He Who Counts the Steps

That traveler who just stepped out into the night swore to me at the threshold that this is the honest truth. It happened to him himself, back when he wandered as a young carpenter looking for work. He left a copper coin on the table, ice-cold to the touch, and asked me not to put out the oil lamp. Pull your benches closer to the stove, and don't look at the closed door. The darkness doesn't lie - it only waits until you are left alone.

He had been hired to relay the floor in a house on the edge of the village. The owners had been found dead in their bed with their mouths open, but the village headman paid triple for the carpenter to finish the work before winter. In the evening the villagers bolted the door from the outside, explaining that feral dogs prowled about at night. The carpenter was left alone in the dark, where the air was thick and reeked of raw earth and old sweat.

The first night he put out the light and lay down on the bare boards. The silence in that house was not empty. It rang in his ears, as if someone were screaming very far away. Somewhere around three o'clock he heard breathing. It was ice-cold, with a wheeze in it, right beside the back of his head. He turned over onto his other side, but the breathing did not vanish. It moved, and he felt a thin crust of hoarfrost forming on his neck.

It was the Navisnyk - a spirit that lives in the gap between sleep and waking. It comes wherever a man is locked in and tries to crawl into his head, searching for the eyes. The carpenter froze. He was afraid to open his eyes, for he knew: if you look at it, the spirit gets inside. The breathing grew louder, and the carpenter felt long cold fingers with five joints touching his eyelids.

The spirit was searching for his eyes, so it could enter. The old man remembered his granny's advice: if the Navisnyk comes, you must start counting in your head the steps from the threshold to the stove. He began to count. One, two, three... The breathing by his ear turned into a low, wheezing laugh that made the blood run to ice. The spirit knew the carpenter was not asleep. It knew he was counting, and it began to count along with him.

At the count of seven the carpenter realized he had gone wrong. In that house there were eight steps to the stove. He had lost the count. The spirit's voice vanished. It grew so quiet he could hear a drop falling from the roof. And then the icy fingers slowly, with inhuman strength, began to pry his eyelids open. He fought back, but in vain. Through the crack he saw not a face but an abyss, and in it floated his own twisted reflection, screaming without a sound.

The carpenter screamed and squeezed his eyes shut so hard he saw stars. When he dared to open them again, moonlight was barely seeping through the window. There was no one by the bench. But on the wooden floor, right beside his head, lay a neat little pile of black earth with grave worms in it. From that night on he never slept in the dark. He said the spirit had not gone. It was simply waiting for the carpenter to lose the count once more.

The traveler went out into the rain. I went over to take the copper coin and froze. The coin was covered in grave mold, and on the bench lay a handful of black earth with worms. I remembered that he had been quietly counting something under his breath as he spoke.

The door he had gone out through was bolted from the inside. Friends, if you hear breathing behind you in the night, do not open your eyes and do not count steps. For the one who counts may be not at your back, but inside your skull.