In the shadow of the Tatra mountains, in the valleys where reception is non-existent and the radios sing a single static filled song, there is a village. It’s no different than the other villages you would find in the Slovakian countryside; there’s a single road lined with wooden cottages, the occasional pensioner on a horse and the fresh mountain air is intermixed with the gentle smell of manure. It’s just like any other village.
Except for the screaming.
Every evening, after the day’s fieldwork is finished and dinner has been eaten, the people of the village get ready for the ceremony. They wash up, put on their Sunday best and gather at the edge of the woods. A couple dozen people, young and old, but mostly old, watch as the sun slowly sets behind the tree line. The lower the ball of fire sinks behind the dark wood the more their mouths open.
It starts off as a gentle gargle, something you’d have to be close to hear, but as the sky reddens those whispered screams grow into a throaty thunder that echoes through the valley. The children in their buttoned suspenders, the old women in their humble headscarves, the farmers wearing their wedding suits – they all scream at the setting sun from the core of their souls.
I grew up in this. This all seemed normal.
As most children do, I had my ‘Why?’ period. I would ask why the sky is blue, why Mr. Jozkovicz’s rooster crows every morning, why the trees shed their leaves with the coming of winter. I was a young human being trying to make sense of the world that I had been plunged into. My mother and father answered most of these questions to the best of their abilities, they supported my curiosity, but as soon as I asked about the screaming their tone changed.
My father would slam his blistered hands on the table and send me to bed without supper. Some questions were simply not meant to be asked. My mother would sneak into my room after all the lights were off with some porridge. She would sit down on the edge of my bed and give me food under the promise that I wouldn’t question the daily ritual. The people of the village simply had a habit of saying goodbye to the setting sun in their own special way. That was all I needed to know.
Some questions were simply not meant to be asked.
I was hungry enough to let go of my curiosity.
My voice was hoarse from all the screaming and the question of the ritual did steal some sleep away from me, but there were more important things to attend to. There were cows to milk and chicken to feed and horses to groom. Sometimes, for a couple loaves of fresh bread or a plastic bottle of moonshine, I would be asked to attend to the neighbor’s livestock as well. Apparently the animals liked me. Whenever my parents, or anyone else in the village, would enter our barn the cattle would buck and ram against the wood in discomfort. It was only if I was alone with them that they would calm.
Whenever any of the livestock was giving birth I’d be summoned to keep the animal company. It was in those big dumb eyes of new mothers that I would find peace. The world was a mysterious place. Some questions were simply not meant to be asked. But I still asked them. By lantern light, as Olga, our heftiest cow, fed her calves I would talk to her. Her ears fluttered as I asked her about the screaming. We became friends.
My childhood blended into my teens in a calm, rural pace. I muddied my clothes feeding and cleaning and grooming the animals during the day, then I would eat dinner with my parents, wash up, change into clean clothes and go out to the edge of the wood. I screamed just as hard as anyone. I did my best to match whatever throaty note the rest of the procession was hitting. I looked out toward the setting sun with the same devotion the rest of them did. But sometimes, when I thought no one would notice, I would sneak a peek into the crowd. I hoped that maybe I would catch a glimpse of someone else, someone who was like me, someone who didn’t understand.
Every day I walked towards the woods with that silent hope in my mind, a hope that I would spot a spark of recognition in someone’s eyes. I looked at the Jozkovitcz boy, the same one who would work the fields in the same sweaty shirt all summer long but somehow had a new suit and tie for each day of worship, yet there was no sign of doubt in his devotion. The children, the same ones that would poke frogs crushed by uncaring horses all morning long, their youthful curiosity was gone, they were committed to the scream. Even my father, a man who seldom showed any emotion, screamed into the blackening sky with tears gathering in his dark eyes. I was alone. I was different. I just didn’t know the extent of it yet.
Thunder. A crackling bolt of electricity tore through the apple tree outside of my window. I bolted out of bed just in time to see the flames of the impact die out in the downpour. For a split second my bedroom was plunged back into darkness. I listened to the heavy rain beat against our tin roof.
