I remember when I came back to my paternal house in a small village in a country in Europe. I won’t be specifying which one, though. I’ve tried to run halfway around the globe to escape the wretched place, and there’s people who might track me down. My therapist suggested that I narrate my experience to someone, but I don’t have anyone close to me. Not anymore.
The village was surrounded by a thick forest, and it was sort of a heritage site as well. International organisations had declared it as an important site to the culture, so the villagers were forced to not burn it down. Why was that enforced, you ask? Because the villagers had already tried a dozen times.
Nobody liked the forest. Nobody could even get timber from the forest since it was always raining there. The plants were mostly a load of herbs and shrubs that had a cocktail of poisonous chemicals, the trees downright poisoned the air at night. The mushrooms were all declared poisonous. Nobody could go out after seven in the evening since the trees would start posioning the air at night, so the residents just had a very narrow window between day and night.
I had come to the village along with my elder brother. Our parents had gone on a two year work trip to Canada, and since they didn’t want us to be alone, they sent us off to our aunt and uncle.
We were both in our late teens, and my brother was doing odd jobs at the local diner. I was mostly helping out my grandmother and attending the local school. The first few weeks were very uneventful since both my brother Noah and I were very careful, and obeyed our aunt’s commands.
But then after a while, we both started noticing it. Sometimes, especially at night, my brother and I would hear faint whispering. There was never a corner you could point out to, never a body to put the voice on. My aunt would usually give us an excuse like “You’re just hearing the wind” or “It must be a draft that is too noisy in the old house.”
By then, at least I was convinced that we were haunted. My brother was a rational human being. He didn’t even entertain the idea of ghosts. But with the condition of the house, it was possible that it had seen at least a couple of deaths. It had originally belonged to an army man who fought in World War II, so it was possible that our house was, plain and simple, being haunted by his ghost.
I wish it was just ghosts.
My brother brought it to the attention of my uncle finally, and he absolutely lost it. He started yelling at my aunt, at me, and my brother. I don’t particularly remember what he said in his anger induced daze, but I remember him saying, “You’ve provided them a door, you’ve provided them a door” over and over again.
It took a lot of pleading from our aunt and us children till he calmed down, and then we were enforced a curfew. We were not supposed to go outside from 5 in the evening till 9 in the morning. I was supposed to skip school on Saturdays. My brother started working at a place much nearer to the house. We were slowly taught what all forest herbs had to be eliminated from the garden in our backyard.
And from then on, my uncle started giving really weird advice. He would suggest putting safety pins and needles in our pockets. He taught us how to avoid stepping on rocks, he would even altogether tell me to avoid walking around mushrooms. It sounded really crazy to me, but after a while I got used to it. Mostly because I was also a very rule abiding person.
But even I had my limitations. My uncle and aunt did have children, but all the three of them were quite older than the two of us. So my aunt and my uncle had… quite interesting ways of enforcing punishments on us. I wouldn’t go much more into detail on that matter, because it wasn’t like it had much effect on us. It was… the other stuff that was happening.
The village sometimes would go awfully silent at times. It would be chirping of birds and whistling of the wind through trees, to complete radio silence within a couple of minutes. The house didn’t provide any respite from the oddity of the village either. Doors would swing open at will, windows would creak unannounced. It got to the point that my brother started to oil all 16 windows and 8 doors of the house. It was a hilarious solution to me at that time, but well, it was practical. I also wanted to chalk this up to a house that had been more than seventy years old that was due for repairs.
My aunt had realised that I wasn’t following the safety pin rule a very often, so she did the best thing that she could. She pinned them into the seams of my clothing. I didn’t realise it was such an important detail, since both of them had never told me about the thing we were supposed to be afraid of. I swear to God, if only I had known what all was going on in the village I would understand much easier… but how can you blame me? I was sixteen at that time. You couldn’t expect me to know from right and wrong. I was merely a child, ripped from her surroundings and placed into a weird situation.
Once in a while, my uncle would take us to the local restaurant to have some breakfast. Me and my brother usually had some toast with eggs, and there was this particular way that restaurant will make their toasts. It will cut the centre of the round bread and drizzle it with some icing sugar. I mean, it was plain, white bread but it tasted damn delicious.
