Where the Devil Says Goodnight

by K. A. Merikan

  “Are you… hm… a masochist?”

  Adam laughed, as if he’d expected an intrusive question but got asked a funny one instead. “No, I… I do it to stop thinking about things I shouldn’t. Trying to recondition myself.”

  That sounded like a very grim self-conversion therapy. “When I was going through puberty and discovering that I liked boys, I found it hard to accept too,” Emil said in the gentlest voice he could muster. He didn’t mean to pressure Adam or belittle his convictions. It was a conversation about something they were both dealing with, and while he meant to encourage Adam to share, the topic made him tense as well.

  Adam swallowed loudly enough for Emil to hear, but at least he didn’t outright protest Emil suggesting they were both gay.

  “I suppose you deserve to know,” he said in the end in the faintest voice. “I didn’t choose to do what I did last night, but what I did, what I said, he’d taken all that straight out of my head.”

  Emil fought the heat in his cheeks. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear that after all. “I hate to think that you hurt yourself over something you were born as.”

  “What else can I do? I don’t want to be like the priests who condemn fornication, and then have orgies behind closed doors or have secret children. The self-flagellation helps me… manage my emotions.”

  Emil glanced at him, so unbearably sad for all that needless torment. “You could talk to me instead. My whole life doesn’t revolve around putting notches on my bedpost, you know.”

  Adam glanced at him, shyly at first, only to turn his way with undivided attention. “Thank you. I know my behavior’s been… erratic, but I enjoy your company. It’s nice to have someone to talk to. Honestly, I mean.”

  Emil rubbed the stupid hump on his nose, yet more proof of his bad luck. "You'll need it now that they confiscated your whip." Emil loved Jinx, but the horse wasn’t a creature he could exchange intelligent ideas with.

  “Maybe we should have morning coffee together. After my jogs?” Adam asked as they neared Emil’s home, which invited them back with shiny windows, as if yesterday’s events had been nothing out of the ordinary. Were mice still following Adam, hidden in the tall grass? Or had they actually responded to their demon overlord, who might still reside inside Adam?

  Emil smiled, turning toward the barn to leave Jinx inside. “I’d really like that. Have you—I mean, you said you’re celibate, right?”

  “Yes.” Adam pulled on a weed growing by the wall and peeled off its leaves and spikelets, as if he needed something to do with his hands.

  “So… what happened, was a first for you?” Emil didn’t want to pry, but he was concerned about what that could mean for Adam.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Adam said in a calm voice, but to Emil that answer was as good as confirmation.

  Jinx whinnied and sped into his box as if he couldn’t wait for his lunch. Emil had filled his manger earlier, so he shut the door and faced Adam, trying to calm his breathing as the truth of Adam’s ordeal sank in.

  “It does. I’m sorry it had to happen for you this way.” Emil leaned against the barn door with a deep sigh. “I was a late bloomer myself. I became aware of the things I wanted after I shared this brief, innocent thing with another boy my age, but never really reached out for them until I was twenty. So, my point is, if I… hurt you, you can tell me. Are you okay?” he asked, trying hard not to imagine how violating the sex must have felt for Adam, who lay beneath him, trapped inside his body and unable to call for help. Being penetrated for the first time was a nerve-wracking experience for most people, even when it was consensual, and he had a hard time coping with the fact that he’d harmed Adam by trying to give him pleasure.

  Adam’s chest filled with air, but he met Emil’s gaze. “I was scared. But you didn’t hurt me. I know I said you should have known, but it was only because I was angry. You couldn’t have known. None of it was your fault.”

  Emil nodded with a heavy heart. No matter how lovely Adam’s blue eyes were, they no longer invited him to seduce. An unenthusiastic partner made any of his arousal wither. What he craved was a lover who, well… loved him back.

  He passed Adam with ‘I was scared’ still ringing in his head. He would never be able to look back at what had happened with fondness.

  “What about you?” Adam asked, following him across the sunlit yard. “You are very confident in what you want, whether it’s moral or not. What held you back before you were twenty?”

