Kriva

Chapter I

The world had never seemed so vast, nor so heavy with omen, as in the summer when I came to stay with my grandmother. Her cottage crouched beside the ancient church like a pale, watchful sentinel. The church itself—magnificent, almost sepulchral—possessed two organs: one electric, which groaned with an uncanny, almost inimical hum, and the other powered by bellows whose ancient lungs had exhaled their last breath many centuries ago.

The village was named Kamnitz in Styria, and I was five at the time. I loved my grandmother, and I adored her rabbits.

Behind the church rose a hill so precipitous it appeared to lean away from the world. At its summit brooded the Turkish Beacon—ah, the Turkish Beacon! A grim little stone edifice, built six hundred years ago to guard a warning bonfire, to catapult flames skyward should the Turks come galloping across the distant horizons. Around it, hammered into the earth like iron fangs, stood a palisade of metal rods. They glittered with diurnal innocence- swallowing lightnings so the village below would remain unscathed.

The villagers placed almost superstitious trust in these rods. No one remembered the last time Kamnitz had been struck.

People believed the Turkish Beacon could foretell calamity. When tempests gathered and the air grew thick, when the rods began to hum with an unholy vibratory tremor, the priest would ring the bells: heavy, reverberant bells meant to chase away the hail threatening their orchards and vineyards.

It was on such a humming afternoon, when a young woman arrived to visit my grandmother. Her name was Violeta and she carried about her a strange aura of restlessness, of hurry, almost of disquietude. At her side stood her daughter, clutching a white cat.

Grandmother welcomed them warmly, for she had known both Violeta and her late mother. Violeta, who worked in a city by the Rhine, explained that she had secured employment as a hotel receptionist, yet could not take her daughter; she had found no one to care for the child. My grandmother, ever merciful, asked gently, “What is the girl’s name?”

“Kriva,” Violeta replied.

The name fell like a cold coin upon the table—hard, metallic. She spoke it proudly, as though invoking a charm: a union, she said, of Krishna and Shiva, the first and last syllables of two powerful gods. Names which, to my childish mind, whispered of danger and peril. Could the girl stay for a month or two, in case a proper guardian could not be found?

Grandmother agreed at once.

Kriva was eight, though her slight figure made her appear younger. Her hair was so black it seemed to swallow the light, and her eyes—those bottomless, pupil-less eyes—were obsidian pools. Her entire demeanor radiated a strange, prepotent authority. Her silence felt deliberate, almost ceremonial. When she looked at me, something tightened inside my chest: an embryonic terror I could not name.

Once the visitors departed, the white cat left in our care, the shadows in the house seemed to exhale and relax.

At dawn the next morning, a light knock, nearly inaudible, rapped on the door. When Grandmother and I peered outside, little Kriva stood in the garden. There was no sign of Violeta. Grandmother, startled, ushered the girl inside with unquestioning tenderness.

Later that morning, we watched from the kitchen window as Kriva climbed Beacon Hill with the older village children. The children played hide and seek, but Kriva played only with a neighbour’s small boy, almost half her age—strangely patient, almost solicitous; the way a cat toys with a mouse.

Chapter II

The afternoon settled upon the village with a heaviness. It was then that the village baker arrived: a stout man with flour upon his cuffs and the sharp, sweet scent of baked bread clinging to him like a precious perfume.

He brought with him a parcel of cookies, warm and fragrant, which I stuffed into my mouth immediately. He asked my grandmother if he might borrow her wheelbarrow, for his own had collapsed in some unfortunate mishap. Grandmother agreed at once; she was generous to every living soul.

But when she mentioned calmly that she would be caring for Violeta’s daughter, Kriva, the baker’s expression changed. He did not look at Kriva, not once. Instead, he lowered his voice and asked Grandmother if she knew the ancient word her name resembled.

“Kriva, Krivapeta, Krivopjeta,” he whispered, as though speaking the name might rouse something slumbering in the walls. “An old demon. Long green hair, hands and feet turned backward… devours children.”