My room lit up again. A flashlight. My father stood in the door, soaked, still wearing his rubber boots.
“Olga. She is giving birth.” His voice was weaker than usual.
“Something bad happen?” I asked.
“You should go check on her.” He lowered his flashlight and let me change out of my nightclothes. As I pulled on my pants the beam of his flashlight shook. What he saw in the barn made his hands unsteady.
My mother hugged me as I made my way out of the cottage. She was just as wet as my father. She had been witness to the same horror. “Don’t be sad,” she whispered, “Sometimes they’re born wrong and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
I put on my raincoat but it made no difference. The morning rain came down with a cruel sweeping force. Bolts of lightning exploded off in the woods and thunder shook the entire valley. But as I got closer to the barn, even through the powerful barks of the storm, I could hear a wailing. Olga was in pain.
Jet-black skin covered in scales. Where the calf’s ears should have been there were simply two bloated crests of swamp-green flesh. When I entered the barn the creature was halfway out of Olga. It hung lifelessly, it’s thin hooves bending against the straw filled ground but its eyes were open. Those milky orbs with floating crimson chunks will haunt my sleep until the end of time.
I quickly turned away from the monstrosity and moved to comfort my friend. Olga’s eyes big brown eyes darted around the barn with fear. Her jaw would spread wide and deliver wails so guttural I worried for her life. She didn’t understand what was happening. Neither did I. The cow didn’t calm until there was a sound of something wet rolling out onto the straw.
She licked it. I watched my only friend gently run her tongue across her lifeless, misshapen child. We sat there in the dim dusk, our mourning occasionally illuminated by flashes of lightning, but eventually the storm passed. The barn descended into complete silence. The only thing you could hear was the occasional rustling in the pigpens and the rhythmic sound of Olga’s tongue dragging across her dead child. I wept for her loss. If she could, she would have wept as well.
The calf’s body was cold to the touch. Its neck twisted against the floor in a fashion that made breathing impossible; I was sure there was no way that the thing could be alive. Yet as the sunlight started to pour in through the cracks of the barn – those milky eyes blinked.
Before I could even properly register the creature’s resurrection the calf was standing. It shuddered beneath its scaled skinny legs, the tufts of green flesh at its temples throbbed, the animal seemed to be in a horrid daze. It looked across the barn, its dirty, white eyes searching for something. Olga stared at the creature in fear, her tongue safely inside of her jaw. We both watched in horror as the frail creature made its way to the Eastern side of the barn and pressed itself up against the beams of sunlight that were flooding in.
The calf screamed. The guttural tone of the scream brought echoes of the sun worship that the village would partake in, but where the voices of the villagers boomed with thunder the cry of the calf whimpered. This wasn’t a scream of worship. This was a death rattle.
Foam started to gather at the edges of the creature’s mouth and soon enough its entire scaled maw was filled with white bubbles. Its wail started to wane, the singular tone dipped and rose and made the animal sound like a dying, organic siren. The scream whimpered down to a whisper, its knees started to buckle and finally the creature fell over to its side. The pops of the mucus filled bubbles from the creature’s mouth tore through the stillness of the barn.
“It’s dead.” My father was standing behind me, the heavy flashlight dormant in his hand. “Let Olga rest. I’ll burry the thing.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could get a word out my father cut me off.
“Sometimes they’re born wrong and there’s nothing we can do about it.” His voice was cold. He wanted me out. A warm morning sun flooded the barn as he opened the doors. “Let Olga rest.”
The big brown orbs of sadness let me know that Olga needed to be alone. I gave my only friend space to mourn the death of her child.
My mother met me outside in the rain-drenched glass and gave me another hug. She offered me rare respite from my duties. She said I needed rest. What I saw was difficult to digest – I could go back to sleep and she would take care of feeding the animals. If I woke up with some energy then I could help her with making dinner. Sleep was the last thing on my mind but so was feeding chickens. Instead, I set out on a walk in the woods.
