Where the Devil Says Goodnight (Folk Lore 1)

Emil’s thoughts were a mess. He still held on to Zofia’s hand, wishing deep down that maybe if he managed to make it warm, her remaining eye would open. When… how could something like this happen with so many neighbors nearby? It had to be a dream, and all the eyes looking at him in accusation—an illusion. They couldn’t honestly think he’d done something so gruesome, could they?

“W-what? No, they’re not my birds! The fucking things follow me, which is hardly my fault.” In a fit of frustration, he rose, grabbed a stone, and threw it at the crows which flew up in a black cloud, as if they were one body.

This couldn’t be happening. Not in Dybukowo, not in this quiet valley where nothing ever fucking happened!

“Death follows him since he was a child, Father. He was only eight when he set his house on fire, and both his parents died. Not long after, his grandmother went missing. This can’t all be a coincidence. Poor Zofia agreed to take care of his horse this week, and this is where it got her. May God rest her soul.”

It was a whisper, but Emil heard it well enough and spun around, about to confront the man who dared to say such things in his presence, but when he faced the crowd, Adam’s blue gaze was the only one he could see. His handsome face, while pale, bore no judgment, but his eyes told a different story, betraying that Adam was assessing the poison poured into his ear.

Nowak must have finally rolled out of his Range Rover, because he asked the villagers to disperse and draped a white sheet over Zofia’s body before stabbing his gaze into Emil.

“Stay here,” Nowak barked. A short, balding man in his sixties, he didn’t project much authority, but he was the village head, a person who could make Emil’s life difficult if he wanted. There was no point in aggravating the situation further so Emil stepped back and sat on the other side of the ditch.

He had nowhere to go anymore. In the face of such horror, the week away he’d planned was just a fancy. So he sat there and listened to people’s whispers, stricken with a frost that reached all the way into his bones. He’d lived here all his life, yet his neighbors didn’t see him as a part of their community, maybe even feared him, and he rarely felt confronted with that fact as intensely as he did now.

Time passed beyond his comprehension, but he must have been there for a while. Even Mrs. Luty came over to gawk at the body despite always claiming she had a ‘bad hip’. The news of Zofia’s death was spreading like wildfire, and more people left their chores behind to gather around the bloodstained sheet covering the body that lay in the ditch like a rag doll torn open and shaken until all its soft insides spilled out.

“I knew his grandmother. A good woman, but he’d been too much to handle after the fire. No wonder Zenon ended up in the grave early too.”

Emil hid his face behind the curtain of hair, unwilling to engage in spats about his grandfather when Zofia lay dead at his feet. How could this have happened? Had she fallen into the ditch, broken her neck, and the opportunist birds attacked her corpse for food?

A hand squeezed his shoulder, and he pushed it off before looking up into Adam’s face.

“Are you okay?” the young priest asked, his brows lowered in an expression of worry. Emil did not want his pity.

“I’m fine,” he said, his shoulders as rigid as if he were ready for a fight. He could already sense the burn of judgment as he rose to his feet. It wasn’t enough that he was the devil himself, attacking elderly ladies and feeding them to crows. Now he also disrespected priests.

Adam sighed and once again touched Emil’s shoulder, as if he’d never heard about the concept of personal space. “Were you friends? Maybe you’d like to join me at the parsonage to cool off? This must have been a huge shock.”

Emil gritted his teeth and jumped over the ditch, making some of the good people of Dybukowo step back in response. As if he could infect them with the stench of death that had clung to him since childhood. For once, he didn’t see Adam’s proposition as an opportunity to get under the man’s cassock, because nobody deserved to interact with a waste of space like him.

He would fail Radek and embarrass him in front of the friend who’d agreed to take a chance on Emil. Zofia lay dead, mutilated as if she were a character in a horror movie despite the sun shining brightly, the sky being blue, and birds chirping happily in a bush. And maybe it wasn’t his fault. But what if it was? What if it hadn’t happened to her if she’d stayed home knitting sweaters for her grandchildren instead of heading his way?