The Groom
Part I
Marco sat behind the wheel of his Audi A4 convertible, a gift from his parents earlier that year. The road from Smederevo to Belgrade lay drowned in a stagnant fog, the kind that descended without warning and might linger for an hour, a day, or forever—it was never clear which. Mid-May, yet they huddled inside their jackets, collars pressed to their throats, their faces dampened by the spectral condensation that seeped through the open top.
“Should’ve taken your father’s jeep,” Anya murmured, her voice a tired blade.
“I thought you liked my cabrio.”
“Liked it until tonight. We’ll freeze before we even reach Belgrade. Even my old rust-bucket would’ve done better than this open coffin.”
In the backseat, Luka sat with his girlfriend, Irina—two years younger, pliant, brittle—and Stefan, the perpetual clown with his pockets of cheap smoke. They said nothing, which told Marco everything. The silence cut deeper than Anya’s words. He reached for the stereo. Thin pop beats rose, collapsed, and dissolved into the haze, like laughter in a mausoleum. Tonight’s plan was a youth-center rave in Belgrade, big-euro DJs exported to provincial Serbia. Vanilla diversions for children, Marco thought. The real festivities would begin afterward—Anya dropped off, and the boys hunting for powder in the shadows. He glanced into the mirror. Luka’s eyes, vacant, bankrupt, reflected his own hunger back at him.
Marco pressed the gas, released his grip on the wheel, and howled into the white oblivion: freedom. For an instant, the fog curling over the hood reminded him of cigar smoke in his father’s study, a memory that clung with a loneliness he would never admit aloud. Anya called him a fool and pushed away his arm. “My makeup’s ruined in this damp,” she muttered. The road yawned on, deserted, as if abandoned by civilization. Then—an impact. A rear wheel struck a rotting barricade; the car lurched, wavered between lanes, swaying like a beast caught in a snare. Irina clung to Luka, whispering her fear. Luka, grinning like a cutpurse, assured her: Marco was a good driver. He squeezed her hand briefly, almost shyly, as if afraid his own warmth might shatter the brittle world around them.
Marco laughed. The Audi shuddered as he pushed it harder, speed swelling underfoot.
Money passed between pale hands, followed by a kiss, a grope. Irina turned her head away; the silence that followed was more violent than any protest.
Stefan broke it with sudden reverence. “The clouds are clearing. Full moon tonight.”
“God, not another of your stories,” Anya groaned. Yet even as she scoffed, her hand crept to the window, fingertips tracing the fogged glass as if to reassure herself the world beyond hadn’t vanished.
But the others encouraged him, drunk on the unease. His voice shifted, low and incantatory: The Bride in White. A local legend. A girl named Maria, seventeen, burning with youth’s feral hunger. A forbidden love affair with an older, violent man, a criminal, a phantom on a motorcycle. A pregnancy. A family’s rage, their savagery. Beatings, confinement, the forced abortion. The boy hunted, beaten half to death. But vengeance was patient. One night he returned, and she was waiting—equally deranged, equally doomed. Together they silenced the dog, took the axes, and butchered her family in their sleep. At dawn they fled toward Belgrade, dreaming of buying a wedding dress. But fate—the whore fate—intervened. A fuel truck, a collision, an explosion that scorched the night and shook the earth. From then on, she wandered this very road, a phantom bride beneath the full moon, searching for the husband death had denied her.
A second of absolute silence fell, uncanny and weightless. Then laughter erupted—first Anya and Marco, spreading backward like contagion. Luka doubled over, shrieking, while Stefan’s face remained motionless, a granite effigy—its blankness making the others howl all the harder. Irina’s giggling fractured into shrill cries, her eyes transfixed on the storyteller, whose expression slowly stretched, becoming grotesque in its stillness, absurd in its refusal to break. The laughter boiled over, chaos spilling into the fog-cloaked road, a shrieking carnival of hysteria.
“Christ, this could kill a man!” Luka hissed, which only provoked louder howls. But when they looked at Stefan again, he sat stern, arms folded, his silence a rebuke.
