Not a lot of people know this, but up until the 1800s it wasn’t uncommon for wealthy travelers to blindfold themselves when crossing mountain ranges. It seems bizarre today, but the same vistas that we now use to make our desktop backgrounds snazzy used to inspire fear in our ancestors.
They’d look out of their carriage at the rugged, snow-peaked stone before them, at the dark valleys untouched by human hands below them and avert their gaze in fear. Land which lacked civilization wasn’t beautiful, it was terrifying. Out there in the untamed wilderness there was danger, there were things beyond comprehension. Out there, in the impassable wood there was death. A piece of cloth wrapped around one’s eyes would help stave off thoughts of human fragility.
The whole idea seems silly, but having heard what I have heard, I can’t help to wonder whether the noblemen who were passing through the Slovakian Tatra mountain range at sundown wore something else along with their blindfold.
I wonder if they wore earmuffs.
My trip to Slovakia was a last ditch effort to save the band. The Warriors of Perun was my baby and I knew that if I didn’t put together some new songs it would become a stillbirth. I had hoped that by escaping the constant rustling of Prague’s subway system and the mysterious smell of dog-food that lingered around my neighborhood I would manage to unlock some magical creative energy. Lyric ideas that could fill entire albums hung from trees in the forests of our Eastern neighbor. I figured all I had to do was to disconnect from the Internet and go pick the luscious inspiration fruit. I was wrong.
Even though Slovakia is completely land-locked the mountain lodge that I ended up booking smelled pervasively of fish. The lodge also happened to be the closest thing to a village pub in the area, so every day from noon until sunrise the walls shook with pálenka-fueled singing sessions. The part of their advertisement that mentioned a tranquil rural location was also misleading. Whilst The Goral Inn was, indeed, located in the middle of nowhere, it was also located right next to a major road that led through the middle of nowhere. The Tatra Mountain vista which I came to see was constantly surrounded by the fog of Polish truck drivers.
Within the first hour of me getting settled into the Goral Inn I had heard the drunk men downstairs howl the same song about throwing cherry branches into unmarried woman’s dresses thrice. This was not the writing retreat that I had in mind. I considered getting in my car and driving back towards the smell of dog-food but I reminded myself that my trip to Slovakia was a last ditch effort to save the band. You can’t give up halfway through a Hail Mary. I refilled my vape, avoided getting run over crossing the road and hopped the fence into the forest in search of inspiration.
After a couple minutes of awkwardly stomping through shrubs I found a quaint hiking trail that I thought could inspire a chorus in me. The cracking of the twigs beneath my feet brought back memories of how Gustave, our drummer, would slam crackling electricity out of his set. If the birds would have been chirping faster, and maybe a bit more manically, they’d sound just like the killer licks that Thuy-Anh could hammer out on her mandolin. The entire forest had conspired to remind me of my band-mates but it refused to give me what I truly wanted – inspiration. I was drawing a complete blank creatively.
So I pushed further.
The forest trail slowly disappeared beneath my feet, the air became cool under the shade of the thickening tree line and the happily chirping birds were replaced with the whistling of the wood. I just kept on walking, leaving a thick cloud of strawberry cheesecake vape smoke behind me. I knew that somewhere in the forest there was a muse that would help me spin gold into my notes app. All I had to do was find her.
Instead I found someone else.
A pale girl passed out on a bed of moss. She looked odd; the dress she wore gave off the impression of being made out of a potato sack and her mouth was covered in the slightest hint of purple. The blueberry bush next to her provided some explanation but there was still something about her that pulled on the strings of my brain.
Pale girl, lying in a bed of moss,
Mourning her best friend’s loss,
As soon as the words manifested in my head I could see Thuy-Anh rolling her eyes. The Warriors of Perun deserved better than cryptic single syllable rhymes. I could do better. I just needed to try harder. I took another puff of my vape and tried to come up with something more creative. Just as I could feel another wave of lyrics stirring in the back of my skull, the girl opened her eyes.
I immediately became self-conscious. Someone had caught me watching them sleep again.
“Whoa! Another person!” I exclaimed, hoping to side step the awkwardness.
She brushed aside the cloud of smoke and stared at my vape.
“Want a hit? Strawberry cheesecake,” I tried to make my offer as casual as I could but the smoke choked back in my throat. She waited for my coughing fit to die down before she answered.
“No, thank you.” The girl replied in a hoarse voice.
“Your loss,” I said and took another, less embarrassing, puff of my vape.
The girl’s eyes bulged as they darted around my body. It was as if I was the first human being that she had ever seen, as if the mere existence of a vape was some work of science fiction. For a split second I was worried that I had stumbled upon some strange cult reject, but when she started to stare at my hat my mind eased.
