OLD SINS

The first time Anselm rode into the town, he was riding a cart drawn by a horse.

It was raining heavily.

He was only passing by, but the downpour made him look for shelter.

Then a sign caught his attention: Black Bird Pub.

Why not a drink? He needed it, he deserved it...

He was pissed off, eager to reach his destination, and it seemed destiny had other plans. He wouldn’t risk travelling that night.

His coat was drenched.

He halted in front of the weatherboard establishment, jumped out, and grabbed an old, wet leather shoulder bag. Heavy with cloth samples, and inside a panel stitched at the bottom of the bag, a purse of gold coins.

The amber glow bleeding through the window looked like something alive, sandwiched by neighbouring desolate two-storey buildings.

He had been travelling for eleven days, sleeping in roadside inns of diminishing quality, eating whatever was set before him without complaint.

He was that kind of man — patient, grateful for small mercies, slow to suspicion.

A merchant by trade, a wanderer by nature, with no permanent address and no family waiting anywhere for his return.

It was his blessing and would be his curse…

The bar was nearly empty. Three men played cards in the far corner without speaking, without noticing his tall figure as he moved to the bar.

On the table, cigarettes in the ashtray, glasses of drink and a bowl of snacks.

The barman who appeared to be young- younger than him, certainly. Thirties? Like someone in the wrong place. Perhaps the bar owner’s son?

What did that matter?

The barman had his small eyes on Anselm. Scrutinising his every move—his limp right leg, his hand removing the damp fedora, his approach to the counter.

The young man was broad-shouldered, as evidenced by his tight shirt.

 The apron hung from his thick neck— no greeting from him.

Anselm cleared his throat before asking for a drink.

‘Something hot,’ said him, drooping onto a stool.

The barman put a bottle on the counter with a thump.

‘Our best whiskey,’ he said with a wry smile.

Anselm watched him pour the drink, scratching his greying beard. ‘And something to eat, if there is anything.’

‘Sausages and fries, if that appeals to you.’

‘I think it’ll be fine.’

The barman shouted the order to someone inside what appeared to be a small kitchen.

‘Miserable weather.’ Anselm tried to start a conversation.

A grumble was the answer.

He insisted. ‘Hey, I’m Anselm…  you are…’

‘Nicolao.’  His name uttered begrudgingly.

‘Is there somewhere I can stay the night? A hotel?’

The barman chuckled.

‘Hotel?  I wouldn’t call that dump a hotel.’

‘Is it really that bad?’

‘I think so.’

‘I wouldn’t mind. Just a bed to sleep for some hours.’

‘A few blocks from here, just off the main street, stands a stone building older than the town itself.’

‘I’ll remember that.’ Anselm gave a half-smile, as if returning what sounded  like a joke.

From there, they talked.

Anselm spoke of the roads he had taken. The solitary life he had chosen for himself, with no one waiting for his return. His adventures in different places, the people he had met. Every day another story—no repetition, nothing ordinary, nothing monotonous.

Nicolao said very little about himself—his deceased parents, no plans for the future. Anselm studied him—the young face seemed to have lived more experiences than he was supposed to share: the scars under his chin and on his right cheek were the proof.

But after a fourth glass, the whiskey loosened his tongue—he spoke of a guild merchant who had paid a handsome sum in advance and expected delivery soon.

He spoke of the gold, the smuggling. Other goods were a front.

A lowering of the careful habits that had kept him safe through years of travel.

Was there something in his drink?

There was a cynical grin on Nicolao’s face. Then Anselm realised how generously he had poured the drink.

He had said too much…

The bar was empty as he looked around, the card players had gone.

It was getting late. Nicolao drew the route to the hotel in the air with one finger, carefully.

‘They don’t have stables for your horse,’ he said.

‘Where can I leave it?’

‘There’s one on the street behind the bar. You can go by an alley beside next door. Actually, I can take you there.’

Anselm accepted the offer. He was tipsy and wanted to sleep.

Nicolao walked him out. The heavy rain became a drizzle.

The moonless night was pitch black, eerie, wrapping around the deserted street— the streetlight barely managed to illuminate.

 They walked, Anselm pulling the horse towards the alley.

It was narrow and dark, the cobblestones slick with rain.

Nicolao caught him before he reached the far end.