“You don’t actually believe that story?” Anya asked, her scorn sharp. “It’s just campfire trash for children. Nicely dressed up, I’ll give you that—but you don’t expect us to take it seriously?”
Stefan’s voice came flat, resentful: “I don’t. But others do. And tonight… we’ll have ourselves a little game.”
The car slowed. A sign for the old abandoned mines passed in the haze. Stefan barked, “Stop here!” Marco pulled onto a layby near a fringe of trees. Fog descended in slow waves, spilling down the hillside to smother the asphalt.
“What the hell are you doing?” Anya snapped.
Marco only grinned. “A little theater,” he said, braking sharply. He and Stefan leapt out. Anya cursed and threatened, but her words fell dead in the damp night. One by one, the others clambered reluctantly after them, like sleepwalkers summoned to some arcane ritual.
From the trunk, Marco withdrew strange objects: lengths of plastic, balloons, a battered mask, a black duffel. The others watched, disoriented. “Something we saw on TikTok,” Stefan explained as he assembled it with unnerving fluency. He grinned as he worked, savoring the twitch of unease in the others, fascinated by the way old legends could twist flesh and nerves into fear. A crude figure took shape: spindly legs of rods, a torso of balloons, a pale mask painted with blood at the mouth, empty sockets for eyes. Draped in a torn sheet, it swayed on the evening breeze. Beneath it, a drone hummed alive, and the figure rose, hovering above the road—a mockery of a bride, a marionette of horror.
Irina whimpered and clutched Luka. “I don’t want to look at it.” But Luka stared transfixed. A flicker of fear ran through him, quick and sharp, yet something darker—a twisted curiosity—rooted him to the spot, torn between wanting to look away and needing to see the mask’s every movement. The mask stirred something nameless, some shadow that had haunted his fevered sleep: the faceless woman who stalked his dreams since the injury ruined his future, when pain and dread gnawed into his shoulder and his sleep. His coaches had once spoken of greatness, BC Partizan[^1], fame, money. Now there was only the grinding of cartilage, the dwindling of hope, and the face without a face waiting in the dark.
Stefan’s voice cut across his thoughts: “We’ll let it drift in the fog. Tomorrow they’ll be whispering again—the White Bride walks the old Mines Road.”
“Idiots,” Anya snapped. “What if you cause a wreck?”
“If anyone comes across it, they’ll recognize it as a joke… eventually,” Stefan said. “And then we’ll all laugh.” He adjusted the controls. Marco filmed. He aimed the camera not just to record the prank, but to capture their terror—and his own daring—so everyone would see he was the one who dared, the one in control. The mask hung in still air, waiting for its victim.
The sound arrived first—a motor in the distance. Then the headlights, twin points swelling into orbs, bearing down on the curve. “This is it,” Marco whispered, eyes shining. “Hide!” They scrambled into the brush, leaves clawing at their faces, while the puppet swayed above the yellow line. The fog smelled of damp earth and rotting leaves, and somewhere distant a dog’s howl sliced through the night. The mask stared into the blinding beams.
“Luka…” Irina’s voice trembled. “I don’t like this.”
He forced a grin. “Relax. It’s just a prank. Nothing can happen.” Yet his throat closed on the words, his gut thick with dread.
The car approached, fast, the lights dazzling. The bride hung motionless, a phantom over the road.
“Any second now… he’ll brake… he must, am I right?” Stefan hissed. The curve came too fast, the headlights blinding, and the brakes screamed too late for anyone to leap clear. There was no shriek of tires. Only the brutal impact—metal tearing, glass splintering, the thunder of a vehicle rolling into oblivion.
Silence fell, once more.
Part II
The Mustang devoured mile after mile, yet Goran had no sense of movement. Everything blurred—the trees, the signs, the lights trailing in the rearview mirror. He was not driving; he was drifting through a nightmare that refused to end.
“Faster, you piece of junk.” He floored the pedal, but the car obeyed only in illusion. Why had he even bought this wreck? Perhaps to appease the boy inside him who had watched too many American action movies. Once, the Mustang had been magnificent; now it was decayed, its floor rotted, brakes failing, engine reluctant, thirsting for fuel like a tank. Not a euro of resale value remained, not with its expired inspection looming. This might be its last ride, and perhaps his last attempt at escape.
