[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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I'll tackle the most commonly asked question first: How the bloody hell do you pronounce 'Folveshch'? You've taken some good guesses, some bad guesses and some outright ridiculous guesses, and trust me, so have I. I'm not Russian, despite a few people thinking I am, so I've had to rely on Google Translate for the answer.
It's like 'full-vish'. Kinda. Plug 'fol' and 'veshch' into the website and you'll see what I mean.
Which brings me nicely onto why it's called that at all. Folveshch is a made-up word, though the two words 'fol' and 'veshch' mean 'foul' and 'thing' in Russian respectively. I quote Google Translate again on this, and while there may be a better way to word it in Russian, I found I liked the sound of 'folveshch', so I used it. That said, you'd be correct in thinking that if I've made the word up, I've made the whole folklore up as well. Ding. Gold star. The Folveshch does not exist anywhere in Russian lore, though I'm sure there may be similar stories of creepy beings in the woods.
It's a story in itself as to how the Folveshch came to be. The very first 'foul thing' was some kind of creature I saw on my way to work at 5 o'clock in the morning. Sounds nuts, right? That's the point. On a particularly quiet road, just as the sun was showing its face, something ran into the path of my car. I didn't hit it, but I got a good look at it. It was about the size of a fox and had a brown coat. Sounds ordinary, but its face was completely flat. Its tail was long and stringy, and its hind legs were lumpy and deformed.
The poor creature (whatever it was) became the height of mystery between me and my work colleagues that day, though the more I retold the tale of the 'foul thing', the creepier it became. Admittedly, the story distorted itself by the time I went home and it was as though I'd claimed to have seen Big Foot's baby in the West Midlands, United Kingdom. I decided to use this evolving 'fear' as the basis for a short story.
Like I did on all my breaks that summer, I sat in my car with a notebook, a pen and an egg sandwich, and wrote. (Though I soon found that egg sandwiches don't make great writing tools.) Thus the Folveshch was born.
As for at what point it took the form of a dead-eyed, jagged toothed cannibal ... I have no idea. Like I've said many times before: this was one of those stories that wrote itself. The pivotal moment that Aleksy went from being this sweet, slightly odd kid, to actually becoming the Folveshch itself was when I saw I'd written the words: "And according to Irina Soldatova, she found Aleksy in the yard ... chewing [the eyes]."
Nope. NOPE. What had I done!?
I kept it, anyway, and I'm rather glad I did. Without it, I could've never written the ending.
I was most nervous about revealing the end. Would it be a clever move, or would it have killed the whole story? You'd think I'd have a definite conclusion as to what the reality of the tale (as juxtaposed as that sounds) is, though I can't seem to commit to any of them.
1) That Stefan was mad and his delusions were a product of coping with his parents' deaths. Aleksy's afflictions, and the afflictions of the catatonic men, were in fact his own the whole time.
2) Aleksy/the Folveshch was never real; he was a manifestation of Stefan's decline into madness.
3) The whole story happened as told. Stefan really was who he thought he was.
I've also been asked a few times: Why men? Well, the clue is in Papa's regard to 'community'. Since men (in this time) were the backbone of manual labour, the demise of Renkassk would've been through targeting the male population. It gives the feeling that the Folveshch, if it existed, enjoyed screwing with the people of the village by means of a far-sighted plan to break it down. Why? Not sure. Why did Aleksy need to do any of this at all? If you've any thoughts, feel free to share them.
Finally: Why the corpse?
Why not the corpse? This is a horror/psycho-thriller, after all. After discovering Stefan's condition, does it now make sense why sh*t didn't make sense? Might I go as far to suggest that the story itself shares some of the same traits as the Folveshch, by messing with your perception of this fictional world? Maybe?
Even though I'm the one who composed the tale, I'm open to hearing your interpretations of it. This isn't like literature class, though; I'm not going to mark you down for anything. You might've thought of something I've missed.
SOME TERMS
Da: Romanised spelling. Means 'yes'.
Darakyev: Name of the nearest town. Not a real place.
Malysh/Malish: Its literal meaning is 'kid/baby', though is used as a term of endearment equivalent to 'little buddy'.