The baker gave an embarrassed, uneasy chuckle, but Grandmother’s eyes flashed with irritation.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Folk tales.”

The baker, emboldened or merely foolish, went on:

“This name carries a lot of meanings: bent feet, guilty. Before she attacks,” he said, “she leaves a mark… a handprint on the window. A warning.” His voice dropped lower still. “I would be very careful.”

Then the baker continued with some local gossip and left soon after, pushing the borrowed wheelbarrow with stiff, determined strides.

The house fell quiet.

Much later, I realized how strange it was that he had ignored the girl entirely, as though she was not there.

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It was deep in the night when I awoke. A strange brightness—cold, silver, almost spectral—filled the room.And in that pale glow stood Kriva.The moonlight caught her long black hair and turned it green: unearthly, shimmering, like weeds swaying beneath a river.

She made small, abrupt leaps; quiet jumps, as though mimicking an animal.

After a moment, she left the window and passed my bed. As she moved, she glanced down at me and smiled.

That smile- it froze the breath in my throat.

She slipped out of the room. I lay wide awake, every nerve alert like the metal rods upon Beacon Hill before the lightning strikes.

Minutes passed. Or hours. I did not know. Time had become eternity.Then I heard her return.

Kriva walked to the window again. Slowly—oh, so slowly—she raised her hand and pressed it against the glass. The faintest upside-down print bloomed there.

Then she turned toward me.With a movement that made the air around her seem to twist, she reached both arms behind her back to pull down the covers of her bed. Then she bent her knees—bent them backward, like a joint folding the wrong way—and stepped onto the bed with the calmness of a sleepwalker.She lay down delicately, her face still turned toward mine, her eyes still open, still gleaming.

That was enough.

A cry clawed its way up my throat. I leapt from my mattress, and ran to my grandmother’s bed, seeking warmth, and the pulse of something human.

Chapter III

Morning came with a softness that mocked the horrors of the night. I awoke in Grandmother’s bed and for a fleeting moment I convinced myself that all I had seen had been nothing more than a bad dream.

But when I entered the kitchen, the world felt wrong. The white cat lapped milk from a tiny saucer. Grandmother stood beside Kriva, urging her to eat a little bread, a spoon of honey, anything at all.Kriva only shook her head.Her voice was light, nearly cheerful. “I want to paint,” she said and disappeared into the salon.

Later in the morning we saw her climbing Beacon Hill with the other village children.

Grandmother sighed and stepped out toward the rabbit hut to fetch fresh greens and feed the animals. I stayed behind, unwilling to be alone yet afraid to follow.

Then came the scream.

A sharp, tearing cry—my grandmother’s voice, but thinned by terror. I ran to her, my heart clattering.

Inside the wooden hut lay all four rabbits, sprawled unnaturally. Their soft bodies were limp, their small eyes dull. Their throats chewed open, soaked in blood.

Grandmother pressed her hand to her mouth. “A fox,” she whispered. “I must have forgotten to close the cage.”But even as she said it, her voice faltered.Her eyes clouded with a creeping doubt.

“I remember closing it.”

She said nothing more. We walked back to the house in silence, the air around us unusually still.

In the salon, a box of watercolours lay open on the table. Beside it was Kriva’s newest painting: a cluster of crimson flowers.

And on the window, just above the table, was a handprint, pointing downwards.

A small print.A child’s print.Red, smeared, mark of warning.

Grandmother stepped closer, blinked hard.

“It’s only watercolour, Neva,” she said, deeply shaken, wiping away the stain. “Just paint.”

But I knew it was blood.

Chapter IV

The next four weeks drifted by with a deceptive calm.

I invited Kriva to play with all my toys; my dolls with their curly hair, my stuffed animals, my puzzles; but she touched none of them. She only watched them with a faint, detached curiosity.

I knew Kriva sensed my terror, and for reasons unknown she granted me mercy.