The dread in his head was tied to the reason for his flight, to the person from whom he ran: his fiancée, Marina. Their wedding was a month away. A week ago, panic attacks had begun, sharp as daggers, accompanied by headaches that stole his nights. Migraines, pills, haze, sleeplessness—all conspired to make him a walking corpse. No doctor could touch the real sickness: he had stopped loving her, and the knowledge gnawed at him, insoluble, unspeakable.
His right hand trembled on the wheel, cold despite the chill in the car. He fiddled with the radio, seeking a station to puncture the silence. Nothing fit. Beside him, a plastic box cradled an ultrasound; beneath it, crumpled hospital papers and bills—a dossier of his failure. “Now what?” he whispered, a man confronting the futility of his own escape. The plan had been simple: flee Belgrade, bury himself in a village near Smederevo, at his grandfather’s collapsing house. But her family would find him. No matter the distance.
Her father and brothers—their incessant, overbearing presence—loomed in memory. From the first day, they had treated him like a son, lending money, fixing cars, opening doors to opportunities he refused. Goran remembered Ranko’s contempt, the slaps across the cheek, the humiliations never voiced aloud. Even her brothers, hulking idiots obsessed with beer and local football, had their names etched in his mind: Dickhead #1, Dickhead #2. Anyone sane would have fled. And yet he had stayed. Until two hours ago, when Marina had revealed the truth he feared most: she was pregnant, desperate to keep the child, and utterly reliant on him. That revelation had shattered him, propelled him into the car, and out into the void.
Goran was no fool. He knew his act was vile, cowardly. But he drove anyway, and there would be no return. The old road to Smederevo stretched endlessly, each kilometer a torment. The fog—the goddamned fog—was thicker than ever. High beams cut only ten meters ahead.
At least he knew the road well, and traffic was nonexistent. Since the junction, he had passed no vehicle, no sign of life. The thought crept in—was the road closed, and he not informed? The Old Mines Road had recently been the stage for protests and blockades, citizens decrying mismanagement by the city of Smederevo and the Chinese Mining Company. Statistics of accidents, injuries, and deaths had circulated online. The road, mostly straight with gentle curves, encouraged reckless speed. Citizens complained that neither police nor municipal authorities regulated it adequately. Last year alone, ten fatalities were reported. Goran had absorbed all this from the news portals he followed—but it did little to soothe the dread crawling up his spine.
Still… he could recall no sign or notice warning of a closed road. Perhaps it was wiser to slow down, to avoid becoming just another grim statistic. But he ignored the thought and floored the pedal. The sooner he reached the old house, the sooner this nightmare would end. A buzzing throb filled his skull—not the usual effects of drink or drugs, but guilt hammering from behind his temples.
Then—his phone rang. The jarring, shrill intrusion nearly sent him skidding into the ditch. The screen blinked: Marina.Eleven missed calls.
Shit. He had forgotten to switch it back to airplane mode. Passing by the old mines, he’d flicked it on to check the news, to scroll Facebook, and then—forgotten. He snatched it up; her name pulsed.
Disconnect, goddamned it!
He inhaled, shivering. He could not speak, could not explain. Not now. He was broken. He rejected the call, killed the device, flinging it onto the passenger seat. It bounced, clattering to the floor. His pulse steadied—until the phone rang again.
How the hell was this possible?
Ring after relentless ring, grinding his tension higher. He pressed the pedal absentmindedly. The ringing ceased—then a single: beep. A message. Marina never sent messages.
He glanced down the road. Fog still gripped the world in a suffocating vise. He could not resist. Fingertips tight on the wheel, he leaned, snatched the phone with trembling hands. Eyes back on the road just in time. It seemed unnecessary; the road was dead, empty, waiting.
He swallowed the knot in his throat, tapped the screen:
“Goran, just so you know—it’s over. If you don’t want us, you don’t have to. But I can’t live like this anymore.”
