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“Don’t mind her. She gets nervous about outsiders and new things. So. You are here for the festival?”
“Yeah. We read about it in here.” I held up our book. “You know, the whole goat’s head, sacrificing lambs, possible pact with the Big D thing.”
Mariana laughed. “This is how we get our tourists. Florence has the David; we have Satan. I’m sorry to disappoint you—mostly there are sheep and superstitions. But the wine is fantastic and the festival is a lot of fun. Here. Leave your bags. They’ll be safe. That’s one of the great things about this town—everything’s safe; you never have to worry. Can you imagine doing that in London or New York or Moscow?”
“I got my bike stolen once, and it was locked up,” Baz said. He gave her his pretend shy face, and Izzie rolled her eyes. “I really missed the bell the most.”
Mariana was a good sport and laughed at his lame, player joke. “So sorry about that. Maybe a little tour of Necuratul will cheer you up. Come on. I’ll show you around.”
“What’s with the stones and salt?” I asked, dropping my pack.
“An old folk custom. Supposed to keep evil spirits out. Nothing undead can cross the threshold. And nothing undead can eat. That’s why she offered you the bread while you were still on the other side—to prove you were among the living. If you’d tried to grab the bread while crossing the threshold, you would have been burned to ash.”
Baz whistled. “Yowza.”
“You get a lot of undead coming in, snapping pictures, asking for I Partied with the Goat’s Head T-shirts?” I asked.
Mariana nodded gravely and sighed. “Why do you think they call them unquiet spirits? They trash the rooms at the inn and they don’t tip. Anyway, you’re not supposed to go into the forest. And you’re especially not supposed to take bread into the forest. It’s like feeding the undead, giving them power.”
“Superstitions, man. Culture of fear. Totally bassackward, right?” John smirked.
“Every place has its traditions,” Mariana said a little coldly.
Baz leaned in close to his cousin. “Way to endear yourself to the locals, my friend.” To Mariana he said, “I love hearing about customs!” He fell in next to Mariana as she led us through the heart of Necuratul.
The guidebook hadn’t lied: the town was storybook charming—in a “we fear for our lives” sort of way. Each house was circled with salt. Braids of garlic hung from the windows and were nailed over the doors. Behind the village was a cleared area of rolling farmland populated by sheep. It was peaceful. Postcard pretty. Then I noticed the scarecrows with the big evil-eye symbols painted over their foreheads. Nobody wants that in the family photo album. But the masterpiece of the whole place was the enormous Gothic church that sat at the top of a hill at the very edge of the town, practically up against the first line of trees. I counted thirteen twisty spires. The entrance was guarded by big wooden doors with faces carved into them. Up close the faces were gruesome. Screaming mouths. Eyes opened wide in terror. People begging—for what, I couldn’t say and didn’t want to know.
“Wow. Charming,” I said.
“I know. Fear is no way to live.” Mariana pushed open the doors and we went inside.
“Whoa,” Baz gasped.
From the outside there was no way to tell how freaking beautiful it was inside. The walls—every single bit of them—shimmered with colorful, gold-leaf murals. They’d been pretty amazingly preserved.
“This was all done in the Middle Ages,” Mariana said. “It is a history of the town.”
On the left the panels were like something out of a horror movie. Freaky images of dying crops. Diseased, half-skeletal people covered in sores. Children crying. Dogs attacking each other over a scrap of meat. Dead bodies laid out on carts and set on fire, women weeping nearby. On the right the murals showed a happier story than on the left. Farmers working in their fields. Women baking bread. The crops thriving. Animals grazing peacefully. It looked pretty much like the village we’d just toured, except for one weird thing you had to sort of squint to see. In all the pictures on the right there were shadowy images of children and teenagers in the forest, watching.
“Even the ceiling’s painted,” John said, craning his neck.
Overhead was just one image. It showed a lake surrounded by forest. The villagers stood in one clump beside it. The children stood in the lake up to their waists. Their hands were tied together with rope. A priest in a red, hooded robe held aloft a goat’s head that seemed to have braids coming down from its horns. It was creepy but also kind of funny. Heidi the Goat’s Head of Satan. Actually, I’d seen girls in the clubs sporting a look pretty similar to that. A thick mist was coming over the trees, and the children had their faces craned toward it while the adults kept their eyes on the goat’s head. The water around the children bubbled and swirled.
“That’s a happy picture,” I cracked.
Mariana shivered. “So bizarre, isn’t it?” She laughed. “You didn’t have to grow up staring at that thing. Believe me, it kept us all in line.”
I was glad for the joke. The church really did give me the creeps.
“So what’s with the Heidi braids on the goat?” I asked.
Mariana walked to the altar where a huge book was propped. She flipped pages until she got to a drawing that showed the goat’s head up close and personal: the glowing eyes, the braids pooled under its chin. But in this drawing, it was clear that the braids were made up of lots of different kinds and colors of hair.
Isabel recoiled. “What. The. Hell?”
“The Soul of Necuratul,” Mariana explained. “According to the story, during the dark time, every seven years, each family sacrificed one child to Satan in exchange for security. To show that you were loyal, that you would keep your promise and follow through, you had to cut the child’s hair and twine it into a plait attached to the goat. By doing that you promised your child’s soul.”
“That is seriously f’ed up, man,” Baz said staring at the picture.
