It was built by a very rich and extremely strange man, who lived in one end of the village, near the forest … No other property was no longer connected with it, and people do not use it because it was bordered by some ravines full of blackthorn with sharp thorns, dense hawthorn, brambles swarmed with snakes and all sorts of legends, one more frightening than another…
But the wealthy had built it as a flagship, so to impress everyone with the paved gutters and road covered with smooth, strictly aligned tiles. He did not receive guests, he was not married and had no heirs, and the rest of the villagers did not want to know. Nobody knew what had brought the rich man in that place, why he fled the world precisely on this wilderness, and his secret died with him in a poisoned by frost morning of an early autumn. Not even a funeral procession on the manorial road because, not knowing what religion, people dif not bury the rich man in the village cemetery, but in the yard of the manor. The manor, left untidy, after it was stripped of tiles and marble pieces by the greedy villagers, fell into disrepair.
When nothing was not stolen from the mansion, and the two English greyhounds ran the nearby forest, the road was not walked by anyone, it was even avoided, because it leads to a solitary place, which gave ordinary people the creeps. Cobblestone gutters was clogged by the mud brought by the spring freshet, and the tiles disappeared one by one, appearing in the foundation of the new house of the village priest.
As no one walking on the road, soon, ground by water and bad weather, it turns into a sticky trenches, conquered by brambles that covered the surrounding cliffs and where, soon, it was heard the hiss of snakes, or perhaps it was the wind!? From time to time, from the newly trenches could hear wolves howling, but the elders who still remembered said that there are some wolf cubs born by a pair of greyhounds mated with earth wolves …
(Translated from aMorale, by Marius Cilibia)
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