Where the Devil Says Goodnight

by K. A. Merikan

  Nowak wiped his face, leaving behind a smear of mud. “Are you sure you don’t want to be around Father Adam tonight?” he asked, lowering his shoulders.

  Emil’s body took root when he heard Adam’s name. “Are you trying to fucking blackmail me here, or something? Because I don’t follow.”

  Nowak looked to his car, but once he rubbed the front of his suit jacket, he must have understood there was no point in trying to hide from the rain anymore. “Look, I know why you don’t trust me, but there are reasons for everything that’s happened to you. And the things that will happen to Father Adam tonight.”

  Emil took a step toward Nowak, his body hair bristling. “What will happen to Adam? What are you talking about? Speak! For fuck’s sake, speak!”

  Nowak hung his head before glancing at Emil again. The rain was slowly getting sparser, and the thunder—more distant, as if the sky didn’t want Emil to miss a single detail. “Chort has left us twenty-six years ago in the body of a tourist. Her child has carried him since. But Chort grew in power since he came back to his domain, and tonight, he’ll claim his new body for good. He won’t be content sharing with a human priest any longer.”

  Emil couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. And from Nowak at that. A man who never expressed interest in the supernatural, too engrossed in his businesses. Your typical dad, with a pot belly, and who occasionally grew a moustache. “You know something about the things that have been happening to him? How? And… where’s Adam? Are you saying he’s in danger?” His head throbbed with sudden heat. No matter how disappointed, how furious Emil was with Adam, he would still jump through fire for him.

  Nowak wiped his face clean once the rain became only a drizzle. He cleared his throat. “It’s a goddamn long story, but I’ll keep it short,” he said with his eyebrows lowered, as if he were offended by having to report any of this to the likes of Emil. “You might know Chort as a demon, or even think it’s just another name for the devil, but he’s always been fair to his own people. The people of Dybukowo and the whole valley. But the people have forgotten him, so he deserted us.

  “You’re too young to remember but bad things started happening overnight. The crops died, we had a flood, people and cattle died from rare illnesses. Things became so dire, we turned to the Whisperer Woman, your grandmother, for help. She convinced some of us that we needed to turn to the old ways and invite him back. So she created a lure to attract Chort to Dybukowo. In you,” Nowak said, pointing his finger at Emil.

  Emil shook his head in disbelief and curled his fingers in his wet hair. “You just said that Chort wants Adam, not me!” Thoughts of Adam’s parents churned in his head. He remembered the story Adam had told him about his mother meeting a pregnant nun, about her conceiving on the trip to Bieszczady. He remembered the nun present in all the Kupala Night pictures until the one taken in the year Adam’s parents had visited Dybukowo.

  His thoughts buzzed, sending nauseating vibrations down his body.

  “Chort is trapped inside of Adam, but you are the intended vessel. It’s what your grandmother wanted. For you to be our protector. That’s why misfortune of the whole village focused on you. Her plan was for Chort to realize he’d left us in peril, so he’d come back fast, but he didn’t, and your situation took a turn for the worse. You couldn’t take it all on, so your grandmother gave her life to give birth to Jinx. He takes the brunt of the dark forces which would have killed you otherwise.”

  Emil’s jaw dropped, and he glanced at Jinx’s black eyes. “Did you just say my grandmother gave birth to a horse?”

  Nowak stepped closer. “What do you want me to say, Emil? It’s dark fucking magic, and we’re at the last stage of her plan. Chort has come back to the valley inside of Adam, but who he really wants is you, and tonight is the one night of the year when the world of spirits is close enough for the exchange to happen. You can’t leave.”

  Emil laughed out loud. Of course. That was why Nowak had offered him the car, and Mrs. Golonko had wanted to hire him. Were they all a part of this insane scheme?

  “Or what?”

  Nowak exhaled. “He’ll die.”

  Bile rose in Emil’s throat, and he took one more step to grab Nowak by the shoulders. “And you’re only telling me now?”

  Nowak wouldn’t look into his eyes. “You will never be able to leave Dybukowo after this night, but you’ve been marked, and you can take Him on. He won’t consume all of you the way he would Father Adam.”