“No, no, no, fuck…” He clutched the phone, dialing frantically. Hands shaking. Marina had always had her episodes… suicidal inclinations. Goran knew of two past attempts (though he suspected more), rooted in fragile insecurities and the oppressive grip of her father, Ranko, whose control had hollowed her soul.
The phone slipped from his grip. He swore, released the wheel, bent down. When he looked up—it was already too late. A figure, pale and impossible, hair tangled like dark tendrils, stood barely thirty meters ahead. A girl—he recognized her. She met his gaze, freezing him where he sat. That look burrowed into him, deep into the marrow of his soul. He jerked the wheel, slammed the brakes…
Part III
No one spoke for the first thirty seconds. They stood frozen in the trees, staring down the slope. The silence after the crash was unnatural, suffocating, as if the world itself had inhaled and held its breath.
“Fuck… that was one hell of a rollover,” Marco finally muttered.
“Are you serious?” Luka tried for calm, but his voice betrayed him, quivering.
“We need to see what happened,” Anya said, stepping out of the underbrush. “What if someone’s seriously hurt?”
“Wait. If the people in that car realize they were the victims of a fucking prank, we’ll be reported to the cops,” Luka said, panic creeping into his tone. “We’ll be in serious shit.”
“Are you fucking serious now?!” Anya snapped, spinning on him. She had trusted Luka to be rational, a steady ally for her and Irina. “This isn’t a joke anymore! Someone could be dead! Irina, are you hearing what your boyfriend is saying?”
“Hey, don’t drag her into—”
“It wasn’t my boyfriend who caused the crash—it was yours,” Irina said, her voice low but clear enough for all to hear. Chaos consumed Irina’s mind. Her father could never know where she had been, what she had done, or where she got the money for this night. If someone called the police…
Stefan’s eyes remained on the doll hovering above the road. The wind had picked up, making the glowing sheet whip violently. “Come on, Marco, we need to get the drone,” he said. “Before anyone comes by.”
“Yeah, that’s the priority now!” Anya snapped. “Because of course, the drone is more important than a man tumbling down a fucking slope! I’m going down!” She pushed toward the sound of the impact, the underbrush tearing at her skirt and stockings, but she did not falter.
“Wait, Anya! Fuck! Look what you’ve done!” Marco yelled, glaring at her as he ran to catch up.
“Me?! What did I do? So now it’s all my fault? You fucking retard!” he shouted back, arms flailing.
Luka and Irina exchanged uneasy glances and followed, slipping through branches, sliding down the wet embankment. The fog shifted around them, darker patches appearing and vanishing like bruises in the gray void.
After a hundred meters, they saw the car. An ancient wreck, straight from an Eighties action movie, lay overturned between two stripped trees. Its hood crumpled, windows shattered.
“Look—the driver’s side door is open.”
“Hey, is everything okay? Are you okay?” Anya called, her voice trembling through the fog. “You in the car… can you hear me?” She couldn’t even guess how many people had been inside when it rolled. Please, no children. Please, no serious injuries, she thought. Memories of her grandparents dying in a car crash when she was four gnawed at her, leaving ugly, lingering trauma.
“Hello! Is anybody there?!” Marco shouted, overtaking Anya, reaching the wreck first. The stench of spilled gasoline hit him. He pulled at the twisted door. Blood smeared the steering wheel—but no driver, no passengers. Instinct told him there had only been one occupant: the driver. But where the hell were they now? “Not a soul,” he muttered.
“Don’t say that!” Anya snapped, nerves fraying.
“Maybe they went for help?” Luka asked, approaching along their tracks. “Maybe they walked back along the road?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Marco objected.
“Actually, it does. That person—man or woman—must be in shock. They went for help. We need to find them.” Anya pushed further into the thicket, calling, “Hey! You from the car! Come back! We want to help!”
“What is she doing?” Irina whispered, panic rising. She only wanted the night to end, to go home, to crawl into bed and forget everything—the things she’d been forced to do. Luka was the first real boyfriend she had: tall, handsome, dark hair, soulful eyes. Many girls at her school lusted after him. Money never mattered; her parents were just ordinary teachers. But it did matter to him—his suppressed jealousy, his quiet contempt and anger. That was why she helped him, once, for this special night. Special it had been—but not in the way she’d hoped.
