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.
And sometimes Zito, Almon the Fisherman's dog, could read his master's mind. That dog could guess what his master's thoughts were even before he began thinking them: He would suddenly get up from where he was lying in front of the stove, cross the room, and stand resolutely at the door less than half a minute before Almon looked at the clock and decided it was time to go out to the riverbank. Or that dog would lick Almon's cheek with his warm tongue, lick it with love and compassion to comfort him when a sad thought was just about to settle in his brain.
Despite all the years that had passed since that night, the old fisherman had not been able to reconcile himself to the dog's disappearance: after all, they'd been connected to each other by a love filled with tenderness and care and trust. Was it possible that the dog had suddenly forgotten his master? Or perhaps something terrible had happened to him? For if Zito were alive, he would surely
have escaped from whoever had kidnapped him and made his way home. Sometimes Almon thought that he could hear the muted echo of a thin howl calling to him from very far away, from the heart of the thick forest: Come, come to me, don't be afraid.
It was not only Zito who disappeared that night, but also a pair of small finches that used to sing to Almon the Fisherman from their nest of twigs on a branch that gently grazed his window whenever the wind blew. And the woodworms that used to fill Almon's sleep at night with the sound of their quiet gnawing as they ceaselessly dug their tunnels through his old furniture. Even those woodworms had been silenced forever since that night.
For many years, the fisherman had been used to falling asleep every night to the gnawing sounds those woodworms made as they munched away at the innards of his furniture in the dark. That's why, since that terrible night, he hasn't been able to fall asleep: as if the depth of the silence is mocking him from the darkness. And so, night after night, Almon the Fisherman sits at his kitchen table till midnight, remembering how once, at that hour, the forlorn cry of foxes used to filter in through the closed shutters and the yard dogs would answer the forest foxes with angry barks that would end in a howl. At those times, his beloved dog used to come and rest his warm head on Almon's lap, look up at him with an expression of deep understanding, an expression that radiated a silent glow of compassion, love, and sadness. Until Almon would say, Thank you, Zito. Enough. I'm almost over it now.
So Almon would sit, thinking alone in the night silence, missing his dog, missing the finches and fish and even the woodworms, and write and rub out words in his notebook, sometimes hearing from a distance the thin voice of Little Nimi as he ran alone from yard to yard in the dark, making whooping noises that sounded from afar like sobs. At those moments, Almon the Fisherman would begin to berate his pencil, argue loudly with the stove, or riffle the pages of his notebook to try to block out the clamor of the night and the roar of the river.
Almon wrote in his notebook that without any living creatures, even the clearest summer nights sometimes seemed overlaid with a murky fog, a fog that descended on everything and almost buried the village, the heart, and the forest under it. Summer-night-haze, Almon the Fisherman wrote in his notebook, not spongy and soft like winter-frost-vapor, but dusty, dirty, and depressing.
Since that night when Nehi the Demon took away all the creatures, pulling them along behind him to a hiding place on the mountain, the villagers lived and cultivated their orchards in silence and fear. Without a single pet, without a single farm animal. Alone. Only the river still passed through the village, rolling pebbles, broken branches, clumps of mud, in the foam of its flow. Day and night, winter and summer, that river never rested.
7
Sometimes brave woodcutters and also Danir the Roofer and his young friends would venture out to the edge of the forest, but even they didn't dare to go into the forest alone, only in groups of three or four, and always in daylight.
Never, never ever under any circumstance, parents told their children, never ever ever go out of the house after nightfall. If a child asked why, his parents would glower and say, Because the night is very dangerous. Darkness is a cruel enemy.
But every child knew.
Sometimes, at dawn, the woodcutters could see broken branches and trampled grass, and they would look at each other and shake their heads without saying a word. They knew that after nightfall, Nehi the Mountain Demon comes down from his high mountain castle and wanders in the forests that surround the village, and at midnight his shadow glides along the river, and he touches orchard fences with his fingers, passes soundlessly among the shuttered houses, through the dark yards, sails among the abandoned stables and deserted cow barns. The grass he steps on and the leaves he brushes against tremble with the whoosh of his black cloak, and only near dawn is he swallowed up in the depths of the forest, slipping away into the tangle of trees in the dark, gliding silently among the valleys, caves, and clefts, returning to his castle of horrors somewhere in the high mountains no man has ever dared to approach.
Look, the woodcutters would whisper to each other early in the morning. Look, he was right here just last night. Only five or six hours ago he passed through here without a sound, right here, where we're standing. The thought made chills run down their spines.