Strange clothes, pale skin, bad at social cues and is interested in my cool snapback? I figured the chances of me bumping into a graphic designer, even in the middle of a forest, were still higher than the chances of me bumping into an escaped lunatic. Gustave had been complaining about how our logo looked more like a bearded man sitting on a dog rather than a pagan god riding his steed into battle. As much as I hated to admit it, I was partial to agree. A plan to leave Slovakia with something more than just lyrics started to brew in my head.
“Man, it’s so nice out here without any e-mails or IMs, right? It’s like we’re living in a completely different world,” I said, trying to establish some camaraderie before moving onto logo design.
She just stared back at me, fascinated by my hat.
“Which lodge you staying at?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t have heard of it,” She said. I noted her hipster response as more evidence for the graphic designer theory.
“Cool, cool,” I said, puffing on my vape for morale. “I’m chillin’ at the Goral Inn. Came out here for two weeks to just kinda get away from stuff, y’know? I’m a song writer. Well, I think of myself as more of a poet, but whatever, that’s just a label. Figured a bit of the forest would help me write some really earthy stuff, there’s not enough nature in modern life, y’know?”
“You make music?” Her eyes lit up.
The high and mighty angle was working. I doubled down.
“I make art,” I said, reaching for my phone, “I’d show you but- Oh shit! There’s signal here!”
One bar – a tiny sliver of nothing in a desert, but still better than actual nothing. I pulled up a video from one of our performances and played it. The girl stood entirely too close to me, I could have sworn she was smelling me, but I didn’t care. Even though the pixeled video was buffering every two seconds it brought back high-definition memories. I was back in that dingy dungeon bar rocking out and tasting a flavor of reality that they don’t keep stocked on the shelves. The Warriors of Perun stood in front of the wild crowd like preachers delivering an ecstatic sermon to a devoted flock. I needed to be there again. I couldn’t let the band die because of my writer’s block.
That’s when I heard it.
It started off as a low rumble. I even ignored it for a second, mistaking it for echo of distant thunder. But the sky was clear and red in the setting sun. This was not thunder.
“Do you hear that?” I asked, pausing the video. There was a low, creeping dread in the noise. I could feel it in the back of my neck.
“Hear what?” the girl blinked.
“That,” I said. The noise had gained a gurgling quality. As dark and elemental as the tone sounded, it shook with human error.
“Oh, that’s just the people from my village saying goodbye to the sun.” She had become animated suddenly, as if we were finally talking about something she could relate to. “Hey, do you know why people scream at the sun?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I yelled past the growing noise.
There was a screeching mania to the screams; it was as if whatever mass of bodies that was producing the sound was in wildly different emotional states. Sadness, anger, joy, every possible palate of a scream mixed together into one horrid yell. And the girl didn’t seem to find anything odd about that.
She was no graphic designer.
“They’re saying goodbye to the sun! The people from my village do it every sunset. I don’t know why but-“
“This is some culty shit. I am so out!” I couldn’t contain my fear. The wails have gotten so loud that the goddamn trees were shaking. Whatever that screaming was I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. But as I started to break out into a sprint, even with the deafening screams in my ear, another voice cut through-
“Merde Robert! You have to promote the band!” Gustave used the end of his old cigarette to light up a new one. He had just seen me talk to two girls at a bar without mentioning The Warriors of Perun. He wasn’t happy. “Without likes and shares we are dead! You must promote every chance that you get!”
I froze. The world around me was shaking with the howls of some demented ritual, but I had a duty to fulfill. “Uh, pleasure meeting ya. If ya wanna hear more of my music look up the Warriors of Perun on Spotify. Chuck us a like on Facebook too.” As soon as I got the words out of my mouth I broke into a sprint. Gustave would have been proud.
I don’t know when I stopped hearing the screaming. The adrenalin was coursing through my veins with such fervor that the only thing I could hear clearly in my ears was my heartbeat. As frightened as I was, however, I was still able to make my way back to the Goral Inn without a second thought. I have no sense of direction. I was just lucky.
I went back to my room to meditate in hopes of breaking into some forest inspired trance that would fill my head with poetic rhymes, but the echoes of the screams cut through any semblance of calm that my mind would allow. All I could think about were the red, raw voice chords of the people that screamed at the setting sun. As discomforting as the idea was, there was something about it that reached out to me, something that begged to be explored. I tried to deny its pull. I tried to think about anything other than the screaming. But I couldn’t.
