and the cape catches on this soft luminescence, each fiber standing out. I realize I’m naked and kneeling.

Be me.

There’s a finality to the command. I don’t want this to be the end. I don’t want to leave my people behind. I can’t leave Valtchan and Ognyana behind. Yet, I reach for the knife and feel its worn out handle as I palm it.

Be me.

I feel the knife’s tip as it slips into my thigh to pry off my skin from my flesh.