  Emil chewed on that with a deep sigh. “You probably heard the gossip about my parents’ death. My grandma died not long after, so I was brought up by my grandad. He was a fantastic guy. He taught me everything I know. How to hunt, how to take care of animals, and how to handle my basic household chores—something he had to learn himself after Grandma passed away. I didn’t want to disappoint him.”

  He invited Adam inside with a heavy heart. The house hadn’t been the same without Grandpa, but Emil kept it the way it had been when they’d lived here together, hoping it would preserve the spirit of the old man.

  “Sin aside, he raised you right,” Adam said with a small smile.

  “I don’t know. I was twenty when he died. See the connection? I didn’t hold back my sexuality after that. It’s not like I can come out of the closet in Dybukowo, but I don’t care what others think as much as I used to when I had to worry about gossip reaching Grandpa. But I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have been honest with him. He was an older guy, but open-minded for these parts, so maybe he would have accepted me the way I am. But I’ll never know.”

  Adam stepped closer and pulled Emil into a brief but honest hug before taking away the warmth and scent Emil was already painfully hooked on. “What matters most is to be a decent person. Help your neighbors, don’t be an asshole. And you are a decent guy.”

  “If that’s what matters most, why do you call my sexuality a sin and hate it in yourself so much?” Emil turned around, because he couldn’t stand the tension buzzing between them.

  For a few precious minutes last night, he’d let himself believe that Adam was his. That he’d lured in a skittish doe, that he would earn its affection by giving it only the most delicious treats with a side dish of love and care. But in the end, domesticating the wild beauty had turned out to be a deluded fantasy of a man who craved companionship more than he’d ever admit.

  “You’re not Catholic, and I try not to judge people who don’t share my beliefs. I fail at it sometimes, but respect for different beliefs is the only thing that can keep us all from killing each other.” Adam grabbed the cup of water Emil had poured for him and downed it before loudly placing the empty container on the counter.

  Emil took a deep breath, stunned at just how right Adam felt in his home. “I never shared like this. About my granddad. I brought you here because I… I’ve had so much death in my family, so much loss, and I didn’t really want to deal with this stuff after Grandpa died. I put all their stuff in the attic. But my grandma was the local Whisperer Woman. It’s like a folk healer who balances Christianity and pagan rites. Most of it is probably superstition, but if we’re to look for clues of how to get rid of a demon, that’s my best bet. Unless… you want to go down the Church rou—”

  The violent headshake Adam gave him was all Emil needed. He looked at the ceiling, toward the attic where he’d tucked away all his family secrets. “I just… I know I could have looked through all that stuff on my own, but I don’t wanna be alone with it. It brings me down so much.” At least he was such a downer that Adam’s excitement for him—if there was any—would surely dampen after today.

  Emil’s skin sparked when Adam touched his shoulder. “Thank you for doing this. You have no idea how alone I felt this morning. But you’re here, despite everything.”

  Despite the burns and the pain of Adam’s rejection, Emil was still ready to be there for him. A martyr. And a lost cause.

  He nodded at Adam and led the way up the steep, narrow stairs to the at
tic.

  “Sorry, it’s very dusty up there,” Emil said, pushing up the trapdoor and climbing in first to get rid of any cobwebs. He wasn’t sure whether the lamp up here still worked and was glad when the single lightbulb illuminated the space enough for Emil to easily reach the window and open the wooden blinds, letting in daylight.

  The attic stretched above the entirety of the first floor, but was too low for an adult to stand straight, even at its highest points. Full of boxes and chests, it was a relic of a time Emil hadn’t wanted to confront for too long.

  Unease crawled under his skin when he sensed the ghost of old-fashioned perfume so he opened the window to get rid of at least some of the dusty aroma, and called Adam, desperate for company.

  The blond head popped through the trapdoor moments later. “This place is huge.”

  “I live here alone, so I never really needed extra storage space. Haven’t been up here in ages. Hope you don’t have any mould allergies. And we have to be done by evening. That’s when the spiders come out.”

  Despite his heavy heart, Emil smiled at the look of dread on Adam’s face.

