Return

Basilisk Island. The perpetual wind sweeping the place even under the Sun. All were there, the whole of Taurinos' Ancient Society: Adriano, Anderson, Andrés, Arthur, Bruno, Guilherme and Renan. Not forgetting the one who's writing and master Danilo. When Bruno looked at me, Renan or Andrés he did it with a scowl. I was trying hard to understand what happened in the track to the sanctuary yesterday, but didn't manage to. Taurinos' greatest mystery was that it was mysterious above all.

Hours followed on to become like days. The buzz dominated it all, went down and down descending the musical notes one by one, coming to a slow and agonizing stop.

We went down through the tracks leading to the bell's site. And there it was. Arthur and Bruno were perplexed at its size. Guilherme seemed to never get used to the vision he had of it. Adriano and Andrés looked at the drawings looking for instructions. Anderson got away from the group and started climbing the spiral staircase to the top of the arch. He wasn't the shopper we met downtown any longer. I and master Danilo watched him attentively. Guilherme too turned his eyes to him. Renan saw his partner climbing and prepared to do the same. A few steps ahead, however, he felt something in his back pocket and again he drew that bag of coarse salt (the same he had been sitting on in Duílio's car when we visited the hardware store) and asked me to put it away. I even thought, "messy kid, must have been days since he left it there in his pocket."

We were all looking up while Renan grievously climbed the staircase leading to the top of the arch. Andrés and master Danilo started going around the bell in search of hidden messages, attentively staring at its details. When Renan was almost on the top we heard Anderson shout to him, "come on o Immortal; I know that you can!"

I glanced at Guilherme and he glanced at me. Arthur and Bruno too exchanged looks. We had definitely heard that thing before. But where? At my side, Guilherme sang a song written by one of his many namesakes. It was "Nave Errante (A Nomad Spaceship)" by Guilherme Arantes.

My good Mithra. "Jacques DeMolay" was back in town. And Renan was up there at his mercy. Andrés returned with master Danilo and said there were instructions engraved on the bell:

The letter A has your name. But your name will not start with A.

"It's not Anderson up there, Andrés", Guilherme was nervous, "it might be the last guy he killed in the ritual he was the only one to speak of us as Immortals, dude!"

"They use coarse salt to bind them", remembered Adriano, "remember the circles on the ground? Nothing else bound them there."

"Renan left me with some coarse salt that has been in his pocket for ages", I had hardly withdrawn the bag from my pocket when Guilherme grabbed it and ran to the staircase. We, of course went right behind him. Up there, Anderson or whatever that was had already convinced Renan to hang from the arch to try and touch the bell. Guilherme asked Adriano to go first and help hold his brother. He walked right behind Adriano and filled his hand with the salt crystals.

Adriano helped hold Renan in spite of the blacksmith's protest and when nothing else could be expected, Guilherme slapped him in the face with the hand that held the crystals. The blacksmith, still leaning against the parapet, turned over to the other side and fell from the height of a cathedral, colliding against the resonating surface of the bell, and ended up smashing himself onto the blue surface of the waters in the well under Tinnitus. Immediately, Anderson started swimming blindly. Renan shouted where he should turn and still he took ages to get out of the well, with his body marked by the bites of the basilisk we saw when we got down from the top of the arch.

"I told you so many times not to look into his eyes. Told you so many times!", he hugged and punched his partner with that mix of joy and anger you only see in Renan and in no one else. Anderson returned the tenderness weakly "into whose eyes?", feeling his body tingle all over. The people of Taurinos' Ancient Society started gathering around us. No one believed what they had just witnessed. A true case of outsider possession.

"And what about the entity?"

"In the well, together with the other basilisks", said master Danilo, "he went back to his source."

"Are the outsiders basilisks?", I was curious.

"Yes, it was what you couldn't understand about the work of the Obscure Police. Some are more developed and complicated, others are simpler, but they are all basilisks", he informed me.

His statement, added to what I experienced in my living room yesterday with Renan, made for some food for thought for me. The human shape was what made the kids' activity so disturbing. Around us the kids were discussing the events passionately about how they had all noticed Anderson's strange manners, the look in his eyes and how the song and its words had helped remember it all. The bell didn't work because the energy of the Obscure Police that made it toll perpetually was not correct. The interference was the basilisk I called "Jacques DeMolay", using Anderson as a host. I remembered the experience of Renan telling him to never look in their eyes. I remembered Andrés telling me the same and referring to Renan at Santa Casa de Santos.

The sound of the note started suddenly going up. The motion of the bell became perceptible to the naked eye. It was going faster and faster. Would it be going too fast? By the voices around me, I could tell I was not the only one in doubt. Anderson explained that it would accelerate a bit just to catch up with the real time and pace of the town to recover its lost time. In fact, the bell came to a peak and then started descending in motion again, the buzz started dying away until it was nothing more in our hearing. The bell was now apparently still. Silence was in the air once again.

"I guess it's going fine now", affirmed Anderson, "was there much trouble with the bell in the end?"

I kicked Andrés' shin to prevent a seizure of laughter he was forming for immediate release. He, of course, showed me his teeth but it was no smile this time.

"There was a little trouble, but things are now back to normal, "sêo" Anderson", asserted the countryman.

It was wonderful to hear Renan's voice back to its normal tone as well as his motion. I couldn't stand the slow motion any longer. That buzz. All of that shit happening. The moment after was the moment when Anderson looked at me with an expression that reminded me of the days we first met for the Society's meetings on the farm Taurinos, unlike the way he had been staring at me since the damn ritual. It was like a spell was being broken. It was a spell being broken. As though he had left someone in his place and only now could return and catch up with the current events.