9 Tales Told in the Dark 22

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  The paediatric oncologist perched on the low beam of the Freires’ neighbour’s fence and reached into his inside right pocket of his jacket and pulled out a cigar. He saw no irony as he lit up and breathed in the smoke, rolling it around inside his mouth before blowing it into a ballooning cloud, distorting the fields, which rolled away ahead. After seventeen years of it, you might think it became easier to watch a child who has never really even lived die. But it didn’t. He wouldn’t eat tonight. Drink, certainly; but he wouldn’t eat. It was almost five in the afternoon and already the visceral crimson of the clouds was fading to a murky grey as the last of the daylight faded. He considered going back in to see how the parents were doing, but no. He would wait.

  Francisco Freire was a proud man. His family had owned this land – and more besides – in this village for longer than it had been on the map. On a better day, his sandy hair, pale green eyes, and often-flushed skin would give him the look of a man half his age. Even with the lines he had earned working that land since he was old enough to walk. But not today. Today he was ashen. Death had swept into the building and carted off what was left of his emaciated son, and it looked like it had taken half of him with it. The tears had stopped flowing when he finally pulled across the latch and let himself, silently, out on to the street where the doctor had been waiting for him. The only sign of his tears was the profound reddening of his strong nose and his fiercely bloodshot eyes.

  “Thank you, doctor,” he said, as he slumped down to the beam beside him. “I know you’ve done everything you could have for him.”

  The doctor took the last drag of his cigar and savored it, before blowing the smoke gently out through the pursed corners of his lips and releasing a sigh to follow it. “Life isn’t fair, Francisco,” he said. “There’s nothing anyone could have done to prevent this. Nor to predict it. It’s a one in ten thousand chance at the boy’s age and it’s nothing but the shittiest of luck that meant it was him.”

  There was a deafening silence from the farmer. He took out his own packet of cigarettes and a battered old lighter and lit up. He inhaled deeply and lolled his head back, blowing smoke high up into the air.

  “You don’t need this talk today,” said the doctor, finally. “I’ll be back tomorrow with the papers. I’ll need some signatures and so on. I’ll come by in the afternoon, when I’m finished with my patients at the hospital. I’ll leave Tomas at home with you and Mrs. Freire tonight.”

  With that he eased himself to his feet and, placing a firm hand on the farmer’s shoulder, unlocked the door of his car and drove along the narrow track back out to the main mountain road and on toward the city.

  By the time he reached the end of his cigarette, the glow from the tip burned brightly against the dark evening sky. Francisco dropped it to the floor and subconsciously, mechanically stubbed it out with his boot. Then he virtually sleepwalked his way back into the house, up the narrow staircase to the landing. He walked past the door to his room and turned right at the end, just before the bathroom, into Tomas’ room. The room that had been prepared for him five years before he had brought it sparkling to life with his effervescence. He looked down at the bed. It dwarfed him in this withered state, but there was his boy, sound asleep. But this was a sleep from which he’d never awake. His mother still hadn’t looked at her husband since the doctor had made his proclamation, almost an hour before. Still, she didn’t now. She simply squeezed the tiny hand in hers a tiny, almost imperceptible amount more tightly. Then she stood quietly, turned to look into her husband’s eyes and felt her olive-toned cheeks warm with tears. She shook her head, not finding the words and pushed feebly past him into the bathroom.

  Clouds had gathered and as they climbed into bed, mere shadows of the people they had been before, in spite of the menacing white noise of pain that clouded their minds, they plunged into a deep and lifeless sleep.

  The snow had kept this remote corner of mountain country even less well trod than usual, so Francisco wasn’t taken by surprise when he walked into the modest, whitewashed church three days later to endure the funeral of his only child and found that the place was near empty. Dr. Santos had sent flowers, which was decent of him, but had been unable to get the time away from his other patients, what with the journey along those treacherous lanes from the highway. It was just the village folk. The original ones. He knelt and crossed himself as he entered the building and then found a space in the second row along from his wife, who was still staring, zombie-like, into space and being consoled round-the-clock by her sister Mariana. He’d decided to forego the opportunity to perform a reading himself. He simply wasn’t up to it. Father Antonio greeted the people of the parish and the first hymn began to play.