The shade of the thick tree line would always be my preferred means of escape from my thoughts. Whenever I would find myself thinking too hard about the mysterious screaming that my village would indulge in or what lingered beneath that sweaty shirt of the Jozkovitcz boy I would wander through to cool forest path and stomp on the twigs that would make their way beneath my feat. With each snap I could hear the thoughts that plagued me lose in their strength. Yet as I made my way through the forest, even after nearly an hour of wandering, the snaps of the twigs sounded like the pops of the calf’s foamy mouth.
My legs were tired. I sat down by a berry bush, tried to finger pick my feelings away but only ended up with a purple mouth. The milky eyes of Olga’s dead child were drilled into my memory. I could hear its wails echoing through my head. I stuffed my face with some more blueberries and then laid down on some moss. The birds chirped off in the distance and a gentle summer wind caressed my arms. Suddenly my exhaustion caught up with me.
“Whoa! Another person!” A plume of smoke manifested itself in front of my eyes. It smelled like a mixture of strawberries and milk. “Whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to blow that in your face.”
The silky strings of fog faded away to reveal a colorfully dressed man with a bright backpack. In his hand he had a strange pipe that flashed with blue light whenever he put it to his mouth. “Wanna hit? It’s strawberry cheesecake.” He said, and then broke out into a coughing fit.
“No, thank you.” I said.
“Your loss.” He took another puff, this time without coughing. The strange short pants and colorful t-shirt were odd but what truly puzzled me was his hat. Its brim was cut short and only shielded the man’s forehead. An imprint of a strange lizard with the word ‘Chill’ adorned the front of his hat. I was very confused.
“Man, it’s so nice out here without any e-mails or IMs, right? It’s like we’re living in a completely different world.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
His clothes and that weird pipe made me uncomfortable, but in the pit of my stomach something rustled. It wasn’t the blueberries. It was the same rush of warmth that washed through me when the Jozkovitcz boy talked to me. But this time there was no stench of sweat. This time there was strawberry cheesecake. I wanted to impress this strange man.
“Which lodge you staying at?” He asked.
“You wouldn’t have heard of it.” I replied with as much confidence as I could muster.
“Cool, cool,” he said, taking another puff of his pipe. “I’m chillin’ at the Goral Inn. Came out here for two weeks to just kinda get away from stuff, y’know? I’m a song writer. Well, I think of myself as more of a poet, but whatever, that’s just a label. Figured a bit of the forest would help me write some really earthy stuff, there’s not enough nature in modern life, y’know?”
I grasped onto the few words that I understood. “You make music?” I asked. My father sometimes played the accordion. He was not very good.
“I make art. I’d show you but-” He reached into his pocket and produced a small metal tablet. He looked at it and his eyes went wide. “Oh shit, there’s signal here!”
He waved the tablet around, occasionally reading something off its screen. He sat down on the moss next to me, looked at his tablet, tutted at it disapprovingly and rose up to stand in the exact same spot where he stood before. “There’s only signal here, but if you want to see a video of my band-“
“Yes!” I got up and stood next to him. There was a television on the tablet. I had never met someone who was on a television.
We watched a movie of his band performing. The music was very strange and every two seconds the musicians froze in place and stopped singing. The man kept apologizing and talking about the ‘bad signal’ but I didn’t mind. I was just getting lost in the smell of strawberry cheesecake and the gentle hint of oak that was coming off from his neck. I didn’t even notice the sky growing red.
“Do you hear that?” He asked. Tapping his finger on the tablet and silencing the band.
“Hear what?”
“That.” A low, growing gurgle spread through the wood. The man nervously let loose another silky cloud.
“Oh, that’s just my village saying goodbye to the sun.” I said, “Hey, do people scream where you come from?”
