The Folveshch: Chapter 1

The Folveshch

The boy’s father lost his mind in the winter of 1922. I was fourteen at the time and little Aleksy Malenhov had just turned nine. My family and I lived across the valley from the Malenhovs' crumbling cottage, and on a Sunday morning in snow-covered December my father noticed something unusual. It was the absence of chimney smoke. A trivial detail, you might think, but the villagers of Renkassk knew different. It meant that no fire kept the Malenhov cottage warm that day, and winters ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle proved fatal if not prepared for.
“Viktor’s fire never goes out in winter,” my father said, peering out through the window of our house. I watched as his breath cooled on the pane.
“What if he’s out of firewood?” I asked at his side.
“The man’s a carpenter, Stefan,” he replied tautly. “He has more logs stacked up outside his home than he knows what to do with.”
By noon my father decided he would cross the field of snow and aid them, afraid that Viktor had grown sick.
“I have to go now, Stefan,” he told me, pulling the collar of his coat up to his jaw.
My ears pricked. “To the Malenhovs’? I want to come with you.”
Papa hacked and coughed mucous into his handkerchief. “You can’t. I’ll call on your cousin Pyotr first, and he’ll come and help me.”
“Let me and Pyotr go,” I protested, putting myself between him and the door. “You’re ill. If you go out into the cold you’ll –”
He shoved me aside like a twig. “When you’re a man of this community you leave nobody suffering, and in turn they’ll grant you the same. If I ever suffer, I want you to remember that.” He heaved a sack of wood over his shoulder and stepped out into the snow. My shoulders sagged as I watched his grey silhouette retreat into the mist.
“Close the door,” my mother said behind me. She lay on a heap of blankets in front of our woodstove, staring into the flames until it sucked the moisture from her eyes. She cried a lot in winter; some kind of seasonal depression. I eased the door back into its frame and returned to my position at the window.
Two hours later something burst through the conifers. I jumped up, realising it was Papa, and opened the door for him with a smile. He tumbled through, powdered white with snow and ruddy-cheeked, and his breath caught hoarsely in his throat. My smile faded when I saw he was in shock. I asked him what was wrong with Viktor, but it was yet another hour before Papa had calmed down enough to answer me. He sat in his armchair with blank eyes, gripping a mug of hot broth so hard he might break it.
From what I could gather, he’d approached the Malenhov cottage and seen the untouched, snowy pyramid of logs by the side of it. He told me of the sudden dread he’d felt upon seeing it, knowing for certain that something had happened to Viktor some days ago. When he followed Pyotr inside the cottage, he found Mr Malenhov face-down on the floor and unable to move. He said the carpenter’s fingers had turned blue, his brown eyes were cloudy and he was completely unresponsive to his name. Pyotr had hurried to his side, being the closest thing we had to a doctor in Renkassk, while Papa sought out little Aleksy. He found the boy shivering in his bed with his coat, scarf and boots on, hungry and pale, but otherwise well.
“Did he say what happened to Viktor?” I prompted when my father fell quiet, seemingly unable to bring himself to continue. “Did he see anything, Papa?”
According to the rest of the tale, Aleksy told him Viktor had come home two days ago in the middle of the night, crawling on his hands and knees, and in tears. When Aleksy had rushed over to him, his father collapsed on the spot and not moved since. Aleksy was too frail to lift him and he didn’t know what to do besides hope. The boy had covered him in a blanket and fed him as best he could, but he couldn’t bear his father’s staring, open-mouthed visage for long. Aleksy was frightened of him. Viktor had been as amiable a man as any, but the man that my father found that day would unnerve him and Pyotr for the rest of their lives.
The news of Viktor’s eerie decline spread through the village of Renkassk far quicker than we’d have liked. Offers to adopt Aleksy Malenhov rippled through the valley, though the boy rejected them, vowing not to leave his father alone in the cottage in hopes he might return to his former self when winter subsided  ...  But by the time spring thinned the ice, rumour had it that Viktor had become gaunt and sickly. His blank eyes stared wide and his mouth hung open into his chest, displaying rotten teeth and a dry, yellow tongue. Saddest of all, I heard that Aleksy’s mind and body had deteriorated too, and he became a weak child, dependent on his father’s silent company.