He told himself, in the terrible minutes that followed, that he had not planned it. That it had happened the way floods happen — a slow accumulation, a threshold crossed, and then the sudden unstoppable rush.

The debts. The creditors. The bar that was not truly his, that belonged in all meaningful senses to the men he owed.  

Drugs…

The sense that life had been tapering around him for years like a fist closing.

He told himself these things.

Anselm did not cry out. That was the detail that lodged in Nicolao’s chest like a splinter and never fully worked its way free — the absence of a cry.

The blade cutting the throat…

There had been a struggle, brief and desperate, and then a stillness that was the most profound stillness Nicolao had ever encountered.

Rain falling on cobblestones. A horse somewhere, shifting its weight.

The distant sound of wind through the upper branches of the elm trees at the edge of the alley.

He took the bag, put Anselm’s body in the cart and drove it to the river minutes from there.  In the shadowy waters he threw the body, and whipped the horse so that it bolted down the road.

An aimless, frightened gallop.

Next morning, the town walked wet. The rain would persist for days—a common occurrence in those parts. It washed away any trace of the night before, as if nothing had happened. As if Anselm had never passed through.

The river current was strong. Swollen with the downpour, it churned brown and indifferent, hiding whatever it had been given.

Nicolao opened the bar in the afternoon. He had slept horribly— a string of broken hours, each one knotted with the same dream: a bleeding throat, Anselm’s wide eyes, a horse running nowhere. The words he had spoken in pain and blood still clung to him: ‘I knew you were no good.’

‘I’m… life made me not to be,’ he said to the empty room. Then he wiped the counter and waited for the first customer.

The river waters receded one week later, and any trace of Anselm had vanished.

Only a cart had been found by the side of the road several miles away, as Nicolao heard — he thought it had belonged to Anselm, though there was no horse.

No one came looking for him. No one ever asked about him. That rainy evening, no one had seen him — the card players hadn’t noticed him at all.

Nicolao moved on with his life in the most fundamental way possible: he tried not to know what he knew. The gold coins were a small fortune — he paid his debts and bought the bar.

In the years that followed, he became a respected fixture of the village—reliable, sober, yet secretive.

He married, though the marriage did not last.

He aged and learned to sleep, some nights, without disturbance.

Time is a strange mercy. It blurs the edges of things, softens the sharp corners until what was once unbearable becomes merely uncomfortable, and what was once uncomfortable becomes simply the texture of a life.

Nicolao was forty-six years old, and he had not thought of Anselm—not truly— for several years.

Or so he told himself.

But there were signs, if he had been willing to read them.

He wouldn’t walk down the alley, especially at night—he took the long route whenever he needed to reach the street behind.

His clientele was used to his untalkative way.

The bar was his lifeline, and at the same time, his downfall.

He would crave have a drink, but never with others. Only when he was alone, with the fear of saying too much.

So, the ghost of Anselm even though he had never seen it, was always on his mind.

The dreams came in cycles, always the same: rain on cobblestones, a firm handshake, and then the terrible stillness.

Lately there was something else.

A feeling of being observed.

It had begun perhaps three months ago. Nothing he could point to, nothing definite enough to speak of. A prickling at the back of the neck during the quiet hours after midnight, when the last customers had gone. The cook dismissed. The doors closed. The emptiness as his company…

A sense, turning from the shelves, that something had been standing just behind him. A shadow at the edge of the lamplight that resolved, when he turned to look at it directly, into nothing more than the ordinary dark.

He was not a superstitious man. He had never been. He poured himself a drink on these occasions and waited for the feeling to pass.

It always did.

On the night in question, in the deep of winter, Nicolao had been in a bad mood since mid-afternoon.

Two casks had come in off, the fire had been slow to take, and one of his regulars had made a joke—innocent, entirely unconnected, about a man who had disappeared on the road years ago—that had caused Nicolao to grip the bar cloth with both hands and stare at the middle distance for a full ten seconds before recovering himself.

It had been a misunderstanding on his part, of course. Anselm had been thrown into the river, not disappeared on the road.

The joke wasn’t about him at all.

But Nicolao’s hands remembered the weight of the body.

His ears remembered the silence where a cry should have been.

That was the thing about guilt—it did not wait for accuracy. It came anyway.