  “My parents took me on vacation to Hungary once. I’ve never seen so many spiders. Mom insisted on keeping the windows closed at all times, and it was so damn hot,” Adam said and burst with laughter. “But I won’t play the hero. Hate them too.”

  “I’d be your hero—” Emil said before he could have bitten his tongue. He was almost thirty, but Adam made him feel like an infatuated teen. Of course he had to fall for the most unavailable man around—the story of his life. “My gran’s chest of creepy shit is there,” he rushed over there in the hope that Adam would disregard the first part of the sentence.

  “Like what? You mean she dabbled in the occult?” Adam asked, climbing into the attic with the broad skirts of his cassock gathered in one hand. The garment didn’t cling to his ass, but as he kneeled facing away from Emil, it showcased its curve enough to push Emil’s thoughts back into the gutter. Oh, how much he longed to take Adam downstairs and lie with him in his bed. Even if just to make out.

  “It’s… something else. She had notebooks about healing. And she did rituals and prayed to your God at the same time. But if she had diaries as well, it could be either useful, or painfully embarrassing.” He crawled all the way to the back, where a wooden chest was tucked away under the slope of the ceiling. He coughed when a cloud of dust blew into his face as he pulled the chest his way.

  “Are there any other women like her around?” Adam asked, shifting closer to Emil, co close in fact that the citrusy aroma of his cologne became overwhelming and made Emil sweat.

  “No, she was the last one in the area. I’ve heard desperate people sometimes go to this lady over the border, in Ukraine.”

  The top of the chest had been hand-carved, and Emil realized it might have been Grandpa’s handiwork. While it didn’t have the artistic merit of some of the items produced by experienced artisans, a lot of heart and effort had been put into the carvings of plants surrounding a frontal view of a horse head with huge spiraling horns.

  He’d been so reluctant to look through those personal items, but fate finally made him face his family’s past. He opened the chest.

  Adam shifted closer, and Emil had to stifle a gasp when Adam nudged him with his knee as he sat cross-legged next to Emil.

  “What is that?” Adam asked, picking up a Y-shaped branch that had been carefully peeled of bark.

  Emil turned it around in his hands but shrugged in the end. “No idea. Maybe there’s an explanation in one of the books.”

  But what instantly drew Emil’s attention instead was a large photo album bound in leather. The label at the front read, Kupala Night.

  “Now, this is a treat,” he said and leaned that bit closer to Adam, all too eager to torture himself with the popsicle he couldn’t lick. “You’ve heard of that holiday, right? It’s also called Midsummer night. Or St. John’s Night for the very religious.”

  Adam shrugged. “There’s festivals. People put wreaths with candles on the water or something, but in the cities it’s just another opportunity to drink and have fun. I’ve never been.”

  Emil opened the album. “Let me guess, Mommy didn’t let you? Look, it goes back to the twenties. That’s really cool, actually.”

  He briefly stopped breathing when Adam reached over his thigh to trace the somewhat overexposed photo depicting a group of men and women in pale clothes and large wreaths in their hair. People of importance were there too, including a man in elegant clothes, a priest, and a nun. The beginning provided little material, but the farther forward the pages went in time, the more photos there were and of better quality. All of them depicted the holiday his grandmother considered the most important in the year, far above ‘Church Days’ like Christmas or Easter.

  He smiled in surprise when one of the pages featured a black and white photo of a couple, and while it took him several moments to realize why they seemed familiar, recognition hit him like a mallet. “Those are my grandparents,” he uttered with excitement, and when he saw the flowers in his grandfather’s hair atop the usual crown of oak leaves, he tapped it with his fingers. “Must have been when they got engaged. Look, he’s wearing her flower crown. That’s what it used to mean. It’s the sixties, so they were barely twenty back then.”

  Emil leaned over to show Adam. “It’s nice to see them like this, you know? So happy. My grandma’s body was never found. The general consensus was that she had been attacked by a bear or wolves, because she walked into the forest on her own and never came back.”