We had gone on one such outing with my uncle, and my brother was scarfing down the breakfast, while my bread remained untouched. I felt very nauseous since the early hours of the morning, and had put down my coat beside me while I fanned myself. It was a particularly hot summer day, and I just wanted to accompany my uncle for a while. You know how kids are. They never want to be left out.
I was pretty zoned out when I saw the scene outside the window. A kid, almost my age, probably a bit older, playing by himself. It was odd. I mean, kids are kids but you don’t play alone once you’re a teenager. I thought maybe he was just alone and wanted to entertain himself while on a lazy Sunday.
I saw an unmistakable glimmer of gossamer wings.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I refused to let this knowledge get to my brother and uncle. I stood as calmly as I could, and looked at my uncle. “I’ll go get some fresh air, I still feel a bit nauseous.”
My uncle looked concerned, but he didn’t stop me. “All right, but don’t venture too far.”
I nodded and looked down at my coat. It was a warm day, and I didn’t need it anyway. I thought I’d be back in a second.
I pushed the glass door to the restaurant open, and I saw what was, without a doubt, an insect with giant wings.
The boy was trying to get rid of it by swatting at it with his hands, but the insect kept coming closer towards him. I looked around for a stick or a log to use as weapon, and I found this long, lithe branch that had fallen down from a nearby tree.
Even though the wings were almost the size of my palm, the insect itself… looked pretty odd. I mean, it has two pairs of limbs, and it looked… eerily humanoid. It has a knob as a head, no eyes, and a pair of claw-like mandibles.
I pushed the boy away and whacked the insect onto the asphalt.
The few seconds following that action were a surge of dizziness, and a feeling of crashing down. I felt as though the gravity holding me down had multiplied a thousand times over. The sensation was so jarring that I let out a gasp.
When I came to my senses, I was still holding the branch, and there were no traces of the weird humanoid insect left. I laughed shakily, and felt as though I could not believe my own senses.
I looked around, and saw the boy I had earlier pushed away looking distressed. He was resting on his elbows, looking at me with a confused look on his face.
“Are you alright?” I asked, and watched his face turn from confusion to a bright smile.
“Ye.” Even his clothes looked like they had been worn a thousand times. His white shirt had turned beige, and he had splotches of mud over his jean overalls.
“I saw you from over there-“ I pointed at the restaurant, the window beside which I was sitting out of field of vision. I shrugged it off. “I saw you were having a hard time.”
He had almost porcelain white skin and neatly combed, bright red hair. It was a bright Sunday, how come he hadn’t had even a bit of freckles on him? Did he never leave his house?
“I’s runnin away from dem.” He clicked his tongue. “Darn tricksters. Dey were spookin the moos out, they just be dancin all darn day.” And that was when I noticed… he talked like my grandfather would. He had a thick accent, as though he had never been around kids his age. Or maybe he just spoke in a slang very different from ours. I couldn’t gather.
I was polite and said, “It was weird. It didn’t look like an insect.”
He got up, and dusted off his overalls. “I see things like dem all the time. I’d have been taken away if you didn’t show up.” He approached me, and put his hand on my shoulders. “I will be indebted to you for this.”
The last sentence was spoken with not the thick accent of a rural farmhand, but with the sophistication of some aristocratic person. Even his body language changed as he held my frail shoulders, and I saw his eyes twinkle with happiness.
“Eve? Eve!” I heard my uncle running as fast as he could towards the two of us. The ginger haired boy patted me on the back, and said, “If you wish to, you can visit me in the forest! Just call for Flann, and I’ll be there.” His thick accent was back, and I blinked, confused. He ran off into the thicket of trees and bushes, and I was left with my uncle, interrogating me about everything that boy had uttered.
After listening to the whole story, barring the part where the insect didn’t look like an insect at all, my uncle raised his eyebrows at every specific detail. He seemed too preoccupied with the fact that the boy took off running as soon as he saw uncle rush towards us, but then he shook his head. “You need to be careful, Eve. You’ll just invite all sorts of people to take advantage of you.”
I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t need to tell my uncle that I was just trying to help him.
On the walk back home, my brother tried to get all the information about Flann from me. He started to become a bit spooked out, and said in a straightforward fashion, “He seems a bit odd.”
I didn’t contest him. My uncle was already looking pissed, and as soon as we reached the house, he changed into his formal attire, and went off to Church.
My aunt raised her eyebrows as she saw him leaving in a hurry. “Why is he so angry?”