Outside occasional headlights would pierce through the impossible darkness of the forest. The unexplainable smell of fish wafted around the room as if it were the ghost of a misguided sailor. Below me, the drunk men sang:
Oyyyy Aničkaa, do not go into the wood,
Some secrets, are not to be understood,
Oyyyy Aničkaa, they scream at the setting sun,
If you hear them, just pull up your skirt and run,
I froze. The moonshine soaked crowd downstairs was singing about a village where everyone screams at the setting sun. The song was a solemn plea, a warning of a mysterious community that did not mean well and was best left alone. The message was simple: Stay away.
We had just finished playing a show in a bar where the walls were wet with sweat and testosterone. As soon as we got off stage I just became another face in the crowd of burly beards but Thuy-Anh had developed a small harem of suitors. “See, that’s why people are so into incest porn,” she told her followers as they bought her more shots, “It’s not that people want to sleep with their brothers and sisters, it’s that it’s taboo. People always levitate towards things that are forbidden.”
Downstairs, the air was thick with the fog of smoke. The black feather tipped hats that the Gorals wore were cocked at a drunken angle, their white shirts carried the signs of spillage and cigarette burns. A couple of hand-axes, way too sharp to be at a drinking establishment, lay propped up against the bar. I ordered a shot of pálenka and kept my vape out of sight to fit in.
The alcohol scratched its way down my throat and started kindling a fire in my belly. I wanted to ask for a glass of water, but I asked something else instead:
“I heard you guys were singing a song about the village where people scream at the setting sun. Is that a real place?”
The balding bartender with the dirty towel around his neck simply laughed as he poured me another shot.
“Some questions are simply not meant to be asked.”
I tried to pry him for more information but he wouldn’t budge. Instead he just kept on pouring me more shots of that devil water. I tried to talk to the other men in the pub, to gain more information about the mysterious village that they sang about but they all responded with the same words.
“Some questions are simply not meant to be asked.”
Even my attempts to get them to perform the song about the village again fell flat. The chorus was less interested in singing about the eldritch mysteries that hid in the depths of the valleys and more interested in singing about throwing cherry branches at unmarried girls. With each rejection came a shot. With each shot my tongue became less cooperative in asking questions. I passed out as soon as I hit my bed.
Faint traces of stars shone through the treetops but they were simply specs of dust in the all-encompassing darkness. Beneath my feet branches cracked like fresh snow. I was lost, in the dark, and alone.
A light wind brushed through the silhouettes of trees I could not see. I tried to focus on the snapping of twigs beneath my feet, to find some semblance of calm in the disorienting darkness through which I was traveling but my frantic mind did not allow for tranquility.
I wasn’t the only one walking through the woods. I stopped. The crackle of the forest path behind me didn’t stop. I was being followed.
The blackness behind me shimmered. Outlines of trees and bushes slowly started to materialize from behind a dim, red light. A chorus of screams echoed through the woods. The shrubbery started to shake at the low tenor of the wails.
I ran, turning the path beneath my feet into a staccato series of pops and crackles, but soon the screams that were following me overpowered my footsteps. The outlines of the dark forest manifested in the crimson hue of the setting sun.
I tripped. A lightning bolt of pain seared its way up my leg. There was no escape from the chorus of screams.
They walked on two legs but that was the only human thing about them. The procession of dark figures moved steadily through the wood, their horrid arms extended towards me. A maddening red light shone from the tips of their claws. The closer they got the more I felt the blistering heat stemming from their ghastly appendages.
From behind the blinding, hot light I could see their milky white eyes. Somewhere in those shapeless forms dirtied with specks of darkness was an incomprehensible anger. They shuffled towards me through the wood. I tried to yell for help, but their deafening wails drowned out my screams.
Beads of sweat crawled down my forehead. My body refused to move. The screams in my throat got stuck and came out as whimpers. Whatever was happening wouldn’t last long. I knew I was about to die.
The red-tipped claws were so close to my face I could smell my beard singing but suddenly, without a glint of warning, they disappeared.
A dark mass of flesh leaped out of the darkness at the mysterious creatures. The forest flickered with a bloody light as a powerful force waged war with the monsters that meant me harm.
The cold sweat that covered my body heated up under the boiling ache that washed through my skull. I woke up dazed and confused and with a promise to never touch pálenka ever again.
The hangover was rough and within minutes the sink of my room was filled up with stomach acids that tasted of rotten peaches. Yet as I splashed water on my face, trying to reacquaint myself with reality, something became deathly clear.
Out there, in the woods, was something that begged to be explored, a foreign force that demanded to have songs written about it. Out there, in the woods, was a village where people scream at the setting sun.
And I was going to find it.