He finally moved when she pulled off a pair of high heels with red bottoms and replaced them with black rubber boots. He found out why the moment his shoe sank into mud.
Mrs. Janina didn’t offer him any more time to think things through. As soon as the car locked with a beep, she switched on a large flashlight and led the way into the woods.
The forest whispered to Adam, but he remained mute to its call, hating every second of their trek. Each hooting owl, each snapping branch under his feet, made his insides twist with anticipation. The beam of the flashlight lengthened all shadows and made them crawl on the edges of Adam’s vision while an insistent scratching resonated inside his body, as if something writhed on the underside of his skin, awaiting the right moment to rip itself free.
He couldn’t take this demon back with him to Warsaw.
He needed to get rid of it. Tonight.
In the dark, Adam soon lost the sense of direction, but as he followed the two women, who hurried up a ridge in the vast emptiness of the beech forest, he couldn’t help but feel as if he’d been here before. Damp leaves felt soft and inviting like a red carpet under his feet, even though the silvery trunks and branches crooked like the hands of a witch were something straight out of a horror movie.
Memories of Kupala Night came rushing back in the form of deja vu. Back then, everything had been green and had emitted a fresh fragrance while the current landscape had been stripped of color by fall, but as his gaze caught a rock wall shooting above the trees in the distance, he choked up at the memory of the magical moment when the bison had appeared out of nowhere to offer Adam Emil’s wreath.
That night, Adam had experienced no fear, because the trust he’d had in Emil had been absolute. Images of naked flesh, black hair, their bodies moving together in a wild display of vitality flashed at the back of his eyelids, but his guides didn’t know of the hidden gorge and took him farther on, where the woods were denser.
He missed Emil’s hand in his so badly it physically hurt, but that reminded him Emil had been the one to cause him all this distress and pain. If he got rid of the demon inside of him tonight, would those fond memories of Emil fade too?
Would his love for Emil dissolve in the clean waves of his conscience?
Nausea rose in his throat, and he struggled to keep his dinner down. A reckless piece of him wished to keep those moments in his heart, hold on to them forever, and he couldn’t help it. It would have been for the better if he forgot Dybukowo and everything that had happened here, but he couldn’t stand the concept of his affection for Emil being gone as well. How could he ever reject the memory of Emil biting his ear as he pushed his cock deep inside Adam time and time again?
He would never feel like this again, and the prospect of forgetting the intense emotions he’d experienced this summer made him want to turn on his heel and run back to join Father Marek on the sofa.
But he couldn’t. Not when this was his one chance to be free of the creature that possessed and tormented him.
His breath caught when he spotted a warm glow ahead. The two women headed that way, and as they approached the thatch of trees, the unsteady nature of the light originating from between the evergreen branches betrayed it must have been produced by fire.
Mrs. Janina raised one hand to her mouth and made a melodic howl, which was immediately answered by a similar sound coming from the hidden light source. She looked over her shoulder with a small smile stretching her lips. “Be brave. Everything will be over soon,” she said before pulling something large out of her handbag.
On his other side, Mrs. Golonko uttered a curse word, but when Adam glanced her way, his blood dropped from his head and flowed into his legs, urging him to flee when she faced him with a small vulpine skull attached to her head with a ribbon. The dead animal still had all its teeth when it had died, but its head had been much smaller than a human’s, leaving the bone mask to cover only the middle of Mrs. Golonko’s face.
“Is this necessary?” he asked in a tiny voice, led forward by Mrs. Janina, who squeezed her thin yet deceptively strong fingers on his forearm.
He couldn’t think of anything more surreal than the conservative parsonage housekeeper, in her elegant purple jacket, putting on a mask made out of a deer skull. Her voice sounded dull when she spoke.