Spring brought with warmer weather, and so the snow began to melt in the vast woodland between Renkassk and Darakyev. It meant school time for Aleksy Malenhov, no matter how much he objected. Renkassk had no schoolhouse to call its own, though the neighbouring town of Darakyev educated boys between the ages of five and fourteen. Six days a week, twenty-four weeks of the year I had crossed the tundra, braved the woodland and attended the schoolhouse eight miles away, but my term in education ended last year. Still, I offered to take Aleksy halfway to the town every morning at dawn, since the other boys dared not offer.
Like any other day, I perched him on my bicycle seat before taking to the pedals. It was an old bike with skinny wheels and rust on the frame, but it served its purpose well enough. Aleksy held on to me around the middle and I laboured to the top of a gentle hill so that the rest of his journey was an easy few miles down.
I hopped off the bike and kicked down the stand. “You know where you’re going?” I asked as I helped him down from the seat. “You remember where you are?”
“Net.”
Same answer every morning. I pointed beyond the woodlands. “Down there and through the trees is Darakyev, where the schoolhouse is, remember?”
He withdrew his hands into his sleeves and shook his head.
“Fine,” I sighed. I bent down to his level and took him by the shoulders. “Listen closely to me then, Aleksy, because I’m going in minute. Follow the trail from here down to the trees and you’ll find Strange One’s Pass. It’s a woodland road with a fingerpost, where your papa would take you to help gather firewood before he got ill. Right?” Recognition flickered in his icy blue eyes. “Follow it, stay on it, until you reach the frozen river. The schoolhouse is just beyond the bridge – you can’t miss it. Got that?”
“Strange One’s Pass,” he repeated.
I smiled at him; my mother said that was my charm. “Da. See you in –”
Aleksy cocked his head. “Why’s it called Strange One’s Pass?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the people in Darakyev named it that.”
“Well, I don’t want to go there,” he mumbled. “I think that’s where we saw the Folveshch.”
I stood. He told me the same thing every morning. “No you didn’t, Aleksy. Nobody’s seen the Folveshch because it’s just some stupid folklore somebody told about you when you were little. My grandpapa told me it, but when you’re older you’ll realise it’s not true.”
“It is true. Papa and I saw it. We –”
“Stop talking about it.”
“But it’s the truth. It happened.”
“Nobody knows what happened to your father,” I said, grabbing my bike handles in a huff, “but whatever it was, you can’t keep blaming it on the supernatural. It was God. How many times do I have to tell you?”
I watched him for a moment as he lifted the leather strap of his satchel over his head and snapped it across his chest in silence. He looked so much smaller in his long coat and too-big boots. I nodded towards the town in the distance and said, “Get a move on, or you’ll be late for school.”
He tied his scarf around his mouth and ears, and waved goodbye.
Little Aleksy would reach the school in an hour, and eight hours later I’d cycle to the top of the hill again and lift him onto the seat for the ride back to Renkassk. It was the same routine, same instruction, same conversation on loop every day. But as my papa said, one day we’d be men of the community, and nobody, not even the weakest of us, should be left forgotten. I let out the horrible cough I’d been hiding all the way up here, and took to the pedals again.
After seeing Aleksy off, my next stop would be his home. Viktor Malenhov had once been the village carpenter and never short of work. His home was not shabby in the way you’d envision neglect, but a working-man’s home would always be the last of his projects and Viktor was no exception. He’d been a quiet man with hardened palms, with sleeves rolled up past his elbows even in the harsh winters, and nobody alive had seen him without a beard. He’d had two wives, but I wasn’t sure which, if either, was Aleksy’s mother.
I reached the cottage half an hour later, though depending which way the wind blew it could take longer sometimes. The warmer months exposed the jagged path to their cottage, but still the degree of incline made it a difficult trip on two wheels. A long time ago I would look forward to visiting the Malenhovs with Papa, but the sight of their cottage nowadays made my blood run cold, knowing who was inside.
