The Mare

Joren Verbeke was a hardworking farmer whose fields stretched along the banks of the Schelde, near the crumbling castle walls of Petegem. For forty years he had tended his land, cared for his animals, and provided for his family. But in the autumn of 1847, everything changed.

It began subtly. Joren would rise from bed with dark circles beneath his eyes, yet he remembered no bad dreams. His wife Marta said he thrashed about all night, his body drenched in cold sweat though the season was already growing cool. "You cry out in your sleep," she whispered. "But you never hear me."

Then came the night when it truly began. Joren lay in his bed with the window open to the night, weary from his labors in the barn. Suddenly he felt something terrible. A weight, heavy as a stone block, pressed down upon his chest. He could not breathe, could not speak a word. His eyes flew open in the darkness, but he could not move, not a single muscle obeyed his will. Above him, barely visible in the moonlight through the window, he saw a form—a woman with grey hair and hands like claws. She grinned and his lungs burned.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the weight vanished. He could breathe. He could scream. But what he wanted to scream, he did not know.

For three weeks Joren was ridden by the mare each night. His body became slicked with sweat that would not cease. The priests of Petegem spoke of demons and murmured prayers, but nothing helped. The wise woman of Wortegem gave him flax and crystals, but the mare only laughed. Joren could no longer eat, could no longer work. His eyes became hollow.

Then his old neighbor, the wise Mevrouw De Smedt, brought him to her small cottage. She was the one who made herbal remedies and knew the old ways. "The mare is always sent by someone," she said. "A human with dark power. You must stay awake, Joren. On the night of the full moon you must stay awake and follow the spirit when she comes. Follow her to where she comes from."

On the night of the full moon, Joren bound himself to the foot of his bed with rope he could loosen but which would rouse him. He gripped a candle in his hand and counted each moment until the terror would arrive. Then she appeared again—the mare with her grey hair and narrowed eyes. But this time, when she vanished, Joren followed the trace of her presence outside, through the village in the moonlight. His feet carried him along the Schelde, past the village square, to a cottage at the village’s edge. A cottage he had always known.

The cottage of Margriete Bosmans, the old woman who had lived alone for twenty years and to whom no one ever spoke.

When Joren understood who had sent the mare, he understood too what he must do. It was not Margriete’s fault alone—it was his own. Years before, he had taken her son’s land from her with a dishonest contract, when they were both young and bitter. She had cursed him with the burden of the mare.

On the next morning Joren walked to Margriete’s door. His heart pounded. She opened it and saw immediately what he meant to say, for it was written upon his face. "I will return the land," he said. "All of it. Forgive me."

Margriete looked at him with eyes that spoke of years of pain. Slowly she nodded. "Then the mare will not visit you again," she said. "But you will feel the sorrow that I have felt. You will understand."

That night Joren slept without nightmares. But the next morning he went to the notary in Oudenaarde and returned the land, as he had promised. He worked harder than ever before for a more humble life. Margriete grew calm. Some say she lived on for many more years, and that she and Joren would sometimes look at each other in church with the kind of understanding that comes from shared suffering. The mare vanished from Petegem, but what Joren had learned never faded.