Found in a journal left behind in an old basement. We could not determine who it belonged to, when it was written, or if the stories were indeed nothing but fiction.
1.
No one had entered the village church for fifty years. But the organ kept playing every winter night.
I heard it too, when I was there. I was sure it was only one of those legends meant to give tourists a bit of a scare. In fact, I actually wanted to go inside the church myself to prove there was nothing there. I couldn’t, of course. The church had been boarded up after a fire. It was not safe.
“How convenient,” I could not help thinking.
One night, I sneaked into the churchyard. I could not get inside the building, but I could look through the windows. If there was someone sneaking in to play the organ, I would find them and expose them.
The thing crawled from a hole in the ground. It walked on two legs, like a human being, but its skin was grey, and its face had a long snout. Its hands were long and ended in sharp claws. But it could play the organ. I stood and stared, unable to move, as that hellish thing started playing and others of its kind appeared in the yard and danced on the freshly fallen snow.
I woke up in my room, although I don’t know how I got there. They told me it was not true, what I had seen. They told me I had been found unconscious in front of the church and I must have been attacked by robbers. But I knew they were lying. And I knew the thing playing the organ had been real.
I know it is real because, after it finished playing and its dancing kin had retreated back underground, the thing from the church had looked right at me. And I still see his smirk every time I close my eyes.
I haven’t really been able to sleep since then.
2.
When I was a child, there was this old house at the end of our lane. No one dared to enter it.
The yard was teeming with weeds and other overgrown plants. When you got close, the muddy smell of untamed marshland overwhelmed you. There was always a wind blowing, moving the plants this way and that, causing them to be locked in an eternal dance. If you sat by the gate and listened carefully, you could hear a distant whistle, not that of a bird, but definitely not human either. It came from inside the house, drifting out the broken windows and over the untamed garden.
The house was not deserted. There was a young woman living there, together with her son. The boy did not play with us, nor did we see him too often outside his yard. His mother we would sometimes spot leaving the house in the evening, but none of us knew where she went.
I heard a lot of people say they were ghosts. I knew they were not, though. One night I saw the both of them crawling up the street, or, at least, their faces were the same. Their bodies were half-bird, half-lizard. They made the same whistling sound that you could hear coming from their house on hot afternoons.
As I’ve said, I knew they weren’t ghosts. Because I knew they weren’t human.
3.
Isabelle’s husband went into the woods one night and never came back. That was twenty years ago.
Back then, Isabelle had been twenty and married only for six months. The Isabelle I met had lost her glow, the years of anxious waiting putting wrinkles on her face and dyeing her hair almost completely grey. She was hard as steel in most things, but she would never go anywhere near the woods where her husband had vanished.
“What do you think happened to him?” I asked her one evening.
“I don’t need to think,” Isabelle told me. “I know. I saw him, ten years ago.”
“He is alive then?” I asked surprised.
Her eyes glittered.
“You could say that. But he is a tree now.”
She told me that night that, ten years after her husband went missing, she ventured into the wood. She walked for a long time, following the path her husband must have followed. And then suddenly she saw it: a proud walnut tree, no more than ten years old. Its branches started swaying this way and that when she approached it, although there was no wind.
“There is a forest demon hiding in the shadow,” she added. “It lures people and it turns them into trees. They’re alive. They’ll stay alive for as long as the tree does. A tree’s life is long. I know my husband will outlive me.”
Since then, every time I pass a tree, I wonder if it really is a tree. Or maybe it had once been something else, and now is forced to watch the world go by and change, waiting for some storm to fell it.
To be continued
Copyright Simina Lungu 2021
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