The Maidens

It was a pleasant August night, despite the heat of the day, and the waning moon cast its light on the country road, bathing the picturesque landscape in its silvery rays. He liked to walk this road on each harvest time, and the distance between his small farm and the wheat fields was not so great as to tire him any more than he already felt, his drooping shoulders bearing the burden of hard agricultural labor.

Radu wiped away a drop of sweat that was slowly sliding down his dusty forehead with the back of his sleeve. The itching sensation on his skin was not giving him peace, but it happened whenever they harvested the wheat. This year they had had a bountiful harvest, and the work in the fields required his presence alongside the other people his grandfather hired to help him thresh the grain crops. He reflexively reached into his pants pocket, searching for his pack of cigarettes, and was disappointed to find that he only had two left in the crumpled pack.

He stopped at the edge of the forest, whose poplars raised their peaks proudly towards the clear sky, resting his tired bones on a boulder. He tapped his cigarette lightly on the surface of the stone, a habit whose benefit he did not understand, then let the flame of the match pierce the darkness of the night for a few seconds. He inhaled the first smoke greedily, looking thoughtfully towards the field from which he had just come. As he rested on the boulder, contemplating the beauty of the landscape, a noise in the forest caught his attention, making him move his thoughtful gaze in the opposite direction. He stood motionless on the stone, listening with his ears pricked up. It was almost three in the morning, who could have been walking through the forest at this late hour of the night? As he stood there, transformed into a stone hut, Radu became aware that neither insects nor birds could be heard, and the thought sent shivers down his spine.

His grandmother had been telling him all along, ever since he was a small boy, not to venture out into the night, and if the silence is so thick that you can cut it with a knife, and the singing of birds or crickets doesn't comfort your ears, it's time to turn back and, as quiet as possible, leave the place.

Radu was skeptical about the beliefs in folklore tales, but at that moment he was going to follow his grandmother's advice, getting up as slowly as possible from the boulder, while he quickly extinguished his cigarette under the soles of his shoes. His heart was pounding in his ears, adrenaline pulsing through his veins. He took a few steps, then he heard the same noise from earlier again. The sound of bells.

At that moment his eyes instinctively turned to where he thought the sound had come from, seeing a faint flicker, like a spark, out of the corner of his eye. Radu froze as tall as he was, his foot in the air. From inside the forest, the tinkling of bells could be heard, their sound piercing the tomblike silence of the night. He thought he saw an unfamiliar figure out of the corner of his eye, this time from the opposite direction. The man was thirty years old and knew better than to sink now, in the middle of the night, deep into the forest.

He took a step towards the moonlit field, every part of his body screaming at him to run as far as possible from the forest and its oppressive darkness, but a madness took possession of his senses, and Radu turned back, sinking as deep as possible into the heart of the forest.

As he got further and further into the thicket of trees, the man noticed that the moonlight did not penetrate the branches of the tall poplars, and the darkness was deep and cold. A damp abyss that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up and his skin tingle, and this time, not because of the harshness of the wheat ears. There was no sign of dried grain in the forest, and he jumped in fright when a tree branch, slammed to the ground, made him lose his balance and stumble, falling into the tall, wet grass. He stood up heavily, shaking off his shabby and dusty clothes, listening carefully. Apart from the sounds of his footsteps, he thought he heard women's voices, screams, but he could not be sure. Was it a woman in distress? This thought crossed his mind, hoping that the idea of ​​going towards the unfamiliar sound was not superfluous, nor the craziest thing he had ever done in his entire life. He let out a crazy chuckle at the thought that his grandmother, who was probably sleeping peacefully in her bed at this hour, would not be at all proud of him if she knew where he was and what he was doing.

"I thought I taught you better than that." he imagined her scolding him, with her sharp voice and gentle gaze.

He sighed loudly, continuing his journey to nowhere. He didn't know how long he had been walking, but his legs ached and fatigue took hold of him, making his eyelids heavy.

Just when he thought he had gotten lost, because nothing could be heard anymore, and the silence continued to be grave, Radu saw before his eyes, a few meters away among the trees, a flickering light.

A mournful song, with high notes, reached his ears, giving him chills. It was performed by a voice like he had never heard before, almost unearthly, because no human being would have been capable of singing with such beauty and sorrow. It was both the most beautiful and the most tragic song he had ever heard.

”The crawling of the snake

And the stepping of the bug,

The whizzing of the wind,

The dust of earth,

The dust of earth.”

He advanced cautiously, careful not to make any noise or do anything that might give his presence away. He reached the edge of a clearing and stopped behind a thick-stemmed beech tree, hiding from the light thrown by the flames. Despite the fact that the fire in the center of the clearing burned brightly, the air was cold, almost icy. He smelled incense and damp earth, even though it had not rained at all and the vegetation around was dry. He looked up in amazement and fascination at the scene unfolding before his eyes.

