5
For a terrible fear filled the village at night.
Night after night, the entire outside world belonged to Nehi the Mountain Demon. Night after night — or so the parents whispered to their children behind the closed iron shutters — Nehi the Mountain Demon comes down from his black castle beyond the ridges and forests and passes among the houses like an evil spirit, searching for signs of life. If he happens to find a stray grasshopper, a solitary firefly blown here from far away by the winter winds, or even a beetle or an ant, he whips open his dark cape and ensnares any living thing inside it, and before sunrise, he flies back to his castle of horrors beyond the most distant forests on the perpetually cloud-shrouded mountaintops.
That's what the parents whispered to their children, but when the story ended, they assured them in a different voice that those were only fairy tales. Yet none of the villagers ever went out after dark. Because the dark, the parents said, the dark is full of things it is definitely better not to meet.
Maya, only daughter of Lilia the Widowed Baker, was a stubborn child. She didn't want to hear such rumors and refused to believe in things no one had ever seen. Maya was often cheeky to her mother: she said that all the darkness stories her mother read to her were silly and stupid. Sometimes Maya said, Everyone in this village is a little crazy, Mum, and you're a little crazier than any of them.
Lilia said, Maybe it's a good thing you feel that way. Maybe there really is an old craziness here in the village. And you'd be better off knowing nothing about it, Maya. Nothing. Because people who don't know can't be thought guilty. And they're not likely to catch it.
Catch what, Mum?
Bad things, Maya. Very bad things. Enough. Have you by any chance seen my kerchief anywhere, the brown one? And when will you finally stop scribbling on the oilcloth table cover? I've asked you a thousand times to stop. So stop. Enough. Finished.
One night, Maya waited patiently under her winter covers until her mother fell asleep. Then she got out of bed and stood at the window without turning on a light. She stood there at the window till morning, wrapped in her winter covers against the cold, and she didn't see anyone walk past outside, didn't hear anything, except once when she thought she heard the sound of Nimi the Owl's sad whoops coming from three streets away. Nimi had become a wandering street child and all the doors of the village were closed to him because of his whoopitis. But then he was silent. In the flawed moonlight that occasionally peeped from between the clouds, Maya saw clearly the clump of black trees across the street behind the ruins of a house.
And because the night was very long and empty, she waited for the moon to shine briefly through the clouds and counted eight trees there. An hour or two later, when the moon shone through again, she recounted them, and this time there were nine. The next time there was light, she counted again, and there were still exactly nine trees. But in the small hours of the morning when the mountain slopes began to grow pale as the first fingers of dawn touched them, Maya decided to count those trees one last time, and suddenly there were only eight again.
She got the same result when she counted them the next day, in the light, after she decided to go to the ruins and check it close up: exactly eight trees. To be on the safe side, Maya went from tree to tree, touched each trunk, and counted in a whisper, twice, from one to eight. There was no ninth tree. Had she made a mistake in the middle of the night? Because she was tired? Because it was so dark?
Maya didn't say a word about the ninth tree, not to her mother, Lilia the Widowed Baker, not to her friends, and not to Emanuella the Teacher. She told only Matti, because Matti had told her about the secret plan he'd been working on in his mind for months. Matti listened to Maya's story about the ninth tree, thought for a while — didn't hurry to answer — and finally said that one night soon, he too would stay awake and wait patiently until his parents and sisters fell asleep, then sneak outside to the clump of trees that grew behind the ruins. He'd stand there all night — he wouldn't doze off for even a minute, wouldn't take his eyes off them — and he'd count them himself to see whether, at one of the darkest hours of the night, something else appeared there, a tree or not a tree, something that vanished a few moments before the first light of day.
6
It all began many years before the children of the village were born, in the days when even their parents were still only children: suddenly, one wet and stormy winter night, all the animals vanished from the village — livestock, birds, fish, insects, and reptiles — and the next morning, only the villagers and their children were left. Emanuella, who was nine years old at the time, missed her tortoiseshell cat Tima so much that she cried for weeks. Tima had given birth to three kittens, two tortoiseshells like her and one playful marmalade kitten who loved to pretend he was a rolled-up sock and hide in a boot. That terrible night, the cat and her kittens disappeared, leaving behind an empty, lined shoe drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. The next morning, all Emanuella found in that drawer was a small ball of cat hair, two whiskers, and the sweet-sour smell of warm kittens, licky tongues, and milk.
There are a few old people in the village ready to swear that on that night, through cracks in the shutters, they saw the shadow of Nehi the Demon passing through the village in the dark at the head of a long, long procession of shadows. The procession was joined by all the animals from every yard, every chicken coop and pen and paddock and stable and doghouse and dovecote and cow barn, a host of silhouettes large and small, and the forest swallowed them all up. By morning, the entire village had emptied of animal life and only the villagers were left.
For many days afterward, people were careful not to look each other in the eye. Out of suspicion. Or shock. Or shame. From that day to this, most of them have tended not to talk about all of that. Not a word, good or bad. Sometimes they even forget why. In fact, they prefer to forget. And yet they all remember quite well, silently, that they're better off not remembering. And there's a need to deny everything, to deny even the silence itself, and to ridicule those who nonetheless remember: They should keep quiet. They should not speak.
That night, Solina the Seamstress, who had once tended goats and raised chickens, lost her flock, her chicken coop, and her ducks. And at dawn, her small cage of songbirds was left empty. Her husband, Ginome the Blacksmith, disappeared the next day and wasn't found until a week later, shaking and frozen with cold among the trees of the forest, perhaps because he had gathered the courage to go out and look for his herd of goats and the vanished farmyard birds. When his wife, Solina, and all the village elders asked him what he had seen, all they could get out of him were wails and sobs. That's when Ginome began to lose his memory. After that, his body began to shrink and shrivel and collapse into itself until it could fit into an old pram and he himself turned into a sort of lamb. Or kid.
Years ago, Almon the old fisherman set down a detailed description in his notebook of what happened that night. He wrote that on that last evening, right before darkness fell, when he went down to the river and took his fishing net out of the water, he found nine live fish in it. He decided to leave those fish in a tub filled with water near his front door till he took them out to sell in the morning. When he woke up the next morning, there was the tub, still filled with water but empty of fish.
And the same night, Zito, Almon's faithful dog, vanished forever too. Zito was a very feeling dog, but as logical as a clock, a quiet dog with one brown and white ear and one completely brown ear. When he was trying very hard to concentrate and understand what was happening in front of his nose, he used to cock his ears forward so they were almost touching. When he cocked his ears this way, that dog looked serious and hugely intelligent and thoughtful, for a moment like a dedicated scientist concentrating as hard as he can, nearly, so nearly about to unlock one of science's secrets.