She ate nothing at all, which stirred in Grandmother an ever-growing fear. Yet Kriva neither weakened nor wearied; she moved with a peculiar vitality, as if some unseen force nourished her far more faithfully than food.

What she did at night, I could not know. I slept in Grandmother’s bed, and by day I never left her side. I tried to tell her what I had witnessed on that moon-soaked night—the green shimmer of hair, the backward-bending knees. But Grandmother only patted my head and insisted I had dreamed it.

She even asked Kriva, gently, if she was afraid to sleep alone in the little room, but the girl answered with a serene, almost unnatural calm: “I like it.”

The weather was bright, and the days were long. Each afternoon Kriva wandered off to play with the children of the village, though she favoured only one companion: the small neighbour boy. In spite of the huge age difference, they were inseparable.

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Another four weeks passed.Then one evening the electricity died. The house sank into darkness suddenly and completely.

Grandmother rummaged through old drawers until she found two stubs of candles, and lit them with trembling hands.

Kriva emerged in the wavering glow:

“There’s no light,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

She took one candle and glided down the hallway toward her room.

I remained with Grandmother in the kitchen. The candlelight shook against the windowpane, and without meaning to, we both turned our heads at the same moment.

There, upon the glass, was a handprint. Small. Pressed firmly upon the outside of the window.

The hand was angled downward, pointing toward the earth. When I tried to imitate the print I realised I couldn’t. I would have had to twist my whole body and rotate my shoulder painfully in order to do it.

Grandmother lifted her candle and brought it closer to the window. The print gleamed for a moment, then began to fade—made of moisture, of fog.

The window was far too high for any child to reach, let alone in the dark, in silence, without a ladder.

Grandmother’s expression changed. The fear she had fought for weeks crept finally into her eyes.

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That night, a sound tore me from sleep.

A horrendous, bone-rattling moan—no, a series of moans, groans—echoed through the village. The very houses vibrated with the force of it. It was as if some ancient creature had risen beneath the earth and now bellowed in rage.

Grandmother leapt from her bed and raced to check on Kriva.The girl lay calmly beneath her covers. Her eyes were open, bright, amused.

“The electricity is back,” she said, and laughed softly. And indeed: the lights were on in the hallway, glowing with an unnatural steadiness.

Grandmother bundled me into a sweater and pulled on her coat. Outside, villagers were already gathering, drawn like moths to the source of the sound.

The church groaned.Its walls shuddered with each monstrous moan.

The old vicar shuffled toward the entrance, muttering prayers, the lantern trembling in his hand. We followed the crowd inside and climbed to the choir loft, where the electric organ’s pipes shrieked and wailed with a terrible metallic resonance.“L’orage” pedal, all the tempest stops, were on.

The vicar reached the power switch and pulled it down with a snap.

Instantly, the great moaning subsided. The pipes hissed once and fell still.

People exhaled shakily. They began muttering excuses: short circuit, faulty wiring, the choirmaster forgetting to turn off the organ, somebody pulling a prank.No one wanted to dwell on fear.Grandmother and I left quietly.But as we reached the church door, we paused.

The moaning had not ceased entirely. A faint, low drone—deep, tremulous, unmistakably real—still emanated from the shadows within the church.Yet it was not coming from the electric organ. It came from the old mechanical organ—the hand-drawn one, the ancient one, the one whose bellows had slept untouched for centuries.

The one that should have been silent. Completely and eternally silent.

Chapter V

Morning arrived, and the air felt swollen with something uncanny. The branches of the orchard drooped, heavy with apples.

Grandmother tried once more, gently, pleadingly, to persuade Kriva to eat. But Kriva, with that eerie, composed patience of hers, merely shook her head.

“I’m not hungry,” she murmured.

She spoke like a queen declining a trivial offering: calm, superior, faintly amused. The patronising softness in her voice made Grandmother falter.Soon she slipped out to play with the village children.

Then, without warning, the world changed.

