He could not hear the other children in the farmhouse or the courtyard or anywhere near. Perhaps they would not return that night. This had become a frequent occurrence. There was no rule of law. The world seethed from no particular central point, and it was for Marc to find his bearing within it. I have done a bad thing, thought Marc.
22.
When Lea and Florian returned to the farmhouse at dawn, they found the old man propped against the wall in the selfsame position. Dew had accumulated on his clothes and skin and his grey face had lost any vestige of color. The children looked at the broken vegetables scattered in the grass around him and the blood. They did not touch them but stood looking at the old man instead. Florian waved his hand in front of Christophe’s glazed eyes. No reaction. Florian looked at Lea, who only reflected his own confusion. She leaned down and pulled Christophe’s hand, which was cold and hard. The old man rose to his feet, but his eyes did not change. Florian took a few steps back but Lea did not loosen her grip on Christophe’s hand. The boy took the old man’s other hand and the children led him into the farmhouse, finding the bottom floor empty. The smaller children had not returned to the farmhouse for several weeks now. Perhaps they would never return.
Florian and Lea helped Christophe down the stairs to the kitchen, where they installed him in his rocking chair and sat near him on the torn sofa. They warmed each other with their hands until the last traces of that cold night were gone. Then they curled up in each other’s arms and fell asleep, the old man keeping a statue’s vigil over the two children as the sun rose steadily over the courtyard.
23.
At first the fire would not come. For a long time Florian stood there in the kitchen, alternately watching the old man and the girl, him sitting very still in his rocking chair, her pawing at the stovetop as it clicked and hissed and emitted strange smells. Then came the fire. The girl knew how to make it appear from where it hid in the kitchen, and for this Florian thought her a god.
Over the next few days, Florian watched the girl feed the old man. She would cut up vegetables made warm by the fire and feed this mush to the grey thing Christophe had become. When these feedings ended, Florian would continue to stare at the old man, who came to act both as an object of fascination and a container for whatever thoughts and feelings were passing through the boy.
The old man’s hands now lay resting grey and still in Christophe’s lap, denying the great pain they had once caused Florian. His hands no longer protected the garden either, yet it continued to produce food in its messy way under Lea’s stewardship. This was good. To Florian, the girl’s face was made of the diamond-light and around it swirled the blackness defining every important thing.
The twins were present during this period and Lea systematically shared food with them. Over the weeks Sabine healed slowly without speaking a word. She refused to make eye contact with any of the other children. Marc could always be found near her, observing his sister sheepishly and making sure she ate and drank as needed. His presence disturbed Florian at first. Over time the boy came to accept that Marc no longer seemed animated by fits of violence, but he remained on his guard nonetheless. After a few weeks, Florian felt comfortable enough to wander out into the wilderness and hunt for the group.
24.
The boy moved through the forest slowly and deliberately. His hearing had grown very fine and Florian could hear the dry rasp of his palms against tree trunks, the rabbits twitching in the dryleaf, the birds pattering about, and the wild boar panting through their yellowed tusks. In each of these animals coursed the blood which stove-boiled would yield food for Lea. In their eyes hung the fluid of all light, of all that could be seen, so that in each gelatinous ball the whole world manifested independently, to be extinguished when Florian, having sunk his teeth into their necks, hung there stubbornly until the animals ceased to breathe. Florian, ender of worlds, provider of death, and survivor of the great sweep, in this way moved through the forest until he spotted quarry. And there it was among the moss, the wet quivering of life, a rabbit bristling with the flawed awareness afforded the hunted. Florian waited before lunging. The smaller throats collapsed easily, and the boy did not have to rend the beast for long before it gave up struggling and expired with a gurgle.
Lea stood in the garden collecting apples from the tree, each fruit pulling at the branches before it gave way. The snapping of the apple stem felt agreeable to her. She looked up through the spidering branches at the fruit she might have to climb for, and stopped mid-reach to examine her immaculate fingers caught in the sunlight, the nails having been chewed to perfection, the flesh suckled until it was rosy and clean. Florian liked his nails long. Over time the two had settled on a nighttime tongue-cleaning combined with the use of a knife or twig to scour beneath them. For a time she had simply waited for Florian to fall asleep before chewing his nails, but this always resulted in punishingly long absences on the part of the boy, and so Lea ceased insisting and accepted his desire to wear them long. It was only weeks later that she noticed the blood caked beneath them and understood their usefulness in his daily hunts.
Now that her loneliness existed only as a phantom, Lea spent much of her time planning for the incoming cold. The summer had given way to a temperate autumn but she knew that the old man—sat catatonic with palms open in capitulation—would be of no help. The soil would harden and the vegetables would die and the pantry was not stocked with the usual non-perishables. Christophe had failed to instruct any of the children how to gather these goods from nearby towns. This fact among others caused Lea to realize how little the old man had prepared for his own end.
25.
Sabine watched Christophe bare his teeth, black now, as he began reacting to the knife. The old man’s pants lay around him in tatters, cut into uneven ribbons before the girl applied the blade to his inner thighs, where a thin sliver of blood formed in the wake of the blade cutting in long sloping strokes. Otherwise the old man did not move, but merely bled from the legs that had once carried him through the world, throat emitting a soft hiss, not unlike that of a coffee pot in the wane of a boil. Sabine looked at her work as the knife swung again in a red line, many slashes now, birds across the flesh of the sky, with a mechanized logic beyond understanding. She listened to the faint sound of the old man’s parting flesh as she pushed the knife deeper, wounds like grey gills running over anemic muscle from which blood poured in a curtain, mixing with the air as it struck the ground and shifted from red to black. The valley was a red valley, and it bled with the same dispassion as a brook babbles and a river flows and an ocean stirs and the black blood of stars pools dully between them, those bright punctures to which we crane our necks in wonder. Sabine cradled each testicle briefly before she sliced through the scrotum, severing the cremaster muscle and the spermatic cord, arteries, blood spraying now, from the old man’s groin and onto the kitchen tile. His eyes fluttered and his chin raised and the nape of his neck lifted from the rocking chair.