“What?” He put his phone away, twigs crackled underneath his restless feet. The screams gained in tenor, the trees gently shook with the echo of the ritual. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Saying goodbye to the sun, the people from my village do it every sunset. I don’t know why but-“
“That’s some scary culty shit, I am so out.” He backed away from me. The low rumble of the screaming drowned out the snapping of the twigs. “Uh, pleasure meeting ya. If ya wanna hear more of my music look up the Warriors of Perun on Spotify. Chuck us a like on Facebook too.”
He didn’t even wave goodbye. The louder the screaming got the faster he walked. By the time the berry bushes started swaying he was at a full sprint.
I was alone again. As darkness settled over the forest and the screams of my community started to die down, the questions that had driven me into the forest came back with tenfold force. What had gone wrong for Olga to give birth to the misshapen calf? Why was the man so scared of the low rumble of the screaming? Why was there screaming in the first place?
Outside of the confines of my village community there was another world. A world where nice-smelling men wore strange hats and puffed on magical pipes. A world where men who spoke a cryptic language buckled in fear at what I had grown accustomed to. I needed to understand.
I returned home to find my mother and father sitting in the dinner room. A fire burnt in the furnace that made the room flicker in a warm, orange light but their faces were inhospitable as a snowstorm. There was a cold plate of porridge on the table that reminded me how horribly hungry I was. When I reached for it, however, my father’s hand pushed it away.
“You did not attend the ceremony today.” His voice was hollow and his eyes did not meet mine. “Do not ever miss worship again.”
“Why?” I asked, “Why would I do something I do not understand? Why would I show up each evening to partake in a ritual that makes no sense to me?”
My mother whispered my name, begging me to stop, but a blistered hand hitting the table drowned out her gentle plea. The orange glow of the fire danced in my father’s eyes. For a blink he looked like Olga’s deformed child.
“Go to bed.” He hissed. “I pray that by the time the sun rises you will come to your senses. There are some questions that are simply not meant to be asked.”
I tried to find the will to argue back, to demand the knowledge that I deserved but before I could speak my mother whispered my name again. She was pleading with me. This was not the time nor place. I would not find answers in the flickering light of the dining room. I went to sleep without supper or goodbyes.
Olga’s heavy body shook and heaved as she gave birth to her scaly offspring, the village screamed at the setting sun, the sweet smell of strawberry cheesecake intertwined with the stench of sweat; as I lay in bed my mind filled with half-digested memories. I don’t know if sleep came but I know when it left.
Beams of morning light peeked in through my curtains. My mother was sitting at the edge of my bed with the plate of cold. She whispered my name.
“Please, child, eat your porridge and do not ask of the screaming. Please, if you hold your life dear please, stop asking.”
“But why? Why can’t I ask? Why can’t I know?”
“Because…” She sighed. Her eyes searched my face for a trace of doubt, for a sign that I would let go of my questions. She couldn’t find it. “Because sometimes children are born wrong and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Why does our village scream at the setting sun?”
“Please, we cannot protect you if you don’t follow the rules. Me and your father just want the best for you.”
“Why does our village scream at the setting sun?” I repeated my question.
My mother placed the bowl of porridge at my bedside. She tried to meet my eyes but she couldn’t. She lowered her face into her hands and began to weep.
“We did our best to hide you. We did our best to give you a good life but… You were born wrong. You were born wrong and we can no longer keep your secret.” She looked up. Two milky white orbs with droplets of floating scarlet stared back at me. “I am sorry child. We can no longer protect you. Your questions will bring doom to our kind.”
Her jaw dropped and let loose that horrid throaty scream. Any trace of that familiar motherly voice was gone; it was replaced with something foreign, something horribly dark. Her face rumpled as the tone of the scream grew, her whole body shook with effort and then, as if her skin were made out of strips of ham on poorly buttered bread, she started to shed. Beneath my mother’s pale skin there were jet-black scales.
