An elderly woman was picking mushrooms in the forest and accidentally fell into a huge hole. She desperately tried to get out until she noticed something terrifying in the ground. đšđ«Ł
The woman’s pension was small, and to avoid starving, she devised a small way to earn money: every morning she went into the forest to pick mushrooms, brought home several buckets, sold some at the market, and dried or fried the rest for herself.
It was warm and sunny that day, and after the rains, there were plenty of mushrooms to be found. The woman walked along a familiar path, toward the very places her late husband had once shown her. Her basket quickly filled with firm boletus mushrooms, and her heart grew lighter. The scent of damp moss and the singing of birdsâeverything around her reminded her of her youth.
Entertained, she went deeper into the thicket, under an old, wide spruce tree, where she spotted a huge white mushroom. She took a step toward him, but her foot suddenly gave wayâthe ground gave way beneath her, a crunching sound was heard, and she plummeted. The fall was short but sharpâthe impact with the wet ground knocked the wind out of her.
She found herself in a deep pit, the loose earth crumbling down the sides. She tried to scream, but her voice was drowned out by the forest silence. She tried to climb out, but the walls were slippery, and every time she grabbed a root or piece of grass, it broke off in her hands. Then, in the wet earth, she saw something terrifying and screamed in horror. đČđ±
Maybe ten minutes passed until she noticed that one of the walls of the pit seemed unusualâthe earth there was darker, denser, as if compacted.
The woman crawled closer and suddenly saw something white in the ground. At first she thought it was a stone. She ran her finger over it and pulled her hand back: it was bone. Human.
Her heart pounded. She began digging into the ground with trembling hands, and a face emerged from beneath the damp soil. A man’s, deathly pale, with sunken eye sockets.
His hair was almost rotted away, but the collar of his shirt and a button remainedârusty, but familiar.
The woman screamed and recoiled. It was the face of her neighborâa man who had disappeared a year ago. The whole village had searched for him, but they had never found him. At the time, they said he had left for the city, abandoning his wife.
And now she understoodâhe had been here all this time, underground. And the hole she had fallen into had formed precisely because the earth above her body had subsided over time.
The woman froze, unable to scream or move. The forest around her grew eerily quiet.