Undersong

Few could ever hope to understand the events that transpired in the autumn of 1888 on the Černik homestead, nestled in the gently rolling Bohemian Alps of southern Nebraska. Those who could forever maintained a stubborn silence.

***Content Warning: This episode contains themes of familial abuse and child illness. Listener discretion advised.***

Transcript

[Softly sorrowful piano]

NARRATOR

Episode Forty-four: Undersong.

(Sounds of earth shifting)

NARRATOR

Anatol Černik hates the root cellar. He hates the way that winter nights seem to endlessly linger within its confines, the way it smells of cold earth and old root vegetables, the way that the darkness of its bowels is never fully at bay even at noontide. But most of all he hates what his Babička Klotylda tells him lives down there, crawling in the shadows and the dirt: the pijavice.

In the daylight, or seated comfortably beside the farmhouse fire, he does not believe these tales. But in the dark hours of the night, or as now, standing at the top of the cellar stairs, his worldly wisdom fades, and he is only a twelve-year-old boy, the youngest son of the five surviving Černik children.

Whenever his parents hear Klotylda speaking of the pijavice, they scold her, and yet they do not stop her. And her thin, sharp face, made almost skeletal with many years of deprivation and toil, takes on an almost raptorial cast as she whispers of the revenant killer, the drinker of blood and tormentor of kindred.

Maminko, his father Boleslav will say heavily, prosím ne.

And she will turn her hard grey eyes on her son, and will continue to mutter her dark lore. Even after the younger Mrs. Černik pleads with her not to add further fuel to the nightmares that already so afflict her children, Klotylda will not relent.

Přijde v noci. Přijde si pro vás všechny, she says. He will come in the night. He'll come for all of you.

There is something hard and closed in her eyes, whenever his grandmother says this, something that Anatol does not understand. And the eyes of his father seem to reflect it back as they fall, fall to the fire, then to the packed earth floor.

His mother Františka calls from the house, asking where Anatol is with the milk and cream he was sent to fetch, and with a deep intake of breath, he plunges down into the cellar, out of the August heat and into the cool subterrene gloom. He recites the first half of the Lord’s Prayer, the only part he can consistently recall.

Otče náš, jenž jsi na nebesích..., he props open the doorway and descends the stairs.

The cellar seems somehow too large, as though it has grown since his last visit.

… posvěť se jméno tvé, Anatol reaches the bottom and begins to search the shelves for where his elder sister, Marika, left the covered milk pail.

Something shifts in the darkness, beyond the edge of the diffuse beam filtering down from the open door. It is a soft sound – a stealthy sound, he cannot help but think.

Prijd' království tvé, Anatol whimpers breathlessly, his hand at last closing on the milk pail handle, bud' vůle tvá, jako v nebi...

A deeper shadow rises amidst the murk, like a rattlesnake rearing to strike.

Tak i na zemi, he sobs, and turns to run up the stairs.

A faint, breathy melody rises from behind him, following him even as he emerges into the light of the surface.

Vraťte se. Vraťte se. Budu tě milovat ve tmě... ve tmě, navždy.

He slams shut the twin doors and slides the crossbar back into place. As he flees back toward the house, he stumbles, dislodging the lid from the pail and spilling some of the precious cream that has gathered at the top. He knows his mother will scold him harshly for wasting the day’s bounty, but all he desires in this moment is the safety of the house, of his parents’ protective presence.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Anatol’s older brothers snore loudly in their shared bedroom, almost loudly enough to drown out the sound of their parents bickering with their babička in the other bedroom. It is not the first night he has heard this, and it has always seemed strange to him how easily his siblings sleep despite such turmoil… at least, before the nightmares stir them later in the night. Sometimes it feels like he is the only one who even notices the ever tauter tension in the house’s inner atmosphere.

Boleslav raises his voice angrily, saying that Klotylda is growing crueler in her old age, and she replies that she has not changed, that she is the only one who refuses to remain deaf and blind.

Boleslav says that he is gone, and he is never coming back.

Stále žije, Klotylda replies, her voice high and brittle. He still lives.

The voices fall silent, but peace does not settle over the dark house. Anatol lies in the breathless dark, wondering of whom his father and grandmother spoke, until sleep at last claims him, pulling him down into muddled dreams where great pale worms with withered human faces writhe in the black of the midnight cellar, liquescently chanting Anatol’s name.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When Marika falls ill in the middle of the month, Klotylda insists that it is the pijavice’s  doing. Boleslav, losing his patience with his aged mother, shuts her in the bedroom while Františka tends to Marika, spooning her soup and mopping her brow.

It is only the damp heat, their mother assures them, and a little rest will see Marika well again.

Nevertheless, with every day, Marika seems paler and weaker. The girls’ room takes on the nauseously sweet smell of illness, and the older boys spend more time away from the house, even during those rare hours when the chores are done and they are free to play or to rest. They do not take the younger Anatol along with them, always telling him he is too dull and too timid, that he is still a baby at heart. So, he is left to play with their little sister Zlata, but she is too troubled by Marika’s illness to take much interest in play. And of all the Černik children, she is the most prone to pay credence to their babička’s grim mutterings. So, as they wander by the little creek where they draw their water, she asks Anatol if Marika will die and become a pijavice too.

No, he tells her, there is no pijavice.

There is, she replies, softly but with a flat certainty. Her voice growing even fainter, she says that she has seen it, down in the root cellar.

Jsi lhářka, he says. You are a liar.

She stops and stands silently, not looking at him, but toward the narrow stream of slow, cold water. He can see now that she is crying, and he moves to take her hand comfortingly, but before he reaches her, she turns and walks away, back toward the farmhouse.

He watches her go, and he notices for the first time how darkly the house stands against the backdrop of the sundrenched fields and hills.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

In early September, when Father Hovorka visits to administer the Extreme Unction, Anatol is tempted to tell him about the thing that lives in the cellar, and beg him to perform the Rite of Exorcism. Yet the grave expressions on the faces of his parents still his tongue, and he wonders if he is still just a foolish child to be so frightened by his grandmother’s fairytales.

Zlata, however, proves braver than him, and runs forward to hug the priest’s knees. Barely coherent through her tears, she begs him to save her sister from the blood-drinking fiend of the night, and Father Hovorka looks down at her in alarm, then questioningly at Boleslav and Františka. Embarrassed, they quietly explain that Klotylda has been filling the children’s heads with the grimmest folktales and giving them nightmares, and the priest’s face takes on a concerned expression briefly, before he replaces it with a kindly smile and gently pushes the girl away, crouches to speak with her at eye level. He says soothingly that he’s sure that there’s nothing to fear from any such creature, so long as she and her sister trust in the Lord. No power of darkness, he says, can overcome that of a faithful heart.

Zlata is at first doubtful, but the priest’s calm persistence slowly wins her over. Yet when the priest looks over the girl’s shoulder at Anatol, he is sure he sees doubt and dread clinging like a shadow around Father Hovorka’s dark eyes.

The priest takes supper with them, staying until after nightfall. When the children are sent to bed, Anatol lingers at the top stop for a moment, straining his ears to overhear the adults’ conversation below. From their muted tones, he knows it must be important, something his parents think he and his siblings need to be sheltered from. He strips down to his long johns with his brothers, then excuses himself, saying that he needs to use the outhouse. They tease him, asking if he wants them to hold his hand, but beyond that show no real interest, and he creeps once more to the top of the stairs and crouches in the deep shadows there.

His mother is asking the priest if such a thing could be true.

No, Hovorka replies, but the fear of such a thing can be very real indeed, and it is this fear which is the true danger. He suggests summoning Doctor Long, even offering to travel the two counties over to fetch him. Boleslav begins to protest, but Father Hovorka insists that it is no trouble, that he is used to traveling to serve the scattered congregations of this mostly rural parish.

Now feeling that he has eavesdropped as long as he dares, Anatol descends the staircase, explaining that he needs to visit the outhouse when the adults look up at him. His father scowls and asks why he didn’t use it before going up, but his mother tells him gently to go.

As if his intrusion has broken a spell, Hovorka stands and says that it is likely time for him to leave. Now that he has no choice but to brave the darkness outside, Anatol is a little relieved to not be going out alone. He only takes a few paces beyond the door, then waits for the priest to emerge after him. When Father Hovorka appears with his hat and his coat, Anatol turns to him and asks if there isn’t something the priest might do just to be sure that there really is nothing in the root cellar.

Rather than dismissing him, as Anatol half expects, the priest asks what he means, his tone patiently curious. Emboldened, Anatol says that if there really is something like his grandmother describes in the cellar, then surely the unclean spirit might be exorcised by a man of the Church.

Father Hovorka does not respond at once, but stands looking eastward, toward the crescent moon which has just emerged over the horizon. The night is filled with the sound of singing crickets, though there is cool hint of the coming autumn in the soft, sweet breeze.

At length, Father Hovorka says that the Rite of Exorcism is not invoked lightly, and not without proper approval. He turns and looks directly at the boy now, and says firmly that there is nothing in the cellar, that Klotylda has allowed anger over past suffering to cloud her thoughts and poison her tongue. He urges Anatol not to listen to her tales, but to pray fervently and trust in God’s wondrous love with all his heart.

Then, gently bidding the boy a good night, the priest turns and begins to walk toward the road. Anatol watches him leave, no longer feeling afraid, but very sad and very alone.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Anatol and Zlata pray with their mother three times a day over Marika’s bed. And despite the fervency of their prayers, Marika’s breath and pulse become so faint as to be barely perceptible, her skin turning pale as milk.

Afterward, as the younger siblings sit and talk downstairs, they can faintly hear Františka weeping above them, and begging God not to take yet another child from her. He has taken so many already, she implores desperately, and she asks only not to outlive yet another.

Kněz lhal, Zlata says softly. The priest lied.

Anatol says that Hovorka isn’t a liar, and that he’s sure Marika will get better soon. He can hear the hollowness in his own voice, and knows Zlata can hear it too. The grey, smothering feeling of pure helplessness washes over him, and tears spring unbidden to his eyes. He turns from his little sister, trying and failing to hide them from her. A few moments later, he feels her small hand slipping into his and squeezing it, and he hesitates only a moment before he squeezes hers back.

Je to pijavice, she says.

Ano, he agrees.

And then, at last, he tells her honestly what he fears, and of the inchoate plan that is slowly taking shape in his mind.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

They wait until the late afternoon, after they have finished their chores but before their father and older brothers have returned from the fields, and while Františka is still busy tending to Marika. During that brief window of freedom, Zlata collects a box of matches and a lantern from the house, while Anatol gathers a can of kerosene and an old sickle from the barn. Testing the weathered blade of the sickle, Anatol finds with satisfaction that it is still sharp.

They meet at the mouth of the root cellar, their faces grave.

She asks him if he is sure this is a good idea, and he admits he is not. A moment of silence passes between them, interrupted only by the hiss of a breeze, cool with the coming autumn.

Then Anatol sets down the sickle and metal can, removes the bar, and opens the doors. A breath of deeper chill, thick with the earthy scent of old root vegetables, rises to meet them.

Zlata lights the lantern, and Anatol takes up his chosen weapons once more. Together, they descend into the cloying darkness of the earth, their eyes adjusting slowly to the starker contrasts of the lantern-lit cellar.

Neither of them speaks now, their breaths coming faint and quick. Anatol no longer doubts the tales his babička – he can feel the thing there with him, in the place where cold night lingers.

At the bottom, he sets down the can again, and begins to dig at the earthen floor with the tip of the sickle. Most of the floor is packed hard, but there is a space at the far end of the cellar where it is looser, and it is here where he focuses his attention, certain that this must be where the pijavice rests during the day.

After only a few minutes, Zlata begins to shift restlessly, her gaze creeping back toward the stairs. She whispers to her brother to hurry, before they are discovered, and he replies ill-temperedly that he is moving as fast as he can, but that they must be sure one way or the other.

As he says this, he feels the sharp edge of the sickle rake across something hard and thin. Terror filling his stomach like cold, congealed pig fat, he digs at the earth with the blade and with his free hand, telling his sister to bring the kerosene and the matches closer. He is terrified that the instant the awful thing is revealed, it will leap up at him, faster than he can react, and he wonders if he has led his youngest sister into a shared, foolish death with him.

 Then the yellow white of aged bone peers from under the dark earth, and after a few more moments of digging, he and his sister are looking at the bones of a long human forearm, still clung to here and there by greyed, leathery scraps of desiccated skin.

Zlata turns away and begins to retch softly, while her brother simply stares at the old corpse in numb surprise. He had expected to unearth an utterly different form of horror, and his mind simply cannot grasp what they have found instead.

Then he begins to dig further, until the shoulder and then the ribs are exposed. A few more minutes, and the fragile vertebrae of the neck are exposed. They end abruptly at the fourth vertebra, which is deeply scored and partially crushed. Anatol stares at the damaged bone, then prods at the earth above it, revealing nothing.

Usekli mu hlavu, he breathes. They cut off his head.

It was nothing more than what he had planned to do to the pijavice, before he doused it and set it alight, and yet somehow this seems so much worse to him – perhaps because now he cannot be certain why it was done, or to whom.

Probably, he thinks, connecting disparate thoughts he has never dared to connect before, it is his grandfather Vojtěch who lies buried beneath, the one of whom neither Klotylda nor Boleslav ever speak more than a few unhappy words. And if they took his head and buried him in the cellar, Anatol reasons, Vojtěch must have been a monster.

And yet, he cannot know anything for certain, only that if ever a pijavice ever lived down here, it does not now.

He is about to ask his sister to help him bury the bones again when they hear the distant voices of their elder brothers, raised in raucous song, and the answering stern rebuke of their father. Looking at one another in terror, the two youngest siblings begin to frantically toss dirt back over the incomplete skeleton, Zlata dousing the lantern as soon as the filthy bones are no longer exposed. Not daring to exit the cellar with what they have brought and be discovered, they stow their tools in a hidden corner, behind the piled potatoes of the early summer harvest. Zlata leaves first, keeping her face remarkably schooled as she casually peers around the yard for the three men returning from the fields. With the subtlest of gestures, she motions for Anatol to wait, and he dreads more than anything that she will close the doors above him to prevent suspicion. Those moments are the slowest in all his life, but at last she heaves a soft, long sigh and waves for him to come up quickly.

He takes the steps up two at a time, the last of the day’s sunlight washing over him like relief itself.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Shortly after dinner, the two of them sneak into a dark corner of the sitting room away from the rest of the family, and confer quietly about what they found – and didn’t find – in the root cellar. Now that the initial shock of the remains has subsided slightly, they have no idea how to proceed.

Marika is still dying, and now they have no understanding of why, if the pijavice is not real. Now, like their parents, they have no choice but to wait helplessly for Father Hovorka to return with Doctor Long.

Somehow, despite her age, they do not even hear Klotylda’s approach until she is already standing over them, and they cannot tell how much she has heard. Her eyes shine with a light they have not seen before, and she tells them that the pijavice is like a disease, that one gives rise to another.

From the dining room, where he sits enjoying an after-dinner pipe, Boleslav calls out a question, asking his mother what nonsense she is filling the children’s heads with now. A sour look crosses the old woman’s face, and she moves away toward the stairs, mutteringly excusing herself and climbing slowly, carefully to her bed.

Shortly afterward, their parents put out the lights and shoo the children upstairs as well, cutting short the younger siblings’ discussion. Zlata parts from her brother with an expression of mingled sorrow, fear, and doubt.

It is then that he knows exactly what he must do.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Anatol’s breath comes shallow and fast, his body cramped and aching in the small, dark space. Even with Zlata’s help, stowing himself away in the girls’ armoire was fraught and far from easy. He has to refrain from reaching for the lantern beside him again, just to reassure himself that it is indeed still there, lest he knock it over and reveal himself.

The room without is silent, save for Marika’s occasional pained whimpering and Zlata’s slumbrous stirring – despite the latter’s resolve to join her brother in his nocturnal vigil. He does not know how many hours he has crouched there, waiting for the unclean thing to enter the room and creep toward Marika.

The waiting seemed interminable, as he lay in bed waiting for his brothers to fall asleep, waiting longer still for the muted sounds of conversation between his parents fade at last to silence in the next room over. Even then, he waited, just to be sure.

At last, with great care, he slipped out of bed and moved through the room and out into the hall, taking each step with torturous deliberation and settling his weight gradually upon the treacherous floorboards until his nerves were frayed. When at last he reached the door to the girls’ bedroom, he hardly dared raise his hand to knock, and before he even could, Zlata had cautiously inched the door open and waved him inside. She had already gathered everything they had agreed upon and secreted it away in the room, during an earlier trip to the outhouse.

His attention returns to the present as he hears the faint creak of the bedroom door, repositions himself to try to get a better view from the crack in the armoire doors. A tall shadow steps softly into the room, its feet soundless upon the floor. One hand strays again more to the lantern, the other to the sickle.

Still, he hesitates. Perhaps it is only their mother, sleeplessly coming to check on Marika. And aside from that, there is a part of him that does not want to leave the safety of concealment, part that is too terrified to consider what it may be that has entered the room if it is not their mother.

The shadow moves closer to Marika’s bed. Two small lights appear within it, and Anatol realizes that they are eyes, glowing like golden embers. His breath catches in his lungs, and his hands feel suddenly frigid. His muscles seize painfully, every cell in his body screaming with the instinct of self-preservation, as though there is some memory of the flesh far older and more perceptive than that of the mind.

The thing looms over Marika now, and those inhuman eyes shine all the brighter. Anatol thinks they are like a cat’s eyes, reflecting the firelight, yet more strongly than any cat’s ever has, and in the absence of any fire. The girls both begin to stir and moan, as though ensnared simultaneously in a shared, harrowing nightmare.

And thinking of fire, he forces himself to move now at last, though it feels like he is engulfed in partially frozen lake water. He strikes the match against the rough wood of the wardrobe’s interior, and shakily lights the lantern, requiring three attempts with his fumbling fingers. Kicking open the door, he slides out and onto the floor, landing jarringly, gripping the sickle tightly in his right hand and holding aloft the lantern with his left. The thing turns to him, and he falters and stops, looking up into the face of his father.

Boleslav’s features seem sharpened and hollowed, as if the fat and muscle have been carved away somehow from between the bone and skin. And those eyes, utterly inhuman, shine even in the glow of the lit lantern.

His father tells him that he is dreaming, taking a wary step toward the boy. His hands, Anatol sees now, are also changed, the fingers become long and skeletal and talonlike. Go back to bed, his father tells him, and sleep untroubled until morning.

Vše je v pořádku, he says, his voice at once commanding and soothing.

Anatol, without willing it, finds his legs moving to obey. It is an act of physical resistance to force himself to stop, like pushing against the powerful current of a deep river, and he can feel a strain in his joints and bones as he turns to face his father once more.

Boleslav’s eyes take on a paler shine, like the cold light of distant suns, and the shadows extend behind him like spreading wings.

Again, he tells Anatol to go back to bed, and that everything is fine. This time, though, Anatol finds his voice, and croaks only a short question in reply, asking his father how long he has been what he is.

Boleslav bares his teeth in what may be either a grin or a snarl, and lunges at the boy. In the lamplight, the long incisors, like those of a rat, gleam yellowly. Stumbling backward, Anatol raises the sickle in an awkward attempt to ward off his father, and feels the blade rake across Boleslav’s face.

The pijavice hisses and leaps back like a startled cat, and regaining his balance, Anatol sees the slash that runs from Boleslav’s left chin to his right brow. Yet what oozes from the jagged cut is not red blood, but something thinner and paler – it is pus, he realizes, his stomach cramping with sudden nausea.

How, he wonders, have he and his family failed to notice what their father has become? How have they never noticed the signs that must have been there, all along?

Boleslav begins to move forward again, more warily this time. His long, powerful fingers reach outward for Anatol’s throat.

Prosím, otče, Anatol pleads, whimpering. Prosím přestaň.

Boleslav’s preternaturally long teeth flash once more, and in the bed, the girls now begin to thrash and flail in their sleep, fighting unseen assailants.

Nech mě tě milovat, the looming shadow says. Dovolte mi milovat vás všechny ve tmě, navždy.

Let me love you. Let me love you all in the dark, forever.

Anatol’s vision blurs with tears, and he feels suddenly so very weak. Zlata and Marika both cry out in their sleep, only a few words, rearranged and repeated over and over again: přestaň, otče, prosím.

With a wail of rage, grief, and despair, Anatol swings the sickle once more as his father’s coiled, pantherine form lunges again at him. He feels the sickle connect with the pallid flesh, feels it shear through flesh that is unnaturally soft and dry, like cheese. His rising scream blends with that of his sister’s as Boleslav’s elongated head separates from his shoulders and falls to the floor with an appalling lack of real weight.

There is movement from the other rooms, the sound of bare feet moving swifltly on the creaking floorboards of the upper story. Horrified at the thought of his mother seeing this impossible scene, Anatol moves to shut the door, crying out to her not to come in, but he is too late. The door swings inward, and in steps Františka, her elder sons peering in over her shoulder.

Františka’s eyes are wide, but no sound escapes her mouth as she stands in the doorway, frozen. Her silence is more terrible to Anatol than any scream, the blank gaze that flits between her husband’s fallen, severed body and her youngest son more damning than any rebuke.

Proklínám tě, ty nevděčné dítě, a muffled voice rises from the floor.

Anatol turns with disbelief as Boleslav’s ruined form scrabbles upon the floor, reaching for the roughly severed head that oozes pus and stares at Anatol with an unholy rictus of fuming rage. As the bony, clawlike fingers close grip the dark hair and fumblingly drag the head back forward its former home, Klotylda pushes her way through the onlooking older Černik boys and their mother, addressing only young Anatol.

Teď ho spálit! she cries. Burn him, now!

Anatol swings the lit lantern at Boleslav as he struggles to rise again, one hand grasping his roaring head. As the glasses shatters and the burning kerosene spatters over the pijavice, a shared animal scream tears from three throats, Boleslav’s and that of the still-sleeping girls. The pallid flesh catches far more easily than living flesh ever could, and at once the body at blackening and shrinking, consumed rapidly by the spreading flames.

And at last the girls, seemingly released from their unnatural slumber, wake and recoil from the flames.

Klotylda yells for the boys to get their sisters to safety, even as she seizes a quilt from Zlata’s bed and begins beating at the spreading flames to prevent them from devouring the house. Františka only hesitates a moment before doing the same with Marika’s quilt, and goaded by the women’s action, the boys skirt the flames, the two eldest picking up the still weakly Marika and carrying her out of the room while Anatol take’s Zlata’s hand and they run together away from the raging heat, down the stairs, and out of the house.

[Short pause]

In the end, they cannot save the house. The kerosene fire spreads too quickly onto the beds and curtains of the girls’ room, and even devours the quilt that Klotylda wields against it, burning her right arm badly and damaging her lungs. Františka has to pull the older woman away from the flames and all but carry her outside.

In the farmyard, they stand and watch until dawn as the house, the only home the children have ever known, burns and collapses in upon itself.

Later, when the neighbors come and offer what aid they can, the children at last give in to their exhaustion, weeping and allowing themselves to be comforted. Klotylda is the one who offers the lie that her son alone was taken by the fire, overcome when, after seeing all of his family to safety, he rushed back inside alone to save what valuables he could.

Františka’s face spasms at these words, and for a moment, Anatol fears that she will contradict her mother-in-law, that his mother will offer him up to the stern and unfantastic judgment of the law. But she says nothing, and after a moment, puts an arm around him and pulls him close. He sees tears at the corners of her eyes, but they are not entirely those of sorrow. There seems to be relief mingled in them, and he wonders at how cruelly, perhaps, Boleslav treated her when the children weren’t present… or perhaps they were, and simply never noticed. And only then does he, too, allow himself to weep openly and cling to her blackened, smoke-scented dress, as though he’s regressed almost a decade after the night’s events.

When the ashes of the house have cooled enough, the men from the surrounding farmsteads poke through the ruins, searching for anything that might be salvaged, or at least for Boleslav’s bones to bury. Yet they find nothing, and Anatol, remembering the unnatural feeling of that flesh beneath the sickle’s edge, wonders if there were ever any bones to find. In the tales Klotylda has so long told them, the pijavice was sometimes said not to inhabit the human body it had in life, but a stranger one formed of thickened shadow and purloined blood that slowly took shape in the days after its first life ended, one that merely counterfeited its former appearance.

No one seems to question the story that his grandmother has woven, and though they do not fully understand what has transpired, his older siblings and his mother seem to accept that what Anatol did was necessary even if it was horrible. Perhaps this is in part aided by Marika’s marked recovery in the days after Boleslav’s death. For all of this, Anatol is overwhelmingly grateful, and for the first time in weeks, he fervently offers prayers of thanksgiving each day.

His mother and elder brothers decide to sell the farm, the two young man deciding to hire themselves out as workers for some of the wealthier neighbors, while the women and Anatol go to live with Františka’s widower brother in Abie. And where once this would have troubled Anatol deeply, he now feels as the rest of his remaining family seem to feel – relieved at the thought of leaving that land, and its tainted history, behind them.

It is weeks later, when they have arrived in Abie and made a place for themselves in his uncle’s house, that Anatol finally dares to ask his grandmother what he has wondered since that awful night. She alone has suffered from deteriorating health since the fire, her burned arm slow to heal and her breathing ever more troubled. Yet she tells him what she recalls: that some twenty years prior, only a year after the death of her husband that both she and Boleslav had successfully concealed and shortly after her son’s marriage to Františka, Boleslav had fallen under a strange illness himself. He had burned with fever during the day, and found comfort only in the dark and coolness of the root cellar. That this was also the grave of the husband that had so tormented Klotylda and her children, and whom Boleslav himself had killed with an axe, had only made her feel more ill at ease than she already did at her son’s rapid decline.

Yet he had seemed at last to recover, and for a time, she had been able to forget all about his illness, and about the husband whose death, though a blessing to her family, the law would have deemed a crime.

It was only after the first three of her son’s children had died from sudden and strange illness that she began to suspect that her husband had returned as the pijavice. And it was years later, after Zlata and Anatol told her of their discovery of the unchanged bones in the cellar, that she began to wonder if it was not her husband who had transformed after all. She had, in all the time prior, explained away the changes she had noticed in Boleslav: how pallid and ill-tempered he seemed during the daylight, how he seemed so much more alive during the dark hours, how he had become colder in the years after his illness, and how voracious certain appetites had become…

At this last observation, she checked herself primly, but Anatol had some vague understanding that she was referring to how Boleslav had been with Františka, and perhaps even with his daughters.

After a few moments of awkward silence and the old woman’s labored breathing, she at last tells Anatol, in a tone more gentle than he has ever heard from her, that he has saved their family, and that she has never been more proud of anyone than she is of him.

Shortly afterward, she excuses herself to bed, though it is not yet full dark. Anatol sits on the porch of his uncle’s farmhouse and feels both grief and love welling within his heart. And yet, there is another feeling underneath, a sickly feeling of guilt that settles in his stomach like cooling copper slag.

And he wonders, as the blue evening is slowly swallowed by black night, if this feeling once coiled too in his father’s stomach, after he had killed his own father and before his strange illness. And the shadows that swell to cover the world seem to beckon him into their ready embrace.

[Darkly sorrowful organ]

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. If you’re feeling particularly generous, you can support the show on our Patreon page or at darkerpastures.buzzsprout.com, and for only three dollars a month, unlock special subscriber-only content. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]