  They—whoever ‘they’ were—had planned this all along. He wouldn’t have been surprised if someone from this cult had been the one to set his house on fire. “How long have you known this?” he whispered.

  “I only found out last night, Emil. Your grandmother said the one who bears Chort inside him would come to the Devil’s Rock on the night before Forefathers’ Eve and give an offering of blood. Every year, we have someone waiting for him, and each time, it had been a disappointment. Until now. It’s been so many years we lost hope for Chort ever coming back. We thought—we thought the lure didn’t work, but maybe something had been holding him back, because he’s come for you at last.”

  Emil was going to be sick. His life hadn’t been his own for years. He’d been watched, assessed, and condemned for failing at something he hadn’t known he was meant to do. Dybukowo would keep him as one of its own, because he couldn’t bear sacrificing Adam to be free of this valley. He should have listened to Grandma’s letter and left long ago.

  Ice cold vapor filled his chest when he realized that maybe Adam’s affection hadn’t even been real. Maybe it had only been an expression of Chort’s need for the body he’d been meant to own, and had nothing to do with choice or love. But if all this had been caused by Grandma’s magic, then it was up to Emil to complete the cycle. Adam deserved to be free, just like he so desperately wished. He would go back to Warsaw, rid of the burden, and never have to look back.

  Emil took a deep breath. “What do I need to do?”

  Chapter 24 - Adam

  Adam couldn’t believe he’d agreed to take yet another step away from the faith he’d held on to all his life. He was a priest, the last person who should be straying from God’s path, but the teachings he’d received when he was still young resonated at the back of his head, treacherously assuring him that the Church offered no way to deal with the danger to his body and soul.

  God will not help you if you don’t put in the effort, was something he’d heard often during religious classes when he was still a boy. God would not help you get better if you didn’t seek help from a doctor. He wouldn’t pass an exam for you if you didn’t study. And as unorthodox as Mrs. Janina’s method seemed, maybe Adam couldn’t be helped if he didn’t try out all the options on offer?

  A part of him knew it was sacrilege, but if this being wasn’t Satan or one of his demons—if it was something different, a creature lost to time—then maybe he could walk out of Dybukowo unharmed.

  Unable to keep calm in his room, which seemed so cold and unfriendly since Emil’s departure, he’d spent the evening with Father Marek, who was blissfully unaware of the two snakes living under his roof. With the weight of the upcoming night on his shoulders, Adam felt lonelier than ever as he sat in the chair while the pastor watched an old TV show, too engrossed in his sentimental trip to ask Adam and Mrs. Janina where they were going once she announced they were off.

  Adam had half-expected her to wear black robes, or one of those linen dresses neo pagans liked to photograph themselves in, but she looked deceptively normal in the fitted jacket trimmed with golden thread and a dark purple dress, the same outfit he’d seen her don for a family wedding two months prior. There was nothing even remotely menacing about her appearance, and that put his heart at ease, no matter how much he feared what was to happen.

  The storm has passed by the time they left the parsonage and walked past the church in the sparse moonlight coming from between the thick clouds still lingering in the sky. To Adam’s surprise
, a car waited for them by the gate, and he recognized it as Mrs. Golonko’s.

  His heart sank at the thought of one more person knowing about his plight, but he should have known Mrs. Janina wouldn’t keep her tongue from wagging.

  “Does someone else know?” he whispered, but Mrs. Golonko opened the door, and he could no longer attempt to align his story with Mrs. Janina’s.

  “Hurry! I don’t have all night,” Mrs. Golonko said with her usual grace. At least this time, she actually did offer him a lift.

  Mrs. Janina took the passenger seat, which left Adam to sit in the back. The vehicle moved before he could have buckled his seatbelt, and an annoying beep resonated after only two seconds. “It’s you, Father,” Mrs. Golonko said, but he didn’t comment and just did what was expected of him.

  “Does anyone else know?” he asked once again as the car sped down the muddy road between two fields, leaving the safety of the church behind.

  Mrs. Janina glanced over her shoulder. “There’s four of us believers. But don’t worry, we’ll keep your secret, Father.”

