The Yark
Page 3
The children are careful not to feed him more than minuscule doses of poison. It would be a waste to kill the Yark straightaway. For a torture session to be fun, it must be drawn out!
All night, the infernal celebration goes on.
At the end of his strength, the Monster can no longer so much as groan. He tells himself that by dawn it will all be over.
“Only a few hours to go,” he thinks, “before these noxious imps will have finished me off.”
But as his strength leaves him, an image surges up before his eyes. Madeleine’s face appears in all its loveliness. Her smile wipes away his suffering. Her memory stamps out his sorrow.
And so the Yark no longer dreads the hours that remain until dawn.
11
BREAKFAST
It’s daybreak. A ray of sunlight tickles the Monster’s snout and makes him sneeze. He stretches, blinks, and yawns voluptuously. Suddenly, he sits bolt upright.
“What? I’m not dead?”
Dumbfounded to find himself alive, the Monster listens to the beating of his heart. By what miracle has he regained his strength? He breathes the morning air, fills his lungs… The Monster has never felt so fit in his life.
“How can this be?” he murmurs, thinking of all the poison he swallowed during the night.
Worn out by their night-long festivities, the wild children snore at his feet. The Yark sniffs at them. Their scent of leather, ear wax, and rotting olives repulses him.
However, this morning, something is different.
The smell of scoundrels is making his mouth water!
Baffled by this mystery, the Yark loosens his ties and kneels beside the children to get a better whiff.
“Yum, what a good smell of bad children,” he purrs, as astonished as he is hungry.
His cherry-red tongue licks greedily over their tiny heads.
But a flicker of pity keeps him from biting. In their sleep, these little wretches seem so touching, so fragile… The gallant Monster asks himself again: “Would they be so nasty if they hadn’t been abandoned? Would they be so cruel if they had truly been loved?”
“They certainly would!” he roars without further effort to work it out.
And he throws himself on the children and munches them down, every last one.
“One hundred and two bad kids!” the Yark exclaims triumphantly, since he has counted each mouthful. One hundred and two bad kids and not even a tummy ache! Nothing! Not a single side effect! One hundred and two bad kids and not even a stray fart!
Whereupon, the Yark breaks into a dance of joy. And in spite of his abundant breakfast, he’s never felt so light!
12
AROUND THE
WORLD
When a gigantic finger taps delicately at the lighthouse windows, Madeleine’s face lights up with an immense smile.
The little girl jumps onto the Yark’s shoulders and the two of them celebrate their reunion with a series of loop-the-loops above the waves.
That evening, while sampling a jar of candied fruit, the Monster regales Madeleine with the account of his extraordinary adventure. He is certainly astonished to have survived his ordeal with the wild children. But he’s even more amazed to have successfully digested them.
“Divine miracle!” the Yark proclaims.
To Madeleine, there’s nothing supernatural about it. Citing the adage, “That which does not kill me can only make me stronger,” she explains that those tiny doses of bad children acted like a vaccine. Instead of killing him, the small quantities of poison immunized him against the toxic flesh of the rascals.
The Yark doesn’t understand much of that explanation, but he nevertheless smacks his lips at the conclusion: “So now I can stuff myself with all the children in the whole world!” he exclaims.
“Freedom would mean that you could live without eating anyone,” the little girl replies.
“To live without eating?” the Monster yelps.
“To live without killing anyone!” Madeleine corrects him with a laugh.
“But it’s in a Monster’s nature to eat little children!” the Yark says indignantly.
“There’s no law that says so,” Madeleine replies. “There’s only what each of us decides for ourselves.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure I’ll never change!”
“Really? Then, why haven’t you eaten me?” Madeleine retorts in a mischievous tone.
Not knowing how to reply, the Yark says nothing.
After a moment’s thought, he lifts his hand to his heart: “Don’t worry! I’ll only eat brats from now on. Only wild children growing up in the forest!”
But Madeleine doesn’t care whether the Yark’s meals are nice or naughty. What bothers her is the fact that in order to live, he has to kill another living being.
In his embarrassment, the Monster hastily promises: “All right then, I swear it…I’ll never eat another child.”
