She assumed a position like a dog that blocks its prey when it doesn't intend to let go. I had no chance to do anything. I was trapped. Occasionally I touched her feet with my hands. They were icy. Inhuman. Even though I was only a child, I understood that she was not human. She's another bloodthirsty being. A night demon.
When she started breathing heavily and occasionally hissing, I was dying of fright. Suddenly she grabbed me by the neck and looked me over closely. Her black eyes pierced me through and through. She was examining me. I don't know what she was looking for in me at all. All of a sudden she stood up, lifted me up and leaned me against the wall. She held me practically in the air and hissed loudly like a snake. Even with her outfit in the strange black dress, she was creeping me out. Suddenly her hideous inhuman face turned human and very pretty. Suddenly, I was held under the neck leaning against the wall, not by a beast, but by a very pretty woman. I was very much surprised by her transformation, but I did not understand the reason for her transformation. Instead of the sort of leathery black braids that had been on her head instead of hair, her long blonde hair was suddenly white in the darkness. So this striga can turn into a beautiful woman in a short while? I huffed. That's not a good sign. She wasn't about to let me go, though, and I began to breathe harder. She noticed this and relaxed a little. She looked at the window because something caught her attention. Then she jerked away and took the form of a hideous night monster again, kidnapping children and no one knows what she'll do with them afterwards. She pulled me away from the wall and took one more close look at me. She hissed ominously and let go of me. I fell back on the couch and striga noiselessly went out at the high window. She didn't even look at me anymore and jumped out into the dark night.
Stunned by what had just happened to me, I stayed as if chained to the couch. I could do nothing. The window remained open and I watched the curtain that floated in the rushing air, occasionally stretching halfway across the room. I hoped, in fact subconsciously I knew, that the striga would not return, that it would not come to me again. I was in shock, but I stayed alive. She didn't take me anywhere. To this day, I don't know what discouraged or disturbed her, why she let me live. She never appeared in front of me again. But she picked many more child victims that the ground seemed to crawl over.
The tragedy in our city was still not over. As a child, I told my experience to everyone I met, but no one wanted to believe me. They said that the striga would surely not leave me alone. Later I understood that there was no point in telling anyone about it. I carried my personal drama into adulthood. During the summer holidays, we were visited at home by the Secret Service and a nondescript agent who looked more like Chaplin than a Secret Service agent. He wanted me to describe the encounter with the striga all over again. So, for perhaps the hundredth time, I told him the whole story as I had told it before to anyone who was curious, who was interested in such strange things. He listened to me intently, and the other agent wrote everything down on his typewriter. The tapping of the typewriter made me nervous, but together we got it done. Then the agent looked at me quizzically and asked:
"Boy, tell me, are you making all this up or did it really happen? When she had you on the wall by the neck, she didn't talk to you in another language?"
"I mean, didn't you hear her voice in your head? Or some other way?"
Of course, I didn't make it up and I kept saying that's exactly how it happened.
"No, I'm not making this up, it's all true. That's how it happened. She's not human. But she can turn into a human. Very quickly. And then she's very pretty. She has fair hair and a pretty feminine face."
The agent walked thoughtfully over to his colleague, saying nothing, just gesturing something important, and then they both thought about something. After a moment he came back to me and spoke the result of his thinking aloud: "So that means he can walk around town among us during the day and no one knows he's actually a cold-blooded beast. If she can turn herself into a human, I mean, into a charming woman, we're in proper trouble here. Tell me, my boy, if you went into a big shop, a Prior, for instance, would you recognise her? Could you recognize her among other people?"
I thought about it and answered, "Yes, I certainly do".
However, with my statement I had signed an agreement with the secret service, which then followed me until the sixth year of primary school. They were always around, even when it wasn't necessary. Maybe they assumed that the striga would come back and liquidate me. When I entered the sixth year of primary school, the Velvet Revolution came and the socialist state system came to an end. The old regime fell, and with it the secret the service that served him. I never saw those agents again, they never contacted me again in any way.
The 1990s in Slovakia were marked by many criminal affairs and the infamous mafia era. After the end of that rampage, the life of the population in Slovakia began to move in a slightly better, more promising direction. From time to time, reports of missing children appeared in the media. But most people did not pay any particular attention to it, although some were offended by these reports. The striga has somehow been forgotten, much remained hidden in the documents of the former regime. After 2000, I finished my post-secondary education. One winter morning in December, someone knocked on the door of my apartment. I jumped out of bed and hastily tidied up. I went to open the door. Two older men in suits stood in the hallway and showed me their service IDs. They were detectives from the regional police station. I invited them in and carefully sat down next to them. They didn't give the impression of some sharp men, but rather gave the impression of insecurity.
"Thank you for inviting us in. Do you know why we are here?"
I looked at them as if I wanted to read their eyes. After a short reflection I said: "Nooo, you remind me of the old days, when we were often visited by StB agents. They were interested in me, in my story, which I often told to anyone who asked me in those days."
One of the agents started recording our conversation on his cell phone.
"Yes, you're right. Last week, while we were disposing of an old archive in the former premises of our organisation, we came across a file called Striga. We studied it carefully and didn't even want to believe what we read there. It mentions your name, so we looked you up to check whether it was true or some kind of socialist fabrication. But you obviously exist. And so we would like to hear from you what was happening in this town at that time, and also what you personally experienced. It is possible that the striga, that abomination, as you called it in your file, is still alive and committing child abductions to this day.
I looked at them in disgust and after a moment I replied: "You don't want me to tell you everything again? I thought I was done with all that in my life and I wouldn't have to look back on it."
"You will certainly help us to better understand the whole situation and to draw the most realistic conclusion from it. We are not very supportive of supernatural phenomena. But if this is what the former regime was able to accept and deal with, that's really strong coffee. If we hadn't been randomly going through the files in our old archive, where your file was, we would never have known about such a thing, and so we would have had no clues as to how to deal with the cases that arose, how to proceed, what to focus on."
I had to admit they were right. Even though I absolutely did not want to revisit the issue, I figured I should do so for the sake of one name alone. The only one. Helen! And so I began to tell the agents my story from the very beginning. I noticed that the other little-talking.