By Anneli Marks
Malum (Latin) Noun: 1. Evil 2. Apple
After forty-one years, one hundred eleven days, and five hours, Old Osvald’s waiting ended. A figure appeared on the country road between the green, rolling hills. Soon enough, his misty eyes could make out her face.
That young Miller girl is back, the old man thought, measuring her age by the scale of value only people his age understood.
Valeria Miller was forty, but with the aging lines that insomnia had etched into her face, one might have guessed her to be at least forty-five.
“No one who’s left has ever come back,” Old Osvald said aloud.
The voice in his left ear whispered, “She’s back because of her dreams. She’s the one you’ve been waiting for. When she reaches you, show her the truth.”
The voice in his right ear whispered, “She’s back because of her dreams. She’s the one you’ve been waiting for. Truth is a terrible thing and not yours to force on her. Let her choose.”
Osvald was right. Valeria Miller was back because of the daily night terrors.
The words of her latest psychiatrist replayed in Valeria’s head. “Revisiting a place that haunts us in our dreams can help us see it in a new light. By going back, you’ll find that it holds no real power over you beyond the meaning you’ve given it. This could be a step toward reclaiming that space and freeing yourself from its hold.”
She shook her head, tapping her thigh twice. Four hours on the bus had left her legs stiff, even after the thirty minutes she’d walked from the bus stop.
As she reached the first houses of that tiny Viigi village in northeastern Estonia, it seemed to her that the twenty-one years she’d been gone had not altered anything. The potholes on the street she used to bathe her dolls in after the rain were still there, and so was the cracked window of a gray house on Pond Street, held together by layers of tape. Lawns were tangles of shrubs and nettles, with occasional mole holes interrupting the greenness. Once a village of hundred and six, it had dwindled to just seventeen souls. Souls who were too stuck to leave or too old to leave. And as always, Old Osvald, a man who seemed ancient already in her childhood, sat at the bus stop that had not hosted a bus in the past thirty years. His misty eyes glinted, and his mouth tightened into a thin line. The cane, gripped tightly in his long, bony fingers, looked as though it might snap.
She remembered how the villagers speculated that he was waiting for his lost love and how the kids at the local school whispered that he’d murdered all the people who’d ever packed up to leave, and that’s why no one’s ever come back.
Valeria walked past him, feeling Old Osvald’s sharp gaze on her. She looked at him, meeting his eyes. Old and crazy, but he recognizes me, she thought. Since she wasn’t a child, she no longer feared him; all rumours about him had been untrue, after all. But why was he still sitting there, waiting at a bus stop that hadn’t been used in decades and never would be again?
“Show her now,” the voice whispered in Old Osvald’s left ear. “Otherwise, you’ve wasted all those years waiting.”
“Wait, and let her choose,” the voice whispered in Old Osvald’s right ear. “Otherwise, you’ve wasted all those years waiting.”
The tension in Old Osvald’s hawkish expression beckoned her to stop, to ask what he was waiting for. But her determination to do what she had come to do was stronger still. With her parents no longer living here, there was only one place she planned to visit—a place she now loathed just as much as the people living in this village.
I’ll ask later, Valeria thought, breaking her gaze with the old man. Though he’ll certainly say, “Because I must,” as always.
When she looked over her shoulder, Osvald’s gaze was intently fixed on the cloudless, blue sky. His eyes squinted, and his lips moved as if he were speaking. It was a pose Valeria—and all the villagers—knew well; he’d sat this way every day. When anyone asked why he was staring at the sky, he always replied with the same words: “Because I must.”
Valeria walked up Pond Street to the remote hill where an old horse chestnut tree grew. It was a sprawling, ancient thing, its limbs bent to the ground, creating a vast living hall beneath. Every child in the village had played there, every lover had sat and kissed beneath its canopy, and every stranded passerby had sought refuge from the rain. It was a place where Valeria had once played with local kids, climbing its branches and imagining it as a grand elven castle. And it was the place of all her favorite childhood adventures, yet also the place where her nightmares always brought her back.
“Why do you haunt me when I’ve only ever loved you?” Valeria asked aloud. “Is it you, the ghost, the dead Vikings, I’ve disturbed? Twenty-one years of nightmares is a punishment worse than death.”
Two years after moving away—two years of nightmares—she had contacted a historian to learn about her hometown, hoping to find any reason why a place she loved now haunted her. She learned that the hill with the great horse chestnut was an ancient Viking burial mound. A sacred place. A small shiver ran down her spine as she stepped into the greenery. The canopy above arched like a vaulted ceiling, with the soft noon sunlight dappling through layers of emerald. The earthy aroma of moss and the bitter scent of wet tree bark mingled with the sweetness of fresh sap—a smell so familiar. She reached the tree trunk, wide as four men, twisted and cracked with age, and plunged her hands into the gaping hollow at its center.
“Whoever I’ve disturbed, whoever I’ve offended, here is my token of respect.” Valeria hid a silver coin among the soft rotten wood and leaves as a psychic she’d visited in despair had recommended. “I’m sorry for playing and laughing on your graves. Please, release me.”
