The Black Shepherd of Halle

It always begins the same way. A traveller walks past the Hallerbos, on the way home, to family, to whatever waits. The mist descends – suddenly, as if it were something alive that wraps itself around you. The trees vanish. The road vanishes. There is only the grey mass that swallows everything.

And then he hears it: a pipe. A simple melancholy pipe, the same note repeated endlessly. Or perhaps two notes. It is hard to say, for the sound seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It draws him forward like a magnet draws iron. His feet begin to walk that direction of their own accord.

That is when he sees him. A figure in black – tall, thin, motionless except for the movement of his arms. In one hand a pipe, in the other hand... nothing. No shepherd’s staff, no rope, no marking. And around him, moving like water, a flock of sheep. But they are not white – they are grey as the mist itself, translucent, half-material.

The traveller feels drawn to the shepherd, though every fibre of his being screams to run. It is as if the pipe has cut those screams from his body. He follows, because he cannot do otherwise. The shepherd leads him deeper into the mist, and the sheep dance around them in a pattern that almost makes sense, but does not quite.

Hours pass. Or are they minutes? In the mist, time has become like water – it flows, but in which direction is impossible to say. The traveller tries to speak, but his voice does not come from his mouth. The pipe continues, the same note, the same melancholy call. The sheep – how many are there really? – multiply, or vanish, or do both at once.

And then, suddenly, like something that wakes you from a dream, he sees light. The mist recedes like curtains opening. The shepherd and his flock are gone. The traveller stands at the edge of a field he does not know, and the sun sets in the wrong direction.

The tales say the shepherd is a cursed man, or perhaps once was. Some claim he was a murderer; others say he watched his flock starve. What they say is all true – and all untrue. What they say is that he is damned to wander the Hallerbos for eternity, tending his sheep, ever alone, ever seeking something he shall never find.

But an old wayfarer who had met the shepherd and returned told something different. “His eyes”, he said, “held more tears than all the seas. Not from malice, but from loss. He does not try to harm us, but to be helped. For who can free a damned soul from suffering except one who has seen him?”

Since that day, only the bravest travellers walk through the Hallerbos after dark. And some – the very bravest – say that if you dare to look at him directly, to call his name, to simply acknowledge him as human, then perhaps the mist might part. That perhaps, only perhaps, he might be allowed to rest. But no one dares try. And the pipe plays still, in those grey labyrinths, forever.