  During the second somber refrain, the creaking sound of the church’s ancient wooden door reverberated through the church over the drone of the organ and a rush of the frigid air from outside rushed in, touching each soul as it brushed by. Marta, Francisco’s wife was the first to turn her head. That meant she was the first to feel the shock, too. Sensing it Francisco, too, turned and was dumbstruck. His elderly mother, to whom he’d not spoken in almost five years, was lurching her way down the aisle of the church. She avoided his gaze as she leaned heavily on the stick in her right hand. Finally, three rows back, she stopped and sat herself down on a pew, alone.

  But for the prayers offered by the priest for Tomas’ immortal soul, not a word was uttered by anyone for the thirty-five or so minutes of the ceremony, but that did nothing to silence the jittering chatter in Francisco’s head. How could she? He asked himself over and over. He found himself almost involuntarily looking back to her. She didn’t notice, her head bowed in prayer. As was the custom, once the ceremony had ended, the organ music continued and people were invited to approach the coffin and pay their final respects to the dead. Francisco reached out for Marta’s hand as she and her sister rose. He would wait until everyone else was gone. He needed to do this alone.

  One by one, the families from the neighboring houses, then the old couple who ran the bakery, then the workmen who maintained the village for the regional council approached, silently, looked in on the lost, sleeping little Tomas and then moved on. Finally came the turn of the boy’s grandmother. The last surviving relative of that generation. Francisco wondered if she could feel his eyes boring into her back. If she could, she showed no signs. She leaned over, and he could hear the murmur of her voice, but couldn’t decipher her words, much the way he could hear the low hum of the highway on a clear day from across the hills. After some ten minutes, the organ music was hushed and she turned and walked out, still muttering under her breath and even now concealing her eyes from her son’s. Francisco exhaled deeply and stood. He paced towards his son, knowing that this was the last time he would ever see or touch his only boy. The weight of that thought made his legs heavy, his lungs breathless.

  He stood, looking down at him. His skin was paler now, but still he bore his father’s rosy complexion. Then in his eyes, the unmistakable darkness of his mother. Her long, thick eyelashes, too, framed them. It was curious to see the primary school boy in the little suit they’d had made for him. The only real sign of his withering towards death in the protruding bones of his hands, his neck. Francisco stood, silent. Searching for words.

  “You’re all we ever, ever thought about, your mum and me,” he finally began. “We did start to think you’d never actually come though. And then… and then, you were such a blessing. Such a bright little man. You’d have been so good, with the… with the farm. I know you would.” He leaned in to plant a final kiss on the boy’s cheek. “Rest well,” he said. And then he froze. Tucked behind the boy’s shoulder were a bottle and a jar, each filled with a golden liquid. He reached down and picked up the jar and watched as the viscose contents glooped to one side. Honey. The other one was clearly olive oil. He felt the rage burning from within himself and his cheeks begin to color as he snatched them up and marched out of the church. The priest tried t
o say something as he was leaving, but he didn’t hear him. He looked around in the bright white of the snow lit day outside and couldn’t see her anywhere. So he turned and began to walk up the stone stairs cut into the hillside, out of the village towards where his mother was now living. His strides lengthened as he took the steps two at a time, but still, when he reached the top, she was nowhere to be seen. Finally, he saw her cottage, smoke from the heating rising in an erratic, windswept plume from the chimney. He didn’t even knock, swinging the door open. “What the hell is this?” he asked, before she had any chance to protest to his being there.

  “You know what it is and you know why I put it there,” his mother said, not lifting herself from her seat or her book at the kitchen table. “And close that door.”