Liar!
Because that very night, after making sure that Madeleine is sleeping like a baby, this glutton flies out the window to test his limitless appetite on children all around the world.
From high in the sky, the Yark lets himself drop sharply to earth and he lands by chance in Morocco.
His sense of smell leads him to a small house from which a delicious smell emanates. His mouth watering in anticipation, he slides into the bedroom, laughing to himself.
“Hee-hee! Whether he’s a good boy or an utter brat, I’ll gulp him down in a single bite!”
But the Monster is startled when he sees the child in his bed. This little Moroccan boy could be mistaken for Madeleine! And even though he looks nothing like her, the Yark could nonetheless swear he’s her twin!
The shock spoils his appetite, so he hurries out of the room and flies straight off to Southeast Asia.
With great strides, the Monster sails through rice paddies, cursing the mosquitoes as he goes. But never mind the bites. The Monster is running full speed toward an orphanage.
In the silent dormitory, he creeps between the rows of little beds. When a splinter pierces his bottom, the stoical Monster refrains from crying out. Still, when he leans over the children, he can’t keep back a howl.
All these little Vietnamese children look like Madeleine!
“I’m losing my mind!” the Yark yelps, trembling.
He rubs his eyes as he runs from bed to bed, but the Yark sees in each face the one child he could never eat.
All night long, the Yark visits thousands of bedrooms across all the earth’s continents. And even though he travels from Spain to Bulgaria, from India to the United States, all the children of the world seem to have taken Madeleine’s features.
For a long time, the Monster thinks he is suffering from hallucinations. Then at last he admits that the love of a little girl has made him see the world differently.
Since that night, the Yark has never eaten another child.
13
HIS
STORY
The Yark and Madeleine still live at the top of the lighthouse. Far from the rest of the world, they look after each other and lead a pleasant, secluded existence. And when the Monster wields his paintbrushes, these days he creates magnificent works of art.
Sometimes, the taste of children comes back to him and he recalls the feeding frenzies of days gone by. Then, when Madeleine is asleep, the Yark leaps onto the roof and vanishes into the night.
If you look up, you might see him gliding over the rooftops.
But don’t be frightened. The Yark is no longer led by the nose. He flies with his eyes wide open.
Sometimes his gaze is drawn to the lighted window of a bedroom. And even if it’s no more than a candle flame, the Yark sees it as a distress flare, a lighthouse in the night, the signal of a nightmare that’s woken a child in its bed.
That is when the Monster descends to the earth.
His hooked nails open the front door. He creeps along the hallway and climbs the stairs without a sound.
Stalking like a silent wolf, he squeezes into the bedroom. His hand slides lightly over the wall to switch off the light. As he approaches the bed, he catches a whiff of a child terrified of the dark.
And to help the child go back to sleep, the Yark tells his story.
The End
Acknowledgments
Nathalie Palméro, Julien Messemackers,
François Tessier & Valéria Vanguelov.
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This edition first published in 2018 by Gecko Press
PO Box 9335, Wellington 6141, New Zealand
info@geckopress.com
English-language edition © Gecko Press Ltd 2018
Translation © Antony Shugaar 2018
Original title: Le Yark © 2011 Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle
Text © Bertrand Santini
Illustrations © Laurent Gapaillard
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted or utilized in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Distribution
United States and Canada:
Lerner Publishing Group, lernerbooks.com
United Kingdom: Bounce Sales and Marketing, bouncemarketing.co.uk
Australia: Scholastic Australia, scholastic.com.au
New Zealand: Upstart Distribution, upstartpress.co.nz
Edited by Penelope Todd
Design and typesetting by Katrina Duncan
Printed in China by Everbest Printing Co Ltd,
an accredited ISO 14001 & FSC certified printer
ISBN hardback: 978-1-776571-71-0 (USA)
ISBN paperback: 978-1-776571-72-7
Ebook ISBNs: 978-1-776571-73-4 (epub); 978-1-776571-74-1(mobi);
978-1-776571-75-8 (pdf); 978-1-776571-76-5 (epub USA)
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