“You’d disgraced their burial site—a place no one should ever tread,” the psychic had said. “The only way to make amends and calm those angry spirits is to offer them silver and an apology.”
She closed her eyes, conjuring the dream she saw night after night. It always began the same way. She was a child, running to the great chestnut tree through the late spring dusk, the wind whipping her tear-streaked cheeks. Her parents were home—Pond Street echoing with their yelling and cursing—unaware she had even left the house. She’d enter the green fortress, climbing onto one of the low, sweeping branches, her back pressed against its mighty trunk. Then, soft light, like breaking dawn, would filter through the canopy. She’d look up. Figures, pale as mist and monstrously tall and slender, would tower over her and the great chestnut tree, their bodies glowing in the dark. A light, white as milk, would beam through the leaves, through her flesh and bone, making her hands—covering her eyes—translucent. Then she’d feel the pull: the ground vanishing beneath her feet, and fear so primal and intense her heart seemed to beat itself to death. All thoughts would press against her skull, squeezing out her eyes and swelling her tongue. She’d try to scream, but she had no will, no voice. And then she’d wake, panting and covered in cold sweat.
“Enough,” she said, opening her eyes.
The greenness swayed softly around her. There were no monsters made of mist and light reaching for her, only soft golden glow and a flicker of clear, cloudless sky. The weight in her chest and throat lifted. A sense of ease she hadn’t felt in years washed over her. She patted the tree trunk gently, a smile on her lips, and thanked whoever might be listening.
When Old Osvald saw Valeria disappear into the green cavern of the ancient horse chestnut tree, he leaned heavily on his cane and rose.
“I’ve conquered time—and myself,” he mumbled, delving into his coat pocket to retrieve something he’d kept for forty-one years, one hundred and twelve days, and six hours. It was something he’d found while plowing the fields around the old chestnut, used once and never again. “She’ll see the truth if she decides she must.”
The old man went home, his soul trembling like his hands in anticipation.
Valeria sensed a change in the village as she walked down Pond Street. The bench at the bus stop was empty. She had never seen it empty in all the years she lived there—Old Osvald was always there. He sat there when she woke up and was still there when she went to sleep, enduring rain, wind, and snow. But now, something round and silvery lay on the bench, catching the midday sun. Beside it was a yellowed piece of paper, neatly folded but torn at the edges.
She strolled toward the bench with deliberate slowness, her eyes scanning for any sign of the old man or other villagers. Seeing no one, she picked up the paper next to the silver orb, which was the size of an apple, and unfolded it.
“You have come back because of your dreams,” it read. “You want answers. The truth. The sphere is the greatest source of knowledge—great, but terrible. Once you learn it, there is no unlearning it, no changing, and no fixing what you discover. If you dare to learn the truth, touch the largest symbol, but only if not a speck of your soul protests. I, too, saw those dreams until I uncovered the truth behind them.”
How can he possibly know about the dreams? Valeria thought, stunned. She hadn’t discussed them with anyone except her psychologist and the psychic. Truth? But I already know the truth.
She picked up the orb. Though small, it weighed at least five pounds. Intricate symbols, unlike anything she had ever seen before, covered every inch of its surface.
“Runes?” she murmured, then shook her head. They looked futuristic and geometric—perhaps even entirely fictional.
One symbol, the largest of them all and slightly raised, seemed to beckon her thumb to caress it. Old Osvald left it for me, she thought. Waited all these years to hand it to me. But why me?
Just as her thumb was about to touch it, a quote flashed through her mind.
“You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.”
She quickly set the orb down, feeling again like a child caught peeking through the keyhole of her parents’ bedroom on that fateful noon. My damned curiosity cost me my parents’ marriage, my marriage, my job, she thought bitterly.
She marched away, leaving the village—and the mysterious orb—behind her. She walked a hundred feet, then turned around so suddenly that she kicked up a swirl of gravel dust.
“Damn you,” she muttered, picking up the orb again. “What are you? Why waste decades of life over you?”
She pressed hard on the largest symbol, rubbing it as if it were a genie’s lamp.
A wide blue beam shot up from the orb, illuminating the vast expanse of sky above. There, revealed under the beam’s light, was what had been silently levitating in camouflage for thousands of years: hundreds of aircrafts shaped like giant spheres—a sea of silver orbs—hovering silently a few thousand feet above her. They were watching her, her species, like scientists observing and testing wild animals.
Nose pressed against his kitchen window, Old Osvald watched as Valeria stood motionless, staring at the sky like Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom.
Now she knows it wasn’t a dream, he thought. But a memory we were meant to forget.
During those forty-one years and one hundred eleven days of waiting at the bus stop, watching the sky, he had seen Valeria and other villagers levitate through the night sky again and again.
Shutting the curtains, Osvald turned away, the greatest mystery of the human soul unraveling within him. The ancient grief of waiting—of wasting life away in anxious suspense—gradually gave way to quiet joy.
***
Anneli Marks has published various short stories in English and Estonian, writing speculative fiction with a focus on fantasy and horror. Born in Estonia during the turbulent collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of the Republic of Estonia, she now resides in Denmark.
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