  “It was a church funeral, for Christ’s sake,” Francisco started again, closing the door and pulling the latch across. “What were you saying to him? Why were you talking to him for so long? It’s not right, it’s heresy!”

  “It’s our way, Francisco,” she said, using his name for the first time in years. “What did I say to him? The same thing I said to your father, and my own brother. I told his soul which way to go and this – this – is important, my child.” She shook the containers and their gold liquid in front of Francisco’s face. “Without this…” she lowered her voice, “without these, something terrible could happen.”

  “My son is dead, mother. Your grandson. He’s dead. Something terrible has happened.”

  She looked at him. Looked straight into his eyes, clutching the two glass containers in her two hands. Her book’s pages sprung up and Francisco lost focus for a moment, as his eyes watched them. She shook the honey jar to bring him back and then put the two containers gently onto the table. “Let me explain something to you,” she said. “This practice has been helping the souls of our dead to rest for generations. For longer than this country has existed. Now hear me, when I tell you, Tomas’ death is a terrible thing. I know the pain you and Marta went through bringing that boy into the world. But if his soul doesn’t find its way-”

  “Then what, mum?” Francisco stood as he said it. “Then what?! Am I supposed to believe this pagan hokum? We live in a modern society. A catholic society. Your witchcraft is out of date and I can’t believe you tried to cast your spells on my son’s dead body!”

  “Then, my boy,” his mother said, perfectly calmly. “Then, your son won’t simply be dead. Your son will be death. The next harvester of souls.”

  He looked at her, incredulous. His eyes as wide as saucers as he just stared, blankly at her. “I’m leaving,” he said, finally. “And don’t you go near my boy!” He stormed across the room and slammed the door shut behind him, sending shockwaves through the dark iron bindings of the shutters on the outside. As he paced down the hillside path back towards the village, he realized that he had snatched the bottles in his rage. He stopped where he was and stared at them. At the mucus-like flow of the honey running down the glass wall of the angled jar. One after another, he wound back his arm and threw them as hard as he could into a nearby rock outcrop, atomizing them both. Oil stained his woolen suit trousers around the ankles and he stood and watched as the honey oozed down the face of the rock like some primeval slime, weaving its way between lichens and jagged edges.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was the priest, telling him that they were about to fill in the grave. Francisco didn’t reply, simply turning and breaking into a jog, mindful of the still dewy surface of the rock path back in to the village. By the time he arrived, the coffin had already been lowered and the gravediggers were just beginning to heap earth on top. Every percussive thud of soil hitting wood was like a punch in the guts for Francisco and where there had been sorrow and lament in the morning’s service, now they had been replaced with an empty despair. He watched because he had to. Then he left without a word.

  The following days passed without real incident. The sun rose lower over the horizon, casting the long shadows of winter and barely cutting through the mist that seemed to hang perpetually in the chilly air. The snow abated and was soon gone from the frozen ground, leaving bare, dark earth. In the Freire household silence hung in the air more than usual, while both Francisco and Marta rarely found any appetite for food and seldom for each other. But considering their only child was decaying in the churchyard, this was not such a surprise. Gradually, the wounds would heal. Things would normalize. It was how things were with such tragedies.

  It was on the sixth day after the burial that old Sergio Fernandes was leading his sheep back into the barn. The sun was fading behind the hills and light drained from the sky, bringing with it a harsh, bitter wind. The sheep bounded up to the corrugated iron doors, and the warm hay bed that awaited them after a day at pasture. The farmer led them all into their pens inside the barn, checked on the level of their water troughs, and set the timer for lights out. Next, he stepped out of the heavy doors and closed them behind him. He closed the clasp and switched on his torch. It cast a wand of light in front of him that ate into the utter blackness of the fields, glinting against the granite border wall. He walked to the steel gate, flexing the joints in his now arthritic left hand as he clutched the torch in the other. He stepped on to the single-lane road and pulled the gate so it was set closed behind him with a clang.

