I had thought, when I first arrived in this strange town, that its silence was its greatest virtue. Coming from Lyon, where every street bristled with voices and the clang of carts, where arguments spilled from cafés and church bells overlapped in an almost orchestral cacophony, this village seemed a relief — a pocket of stillness set apart from the world. The air was crisp, the light diffused by a mist that clung stubbornly to the cobbles, and there was a sense of time paused, as though no clock dared move without permission.
But silence, I have since discovered, is not the same as peace. Silence is an atmosphere — it is the weight of something withheld, of words unsaid, of secrets grown so heavy they bow the very air.
The first days had been simple enough. I lodged at The Swan’s Rest, an inn whose beams sagged with age but whose hearth burned brightly. The innkeeper, a broad man named Hargreaves, was polite to a fault. His wife brought me bread that was always a day too hard, and his daughter, Margaret, carried my tray upstairs with downcast eyes. Politeness, I began to sense, was their armour.
Each morning I walked through the square, sketchbook in hand, taking notes on the architecture. The church dominated one side, its stone blackened by damp, its spire leaning just enough to suggest fatigue. Beside it, the town hall loomed with windows too narrow for civic pride. The fountain in the centre sputtered reluctantly, water pooling at its base in a greenish film. The villagers nodded as I passed, but never once did a smile reach their lips.
It was the absences I noticed first.
Faces I had marked in those first days — the bent-shouldered butcher, the seamstress who hummed as she wound thread, the boy who tossed stones at the well each dusk — began to vanish from the landscape. At first I excused it as chance. But soon the pattern became undeniable. By the second week, I could count no fewer than seven familiar figures who had ceased to appear. No explanation was offered. Their names were not spoken. They were erased as if they had never been.
One morning, curiosity drew me toward the graveyard. I had seen a coffin carried that way, borne not with grief but with grim efficiency. Four men in dark coats lifted the box as if it were cargo, not a companion. There was no hymn, no family in procession, only the scrape of boots and the dull thud of soil. Upon the coffin’s lid was a crude symbol, painted in tar or ash: a circle, divided into three equal parts, like a wheel broken from its axle.
I sketched it that night, my pencil faltering as though my own hand recoiled.
The graveyard lay on the western slope, walled by lichen-coated stone. Within, the earth undulated in disarray, as though centuries of burials had heaved the ground like waves. Angels, carved in softer stone, had lost their faces to rain. Crosses leaned like drunkards. Some graves were centuries old, their inscriptions illegible; others were startlingly new, their soil raw. A few bore no names at all, only the same sigil I had seen on the coffin.
It was here that I encountered the first true disturbance.
I had strayed toward the northern edge, where the graves were untended and ivy had strangled the markers. A man crouched there, half-hidden behind a crooked headstone. At first I mistook him for a vagrant, his clothes torn, his hair wild, his face half obscured by a thicket of beard. He muttered to himself, words spilling in a rhythm that suggested prayer, though it was in no tongue I knew.
When he noticed me, he rose with suddenness, and his eyes — I shall not forget them — glared with a light too fevered to be wholly natural. He pointed a trembling finger toward the disturbed earth and spoke in a rasping voice:
“Mary’s womb for blood. Christ’s blood, Mary’s blood, the Grail’s blood. Sacrifices, always sacrifices. The covenant must be kept.”
I stammered some question — who he was, what he meant — but before he could answer, two villagers appeared. They seized him roughly, dragging him toward the gate. One muttered, “Pay him no mind. He’s cracked. Always raving.” The other spat, “Best left in silence.”
Yet the words remained with me, like burrs clinging to cloth.
That evening, from the window of my chamber at the inn, I saw the castle for the first time. It crowned the distant cliff, black against the autumn sky. Its towers rose like broken teeth, its walls seeming less built than grown from the rock itself. What unsettled me was not its age, nor even its desolation, but the posture of its architecture. It did not spread outward in defiance of time, as castles often do. It folded inward, hunched, as though the very stones bowed beneath an unseen burden. Once — and I cannot swear it was not my imagination — I thought I glimpsed a flicker of light in one of its high windows.
The days passed in uneasy rhythm. My sketches grew darker, my notes increasingly consumed with the pattern of disappearances. When I asked the innkeeper if he had known the boy at the well, his expression hardened like plaster. When I inquired at the church about the graves marked only with symbols, the priest fixed me with such a withering glare that I felt my very soul chastised.
Once, Margaret, the innkeeper’s daughter, whispered as she cleared my plate, “Don’t look at the tree. Don’t ever look at the tree.” Then, seeing my startled face, she dropped her tray and fled.
The phrase burrowed into me. The tree.
I saw the ragged soothsayer again, days later, near the church steps. His manner was calmer, his words less a rant than a warning.
“The dead do not rest here,” he said softly. “They are bartered. Blood for blood. You will see the price, foreigner. You will see.”
Then he laughed — a brittle, hollow sound — and slipped away into the mist, leaving only the echo of his prophecy.
The silence of the town thickened. When I walked the lanes, conversations ceased as I approached. When I paused in the square, shutters closed discreetly. At night, I thought I heard footsteps beneath my window, though no figure was ever there.
It was after one such restless night that I overheard two drunkards at the well. They slumped against the stones, their words carrying farther than intended.
“Not the tree again,” slurred one.186Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCLojNFFRRz
“Another body,” muttered the other, shaking his head.
The word struck me like a spark to dry tinder. The tree.
I followed the direction of their gestures, a crooked lane leading into woodland. The mist grew denser beneath the branches, and the ground softened into mud. The trees here were ancient, their bark gnarled, their limbs twisted like arthritic fingers.
And then I saw it.
A great oak towered above the rest, its trunk wide enough to swallow three men. Its branches reached outward like the arms of some ancient titan, bent with the weight of centuries. From one such branch hung a body, suspended upside down by the ankles.
The sight froze me where I stood.
It was the body of a man — young, perhaps no older than myself — but his skull was split grotesquely, the bone cracked as though by deliberate force. Dried blood streaked his face, his clothes tattered and stiff. Beneath him, carved deep into the trunk, was the sigil again: the circle divided, stark and blackened.
The body swayed, though no wind stirred. The creak of rope was the only sound, louder in the silence than a scream.
I do not know how long I stood there, transfixed by horror and fascination. It was not merely murder I witnessed, but ritual. Not death, but sacrifice. The soothsayer’s words returned, echoing in my mind: Mary’s blood, Christ’s blood, the Grail’s blood.
At last, I stumbled back, my breath ragged, my limbs trembling. The mist seemed to close around me, pressing me toward the path, toward the inn, toward the illusion of safety. But I knew then — knew beyond doubt — that the silence of this town was not born of peace.
It was the silence of complicity.
That night, my journal bore these words, written with hands that shook so violently the ink splattered the page:
I came in pursuit of history. Instead, I have uncovered the present — raw, deliberate, and hanging from a tree. This town is no quiet refuge, but a wound disguised as stillness. And I, a foreigner, have placed myself within it. The silence is not empty. It watches. It waits. And it knows my name.
ns216.73.216.13da2
and then Add to home screen.