Evil spirits

Evil spirits are part of a village cosmology in which unseen beings attach themselves to people, influence what happens around them, and appear in signs drawn from nature. Their presence is described through local belief rather than established as an objective explanation: Olga the Wise One teaches The boy to understand himself as possessed, Lekh reads the movements of birds as evidence of spiritual activity, and a storm leaves the boy amid images of supernatural danger. Across these episodes, Evil spirits make misfortune legible while exposing how thoroughly fear has entered the boy’s account of the world.

The Spirit Olga Identifies in The boy

Olga calls The boy the Black One and tells him that an Evil spirit dwells within him, hidden from his awareness like a mole in a deep burrow. In her explanation, the boy’s dark, unblinking eyes distinguish him from people with bright eyes. This difference is not merely a physical trait in Olga’s account: she treats it as the outward sign of an inward possession, giving the boy a frightening identity before he can judge the claim for himself.

Olga’s teaching also assigns the boy a power that is at once dangerous and potentially useful. His bewitched eyes can cast a spell, she says, but can also remove one. To help someone or something afflicted by illness, he must keep his mind blank except for the disease he is trying to remove. The warning makes attention itself consequential. If he looks at a healthy child, a calf, or grass without maintaining that disciplined focus, each may waste away, die suddenly, or spoil after harvest. In this folklore, the same gaze can be a remedy or a source of harm; the boy’s supposed power therefore comes with a burden of constant self-surveillance.

The Beings Drawn to Possession

Olga describes the spirit inside the boy as attracting other mysterious beings. Phantoms are among them: silent and rarely seen, but persistent in their interference with ordinary life. In her account they trip people in fields and forests, peer into huts, and may take the form of a hostile cat or rabid dog. When angered, they moan; at midnight, they become hot tar. The details give the invisible a shifting vocabulary of familiar surroundings, from animals near a home to a substance encountered in the dark.

Olga distinguishes these beings from Ghosts and Vampires. Ghosts, as she describes them, are the dead, condemned to damnation and returning at the full moon with extraordinary powers and their eyes turned mournfully eastward. Vampires are a further threat associated with possession. Her account says they may assume human form and come from people drowned without baptism or abandoned by their mothers; after growing up in water or forests, they become vagabonds. They seek access to Catholic or Uniate churches, where they trouble sacred images and objects and may attack sleeping people. These stories extend the idea of possession outward: the inhabited boy is not only marked by a spirit, but placed at the center of a world crowded with beings that can cross the boundaries between human, animal, and supernatural forms.

Omens and the Behavior of Birds

Lekh offers another route by which Evil spirits become perceptible. He teaches The boy to watch birds and draw conclusions from their behavior. A large, mixed flock flying against a red sunset means, in his interpretation, that spirits seeking damned souls are riding on the birds’ wings. When crows, rooks, and jackdaws gather together in a field, Lekh attributes their assembly to an Evil one trying to turn them against other birds. The flock is thus not simply a natural gathering: it becomes a scene in which spiritual conflict is read through the relations among animals.

Lekh’s bird lore also includes predictions that are not attributed to spirits. Long-winged white crows signal a cloudburst, while wild geese flying low in spring foretell a rainy summer and poor harvest. The contrast matters: close observation can, in his view, disclose either spiritual danger or practical weather signs. His teaching binds supernatural interpretation to attention to the natural world, without making the two kinds of explanation identical.

Storm, Terror, and the Unseen

The story later gives supernatural fear a physical setting when the carpenter chains The boy to a harness, takes him by cart to a distant field during a storm, and leaves him there. In the lull he perceives werewolves creeping from the forest, translucent demons flying from swamps, and graveyard ghouls passing through the air. The episode does not establish these beings as independently verified creatures; it renders the boy’s isolation and terror through the same supernatural vocabulary that has shaped his earlier understanding.

The scene broadens the folklore from Olga’s explanation of a possessed child to an encompassing vision of a world alive with hostile forces. The boy is alone, far from the village, while darkness and the storm make familiar distances difficult to grasp. His experience of the setting and his inherited stories converge: invisible beings seem to occupy the spaces between forest, swamp, and graveyard. Evil spirits therefore function not only as characters in village belief, but as a way the narrative gives form to danger that the boy cannot control or explain by ordinary means.

Narrative Significance

The accounts of Evil spirits are mediated by people who offer The boy systems for interpreting vulnerability. Olga’s teaching makes his appearance a sign of possession and turns his gaze into a possible cause of harm; Lekh’s teaching makes the flight and gathering of birds evidence of spiritual designs. Neither account gives the boy a secure refuge from fear. Even the supposed capacity to remove a spell requires care, while the signs in the sky and fields invite him to search ordinary nature for hidden threats.

At the same time, the book keeps the sources of these beliefs distinct. Olga presents a detailed local cosmology, Lekh reads omens through his own bird lore, and the storm scene conveys the boy’s isolated perception. Together they show how supernatural explanations organize experience without requiring the narrative to certify every reported being as real. Evil spirits name an unseen threat, but they also reveal the human need to interpret illness, misfortune, and terror when a child has little power over the circumstances around him.