Luka glanced toward the forest. “What if he didn’t leave for help… but ran because he saw something?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?!” Marco snapped, desperate, wanting to retreat to the cabriolet and escape this cursed place, with or without them. His connection with Anya had already fractured, though neither had said it aloud. So why was he still here? Did he really want to find the missing driver? And when they did… what could they even say? “Hey, sorry, sir. Just a prank. Saw it on TikTok. Ha ha. Don’t be mad.” No. That wouldn’t work.
Luka swallowed hard, staring into the ditch where they stood. “I know you don’t want to hear this, especially now, but… when I last looked at what was hovering above the road… it wasn’t a doll anymore.”
“What? What the hell, Luka?” Marco pushed him hard. “Stop talking this shit. I’m going for Anya, and then we’re gone. There’s no place for you two here. Call a fucking taxi; I don’t care. Anya! Wait—”
“Why’d you say that? You’re scaring me, Luka. Let’s go back,” Irina hissed. “Back to the road. I want to go home.”
“No. Something’s up there. Something is watching us.” He gripped her hand. “If you want to return to safety… follow me.”
At that moment, they heard a scream.
Part IV
The world spun around him several times; a paralyzing pain tore through his arm, then everything went black. When he regained consciousness, it took him dozens of seconds to realize he was upside down. The pain returned, scorching and throbbing. Iron coated his mouth. He struggled for air, and something hissed and sprayed around him. Ten seconds passed before he understood: it was his broken nose. I hit my head on the wheel, he thought, the realization forming slowly.
He unclasped his seatbelt and fell out.
“Aaah!!” The main source of agony radiated from his hand. His right wrist was shattered. Bone fragments tore into the flesh; the entire forearm and hand began to swell, turning blue.
He staggered upright, then fell to his knees. The ground beneath him tilted. Blood from the gash on his forehead covered his left eye, distorting the world around him. Wet earth, thorny underbrush. Mud. And that ever-present fog.
What the hell had just happened?
Then it returned—the memory. Screaming at the white apparition, he grabbed his forehead with his good hand.
What the hell was that? A girl?
No. It made no sense. Why would anyone walk in the middle of a road at night, in fog? That was guaranteed death. Yet… perhaps that had been her intention? Suicide?
He hadn’t hit her, of that he was certain. He’d swerved just in time, tumbling into the ditch. That meant she was still up there. He spun around, trying to orient himself, to find the road’s edge. He failed.
“Help! Someone, help me! Is anyone up there? Hey!” he screamed, but no answer came. He didn’t know what to do. Despair and pain brought tears. Then he remembered the phone. If only I could call someone… an ambulance… the police…
He found it, broken, in the mud. He tried to turn it on, to no avail. From the black screen, his battered reflection stared back: a zombie freshly risen from a grave. He shoved it into his pocket and began moving upward, limping and pausing, every step agony.
Then he heard it—a faint giggle, drifting through the fog, somewhere ahead. “Hey, is anyone there? Help me, I’m hurt!” He strained to listen. The voices paused, then the giggling returned—from an entirely different direction.
What the hell is happening here?! His body trembled. Likely a result of blood loss, he thought. Cold air was sucking away the last reserves of his body heat.
Then—a whisper. As if someone spoke his name.
“Goran…”
No, no, no, it couldn’t be real. Just a trick of the mind. And yet he limped in the opposite direction of the voice. It was too clear, too near. Soft. Feminine.
The wind blew and pushed aside the curtains of fog. The world around him expanded. Squishy footsteps echoed. He turned with effort. And there she was again. Standing beside the road, above the spot where he’d crashed.
Her.
The same deathly pale girl he’d seen through the windshield moments before impact. She stood—or rather hovered—silent, scanning with eyes that knew.
“Goran…” Her breath was icy, escaping her open mouth in a wordless scream.
