Saint John

Renan woke up at four in the morning. He moved across the upper floor like a tiny elephant. The carpet on the upper floor was not enough to deaden his heavy footsteps. Course I ended up insomniac and went to his room to ask him for some good silence. I turned on the light and he was in his bed, sleeping soundly.

But the footsteps on the upper floor wouldn't stop; judging by their progression, it felt like they were coming from behind me.

"Renan, there's someone in here", I shook him awake and he opened his little eyes full of sleep, goggled suddenly (with an expression of horror and alarm I had never seen on his face) not at me but seemingly at something behind me. Next I saw was that I was fallen down on the floor. Next to the door, blood spilled al over the floor and the wall, a pool of blood that got to reflect the lamp light; the body of a man severed from his head, the heinous severed head eyes wide open still staring at me, a Dantesque view few have the privilege to see in a room in their house at four in the morning. Horrified, I looked away from that obnoxious sight only to find Renan sitting on his bed, still a scythe with a bloody edge in his right hand. It was easy to see how much energy he had spent in the move. I turned my eyes back to the door, but there was nothing there any longer. As if it were a dream. As if it had never come to pass, but according to Renan it was not.

"There's nothing there but there was", he said with the tired air he had been showing these days, "hadn't I pushed you aside he'd touch you and drain all of your energy."

We went outside a bit; we were there for hours, gazing at the night sky for some mental hygiene. He was feeling a bit cold of the night, so I sat down behind him on the steps to the porch and cuddled him for warmth. "Strange how long it takes for the day's first break", I thought some hours later. Funny thing was, he ended up saying the same with more or less the same words.

"Tinnitus is bringing time to a stop. The clocks. The rotation of the Earth around Taurinos, Miss Grisam."

"You mean the whole of the Earth???", I was getting astonished with the outreach of that thing. I remembered him killing the two outsiders and how they did die in Santos, reflecting what was done here in Taurinos and thought it would be much the same thing. Would it affect the whole planet's rotation?

"No it jus' happens in Taurinos", he said it with such a cute accent in his tiny voice that it caused me to have a seizure of tenderness and kiss him on the head. He beamed, but was as surprised as every time he got kissed. Made an attempt to clarify what had just happened in his room, but he urged me not to talk about it until Mithra started driving his car.

"Why did you kiss me?", he smiled again, curious, "because I killed that outsider in your house?"

"And also because I find your accent so cute, so beautifully cute", and he let out a tiny episode of laughter as he heard this. All of a sudden, he was serious and stared at me as if he had a curiosity about something but still hadn't found the opportunity to voice it.

"Why did you make us Mineiros, Miss Grisam?"

"I don't know Renan, I haven't the slightest idea. Maybe because I like it here. Why? Don't you like to be one?"

"I think I do. But I have never been a Paulista, Gaucho, Bahian or Amazonian to know if it's better or worse.", replied the round and tiny little thing before I kissed him on the head again in one more of my seizures of tenderness.

Andrés dropped by later with his brother for some talk. We were commenting about how the bell's failure was beginning to become a serious issue for the town. The buzz started to bother more heavily and get louder for everyone of us. Adriano was the first of the Conselheiros to mention that things were growing slower and slower in time. Andrés said Anderson's idea of building the bell was perfect, but that what was causing the current issue with the bell could as well be before our very eyes right now. I told them about the incident in Renan's room and they said it was only the beginning. They were talking like we're in full effect of the Law of the Bulls once again.

Adriano told us he saw dark shadows moving around the main house of the farm Taurinos. He didn't have the guts to go outside and look, especially because he knew exactly what they were. Andrés added it was no use closing or locking doors to this kind of thing; it always got in eventually as flies through a window without a screen.

"The worst of it all is this tiredness, this lack of energy. Soon Anderson and I won't have energy to fend off these things and then what will become of the town?", complained Renan, still tired from the quick horror night adventure.

"Come on lads, let's think of solutions. What does the bell mean with all those messages? The solution, whatever it is is in them", I urged them to put their grey matter to good use.

I drew a piece of paper where I had written down the inscriptions on the bell in their sequence, "first it said Anderson could not solve it by himself, because he didn't understand music. Then it said Anderson was not there at all; that Renan was all alone. Then it said Guilherme was there and that the note G had its toll. What does it mean?"

"Anderson told me that the note he cast the bell for and the note it should ring was the note we Taurinians consecrated to the Sun", said Renan as though he could only remember what Anderson had said at that moment.

"The note is Sol", said Adriano in a sudden epiphany.

I opened my laptop. On the internet, I looked for an article about music notation. I remembered that in some countries the musical notes were referred to by letters and not by their names in Latin from an old hymn to St. John I found on Robertinho Mori's site and showed it to them, along with their translation:

"Ut queant laxis
Resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
Famuli tuorum
Solve polluti
Labii reatum
Sancte Joannes

So that we, servants with sharpness
and unleashed tongue
the miracle and power of your feats we can praise
take away from us the grave guilt
of a stained tongue
o Saint John."

I made them see each musical note's name had been taken from the initial syllable of each one of the verses. The exchanged looks as they always do when they run into something they had never thought about before. Andrés asked me why the first verse did not begin with do, since the first note's name had been taken from it.

"Because Italian maestro Giovanni Battista Donni, seeing that "ut" was not a good name to sing, changed it to "do", the first syllable of his surname. This happened in the seventeen century, if memory serves me in 1640", I explained to them.

"But not even the note "si" fits, Miss Grisam", helped Adriano, "the initial of the last verse is "sa", and not "si"…"

"Yes, it does fit. Unlike the others, for the last verse he took the initials for the two words, not two (or three) letters from the first word. So it was Sancte Joannes, SJ. In many countries as well as in Latin, "i" and "j" are the same letters."

"But my goodness, Miss Grisam, "i" and "j" have such different sounds", Renan talked with that tiny voice in slow tempo; he had found my account weird.

"It happens to us here, Renan; the two letters have the same sound for them. It's another language, another culture", I told him.

They were in silence. Didn't know what to think. I opened Wikipedia in search of correspondences for the musical notes. It was there, there was no room for doubts on the table: the note G was the note Sol.