  Adam didn’t trust either of them to keep the gossip to themselves, but was now too far down this rabbit hole to protest, and watched Mrs. Golonko drive him off somewhere where all three of them would participate in a pagan ritual. With her big-brand bags, expensive clothes, and practical nature, she was the last person he’d have expected to be dabbling in the occult, yet here they all were.

  As the SUV trembled on the uneven road, penetrating darkness with the sickly glow of its high-beam lights, Adam recognized faces and hands in the twisted shapes of branches ahead. He considered calling the whole thing off, but a shiver went down his spine as if an invisible finger traced his back when he inhaled to voice his thoughts.

  “Can’t wait for all this to be over,” Mrs. Golonko said as if she were reading Adam’s mind.

  Mrs. Janina scoffed. “It’s always the same with you. Maybe Chort grants you more patience when he’s back with us.”

  Adam’s breath caught when he heard the demon’s name again. “The thing we’re supposed to do… what does it involve, exactly?”

  He saw Mrs. Golonko’s eyes roll in the rear view mirror. “It’s better seen than described. But it has to happen tonight. It’s Fore—”

  “I already told him.” Mrs. Janina complained. “It will be okay, Father Adam. We will get him out of you in no time.”

  Adam swallowed hard, his palms sweating when he spotted the glimmer of water in the distance. The car slowed down and continued along the little lake where the Kupala Night celebrations had taken place. The glow of the headlights penetrated the line of the forest, slithering through the lattice of trunks and branches. Shadows crept behind the trees, faceless strangers eager to welcome Adam within their midst.

  “Is this something that happens often? My mother… she told me she’d seen strange things when she visited here many years ago.”

  Mrs. Janina shook her head. “Dybukowo is a perfectly normal village.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Mrs. Golonko mumbled.

  “All I’m saying is that you’re safe, Father, as long as you follow instructions.”

  That didn’t answer any of Adam’s questions, but he remained silent until the car came to a halt at the edge of the woods.

  He took a deep breath, too stiff to move even when Mrs. Janina left the vehicle, deserting him to the company of Mrs. Golonko, who switched on the ceiling light and applied a fresh layer of lipstick. In her knee-length dress and a fur coat, she looked ready for a date, not to perform an ancient ritual in the woods.

  He finally moved when she pulled off a pair of high heels with red bottoms and replaced them with black rubber boots. He found out why the moment his shoe sank into mud.

  Mrs. Janina didn’t offer him any more time to think things through. As soon as the car locked with a beep, she switched on a large flashlight and led the way into the woods.

  The forest whispered to Adam, but he remained mute to its call, hating every second of their trek. Each hooting owl, each snapping branch under his feet, made his insides twist with anticipation. The beam of the flashlight lengthened all shadows and made them crawl on the edges of Adam’s vision while an insistent scratching resonated inside his body, as if something writhed on the underside of his skin, awaiting the right moment to rip itself free.

  He couldn’t take this demon back with him to Warsaw.

  He needed to get rid of it. Tonight.

  In the dark, Adam soon lost the sense of direction, but as he followed the two women, who hurried up a ridge in the vast emptiness of the beech forest, he couldn’t help but feel as if he’d been here before. Damp leaves felt soft and inviting like a red carpet under his feet, even though the silvery trunks and branches crooked like the hands of a witch were something straight out of a horror movie.

  Memories of Kupala Night came rushing back in the form of deja vu. Back then, everything had been green and had emitted a fresh fragrance while the current landscape had been stripped of color by fall, but as his gaze caught a rock wall shooting above the trees in the distance, he choked up at the memory of the magical moment when the bison had appeared out of nowhere to offer Adam Emil’s wreath.

  That night, Adam had experienced no fear, because the trust he’d had in Emil had been absolute. Images of naked flesh, black hair, their bodies moving together in a wild display of vitality flashed at the back of his eyelids, but his guides didn’t know of the hidden gorge and took him farther on, where the woods were denser.

  He missed Emil’s hand in his so badly it physically hurt, but that reminded him Emil had been the one to cause him all this distress and pain. If he got rid of the demon inside of him tonight, would those fond memories of Emil fade too?

