Milk Teeth

Autumn 1943. Krzywy Bór is forty households on the inner edge of the Białowieża, the last unbroken primeval lowland forest in Europe. The Germans have garrisoned a small Wehrmacht forestry detachment in the old manor house — ten men under a middle-aged Bavarian reservist who is a forester in civilian life and a soldier only on paper. The Polish Home Army has a quiet cell run by Halina Borowska, a thirty-year-old woman who was a Wilno university student before the war and who came home to her grandmother’s house when the world ended.

Three children have gone missing in the three weeks before the novella opens. The Germans blame the partisans. The partisans blame the Germans. Halina’s grandmother Jadwiga — the last *szeptucha* in the village, eighty years old — knows it is neither. She has been leaving salt and hair on a particular stand of old birches at the forest’s edge since she was nine years old, and her grandmother before her, and her grandmother’s grandmother before that, and the village stopped doing it after the First World War, and the thing in the forest has been waiting eighty years to be paid.

When the fifth child — the German Oberleutnant’s nine-year-old son, brought east because his mother died in a Berlin air raid and there was nowhere else for him — disappears from his bed and a small bundle of birch twigs tied with red thread is left on the windowsill, the Oberleutnant has forty-eight hours before the Gestapo arrives and burns the village. So Halina, Jadwiga, and a Bavarian forester-in-uniform walk into the Białowieża together at dusk on the eve of *Dziady* to do a thing none of their three traditions has a word for. A standalone Slavic folk-horror novella in the world of Calix Sanguinis.