  Then he heard it. A feint, grinding sound, like gears in a machine. He shone the torch onto the road behind him. Nothing. The sound was present and clear, and growing louder. He decided not to wait and began walking the other way, towards his cottage. A hum joined the grinding sound now and still he could feel it getting nearer. He stopped and turned around, shining the torchlight all around the stone walls at either side of the road and at the narrow fingers of the trees overhanging from the verge, above. Then his light reflected back at him. The sounds stopped. No grinding. No humming. Silence. He swept the torch left and right across the area where it had been reflected. Again it caught. Eyes. Bright, yellow, narrowed in the face of the bright light. He took a step toward it. It leapt forward, onto the road and darted away along the roadside. A rabbit.

  He chuckled to himself. “Forty-two years keeping a flock and you’re still scared of a bloody rabbit,” he said to himself, watching the words blowing out in vaporous moonlit clouds in front of him. He turned once again and set off back down the narrow road. Then he heard it again, the grinding, the humming and then he could make it out. The grinding sounded like a bicycle chain. He turned back, still moving forward, still holding the torch out in front. Who would be out on their bike on a night like this – and without lights? He wondered. Part of him wanted to stop and investigate, but his legs didn’t want to stop. They dragged him onward, on autopilot. He could see nothing in the seemingly endless gloom. But still the sound grew closer. Feeling his heart thumping hard in his chest he finally stopped and turned around. He swung his torch left and right up the road, and then he saw it. The front wheel of a bicycle. It couldn’t have been more than fifty yards back up the road.

  “Hello?” he called. There was no reply. “Can I help you?” Nothing. He began to edge up the road, still calling out to the cyclist, whoever he might be. He reached down to his pocket with his left hand and squeezed the sharpest of his keys between his fingers and made a fist, just in case. Thirty yards away now, and he began to realize, the bike was a child’s. The front wheel had ivy and brambles woven around the spokes. He shined the torch up the body of the rider now and saw that it was a boy. Young, with pallid yellowish skin.

  “Are you ok, son?” he said. The boy twitched and shook his head. He didn’t look at the farmer, so much as past him, showing no recognition of the communication. “Son?” the farmer was shouting now, could hear his own panic, present in his voice. He took another step forward and then froze as he saw a line of ants walk in single file from the boy’s ear and down, below his chin and into a gash in the boy’s neck. He shone the torch down, to see the boy wearing a suit, torn in places and the bike, he could see
now was rusted, corrupted as though it had been left to the elements for years.

  Finally, the boy’s eyes glanced up and bore into Sergio’s own. Then he recognized him. The thought was still crossing the network of synapses in his brain when his aged legs engaged, carrying him more quickly than they had done in two decades. He arrived at his house without looking back, only peering over his shoulder as his key slid shakily in to the lock and he pushed down the handle. The boy hadn’t followed him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said his wife, smiling, in front of the dual lights of fireplace and TV. He said nothing and staggered, breathless to his bed.

  When the shrill sounds of the alarm dragged him from sleep at five thirty in the morning, he was as surprised to be alive as he was by the rude awakening. He sat up and looked around. His wife lay beside him, still sound asleep, so he crept out of bed and went down the hall to the bathroom. He turned on the light and looked in the mirror. He still looked pale from his ordeal, but it was also the middle of winter. He began to wonder if he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. He went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk from the fridge. He opened the bread bin and cut a thick slice of bread, slathering honey on to it. He sat at the low kitchen table and ate, silently. When he was finished, he placed his dishes carefully into the sink, brushed his teeth, pulled on his clothes and boots, turned on his torch, and stepped out into the early morning. It was pitch dark and the sun would not grace the earth in these parts until some three hours later in mid-winter. Yet somehow, the violence of the darkness of the night before had abated. The birds were already beginning to chirp their morning songs, masking the discomforting silence of the night before.