8
One, night Matti decided to keep the promise he'd made to Maya. But he didn't have the courage to get dressed, sneak outside, and walk to the small grove near the ruins. Instead, Matti waited patiently until his parents and sisters were asleep, got out of bed, and slipped barefoot to the kitchen window that looked diagonally out on to the grove, and stood there, awake and sharp-eyed, till morning. He was able to count the silhouettes of nine trees at the foot of the ruined house. There were nine trees all night, and when the sun began to rise, there were still nine, so Matti decided that Maya must have been so frightened or jumpy that she had made a mistake. Or maybe she just fell asleep and had a dream.
But in class the next day, when he told her in a whisper, Maya said, Come on, Matti, let's go after school and count how many trees are really there. And they went to the slope where the ruins were and counted carefully, touching each and every tree and saying its number out loud, and there were only eight, not nine.
In class, on either side of the blackboard, between the windows, and over the bookcase, Emanuella the Teacher had hung warning signs in black and red: THE FOREST IS DANGEROUS. BEWARE OF THE MOUNTAINS. EVERY BUSH COULD BE PLOTTING TO TRAP YOU. EVERY ROCK MIGHT BE HIDING SOMETHING THAT IS NOT A ROCK BEHIND IT. A CHILD WHO WANDERS DOWN TO THE VALLEYS ALONE MIGHT NEVER COME BACK, OR HE MIGHT HAVE WHOOPITIS IF HE DOES. THE DARKNESS HATES US. THE OUTDOORS IS FILLED WITH DANGERS.
From the depth of the woods, from the heart of the thick pine forests that completely surrounded the village, a hushed wind of darkness blew from morning till night. Even in the summer months, a dark wind shadow seeped into the village from the forests. And the river, frothing, bubbling, wound through the yards and rushed into the valley, white foam on its banks, as if racing as fast as it could to get far away, yet lingering there for a moment to curse the whole village.
9
Maya and Matti were the only children in the village to feel the pull of the dark woods. It was actually because of all the warnings and silence and fear that they were so drawn to the forest, and imagination tempted them to try to find out what was hidden in its depths. Matti also had an unfinished plan he told Maya about because he knew that Maya was braver than he. But it wasn't only the plan and the desire to go into the forest that they shared; they also had a deep dark secret they told no one, not their parents, not Emanuella the Teacher, not Matti's older sisters, not Almon or Danir the Roofer, not their friends at school. Only when there were no other ears around to hear did Maya and Matti whisper together and nurture their secret, the secret that belonged only to them. Often, Matti and Maya would meet on the sly in the afternoon in an abandoned, dilapidated old stable in Matti's backyard, out of earshot of his parents and sisters, and whisper their secret.
The village children, including Matti's older sisters, noticed those two whispering to each other, and immediately decided that Maya and Matti must be in love, perhaps even "a couple." And if they were "a couple," then it was surely fair, even expected, to gossip about them a little, even to make fun of them and tease them a bit. After all, everywhere, a boy and a girl who want to be alone together from time to time, instead of always being with their friends, are always considered a couple. And couples always stir up envy. And envy hurts and swells and begins to secrete ridicule, almost the way a dirty sore leaks pus.
That wasn't how Matti and Maya saw themselves: they didn't consider themselves a couple at all, just the only ones who shared the secret. They never held hands or looked deeply into each other's eyes or exchanged private smiles, and they certainly never kissed, though both had tried to imagine, two or three times, how a kiss would feel and maybe how to make it happen.
&n
bsp; But they never spoke about those imaginings. Not a single word. What joined Maya and Matti wasn't love, but a secret only they could ever know.
It was their secret and the way they were teased that made Maya and Matti feel so close and alone, because if others found out their secret, they would laugh at them a lot more and taunt and tease them twice as much. After all, anyone who refuses to be like the rest of us must have whoopitis or hootosis or whatever, and he shouldn't dare get close to us; he should keep his distance, please, so as not to infect us too. Some also ridiculed Almon the Fisherman for his thought notebook, for his habit of standing at the far end of the yard every morning and evening, whistling to a dog that had most likely died years before, and for the completely unnecessary scarecrow he'd put up in the vegetable beds in his garden. They especially liked to make fun, behind his back, of the long arguments he sometimes had with himself or his scarecrow. Often, the former fisherman would argue even with the river, the moon, the passing clouds in the sky. In the village, they had a good laugh at the emotional reconciliations that took place after every argument between Almon and the scarecrow or Almon and the wall and the bench.
The villagers also took great pleasure in mocking Lilia the Widowed Baker, Maya's mother, and they even made a circular motion with their finger near their forehead in her honor—come look see, here she is again, that peculiar woman who crumbles the loaves of bread she hasn't managed to sell during the day and throws the crumbs into the river or scatters them among the trees. Maybe by a miracle, a stray fish might suddenly pass through our village or a lost bird might accidentally be swept into our sky.