The Face in the Crimson Salt

Such a thick silence settled over the inn tonight that I put down my towel, sat closer to the fire, and for a while could not bring myself to speak. Even the firewood stopped crackling. I heard this story from a salt miner from near Solotvyno. He came in one autumn, all his clothes, his brows and lashes covered in a white bloom, like a man from another world. He smelled not of sweat but of dry salt and deep earth. He told me about the lowest gallery, where nobody goes.

Lowering the cage down there had been forbidden since the days of his grandfather's grandfather. They say the salt there is not white but dark crimson, and it smells not like ordinary salt but like old blood. The miner said that one day their crew got lost in a side tunnel when the lamps went out. Darkness underground is not like darkness up above. It has weight. It presses on your ears and fills your mouth.

They sat in the dark, waiting for their eyes to adjust, but there was no light. Then one of them, the youngest, heard a knocking. Steady, muffled. Knock... knock... knock... As if someone very far away were striking the wall, very slowly, with a stone hammer. They called out, but the answer was only silence, and then that knocking again, coming closer. Not along the floor, though - as if from inside the very thickness of the salt.

The miner said that salt grows underground. It creeps, it crystallizes, it heals over cracks. And sometimes it remembers what has fallen into it. The knocking grew louder and louder, and suddenly, right beside them, a figure began to bulge out of the smooth salt wall. First a face, then shoulders, as if someone were trying to come out through the thickness of the stone.

It had no eyes, only a mouth open in a silent scream, and an outstretched hand clutching an old rusty nail. The young lad panicked and struck the figure with his pick. The salt crumbled away, and the knocking stopped at once. But when they found the way out and came up to the surface, the lad noticed that the skin of his own palm had turned hard and cold.

With every day he grew paler, and his steps grew heavier. He began to hear the knocking everywhere: in the ticking of the clock, in the drops of rain, in his own heart. And then one morning they found him in his bed. He had not died. He had simply turned into a solid block of dark crimson salt, only in the middle, where the heart should be, a rusty nail stuck out.

The salt miner never went underground again. He said the salt does not forgive being disturbed, and it always takes back what is its own. And the knocking... he still hears it sometimes at night, when it is very quiet outside. And do you know the most frightening part? He said the figure in the wall did not have the face of some long-dead man.

It had the face of the young lad himself, the one who struck it. As if the salt knew he would come back, and was simply preparing a place for him. So listen to the silence tonight. And if you hear a steady, muffled knocking somewhere in the wall of your house... do not go near it, and do not press your ear to it. For what if the wall wants to remember your face too?