  Adam’s fingers rested on Emil’s forearm, golden and warm like the sun outside. “I’m sorry. It must have been hard on both of you.”

  Emil swallowed. “It happened less than a year after my parents died. I was seven I think, but I remember her vividly.” When he turned the page, even the somber atmosphere lifted from his heart for a moment. “Don’t look!” He laughed and covered Adam’s eyes so he wouldn’t see the whole collection of photos featuring people dressed only in wreaths as they ran into the lake where the Kupala Night festivities always took place in Dybukowo.

  Adam grabbed his fingers, chuckling as if they were studying the album just for the fun of it. When they were together in the sun, the burning fear of the unknown dispersed, as if they’d been friends since forever and knew there was nothing they couldn‘t take on.

  “It’s artistic nudity though!”

  “Right. They allow that at church after all.” Emil winked at Adam, and they looked through the photos page after page. “No! It’s Mrs. Janina.” He pointed out a smiley young woman hiding her nudity behind a tall man. “Can’t believe this shit.”

  In the seventies, the festivities seemed to involve hundreds of people who had to have come to Dybukowo from all over the region, but as the years in the album passed, the groups seemed smaller, and in 1991, just one photo featured a group of more than ten people.

  Emil’s heart skipped a beat. “That’s me, and that’s my mom.” He pointed to his mother holding a baby. He barely remembered her and Dad, only glimpses of a happy childhood taken away because he couldn’t keep his hands away from a box of matches.

  “You have her eyes and nose,” Adam pointed out, and it was true. While her features were softer, the overall shape remained similar. Maybe he should take his time and find more albums that weren’t about celebrations, but a happy yet mundane life?

  But there was no reason to stop browsing through the album despite the festivities clearly dying down in the nineties. Emil flipped through a bit faster, but Adam grabbed his arm. “Wait. Back.”

  Emil raised his eyebrows, but went two pages back where Adam touched a picture that featured people Emil didn’t recognize, even though they stood right next to his mother and his own six-year-old self.

  Adam swallowed hard. “It’s them.”

  “Who?”

  “My parents. They’re my parents. Wearing wreaths, holding horns with me
ad, the whole deal. Mom’s not even wearing her cross. She always wears her cross.”

  Emil frowned, uneasy about this discovery. “I guess they didn’t tell you everything.”

  Adam wheezed and his fingertip moved to a veiled person in the back of a picture. It was a nun.

  The room started spinning around Emil when Adam hurriedly paged through the collages from earlier years. The nun was in each one. The same nun. Emil’s brain boiled, and he pushed Adam’s hand away, returning to the very first year recorded, and yes—it was the same woman, unchanged, wearing the same robes. A chill went down Emil’s spine.

  Adam scrambled to his knees and pushed his head through the window. “Oh, God… Emil, my mom always did everything so I couldn’t come to this region. Blocked every trip I planned, even the school one.”

  Emil swallowed, staring down at the photo of the happy couple and the nun. They seemed to be the only people present at the festivities that year, other than all the members of Emil’s family. Creepy as fuck. “I hate to be the one to say it, but I’m sure you’re thinking it. They might have done something here they’re not proud of.”

  Adam sat by the window, slowly catching his breath as he studied Emil with his mouth wide. “I was conceived here. And then, I was born with a tail. This can’t be a coincidence!” he said, grabbing his knees to keep his hands from trembling, but it was a futile attempt.

  Emil smiled. “Oh, my God! I wondered what that scar on your tailbone was.” Adam’s miserable expression dampened Emil’s enthusiasm. “Sorry, I know, awful. It could still be a crazy coincidence.”

  Emil wasn’t sure if he should even show Adam the next year’s photos. He got goosebumps at the sight of eight people standing with their backs to the camera, dressed in white robes and facing the lake as they held hands.

  There was an emptiness to these, no bonfire, no dancing. And the nun wasn’t there either.

  Emil was a single child among adults. It was the year of his parents’ death in the fire. His memories of that day were vague, but he’d gotten a lot of honeyed nuts, and his grandmother had dipped him into the lake.