There were not three, not five, but perhaps seven or nine, he could not count them. They were maidens of an unearthly beauty, it almost hurt him to look at them. They danced in a circle, but they did not touch the ground, but floated in a perfect whirlwind, with bare feet and silver bells at their ankles. Most of them were naked, with long black and golden hair, fluttering like an aura around their porcelain skin, and his eyes could not fixate on any particular woman, they merged into a single vision, like a disk of mist and light. The song grew in intensity, its lyrics resembling a curse:

” For he who loves and then leaves,

God should give him as a punishment:

The crawling of the snake

And the stepping of the bug,

The whizzing of the wind,

The dust of earth.”

They were all one voice, and the melody culminated in a wild, crystalline laugh, making Radu want to enter the circle. He felt the physical need to collapse there, he wanted to dance, to be loved and to die there, alongside them.

One of the maidens, the one he managed to catch a clear glimpse of for a moment, stopped spinning with her back to him, turning her head very slowly, with an unnatural gesture, towards the tree behind which he was hiding. Her eyes were two black holes, without sparkle, looking directly at him, through him.

Just as they knew that the fire was burning and the moon was in the sky, they knew that he was there. She did not look at him with anger, but with indifference, like a creature crawling towards its own death.

At that moment, Radu understood what they were. He had heard stories, legends, but he had never believed them. The men would gather around the fire, on the night of Pentecost, and tell stories heard from previous generations. And the stories related to them always gave him chills.

He made the sign of the cross with his tongue on the roof of his mouth, for his hands and feet had gone numb, and in the stories he had heard it was said that this gesture kept them at bay. He felt cold tinglings rising up his legs, he knew that he had to run before it was too late, before he was drawn into their dance, the Hora, and it spun around him three times. The curse was beginning to set in motion, feeling himself being carried towards their center with a mute force.

The maiden who had been staring at him extended a long, white hand to him, her white, cadaverous skin offering him an invitation that promised the end of all pain. Radu tore his gaze from their vortex with great difficulty and with an almost superhuman effort, he spat out an old curse, learned from his grandmother, against spirits. His simple gesture acted as a small break in the rhythm. Their song did not stop, but it became discordant for a moment, as if a string had broken.

Radu didn't need more, taking advantage of that second of interruption in the rhythm to escape from their spell. Without thinking about the direction or the noise, he threw himself back into the darkness through which he had come, pushing aside the branches that were scratching his skin. Terror had taken possession of him, feeling behind him not footsteps, but a sharp wind, as if They had flown directly through the air after him. He was too terrified to turn his gaze to check, all he wanted to do was to get as far away as possible from that clearing, from them.

He heard Hora start again, faster and more furious, while he ran unconsciously towards the exit from the forest, praying ardently that it was the right path. He didn't know how much time had passed this time either, coming out of the trees by crashing, falling onto the same country road he had been walking on a few minutes or hours before.

Crawling back to the village with difficulty, Radu trembled uncontrollably, and the air he breathed in, insatiably, seemed odorless. Even though he could no longer hear their song, fear did not let him go from its embrace. He knew what happened to men who saw them dance, the maidens were evil and vengeful beings.

Arriving on the porch of his house, his knees buckled, falling with a thud to the wooden floor. His right leg, the one that had stopped closest to Hora, was heavy, almost inert. He could move it slightly, but he could no longer feel it, and while he thought he was writhing in pain, his face remained unmoving.

The front door swung open, the light bulb coming on as his grandmother appeared in the doorway, dressed in her nightgown. A cry of horror escaped her lips, her old, gnarled hand reaching out to her grandson, who was lying prostrate on the floor.

Radu looked at her with tears in his eyes, trying in vain to gesture, to explain the shock he was going through, for his mouth moved, but he could not articulate a single word.

“My poor boy, what have they done to you?” his grandmother began to cry, cradling his head in her arms. “Ilie, come out! Come out and see, Ilie.”

His grandfather appeared in the doorway, tired and confused, his eyes gradually expressing the same horror with which his grandmother was looking at him.

"Radu" he began in a trembling tone "Can you speak?"

Radu shook his head mutely, clinging desperately to the thin hand that caressed his unwavering cheek. His grandfather was a stoic man, with a stern face, the kind of man who never betrayed his emotions, but that night, he knelt down next to his grandson and began to cry. There was no need to say more, they knew what had happened. The legends heard around the fire were not horror stories, to scare the naughty children, they were confessions of those who, like him, escaped alive but remained cursed by Them.

From the hill on which the village was located, the forest was visible from every angle you looked. Radu turned his gaze there, drawn by the same force that had lured him into the heart of the forest. Although he could no longer hear or feel anything, he knew that they were watching him. That wherever he went and wherever he hid, every moonlit night, he would hear in his mind, that sound of bells and that wild laughter of Them, reminding him that in that clearing, he had lost control of his own story. He was just one of their victims, like all the men in the legends, and the torments he was going through were just another form of amusement for Them.