Folklore of the Night

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Showing posts from February, 2022

Granny's in the Cellar

February 06, 2022

Grandma had always been such a help around the house when she visited; especially in the fall of the year. At harvest time, she was a cyclone of activity around the old kitchen helping Mom get everything into mason jars. She was odd just the same. Even though no one liked them, she insisted on preserving such strange things as miniature cobs of corn, and she especially had a thing about canning plums. Now plums are great, but canned? Yuck! I’m sure that those things sat for year gathering dust on the shelves of our cellar. But then when I was about ten years old, we kids became less interested in walking the half mile down the road to visit her at her own place. She was quickly going senile. With each passing month she became more and more the stranger. It was particularly disturbing to hear a good Chri...

Carpathian Nights is my first novel and a significant effort to move beyond Hollywood stories of Vampires and Werewolves to the original folklore of Romania. It is set in a Sixteenth Century village among the Carpathian Mountains. The novel spans the course of one year where each chapter centers on the folklore of each respective month.

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An excerpt from Carpathian Nights:

The beautifully carved grave markers cast long moon shadows.Each was crowned by a thick layer of blue-tinted snow.The detailed woodwork and the particulars concerning the occupant lying beneath lay shrouded in the gloom of the night.None of these facts registered with Father Sovata.Instead, he focused on the silhouette of the enormous wolf rising from a nearby grave, dragging the remains of an old woman.

The whole impression was of a supernatural thing, as if the wolf were materializing through layers of casket, soil, and snow to ascend to the surface. While this was the general appearance, the priest knew or thought he knew that the image was an illusion and that the whole occurrence, though disturbing and repulsive, was a natural and understandable phenomenon. This was a season of hunger. It was only natural that wolves would grow daring in their pursuit of food. In either case, his impulse to cross himself seemed like a prudent thing.

The wolf spotted the priest at nearly the same moment he spied it. The beast froze, all absolutely still save the movement of eyes that seemed to glow a dull amber in the darkness. Father Sovata and the wolf eyed each other for some moments, then a low, reverberating growl arose from some echoing chamber deep within the animal. Small cornices of snow crumbled from the tops of several of the grave markers.

The priest slowly moved away as unobtrusively as he could until he was within dashing distance of the rectory. Only then did he bolt for safety. He glanced backward as he cleared the threshold. Yet that brief instance produced the indelible image of the wolf sprinting across the graveyard, triumphantly leaping over the low fence with its prize.It then horribly lost its grip on the meal as the old woman snagged on the iron spikes that crowned the fence. The wolf, with visible regret, bounded into the night, leaving the woman in the attitude of a macabre scarecrow, guarding judgment day's harvest against nocturnal scavengers.