By closing time, the mood had settled into something low and grey, like the sky above the village. He called last orders. He watched his regulars drain their glasses and button their coats and disappear into the night, one by one, until the bar was empty. The cook hadn’t worked that night.

He began to clean.

The clock above the bar read five minutes to two when he heard the latch.

The stranger came in, dragging the cold wet air—ragged coat, long greying unkempt beard, a weathered face, tracking mud across the mopped tile floor.

He asked for a drink.

‘We’re closed,’ said Nicolao.

The stranger uttered nothing. He simply stood, with the patience of someone for whom waiting had ceased to have any meaning, and looked at the bar with those hollow eyes. The candle flames did not shiver at his entrance, though the night air had been cold. The door swung shut behind him without a sound.

The stranger insisted.

Some instinct made him reach for the worst thing on the shelf.

Nicolao set down the cheapest bottle. Rotgut.

The old man drank without complaint. Gulping it noisily.

He settled on the stool and was quiet for a long while. Nicolao cleaned the counter.

He cleaned it again. The silence between them had a quality he could not name— not the comfortable silence of a late-night bar, but something older.

Something that had been waiting a long time for this room.

Then, without looking up, the stranger said, ‘I know what you did.’

Nicolao’s hand stilled on the counter.

A sound—not quite a laugh. ‘You’re crazy. I don’t know you.’

‘Years ago.’ The stranger raised his eyes slowly, meeting Nicolao’s across the bar.

They were pale as winter fog, those eyes. Pale as the eyes of a man suffering from rheumatism and cataracts. ‘I’ve been watching you…’

Something happened in Nicolao’s chest.

A loosening of something that had been held tightly for seventeen years—a knot he had forgotten was a knot, so long had he carried it.

He felt the stranger’s sharp gaze cut through him, his body shuddering.

‘Get out!’ he shouted.

His voice rang off the stone walls and died.

The stranger stood up slowly, moving towards the door, unhurried. As though nothing that existed in this world could touch him.

At the threshold, he paused. He did not turn. But in the silence before the door opened, Nicolao heard—or believed he heard—three words, spoken quietly.

‘Anselm merchant. Remember?’

The door swung shut. No creak of hinges. No draught.

Nicolao stood for a moment without moving. Then something broke loose in him and he moved fast, crossing the bar in long strides, pulling the door open and stepping out into the wet night.

The street was empty. He looked left. He looked right.

No retreating figure. Not a soul.

Nothing.

Only the dim yellow hue cast by the lamppost, reflecting on the wet cobblestones.

The rain falling softly. Indifferent. Or perhaps not…

Trembling, he stepped back inside and deadbolted the door.

He stood with his back against it for a long moment, his eyes closed, his hands pressed flat against the wood. Then he steadied himself. He breathed. He was a practical man. He had always been a practical man.

He turned back to the bar.

On the counter, the glass that the stranger had left empty was full to the brim — dark red, thick, overflowing, spreading slowly across the wood.

He knew without touching it what it was. He had known the last time he had seen it, on the cobblestones of the alley, seventeen years ago in the rain.

Blood.

He froze, agape.

Then, came a sound.

Not a voice. Not quite. More like the echo of a voice. Patient. Low. Of someone who had waited a very long time and had, at last, been satisfied.

The lights went out.

He was found the next day by his cook. The man arrived in the afternoon and found the door closed, yet unbolted. That was unusual.

Nicolao lay on the ground. His face arranged in an expression that the cook could only describe as terror—as if he had seen something or recognised something frightening. Something that had caused him great pain.

The inexplicable thing was the overturned glass beside Nicolao’s head. Blood smeared on his neck as if coming from his throat.

It wasn’t his as it had been tested. The cause of death was recorded as heart failure.

There were no marks on him. Nothing was missing from the bar. The till was untouched. Not a crime, or any evidence of one.

Nicolao’s death became a mystery. A tale of something supernatural.

The bar had been closed down and abandoned.

Rumours spread around town that on nights when there is a full moon, through the bar’s broken window, you can see two figures moving about inside.

Or in rainy nights two figures, walking side by side from the bar to the alley.

One with a long ragged coat, the other with a heavy gait.

Their steps were slow, as if they were in no hurry to get anywhere, as if the rain did not wet their bodies, as if the world around them did not exist.

Just the two of them, in silence, until they disappeared into the darkness…