“No, let me go. You’re not real.” He shut his eyes and quickened his pace, plunging into the comforting whiteness.
Part V
“Come on, bitch. Come to daddy,” Stefan muttered, pressing the buttons on the drone’s controller. Yet the entire contraption drifted further away, pushed by a sudden gust of wind.
“No, fuck, not there! Ah, damn it.” He sprinted after the puppet. It no longer hovered above the road but veered into the woods. The white sheet tangled in the branches. When he stepped off the road, he lost sight of it entirely.
He tried raising the drone higher, but it was stuck somewhere, unresponsive. “Where are you, bitch?”
He walked in circles, nerves giving way to pure terror. The fog surrounding him… he hated the cold, damp brush against his skin. Something was wrong with it, with her. He wished he were at the Youth Center, listening to music, sipping a beer, checking out girls. Instead, he stumbled through mud, half-lost. What are the others doing? Will they wait, or leave me to stumble blindly in this perverse fog?
Just as he lost the last shred of hope, he saw it again. The puppet swung in the wind, trapped in a dense tangle of branches, directly in front of him. A tall, thin figure wrapped in torn white fabric that fluttered even without wind.
What the hell?!
He swallowed hard. The drone wasn’t cheap. The sooner he grabbed it, the sooner he could vanish from here. He reached out for the puppet. The wind picked up, deafening, violent. It turned toward him. Not a mask. A face. Eyes—two hollow voids drilling into his brain.
He screamed and ran. His limbs refused to cooperate; his arms went limp, knees like jelly. He fell into the mud, thrashing like a pig sensing the butcher’s knife. Every moment, he expected cold hands to wrap around his feet. Finally, his legs found the foothold.
He ran, frantic.
Marco heard the scream. What the hell was that? Something tonight was off. How had a normal night out turned into a nightmare? It involved the puppet, their practical joke, yes—but it was far more than that. And on top of it, he had to endure his girlfriend’s nagging.
“Fuck it! Screw you, Anya!” he shouted. He had no intention of following her. He returned to the road. In the distance, he saw the headlights of his convertible.
How the hell did we get this far? he wondered. It made no sense. The victim of their runaway prank had crashed just fifty meters from them, and now that distance seemed like five hundred.
This goddamn fog… He sprinted toward the car. Then he heard a rustling ahead. From the forest across the road, people emerged. Four, no, five. They walked with solemn dignity, like a funeral procession. No sound came from them—no whisper, no footstep.
Shit, Marco thought. There was no way they hadn’t noticed.
“Hey! Were you in the crashed car?” he yelled. “Listen, we’re really sorry… my parents will cover all the damages…”
But his mind screamed that something was wrong. First, their movement was surreal, dreamlike, unnaturally slow. Then the fog parted, revealing them more clearly. They weren’t walking—they were jerked forward in twitching motions, as if moved by some unseen force.
Everything else about them was far worse. Their bodies were riddled with gaping wounds, from which black, viscous, insect-filled slime oozed—not blood, no… a stream of worms and filth. The leader’s head was almost severed at the neck, barely hanging by a few sinews.
Marco covered his mouth to stifle a scream. Warm urine ran down his leg. He couldn’t move… not a muscle.
The procession crossed the road, slow as death itself. Then one of them turned toward him.
Luka was lost in thought. People don’t understand the fragility of everything. The waves that a single horror can unleash. How one lapse of attention can hurl you into a pit of despair. How everything can become irreparable.
“Luka, where are you taking me? What did you see? Stop, it hurts!” Irina protested against the violent movements and the running he forced her into. She did everything he demanded… and where had it brought her? She was on the verge of tears. What was supposed to be a fun night out with friends, flaunting the money she’d earned, had devolved into a hellish chase through the fog.
Then they fell into some water. A shallow ditch, filled with stagnant mud.
“My shoes are ruined… please, stop…” She was gasping for breath.