  Would his love for Emil dissolve in the clean waves of his conscience?

  Nausea rose in his throat, and he struggled to keep his dinner down. A reckless piece of him wished to keep those moments in his heart, hold on to them forever, and he couldn’t help it. It would have been for the better if he forgot Dybukowo and everything that had happened here, but he couldn’t stand the concept of his affection for Emil being gone as well. How could he ever reject the memory of Emil biting his ear as he pushed his cock deep inside Adam time and time again?

  He would never feel like this again, and the prospect of forgetting the intense emotions he’d experienced this summer made him want to turn on his heel and run back to join Father Marek on the sofa.

  But he couldn’t. Not when this was his one chance to be free of the creature that possessed and tormented him.

  His breath caught when he spotted a warm glow ahead. The two women headed that way, and as they approached the thatch of trees, the unsteady nature of the light originating from between the evergreen branches betrayed it must have been produced by fire.

  Mrs. Janina raised one hand to her mouth and made a melodic howl, which was immediately answered by a similar sound coming from the hidden light source. She looked over her shoulder with a small smile stretching her lips. “Be brave. Everything will be over soon,” she said before pulling something large out of her handbag.

  On his other side, Mrs. Golonko uttered a curse word, but when Adam glanced her way, his blood dropped from his head and flowed into his legs, urging him to flee when she faced him with a small vulpine skull attached to her head with a ribbon. The dead animal still had all its teeth when it had died, but its head had been much smaller than a human’s, leaving the bone mask to cover only the middle of Mrs. Golonko’s face.

  “Is this necessary?” he asked in a tiny voice, led forward by Mrs. Janina, who squeezed her thin yet deceptively strong fingers on his forearm.

  He couldn’t think of anything more surreal than the conservative parsonage housekeeper, in her elegant purple jacket, putting on a mask made out of a deer skull. Her voice sounded dull when she spoke.

  “Yes, the Whisperer Woman told us what to do before she left. We don’t want to take any chanc
es.”

  “You mean… Emil’s grandmother?” Adam asked in a tiny voice, but followed Mrs. Janina when she stepped closer to the twin thuyas growing nearby. He could barely see what was beyond them other than yet more trees and bushes, but when the housekeeper stepped into the narrow passage between the two trees, and Mrs. Golonko pushed at his back, Adam entered an irregular clearing lit by several burning torches stuck into the ground.

  Huge thuyas grew behind a corpulent man Adam recognized as Mr. Nowak. The village head wore a pig skull over his face. Its elongated shape couldn’t have been any creepier, but Adam looked around, searching for the fourth ‘believer’, as Mrs. Janina called them. And he had a hunch who it was too.

  “Good to see you, Father,” Koterski said from behind Adam’s back. He was so close every hair on Adam’s body rose in alarm. But Adam made himself turn around at a slow pace, unwilling to show his weakness to the ranger, whose eyes stared back at him from behind a skull mask with long canines. It took all of Adam’s willpower not to back away from the wolf at once, even though, like Nowak, Koterski was dressed in his best suit.

  “Yes… you too,” Adam said, and while it was the skull that grinned at him, he had a sense that Koterski did as well, behind all the bone.

  It only then hit Adam that it made very little sense for Koterski to accuse Emil of occult practices when he was dabbling in them himself, but he didn’t get enough time to think it through, because Mrs. Golonko was growing impatient.

  “Can we proceed now?” she asked, as if she were doing this solely out of obligation, and Adam remembered that this was also how she had behaved on Kupala Night.

  Mr. Nowak looked at his watch. “Still a few minutes left until midnight.”

  “Then wait here until then,” Mrs. Janina said and took hold of Adam’s wrist.

  He followed her lead without question, even though he still hadn’t gotten any pointers or explanations as to what was to happen. There was a rocky wall looming behind the thuyas, illuminated by yet more trembling light that indicated something was going to take place there. Instead of trying to push her way through trees growing densely, as if they’d been planted that way on purpose, Mrs. Janina walked along a path winding between evergreen bushes. Torches, placed in the ground along their way transformed the clearing into a ceremonial hall with irregular wooden walls and a sky-high ceiling.