Some stories are passed down only beside the oldest well in a village, in front of a stove extinguished late at night, or in the intermittent glow of a night watchman’s cigarette. They were never officially recorded, yet they have passed from generation to generation, seeped into the land, and become unspoken taboos of the places where they took root.
This book collects those “stories that should never be mentioned.” There is the bone collector who appears only on rainy nights, gathering remains from abandoned, unclaimed graves and assembling them into a silent procession. There is the ancient well whose surface ripples on its own every night at midnight, as if answering a steady knocking from its depths. And there are the ancestors whose names suddenly fade from the family register, as if some force had erased them entirely from both bloodline and memory...
As you read these words, take care to notice whether the shadows behind you have suddenly grown darker, or whether the doors and windows have begun to move without a breeze. Some things awaken when they are known. They come from the deepest reaches of the countryside, lying dormant in the cracks of ordinary life. The moment you begin to believe, they reach out to you from behind the curtain of legend.
Be careful. You are opening a book that should never have been opened.