I wanted to get away but she wouldn’t let me. When I tried to pull back she gripped my leg with her hand. The same hand that would caress my hair when I was young and feverish, the same hand that would tend to the wounds when displeased chickens took umbrage with my shins, the same hand that I would hold when I was learning how to walk – that same hand was now unrecognizable. As the skin shed off her fingers turned into long, sharp claws. She held me down and extended her other hand towards my face.
“I’m sorry, my child,” she said, punctuating her screams, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The claws that she extended to my eyes shone with the color of the setting sun. The glow was impossibly hot. My eyes started to water as those bright needles approached my face.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorr-“
SMASH!
The bowl broke against her skull like an egg. The thickened porridge hit the floor and splattered into a mass of white chunks. I ran. Behind me my mother stopped apologizing, now she was just screaming – screaming and clutching at the dark green wound that was bubbling from the side of her head.
Shutting the front door of the cottage muffled her screams somewhat, but I soon realized she was not the only person releasing that throaty wail. The village green was bathed in a bright morning sun but out of the fields, out of the other cottages came dark figures with glowing fingers extended towards me. Their dark, scale covered bodies were alien to me but I knew they were my neighbors. I could recognize the screams. As the only community I had ever known descended into madness I ran to the only friend I had.
The barn doors barely made it through the thunderstorms, I had no illusions about them being able to hold off the screaming mob, yet I still shut them as tight as I could and hid in Olga’s enclosure. At first she seemed happy to see me but as the wailing outside grew closer her long ears flickered and her big brown eyes filled with fear. Through the cracks in the wood I could see glimmers of their fingers, like fireflies on a summer night. I hugged the cow as hard as I could. She rested her heavy head against my shoulders and pulled me in.
The door didn’t last. Within moments it was ripped off its hinges and the crowd of bright-clawed monstrosities was in the barn with me. They moved towards me, screaming, their pale eyes slowly fading behind the red glare that stemmed from their fingers.
“You were my only friend,” I whispered to Olga as I hugged her tight.
“Moo,” she replied.
I faced the burning heat of the crowd in front of me. I prepared to meet my end in a hail of screams and the hue of a setting sun but suddenly I felt wetness on the back of my neck. Olga’s mammoth tongue nuzzled the back of my head and pushed me to the side.
“MOOOOO!” Before I knew what was happening the glow of the creature’s claws was gone. The one-ton mass of muscle and horns charged at the crowd of villagers with a battle cry that drowned out their screaming. Green bubbling liquid spilled across the barn, the screams broke into choked gurgles as Olga crushed everyone I had grown up around beneath her hooves.
Yet she was outnumbered. Even with her gargantuan strength she was unable to shield herself from their hot claws. My friend had sacrificed herself for me. I would not let her die in vain. As the battle between the cow and the villagers raged on I slipped out of the barn and ran for my life.
There’s something to be said about Slovakian hospitality. When the people of Dolné Kravany found me stumbling through their fields tattered and hungry the only questions they asked was what size shoes I wear and how long it had been since I last ate. They accepted me as one of their own and did not inquire about my past.
It took me weeks to get adjusted to my new existence. There were so many things to get acquainted with; cars and soda and the Internet. These people lived in a world that was much bigger than the one I had inhabited before and the sudden knowledge of life being contained to more than just the dark woods and the setting sun was an intimidating piece of knowledge to digest. But Dolné Kravany had something I was well familiar with. Dolné Kravany had cows.
After I had recovered from the fragile daze that wandering through the forest for weeks without proper supplies brings, I took a job in the local dairy industry. The cows took well to me, and I am happy in my job, but the friendship I have struck with the animals is nothing compared to what I had with Olga.
I still think about her sacrifice, about how she was willing to give away her own life to help me escape. Yet there’s another part of my past which gnaws at me. Each evening, as the bright ball of fire descends behind the dark wood, I listen. Somewhere out there in the far-off valleys I can hear a low rumble of the village in which I had grown up. I still think about them, still wonder about the mind-boggling mystery of their identity and practices, but then I remind myself of a simple truth: