[Formerly Featured/Award-Winning Novella/#2 in Horror]
There is something eerie about this village -- this hole of silent, maddened people.
In 1922 my Papa told me of a faceless entity that lurks amongst us in our isolated slice of Russia. The loc...
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Nobody ever did find Viktor Malenhov's remains. Three weeks later Isaak sealed the grave again and the height of the mystery waned.
But not for me. I pondered that day for many of my waking hours, and the images of the wrecked grave and Viktor's corpse crawling out of it haunted my sleeping ones too. Perhaps it wouldn't have affected me so severely if I hadn't already borne witness to Viktor's corpse moving of its own accord.
To make it worse still, it was though Aleksy knew I knew the truth, even if I would not allow myself to subscribe to it. My sweetheart noticed something wrong in me – said I seemed distracted, moody – and tried incessantly to coax me into talking about it. Marina was only nineteen at the time, and, as much as I wanted to confide in the woman I wished to spend my life with, there were some things her delicate ears were not ready to hear.
Even my mother took a moment out of her depression to ask me what was eating me. Surprisingly, I told her everything and pulled her in for a hug for the first time in years, feeling her very real, warm plumpness in my arms. Mama had not taken her own life. My father hadn't danced the last dance to the tune of pneumonia. There was more than one Alyovich in the village – many, in fact. It was more than likely Isaak was thinking of the wrong one.
That was it.
Life following Viktor's disappearance soon returned to the accepted norm for the village, and Aleksy and I enjoyed a particularly pleasant summer together, almost as brothers would. I took time out of my usual job and began trapping game with him for income, at which, you may be surprised, he picked up quickly. I soon began to learn the ways of hunting in the forests too, and by July I trapped and skinned my first young buck. We celebrated it with a few dark beers that same, long evening while the meat spat at us on the fire pit we'd built. Perhaps if Rusya had survived I would've cherished that summer with him instead, but by that age I pushed any thoughts of him away.
In August I rallied enough courage to ask for Marina's hand in marriage. She even cried a little. Whether with joy or disappointment that she would never share this moment with Ivan, or both, I tend not to dwell on. That September, following a long, solemn wedding in Darakyev, we were man and wife, with plans to build our first home together.
And, it turned out, my asthma had finally subsided.
For the first time since 1922 I felt like the Stefan Alyovich my father had hoped I'd be, and it was ... well, things were good.
But there was always the winter.
I'd been helping my father's old friend, Sep Frantsev, fix the drafts in his barn before the frost settled into the beams. The job would take up most of my week, but he'd promised me first choice of his frozen racks of mutton as repayment, which I considered exchanging for Tomas Yakunin's stack of treated lumber. Despite the thick snow, the brisk winds and the briefest of daylight hours, the two of us worked at a good pace, chatting little and stopping often to sip the steaming coffee that his heavily-pregnant wife provided us.