Viktor, after only four months since my father and Pyotr had found him, had deteriorated into something just shy of a skeleton. I pushed aside the wooden door and it creaked on its hinges, sending something cold slithering down my spine. Viktor sat in his armchair by their low-burning fire, with his mouth agape, and his blank eyes staring straight through me.
“Hello,” I said, in case he could still understand me. An awful rasping sounded in his throat and the dark hairs on my arms prickled. I supposed it was the only form of communication he could make now that his body was stuck like wax. The village never worked out what his condition was, or why he’d lost the ability to move or speak. He’d been healthy and active, sound of mind and sociable, yet there he sat across from me in his armchair, a man reduced to a life of sightless silence.
I tried to pretend he wasn’t there during my daily visits, whistling tunelessly as I’d throw more logs into the woodstove and check their supplies. I’d bring a loaf of Mama’s bread so that Aleksy could tear it up in the broth I’d set to stew – “put in some ducks,” he’d say. Some days I’d even leave a knob of salted butter or a jar of preserve for him. On rare occasions I’d set down some old clothes or toys that my mother came across, or even go over his homework and correct it. That day I put a children’s book on his bed for him to read. As for Viktor, the most I did for him was kept him warm.
People said it was a shame what happened to the Malenhovs, and I agree; it was terrifying. But kind Viktor’s fate was no more than the start of it, and by the time winter came around again in 1923, more glum news passed from lip to ear. Polio survivor Iakov Yakunin had been found face down somewhere on the tundra, hypothermic, blind and petrified. I didn’t dare visit him at his home, but Pyotr told me the cripple had the same condition as Mr Malenhov. And, worse, only six months after he’d proposed to the love of his life. My cousin told me of Iakov’s hanging jaw, his wide cloudy eyes, and his sudden inability to move or communicate  ...  Just like Viktor. What did it mean?
“What kind of a life is that for good men?” Papa said, as he brushed the snow from his boots after our day’s work on the building site in Darakyev. He coughed horribly; his bubbling anger only made it sound worse. “They’d be better off dead, the pair of them. I know I would, if it was me. Why did God bring this on them? Why now?”
“I don’t know, Papa,” I replied, and hung my coat up on the back of the door.
“You hear what Iakov’s little brother claims?”
“Georgiy? No, why?”
“He said he and Iakov saw the Folveshch this November. How ridiculous.”
At that, I caught his eye. “Are you being serious?”
“Well, he seemed serious, but then he’s only eleven. He said they saw the Foul Thing as though it was as ordinary as seeing a fox. You know, I’ve not heard of the Folveshch since your grandpapa used to scare you with it like he did to me.” He hunched over in imitation of his father and said in his raspy voice, “Close all the curtains at night, syna, or the Foul Thing peers in.”
“Funny you should mention all that old crap,” I told him as I plopped down into Grandpapa’s old rocking chair, “because Aleksy Malenhov says Viktor saw it too. He says they saw it on Strange One’s Pass.”
“That’s where the little Yakunin boy says he saw it, too.” He coughed and spluttered again into his hand. “Ha! Stefan, why are we talking about this? I don’t entertain such folklore anymore, and yet here we are talking about it as though there’s something to see. Those two boys attend the same school. Children talk. Nothing more. More than likely that weird Aleksy kid has been telling tales.”
But the winter after that, it was Papa who collapsed, screaming his throat sore about the Folveshch.

In 1930 I celebrated my twenty-second birthday about the same time Renkassk cheerlessly opened the kabina. By then, a total of eight village men had fallen sick each winter, never to recover, and the kabina was a place to house them; a place to forget them. Except for Viktor Malenhov, who stayed at home with seventeen-year-old Aleksy. Not by choice, you must understand, as it was his frail, mousy-haired son who insisted Viktor remained in his care. As for my poor father, I visited him once a week to put my mother’s mind at rest, for the news of his disease had nearly killed her. I wish I could speak of it figuratively, but she’d sunk into a depression so deep that she never fully roused from it, not in all the winters since.
Conversation with Papa was a fruitless effort, and my father would stare blindly as though I wasn’t there, out the window, as I talked about people he might not even recall.
“Do remember Pyotr, Papa? He visits you too sometimes. He couldn’t see you this week, in case you’re wondering, because he got married to Yuliya.” I heard his response in my head. “I know you don’t like her much, but he sees something in that city-girl. We all went to the wedding. The Frantsevs brought him jellied veal. Have you ever tried veal, Papa?”
I heard nothing but his laboured breathing, and took it as my cue to leave.
The kabina, to me at least, was the second most dreaded place in this barren little village – pews of gaunt, catatonic men with no memory of how they came to be that way. But the place I dreaded most, by far, turned out to be the Malenhov household, and my daily visits there had not yet ceased.
“Aleksy!” I banged on the door with the butt of my axe. “It’s Stefan! Open up!” After a few moments the boy opened the door a crack. Watery blue eyes peered up at me through a thick fringe of brown hair. The sour stench of rot and faeces escaped the house and my eyes began to water. I could almost taste the decay on my tongue.
“Da?” he said, barely even moving his cracked lips.
I presented him with a warm parcel of brown paper. “Mama’s baked you a loaf.”
“For ducks?”
“Sure, for ducks. Take it.” I pressed it into his chest. “Anything else I can get you while I’m here? Have you got enough food?”
He turned away to look at his father, who hid in the dark depths of the room. “Papa, Stefan asks if you need anything.” Aleksy cleared his throat and shook his head. “No thanks,” he said in a gruff, deep voice that sounded nothing like his own. “Thanks for your concern, son.”
He was a fucking weird kid, but I never said as much and continued as though nothing had happened. “So you’ve got firewood?”
“I can take care of that,” he’d say in imitation of his father’s voice. “My little lad gives me a hand, don’t you, boy? – Yes, Papa – Oh, and thank Mariamna for the loaf for me, Stefan. I’ll see to it that I repay her the favour one day. I noticed your sleds have woodworm. Tell her I’ll see to them for nothing but a smile.”
“Yes, Mr Malenhov.”
I turned to leave the premises, waiting for Aleksy to reach out and grab my shoulder as he did every time.
“On second thoughts, perhaps you’d better give me a hand. Some of the logs in the yard need another strong man to help lift them.”
“Come on, then,” I told him, and he fetched his boots and scarf. I skirted around the right side of the cottage, kicked open his father’s exhausted workshop, and retrieved another axe and a two-man felling saw. The teen would follow me out after a few moments and the weak daylight only accentuated how pale and waxen his skin had become. His attire served to bulk him out a little, so I never quite knew the extent of his frailty.
“Here’s an axe,” I prompted. He pulled a gloved hand from his pocket and took it from me by the handle, and let his arm fall limp. “Takes half the time to chop firewood if there are two of us.”
“I can’t leave Papa for long,” he said, returning to his natural voice. “What if something happens to him?”
I gave him the same response I always gave. “Nothing will happen to him. There’s only me and you up here.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Well, there’s always the kabina if looking out for him gets too much for you.” I kicked my heel into the pile of logs and a couple rolled off into the snow.
“He’s never going to that place, Stefan, never. Have you seen who lives there now? Those men have all lost their minds and my father isn’t like that. Sure, he’s quiet sometimes  ...  a–and he doesn’t do much, either, but he’s not one of them. I know it. The men in the kabina have no minds left after they saw the Folveshch. Papa is sane. He still knows who he is.”
I sunk my axe into a log and Aleksy flinched. “Your father and mine are no different,” I reminded him, shortly. “The doctors all agree that it’s some kind of disease. Like polio. Now get hacking.”
And that, besides the shower of gratitude and farewells, would be our only daily exchange. Since Aleksy had finished school three years ago I’d not had to go inside the cottage and see Mr Malenhov at all. I thanked God for that, although a month later, on a bleak rainy day in early November, Aleksy acted more oddly than usual.
“Nothing will happen to him,” I sighed after Aleksy had expressed his fears of leaving Viktor unattended. I took out my frustration in the swing of my axe. Thud.
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Like I keep saying, there’s always the kabina if you can’t cope. There’s no shame in admitting defeat, malysh. I helped build the kabina with you in mind, as it happens.”
He let his axe sway at his side and said, “Da. I guess he could go there.”
Had I heard him right in the rattling rain? I snapped my head in his direction and eyed him. “What’s that?”
“I said yes.”
“So ... you’ve thought about homing him there?”
The boy looked down at his soggy feet. “Mmhm.”
“What’s changed your mind, malysh? Every time I ask you about the kabina you won’t hear any more of it. What about the part where you tell me your papa is still sane?”
He brought up his gloved hands, took a long look at the axe across his palms, and dropped it into the sodden grass. “Papa wants to go. He hates me.”
“He does?”
“I don’t know what I did wrong, Stefan. I washed his face as usual, I changed his shirt, I spooned some food into his mouth as always. The fire’s still going, his pillows are plump, but he still won’t talk to me. I–I asked him what was wrong but he just ignores me. It all happened after I drew those pictures. He wants to leave me and live in the kabina like the other men in this shithole village.”
His blue eyes flickered with tears, and worry enveloped me like a black veil. Even in this spooky village, in the lonely cottage on the side of a hill, I knew something strange had happened.  I marched towards the house, boots squelching in the mud.
“Stefan?” Aleksy called after me. “Where are you going?”
I threw my axe down on the porch. “To check on your father.”
I lead the way inside and Aleksy followed, peeping over my shoulder. As I pushed the front door open the wall of stench greeted me as ever, worse, if anything, and I reeled. I unashamedly covered my nose, barring out the stink. By the woodstove I spotted the arched form of Viktor Malenhov sat in his chair. Just like Iakov and my father, he’d become hunched over as the years in his soulless state passed, but Viktor seemed beyond that. His spine had buckled so far that his chin hovered over his knees, and his neck had contorted back on itself so that his gaze remained forward out the window. I glanced to see what he might be looking at, and saw only wet woodland.
Aleksy grabbed the sleeve of my coat. “Don’t go near him,” he breathed. “He’s angry.”
I shrugged him off and circled Viktor ... And nowadays I wish I hadn’t dared.
His eye sockets were bare.
“Aleksy,” I whispered, swallowing down the sickness in my stomach, “what happened to his eyes?”
“I took them out,” he said in a low voice. “Last month.”
“Took ... them?”
“He told me he no longer needed them, and to put them out for the Folveshch.”
I searched his face for any suggestion of a lie. “ ... And did you?”
“Da. I had to. Next autumn he says to cut out his tongue.”
At that point I think the stink finally got to me and I barged outside to heave. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was Aleksy Malenhov really mutilating his disabled father? Sick fuck. Part of me felt like throwing him a punch across the jaw, but when the teen drew his hands up to his face and began to sob, I knew it would be insensitive.
“What is it?” I said through gritted teeth.
“He won’t speak to me!” he wept from the doorway. “I can’t bear it!”
I straightened, brushed my dark hair from my eyes and composed myself. Holding my breath, I ventured back inside the cottage, finally noticing just how still Viktor sat. Not even his ribcage moved, and I realised then that Death had stolen his final breath. Viktor was dead.
“Aleksy,” I began, but how could I tell the boy that his father had passed away unnoticed while the boy had tried so hard for eight years to keep him alive? “Go outside,” I said instead.
“Why?”
“Just go.”
When he ambled away into the woodland, it dawned on me that I was alone in the room with Viktor Malenhov once more, just like three years ago. He was a corpse; a lifeless, deformed man with no pulse, no breath and no eyes. I rounded the room, trying my best to keep my chin up and be brave. It was the sight of his terrible face that had turned my stomach all those years ago, and terrible, I discovered, was no longer a substantial adjective. Aleksy’s father, bowed and contorted beyond recognition, was little more than a brown, rotting carcass. A deep opening in his cheek leaked what I assumed were his gums and brain down his chin and onto his trousers. The stink of faeces had been his, but that was nothing compared to the reek of decay. Black liquid had seeped into the rugs and floorboards, and stained them. Aleksy had assembled a bed on the floor near his father’s feet, and there, under his pillows, he’d stuffed a wad of paper torn from the children’s books I’d given him when he was nine. Were those his drawings? I stooped and looked closer to find the pages covered in a collage of identical charcoal sketches. Faces. Screaming, frightened faces.