A harsh wind punched the houses, rattled shutters, bent the trees. The sky, moments before only sullen, turned a sickly green—a colour that felt unnatural, as if the storm carried poison in its gut.

Women burst from their homes, calling frantically for their children.Grandmother ran outside as well, her voice swallowed by the wind.

The children were already racing down Beacon Hill. Behind them, the metal rods atop the summit began to hum—a dreadful, rising vibration. Sparks spat from their tips, dancing and cracking in the air like tongues of serpents.

The vicar, robes whipping around him, disappeared into the church and seized the bell ropes. The great bells began to swing wildly, desperately, their booming slicing through the storm. Each toll felt like a blow struck against the sky.

At the edge of the village, the men gathered in tense formation around the old short-barrel mortars half-buried in the earth. With torches longer than two men’s height, they lit the gunpowder chambers. Thunderous blasts roared upward, ripping into the clouds, trying to crack the heavens open before hail could form.

Rain answered. A sudden, punishing downpour.Sheets of water hammered the earth.

But no hail fell.For a moment it seemed the village might breathe a sigh of relief.

Then a woman’s wail cut through the storm.

A neighbour burst into our kitchen, soaked to the bone, madness in her eyes.

“Where is my boy?” she screamed. “Where is my son? Have you seen my boy?”

Her voice sliced through me like a blade.

Kriva stood calmly in the doorway.

“I haven’t seen him today,” she said. Her tone was gentle, soothing.

I flinched at this obvious lie.

The woman only cried harder.Grandmother grabbed a raincoat and hurried out again, joining the frantic search that spread like wildfire across the village. Soon the police arrived, then the fire brigade.

And I—I remained in the kitchen.Terrified. Alone with Kriva.She smiled at me knowingly, her eyes glowing.She looked at peace, satisfied.

Chapter VI

Morning crept into the valley like a wounded animal—slow, limping, and without a single sound. The village lay under a spell of dreadful silence. No chickens stirred in their barns. No sparrows darted through the orchard.

I followed Grandmother along the muddy path to the neighbour’s house.The little boy had not been found.

The family sat inside their darkened home. No one spoke above a whisper. No one dared to suggest hope. As if they already knew the boy would never be found again.

Grandmother offered what comfort she could; but she seemed small and frightened in that house of sorrow.

When we returned to our own home, the air inside felt strangely warmer, more cheerful, more welcoming, as though someone had lit a fire that hadn’t been there before.

In the salon, waiting calmly, sat Kriva.Beside her, elegant in a pale summer dress, sat her mother Violeta.

Grandmother stopped in the doorway, but Violeta rose at once, her smile bright and untroubled.

“Good morning,” she said. “I came to fetch the cat. I hope she didn’t bother you too much.”

“The cat?” Grandmother repeated, perplexed. “Not at all… Not at all. Oh, Kriva was such a good girl.”

Violeta blinked, puzzled. A faint wrinkle formed between her brows.

“Kriva?” she echoed. “Yes… yes, of course she’s a good girl. I was so glad to find a nanny for her. To take her with me to my new post, after all.”

Grandmother’s breath caught.

“Oh, yes,” Violeta continued lightly, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “We had the most wonderful time. Two whole months together. We went to the pool! Kriva even learned to swim! And the manager said we may come again next year.”

A silence fell—sudden, rigid, suffocating.I felt the room tilt.

Then Kriva clapped her hands together with genuine joy. I couldn’t recognise these flushed cheeks, those smiling eyes. A girl with dark brown hair; certainly not black hair.

“Yes!” she chirped. “The chef gave me cakes every day. And he said I reminded him of his daughter. And I learned a new song! Do you want me to sing for you?”

Her voice bubbled with happiness and warmth.

I saw Grandmother’s face.Ashen. Stunned. Drained of all colour. Like a corpse. Her lips parted, but no sound escaped.

I stepped behind Grandmother’s chair and said feebly, facing the girl:

“But Kriva… you lived here with us for the last two months.”