“She made friends with a weird fellow.”
Aunt brought some tea and scones, and my brother spilled all the beans about the boy I had helped. Aunt didn’t seem concerned at first. She joked a bit with my brother for a while, and poked fun at me. “Was he really weird, eh?”
“Well, here’s the thing,” I said, thumbing the edge of my teacup. “He looked flawless. As though he hadn’t been out in the sunlight for years.”
My aunt found that hard to believe. Especially as I had painted him as a farmhand, she didn’t believe that he didn’t have freckles even as a ginger.
My aunt motioned to me, “Where’s your coat?”
I realised that I had left it over at the restaurant, on the booth. “I’ll go get it, it’s ok, it’s no big deal.”
My aunt seemed to become a bit unsettled, but made me promise to get it back as soon as possible, and not to leave my belongings around in the future.
In the evening my uncle came back, looking a bit worn out and dishevelled, but nothing too serious. I also noticed a stench of liquor from him, but I didn’t pay any mind. Adults drank in our household, and it wasn’t a big deal if he did as well.
For the next few days, I was unbothered, and almost forgot about the red haired boy. My school was keeping me busy, and I didn’t have much time to do anything else other than homework and helping around the house.
I forgot to do one thing though: bringing the coat back.
I started noticing tiffs and fights between my aunt and uncle even more nowadays, and even thought it was a bit jarring, I could live with it. Maybe they were trying to work on their issues. I didn’t know much about their struggles at that time. My uncle would come home black out drunk every evening, and my aunt would shout at him and it would turn ugly every time.
It wasn’t until one day, a few months after the incident, my uncle dropped my navy coat in front of me on the dining table, and asked, “What is this?”
I looked at him, and knew I was in trouble.
I tried to give excuses. I got stuck with my school, I didn’t have time to pick it up, and with every excuse, his anger grew even bigger. He started shouting, calling me irresponsible and ungrateful, and started arguing with my aunt. If only you hadn’t mollycoddled her like this, he shouted at her. I started crying, and my brother started shouting back at my uncle, something I had rarely seen him do. I didn’t understand why he was so upset about the damn coat. And not like they had explained anything to me. Everytime I tried to ask them why they were so angry at us asking about things, like the whispers, they just flat out ignored the question.
My uncle slammed his first on the dinner table, silencing all of us.
“You know, Eve,” he started, his gaze pointedly at me. “I wanted to know more about this Flann guy that you told me about. By the time I was there he had gone off, right? Nobody saw you both together, neither did he tell you his full name.”
I was this close to tearing me hair out. “Is this still about Flann? Is everyone so bummed about the fact that I helped a boy?”
He clicked. “That wasn’t it. You see this village is very small. The fact that you met a person you wouldn’t know, who looked like a native… the chances are slim to none.”
I waited with a bated breath.
“And I was curious, where had this boy come over here? There aren’t many ginger kids in your class, so I asked the entire town about a red haired boy named Flann.”
My aunt was already clutching her napkin, on the verge of tears.
“There were none.”
I shook my head, unable to comprehend. “There must be something wrong… it’s not- you couldn’t possibly-“
“What’s more,” he interjected, his voice stern. “You yourself saw that from the angle you were looking outside the window, it was impossible for you to spot the kid.”
I didn’t think it was that important, but it felt as though he was questioning my sanity. I didn’t conjure up that moment in my head.
“Uncle, I swear, I saw a boy.” That was all I could say before I felt sick. Was that a huge hallucination? Was I perhaps imagining the whispers as well?
My uncle sighed slightly, and then said, a bit concerned. “I know you saw somebody, but I don’t think…”
My aunt spoke up, in a low voice. “Do you know what Flann means, Eve? The meaning of that name?”
I started hyperventilating. “No.”
My aunt pinched the bridge of her nose. Something about her expression felt as though she had seen all of this before, as though she were reliving a traumatic memory yet again.
“It means ginger.”
At first I didn’t understand, but then my eyes widened with horror.
“The boy had no name… that’s why I couldn’t find him, Eve.” My uncle looked full of remorse.
I dropped my fork on the table to suppress a desperate cry. My sob was muffled by my hand, clamping down hard on my mouth.
“You invited it into your life, Eve. It’s unfortunate, but… these things are hard to get rid of.”