Luka suddenly stopped. He trembled. Panic had caught him. He didn’t know why he had even suggested this in the first place; he just felt the group disintegrating. He wanted to hold onto the feeling of belonging to a world that had never been his, at least a little longer—at least until the end of summer. It was the last summer they’d spend together. Marco had announced a trip to the seaside before leaving for college in England. Marco had always had money—his father had bought up land in the villages around Smederevo and sold it at exorbitant prices to Chinese investors, then poured the cash into restaurants and nightclubs all around Smederevo and Belgrade.
Anya was just Anya. A princess. Girls like her got everything in life. Her mother was a minister in the Serbian parliament. They owned apartments in Belgrade and Vienna. After high school, she would attend a prestigious university and never return to this backwater town, he thought. As for Stefan, he’d be off to Switzerland by September. His older brother was a ski instructor at some elite resort. Where did that leave Luka? In fucking Smederevo. With nothing and no one.
Okay, he still had Irina, but she was meant to be a fleeting distraction. Maybe that was why he had done what he did—to push her away? Perhaps it was the final strike of self-destruction. Whatever the case, he had gone one night to Marco’s father’s nightclub, Midnight Fan, and arranged a deal for a blowjob with a slick Chinese manager from the HBIS iron smelter—for two hundred euros. He had heard about these arrangements months earlier. Girls from Smederevo and other smaller towns, mostly underage, offered themselves to wealthy outsiders for a little cash. All of it sanctioned by Marco’s father, who might have taken a cut as well. The Chinese man had looked at Irina’s picture and said he would pay much more, maybe even a full thousand, if the girl agreed to—well, something more. Luka left that option for another time. Two hundred euros was enough to spice up the evening, a few turns before the boys, so they wouldn’t pity him anymore.
The fog cleared, and Irina finally managed a proper breath.
“Luka…”
“Shhh.” He pressed a hand over her mouth and, with the other, pointed to a clearing twenty meters ahead. There stood an unmoving figure—the silhouette of a hunched man. Clearly visible in his hand was an object.
An axe.
She bit her lip.
The creature looked more like a beast than a man. It seemed to be sniffing the air. With a violent jerk of its head, it turned toward them.
“Run!” Luka hissed.
Anya ran through the fog, angry at Marco and even angrier at herself. She should have called a taxi and gone to the gig in Belgrade the moment they stopped the car and pulled that grotesque doll from the trunk. She had solemnly promised herself she wouldn’t waste time with immature kids anymore. If Marco had the audacity to ever call her again, she’d tell him to fuck off with his new girlfriend—the Bride in White.
The Bride in White. God, what a stupid story!
Then she saw a silhouette in front of her.
It had to be the person from the car!
“Hey, stop! Are you okay?” To be fair, the figure wobbled uncertainly on its feet. “I’ll help you!”
That person seemed to hear her voice and then decided to run from her. Anya felt like she was playing hide-and-seek. It unnerved her. She didn’t want to wander through the fog and mud for a minute longer than necessary. And that wasn’t all. Somewhere in the fog came a low, guttural growl.
A strange thought crossed her mind—maybe I’m the one who needs help? She ran and collided with something (someone?!) so suddenly that she screamed.
It was just Stefan. He looked disoriented.
“Jesus, you scared me! Where are you going?!” she shouted at him. He was bloody and babbling. That turned her anger into something else—fear.
“Pull yourself together. What happened?”
“The girl… the pale-faced girl…” His eyes were wide, lips blue, teeth chattering.
“Girl? What girl?!” She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. He was crying, and she stopped. He was useless. As the fog thickened, her own fear grew stronger. Nothing in that feeling was rational, and yet, wasn’t that precisely why it was turning into something uncontrollable?
“Let’s get out of here,” she pulled him abruptly. His legs obeyed instantly.
They hadn’t walked more than a few minutes when they fell into a pit! They sank several meters down, crashing into the muck. No light reached their eyes.
“Ah. Where are we?” Stefan asked.
She didn’t know what to answer. Their limbs flailed in the viscous mass. If there had been even a little light, she was certain they would have seen that the writhing substance was crimson.
“I… I can’t take this stench anymore,” she said, moments before vomiting.
They heard that same growl again. This time, closer. From a tunnel leading somewhere below, phosphorescent light shimmered. The glow outlined a skeletal dog, flesh dripping from its bones.