I didn’t have much chance to look at what else he’d drawn, because it was then that Viktor Malenhov stood up from his chair, arm extended and mouth wide. His eyeless sockets bored into my soul.
And I bolted.

I didn’t dare return to the cottage after that ever again, and nor did Aleksy. I broke it to him a few hours later in my home that I’d found his father dead, and that my older cousin Pyotr would be in touch with the grave keeper. He cried hard in our front room for a long while, still buried head to toe in his ill-fitting outdoor clothing. I had to assume Viktor had died of starvation and dehydration, despite his son’s best efforts and enduring belief of his eventual recovery. Perhaps the rest of the brief visit had been my mind playing tricks; after all, the flickering firelight often does summon phantom figures and faces that are never truly there. How do dead men walk? They don’t, and I knew it. Pyotr assured me he was dead, confirming that he had no pulse.
“So that’s why he didn’t speak to me?” Aleksy asked me after he’d swallowed the news and wiped away the tears rolling down his cheeks. “He couldn’t.”
“He couldn’t for a long time, Aleksy,” I told him, keeping to a gentle tenor. “He’s been dead for weeks on end.”
“You’re wrong,” he fired. He shook his head, long fringe swaying across his dirty brow. “He spoke to you only a few days ago; he told you to say thanks to your mama for the loaf, remember? He said he’d fix your sleds for a smile. He asked for help to carry the logs. I remember.”
My mother appeared at the far side of the room, mouthing one word – don’t. Don’t what? Tell him that it was his imagination all along? My own father had not spoken a word since the day we found him collapsed on his back on Strange One’s Pass. A long time alone with somebody so silent would have only wreaked havoc on Aleksy’s mind, testing his capability to endure loneliness and finally succumbing to it. I heeded my mother and smiled. “I remember.” Aleksy did not need the truth.
He lived with me from then on, having no other family to get in touch with, and the offers of adopting him having dried up a long time ago. Outside the company of his father, Aleksy became a lost lamb and followed me about whenever he could. He would watch me read the newspaper in Papa’s chair, tag along when I visited my sweetheart ... Even accompanied me to the outhouse and sit in the snow until I’d finished relieving myself. My only true solitude was when I slept. His constant presence was harmless at first, though perhaps a little unnerving between you and me, but I couldn’t find the heart to tell him to back off. It was when he tailed me around work, at the construction site of Darakyev’s new Russian Orthodox church, that he became a problem. Six days a week I laboured at the site, hardening my palms and straining my young back for very little return. Aleksy sat no more than ten feet away from me, tossing a hammer from hand to hand for stimulation.
“You need to find your dog a new home,” my employer grumbled one morning as I clocked in. I glanced at Aleksy behind me and sighed through my nose.
“Of course, Mr Shchurov,” I said, picking up my quota of tools. “He’ll be gone by tomorrow.”
He jabbed a finger at me. “Today, Antonovich. Get him out of my sight within the hour or I’ll see you off too.”
I cursed under my breath as I walked back on myself, ushering Aleksy along with me.
My mother, who spent most of her time out the house volunteering at the kabina for the time being, offered to take the teen off my hands until I could find an occupation more suited for him. I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. It seemed that Aleksy’s damaged sociability extended not only to his failure of forming relationships, but to acting appropriately around other people at all. And that, I thought, didn’t matter where the men of the kabina were involved. He could help my mother wash them and feed them, and it wouldn’t matter if Aleksy said something weird or not.
But how could I have been so senseless?
By the time autumn strolled in and stripped the trees of their foliage, catatonic polio survivor Iakov Yakunin had no eyes.
And, according to Irina Soldatov, she found Aleksy in the yard ... chewing them.