In the spring of 1893, a church painter named Houston Parvan arrived in the remote mountain valley of Vala Muta, a place whose name meant “the silent valley. ” He had been hired by the village council of Serduk to restore the frescoes in an old church that had stood sealed and empty for 40 years. The pay was unusually generous for a poor farming village, but Parvan, a careful craftsman known for his patient work, accepted the commission without asking why. The strangeness began before he even reached the church.
The valley was unnaturally quiet. The stream ran without sound, no birds sang in the trees, and the wind moved through the leaves without a whisper. The villagers watched him in silence, and one old woman crossed herself and shut her door when his eyes met hers. Only the head of the council, a man named Grigorash Marganean, spoke freely, and even he avoided the subject of the old church.
The church stood apart from the village on high ground, surrounded by an ancient graveyard. Its oak door had been sealed, not merely locked, with iron bands and staples driven deep into the frame. Pressed into the wet mortar along the seam was a row of old, yellowed teeth running the full height of the door. Grigorash told Parvan that the last priest had done something the bishop disliked, and the church was closed and the priest sent away.
He added that his grandmother used to say the old church did not keep God anymore, but kept the dead. When the seal was broken, the smell that came out was not the must of 40 years of emptiness. It smelled of warm tallow, recently swung incense, and a room where people had been breathing moments before. The two workmen refused to enter.
Grigorash told Parvan he would be left alone for three weeks, and that food would be left at the gate if he hung a white cloth from the tower. Then Parvan was left alone with the open door. Inside, every wall and the ceiling were covered in paintings hidden under a thick skin of soot and age. As Parvan began to clean the eastern wall, he uncovered faces of saints.
Every one of them had been painted with level, outward-looking eyes that followed him no matter where he stood in the room. By the fourth day he had marked nine spots of unnatural cold on the floor with chalk. By the sixth there were nineteen, arranged in the loose shape of a standing congregation. Faces appeared faster than he could clean them.
Each evening he counted the newly uncovered figures, and each morning there were more, clean and waiting, as if something had been working alongside him during the night. On the ninth night, lying in the grass outside, he watched the high grimy windows of the sealed church fill with a moving candlelight and the shapes of people passing before them. In the morning the church was empty and his candles were unburned, but four new faces had appeared on the walls. The paintings did not follow the usual church story.
Around the room at the height of a kneeling man’s eyes ran a band of small, carefully painted figures. They were not saints but ordinary people of the valley, each with a name and two dates beneath it. They were records of the dead. And as Parvan cleaned along the band, he found that the dates did not stop when the church was sealed.
He found figures of people who had died years and even decades after the church was closed and shuttered, including one man whose death date was 1890, only three years before Parvan stood in the sealed room. An old woman named Parashiva, the only person in the valley who would come near the church, told him the truth. The last priest had been Father Cassiodor, a man who had loved his flock and his wife, Despina, with a consuming devotion. When Despina died in a fever, Cassiodor could not accept that she was gone.
He came to believe that the dead did not leave, but were held inside the consecrated stone of the church, layered within the walls like the plaster itself. He painted the band of the dead as a way of opening the walls and calling souls back out. Parashiva had been present on the night Cassiodor tried to bring his wife back. She described the candles bending flat toward the wall, the cold coming down, and the painted figure of Despina lifting its hand off the flat surface.
Then, she said, every painted figure on every wall moved at once. Three hundred years of the dead turned their heads and reached out, and the wall made a sound she could only describe as glad. The villagers fled. In the morning the church was empty and Cassiodor was gone.
Parashiva told Parvan that he had not yet cleaned the wall behind the altar screen. That was where the newest paintings were, the last ones Cassiodor made. She told him the priest had gone into the wall, and had been painting from the inside for 40 years. She urged him to go home and leave the wall alone, saying some doors should only ever be looked at.
She left the hill and never returned. She died that same autumn, and no painted figure of her ever appeared on the church walls. Parvan did not leave. He had been hired to do the work, he was a careful man who finished what he was paid for, and he wanted to know what was on that wall.
On the fourteenth day he took down the altar screen and exposed the eastern wall. Beneath the heavy soot he found a life-sized painted figure of a gaunt priest in black, reaching out with straining fingers, his face painted with such skill and despair that Parvan forgot to breathe. The eyes were wet with a thin layer of varnish, and as Parvan watched, the pupils moved. They had been looking at the door.
Now they looked at him. The lamps bent flat toward the wall. The cold came down. The painted hand pushed and the solid stone bulged outward around the fingers.
And the painted mouth spoke his name in a dry, patient voice. Then it said the words Parvan carried for the rest of his life: “You opened the door from the outside. Thank you. We have been so long getting out.
” All around the room, three hundred years of painted faces turned on their flat stone and looked at him. The priest in the wall began to teach Parvan the words of the rite, the words that would open the wall fully from the living side. Parvan wrote that the horror was that the words were beautiful, that they wanted to be said, and that he could feel them rising in his own throat. It did not feel like being forced.
It felt like remembering. His mouth was beginning to shape the first word when his hand, still holding his cleaning blade, drove the thin sharp blade into the painted face of the priest. Parvan wrote that the church screamed. Every painted figure, every face in the band of the dead, cried out at once in a sound that finally broke the silence of the valley.
The force threw him backward, and he ran, the cold and the smell of warm tallow chasing him down the hill. Behind him he heard the sound of a great indrawn breath that would not end, and woven into it, hundreds of voices trying to finish the words his living mouth had refused to say. The men of Serduk sealed the church again the next morning, with new iron and new staples, and, according to what Parvan was told, new teeth pressed into the wet mortar along the seam. Parvan took the cart west out of the valley that same day.
When the road crossed the shoulder of the last hill, the noise of the world came rushing back, and he wept at the sound of a sparrow. Parvan lived a long time. He returned to the city, painted churches for another 40 years, married, and grew old. He told no one what had happened.
Late in his life he wrote the account down once, sealed it, and it was not read until after his death. In the final passage, he wrote that on certain nights, for the rest of his life, he would wake past midnight knowing the room was fuller than it should be, and he could smell warm tallow and swung incense in the dark. Once, in his last year, he woke and heard close beside his ear a dry, patient voice beginning the words of the rite, spoken softly, the way you wake a sleeping man you do not wish to startle. The written account simply ends there, mid-page.
The rest is blank.