To be there! thought Raf. Somewhere else, in the middle of the sea, in the middle of a job, in the middle of everyday life.
The child would come and he would kill it. And then it would all be over. They would have survived and could go home.
That was how it was going to be.
The man at the top of the cliff was not whistling, he had probably just joked about that.
Aco looked at the point of light in the distance. It seemed to him as if their positions were reversed and that he was approaching the town, but this time the lights were not scattered like stars, but concentrated in one single burning point, on a spot big enough for just one person. He remembered his woman, but not just her photograph in the kitchen, as he usually did. Pre-battle nerves? Saying goodbye to his dearest? No, he felt more like he was just about to do something he had been delaying for such a long time that it had turned into a moral obligation. He tried to stop remembering her but without success. Memories of women are like mice, they can squeeze in anywhere. Even when they are women from other countries, other times and – this was how it felt at that moment – from other lives. Even when they were dead.
There, beyond that light, was Africa with its desert sands and unpronounceable place names. He had lived through all those events, met all those people and now he was where he had first started.
He looked down, towards the sea. It was a long fall. After that first experience which had got him into all this, he was no longer afraid of heights. The dark rocks below him surrounded by the golden sand looked like flowers. Where the sand ended, a path went up some terraced stairs to the grass. There was no way he could miss that thing in its dark clothes on the light background. He expected it to enter his visual field in a narrow passage between two rocks, which looked somehow lonely because of the distance between them and the other rocks lying in the sea, the surface of which was periodically raised by the waves.
He wished that moment could become eternity. The night, the silence, the sounds of the trees in the distance, the light on the ship, the splashing of the waves. Nothing out of the ordinary and nothing superfluous.
He took off his beret and rolled it between his fingers. Its material full of memories. No wonder it made his head feel so heavy. He threw it towards the sea and it flew off in a wide arch. He did not have enough strength to stop his eyes following it, but luckily the darkness soon swallowed it.
He listened. There were no sounds coming from the village. Even if the rescuers took off at that very moment they would be too late. He felt guilty and could not find anything that would absolve him of that guilt. Really, he had asked for help before he had known what the enemy would look like and if the ambush failed, they would come, find a helpless child and tell him their names. After all the battles they had fought together they would just utter their names and die. Adriano had once been captured and tortured, they had even burst his eardrum with a handle of a gun, but he had not told them a thing. This time he would be asked a polite question and he would not be able to resist answering.
He secretly hoped that Ana was not as obedient as she seemed and that she would disobey his instructions. But of course, she would not, his first impression was correct: she would have a hard life ahead because of the way she was. If that boy in the bushes gave her a life, that was. For the first time, he thought about the young man behind him and his heart did not exactly sing out. Raf seemed clumsy and confused. The latter was hardly surprising after the events of that evening but the former lay like a heavy weight on his chest. Maybe Raf would not even jump up, let alone attack? He would have to give his name to the dark forces and the tree branches would remain undisturbed.
However, it was too late to choose his companion. You take what you are given and you try and make the best of it, that is what he had learnt as an army instructor. You just have to rely on them in battle.
A dark shadow covered the sand between the two rocks.
“There you are!” said Aco and looked at the light on the horizon for the last time.
Ana was getting more and more frightened and she had to stop. I mustn’t look at the trees any more, I see too many monsters in them, I must look at my feet, she said to herself. I’ll count my steps.
One two three four five.
I won’t think of monsters hiding in the woods because they don’t exist. Fear is a hollow surrounded by nothing — as my mother, who’s always watching over me, would say.
I won’t count, I’ll pray:
Saint Stanislas, my guardian, protect me from the woods and the monsters which don’t exist, which I know very well don’t exist and that’s why I’m begging you
Max could feel that his bonds would soon be loose enough and he gurgled with pleasure. What sort of a kiss would he get from his father for a job well done?
Raf waited and his determination was unshaken. The monster would come and he would stab it. He remembered a picture depicting George’s fight with the dragon on a wayside altar he had seen by a path one day.
And then he noticed that the man on the cliff had stopped turning towards the sea and was now looking only towards the beach. Raf had to move a bit to his left to be able to see past the tree trunk and it was a minute before he spotted the child on the sand, still clutching the toy. It took an unbearably long time before the child finally came to the rocky bit where he had to turn towards the meadow. He stopped on the last stony terrace and Raf could only see the top part of his body. He put the toy down, lay on his tummy and kicked his legs up onto the ledge. He then got up, brushed the soil off his knees, picked up the toy elephant and slowly went on.
Raf suddenly saw the truth: all that talking earlier about destroying monsters and dragons was just theory, and that there, that child brushing dirt off his knees, was reality.
He did believe that the being on the meadow brought madness and death but he could not really comprehend it. The child looked so vulnerable, so lost. Raf was an only child and he had never had much experience in dealing with small children. He had never had to babysit and nobody expected him to mess around with the neighbours’ little brats.
A possibility occurred to him about which he desperately wanted to talk to Aco. What if they had left the child there because he was unfinished? Had Aco’s scream disturbed their ritual that night, driving away the demons and interrupting the procedure? What would the boy have been like if he had been more successfully transformed? A machine, which would walk from person to person, without stopping, without calling for his mother and without moments of being lost. How easy it would be to destroy such a robot in human form! But as it was, the child’s best weapon was his vulnerability, his humanity. The machine inside him awakening just for a moment, carrying out its murderous task and then retreating and leaving the body to the child.
He looked at the small figure slowly approaching the middle of the cliff and he groaned to himself, feeling with every step the child made that he probably would not be able to do what he had promised to do.
Even worse: what he had to do.
“Alright?” said Luka, “are we ready? As you are aware, I’m the leader in Aco’s absence and although I may not be as clever as he, you have to obey my orders. Shall we go?”
“YES!”
Soon the moment Luka liked most would come.
The receptionist opened his right eye and listened. Complete silence and undisturbed peace. He asked himself how much longer it would be before the mayhem started. He looked at his watch and could not believe just how late it was. He looked at the glass wall but could see nothing but the lit up semi-circle in front of the reception.