“Stefan, the dog from your story—the one that belonged to the Bride in White… what breed was it?” she asked, unnervingly composed. She knew they would never leave these tunnels.
“Dog?! What dog?” It seemed he couldn’t see it, or if he did, it was only his personal version of hell. “Jesus, it’s just a made-up story. There was no dog.”
“Yes, there was.”
Part VI
The fog parted again. It came and went in waves, as though part of a carefully staged mise-en-scène, or as if it had a will of its own. On the road, there was nothing—except that car.
A convertible.
Its doors were flung wide open. It looked absurd in that dehumanizing grayness, like some toy. His heart pounded harder. Whose car was that? he wondered. Where were the people who had been riding in it? Were they connected to his crash—or to the pale-faced girl he had seen?
The girl… with each passing moment, her image seemed less and less real. Had he really seen her? Twice, no less—once the instant before plunging into the ditch, and later, when he had crawled back up to the road?
He looked around. No one. This is what purgatory looks like, he thought for some reason. With relief, he slumped into the driver’s seat. The key was still in the ignition, with a nightclub keychain dangling from it. Blood was still dripping from him. Staying conscious was harder and harder. I have to get to the hospital, he thought, clinging to the last threads of reason. He turned the key.
Nothing. Just the hollow click.
“Come on, start, damn you!” He slammed his fists against the wheel, which set off the horn—a piercing shriek in the night. It startled him awake a little. As if, besides that, it had awakened something in the darkness. The coughing of the engine grew more corrosive. He couldn’t help but think that this unnatural fog drained the strength from living beings and car batteries alike.
He raised his head and instinctively glanced at the rearview mirror. What he saw almost made him pass out.
A girl’s silhouette was approaching the car. There were no steps, no walking; the apparition floated forward, like it was part of the fog itself, ghastly and detached from its ethereal essence, glowing faintly with the phosphorescence of rust.
After what could have been seconds or minutes, his fingers finally thawed. The starter wheezed like a lung cancer patient in their final days.
“Start, please, Jesus Christ, start…”
The engine coughed to life. The headlights flickered. “Yes!” he shouted. Beams of light cut through the dark, illuminating the space around the convertible. The girl’s apparition vanished.
Then he heard a voice coming from somewhere close. Not a voice—just a counterfeit of one, a word shaped into thought, a sound—like wind whispering through bones.
“Goran…”
He screamed and slammed the gas pedal. Tires screeched, the car shot forward. He nearly hurled himself into another ditch. He drove blindly, without thought, without knowing if it was the right direction, and not caring. Moisture clung to his face like some foul veil. In a haze, Goran realized the convertible was lifting off the ground; the tires no longer touched that cursed road.
What the hell?!
The very next moment, he felt a presence. Every hair on his arms stood on end. He turned his head to the right, achingly slow, as though a sudden move would provoke—it—whatever monstrous thing was in the car with him—into some dreadful act.
On the passenger seat, in that whitish phantasmagoria, sat the Bride in White. Her face was distorted, blackened with soot. Her eyes were two pits of despair. She grinned malevolently, holding a filthy bridal veil in her left hand.
Goran tried to scream, but no sound came out. Her hand slowly rose, covering his face.
When the police discovered the abandoned Audi convertible the next day in a neglected field near the old Mines Road, they found a man inside whose face had been burned to the bone. On the windshield, written in blood, a word:
THE G R O O M
Soon after, they identified him—as well as the wrecked Ford Mustang found close to the convertible. The bodies of boys and girls from Smederevo who had been driving the Audi toward Belgrade were never found. Their fate remained a mystery.
[1] Basketball Club Partizan is a Serbian basketball club from Belgrade. It is the most successful club in Serbia and one of the most successful in the former Yugoslavia, having won the national championship 22 times, the national cup 16 times, the Adriatic League eight times, and the Adriatic League Supercup once.
About the Author
Born and live in Serbia. 43 years old. Graduated at Belgrade University. Wrote and published five books, four novels and one short stories collection.