Hiking has been one of my many hobbies for a big part of my life.Every occasion I would get I would use it to go hiking,be it in the mountains or in a field.
Once was like any other hiking trip, except that this time I was alone. Most of the times I would take somebody with me,but this time nobody was able to come with me. That didn’t really bother me, as I actually enjoyed being alone.
I must mention that it was a very beautiful scenery and there was only nature surrounding me. Only green all around me and occasional lakes or mountain rivers.
After about two hours of just walking and some short breaks, I reached a hill and to continue I had to climb it.
While going up it,I noticed some wierd things,like there being a paved path going all the way up the hill that appeared out of nowhere. And it didn’t look like any stone you would find today in stores. It looked ancient.
After another ten minutes I reached the top of the hill and I expected to see some sort of settlement.And while I did, it was not the one that I had expected.
First thing was that the houses that I saw in the valley looked like those that you could find in medieval times. I was thinking that maybe it was like a really old village that people had moved out of due to its isolation.
But it seemed as alive as it would have been a couple of centuries ago. I descretly started going down the hill hoping that I wouldn’t be noticed. As I got closer I saw that the humans that were living there were dressed in ancient clothing as well. It looked the same age of the houses.
As I got closer I realized that something wasn’t quite right. All of the humans looked extremely malnourished. And if they didn’t look as if they were about to die from starvation, then sickness would have been their cause of death.
I must say that I am a pretty big history lover and I immediately recognized one of the most evident symptoms of the whatever the people were suffering from: black boils. If you know anything about history,you will know what sickness has this horrendous symptom: the black death.
Yep, that illness that caused people to die left,right and center during the 14th century. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear that I could see dozens of people laying on the ground, probably having their lasts breaths.
Like a scene plucked out of a history movie, “doctors” , wearing the plague doctor mask were scouring through the death filled streets.
At this point, I was about 2 meters from one of the houses hidden behind a bush. I was looking around me not knowing what to do next when I noticed something touching my leg. I looked down and saw a big black rat sniffing the grass around my foot.
I jumped from behind my hiding spot and surprisingly, not a single human paid attention to me. I mean I don’t blame them, considering that most of them were fighting between life or death.
I never ran so fast in my entire life and didn’t stop until I was on top of the hill. There,for some reason I decided to take a photo. I guess it was because people wouldn’t believe me if I told them about this place. I decided to end my hike then and there and started fast walking to a train station nearby.
When I got home I left my backpack in a corner of my room and just layed on my bed without doing anything for about half an hour. Then I went on with my normal day, trying to get my mind of that incident.
About 2 days later I started getting consistent headaches and fever, and when I went to the doctor’s, he gave me a list of medicine that I could get but none of them helped me. Then I remembered the rat that was lingering centimetres from my foot when I came across the village. Now it is clear what I had got.
Within a few days my symptoms got progressively worse, until today, when I discovered what I have feared of the most: black boils. They haven’t ruptured yet, but it is only a matter of time.
And why didn’t anybody believe that I got the bubonic plague? Because everybody I have showed that picture that I took to said that it was just a normal green valley.
Every now and then I notice strange humanoid shapes that look as if they have beaks. I don’t think that’s a mask.