Stargazing

Downtown with Adriano buying for the month at the Souza's Serve Well To Serve For Life. I make a point of carrying all of the bags, he only has to drive. I found I gave too much trouble to the family already with my requests for staple transportation. The youth loved to drive so he agreed and even proposed to take me every month. Duílio wouldn't take long to agree, a sign that either he trusted his elder a lot or was fed up with my requests. I hoped for the first alternative but since I had Adriano as a helping hand I wouldn't need to pester Duílio any longer.

Adriano and I went to Zé of the Depths to eat. Incredible, he even had Minas cheese pastries and all that jazz. The snack window on the counter didn't look like a toothless mouth this time. We walked in without noticing a table in the background. We crossed the bar and sat at a table beside that one. I felt a chill up my spine that bothered me but it was something at first I could not identify. I started moving my eyes slowly to my left side. Anderson was sitting at the table in the darkest corner of the bar, exactly by our side. If I reached out I could touch him. Adriano saw him and stood up from the table with his pastries and a bottle of Coke.

"I'll be waiting in the car", he growled, not happy with the company. Anderson was silently looking at him as he got out of the bar heading for the car. His eyes fell on me as soon as Adriano disappeared from his field of vision.

"How much do I owe you for the work on the lock?", it was the first thing I asked him.

"I've told you, you've paid for the lock already."

"So what you mean is that every time you got to fix something in my house this will be the price to pay? Nightmares and having you come out of your store as a black dog out of the blue? There's no Procon here, but there's the Council of Taurinos' Ancient Society."

"Next repair will be charged in money, I promise", he was quick to act.

"I hope so."

I got out of the bar with my things and went to eat in the car with Adriano. I wasn't angry with Anderson. I was in fact a bit afraid of him.

At night, went out on my own. Went to a field nearby to gaze at the night sky, spend some moments enjoying the beautiful starry skies of Taurinos. I opened a mat on the ground, sat down and let myself be absorbed by that wonder. The Southern Cross, the Air Pump, Coma Berenices. How many more constellations could I ever spot?

It hadn't been half an hour since I had gotten to that spot when I heard a distant murmur. In time, it grew clearer and I could tell what it was. Horses. As usual I wouldn't take long to have company. And it was likely to be bad company.

I wasn't moving. If those kids kept on playing these tricks, I'd bring them to Council myself. I was so sick of all of that. The horses came closer but unlike the other occasions, the sound of the night wouldn't die away. As carefully as I could I bent over and placed my ear near the ground. Nothing strange. The horses came closer and closer. I set my ear exactly on the ground against all recommendations from master Danilo and the Obscure Police itself. Again, nothing strange. The horses came closer and closer; now they could be seen, weren't they coming from somewhere behind me.

As usual, the horses slowed down as they approached me. I had the impression I heard a metal clash somewhere and the sounds of two people walking, one at each of my sides. They sat down. I looked at my left side with the corner of my eyes and there Anderson was, sitting. On the right side it was Renan. None of them said a word. I was in silence myself. The fact that on such vast fields the two would stop exactly by my side seemed to stubbornly mean something to me.

I didn't remember spending so long with those kids without a word like that. It was or seemed to be hours there. After a period that seemed an eternity, the policemen rose from the ground and once on their horses, disappeared in the last darkness of the night that preceeds the dawn as silent as they had appeared.

It hadn't been half an hour since they left when I saw the day's first break. I stood up, folded the mat and saw blood splats on the grass the two had been sitting upon. That indicated that their night had been hectic. I figured the time stargazing did them good. And like them, I took the long way home too.

The figure of the dog

First it was the void. Then my body falling into the void, a chasm far beyond the wildest descriptions I could ever gather. An infinite chasm where I kept falling non-stop, a horror scream choked in my throat, unable to find a way out of it.

I woke up, don't know how I woke up from that and was sitting on my bed enjoying the sensation of horror and unreality of the post-sleep moment. When I moved my left leg an object almost pierced me. A screwdriver on my bed. How would it end up here?

Went down to the lower floor. The window facing the porch was ajar. Tried to open the door. It was locked. Locked??? That door had never been locked since the construction of the house. The lock was not the same anymore. I went to the window to look and stepped on something sharp, metallic that nearly pierced my bare foot. A key, on a key-chain on the floor. I tried it in the new lock and it worked smoothly and effortlessly. Went out to the porch and there was no one out there. A cold wind of a Sun half obscured by clouds plagued me for a while. I walked back in, shut the door but didn't lock it and went to the kitchen to make coffee. It was nine and something in the morning.

While I had coffee, master Danilo dropped by. I offered him coffee and he had hardly sat down to drink it when I went on to tell him about the horrific dream, the screwdriver on the bed and the change of the front door's lock. He heard me attentively and in time started to frown.

"The locksmith came to work, solved your problem with the lock and caused you some sleep disturbances", said the old countryman with no shadow of a doubt as he spoke.

"Do you think that…"

"I'm sure. He came here, fixed the lock and spent good time in your room strangling you. It was what I told you happened to my grandpa when he told me of Jurupari."

Anderson was checking some merchandising at the store's entrance at the end of the afternoon when Duílio turned the car to enter the square and parked the car by the curb on the side of the street. Master Danilo and I got off the car, Duílio stayed in waiting. Anderson beamed as he saw us but saw his smile met no correspondence.

"Did you like the new lock?", he asked a bit embarrassed, glancing at master Danilo and me alternately.

"Loved it. What I didn't like about it was the price."

"Ah, I wouldn't do it for the money", he beamed again.

"Only for the sheer pleasure of squeezing my throat would you do it, wouldn't you?"

His beam disappeared definitively now. He stared silently at me and then resumed his checking of his merchandise, "you sometimes speak too much."

Master Danilo and I glanced at each other.

"Yup, that is what I have always heard about Adriano, remember? By the way, his family only hasn't called you saints."

Anderson was silent. I told him that either I spoke too much or they'd admit to what they did too little. I asked him if they had expected me to be silent about their idiocy during the Jamboree. He wouldn't reply and only looked up on his clipboard for data. I handed him the screwdriver I had found on my bed. He snatched it from my hand, embarrassed and nervous and walked into the store to put the tool away.

"They are taking the matter to Council?", now he looked worried when he returned to the front of the store, "because if they are…"

"Are you going to reopen the case of the Celestial Gardener?"

Anderson was silent again. He now saw master Danilo and I were one step beyond their plan B. He asked us to go because he had already messed his calculations twice. The old countryman seemed willing to cooperate, but I intended to speak with the blacksmith some longer.

Anderson saw I wasn't going to leave so soon and beamed at me. A luminous smile, luminous and weird as hell, deforming the edges of his face, from edge to center turning all of his face into a horrific, grotesque and twisted smile from the ugly face I knew from so many nights on duty.

I got lost in the dead light of that beam until it got mixed with another and all of a sudden I had Duílio and master Danilo shaking my head as I collapsed on one of the square's benches.

"Eh, "sá" Stella, sometimes the time to go is sooner than we expect…"

"What do I do here, I want to go back there, talk to…"

"You're nuts, you're not going back there, let's get out of here before he decides to come to the square."

People started to gather to help or simply see what was going on; I feared they formed a circle around me. I looked at the hardware store entrance and in its inner penumbra, I had the impression of having seen a dog or something to that effect. There was no dog at the store.

"What dog is that one at the entrance of the store?", I asked the two as I rose from the bench, "this is why I tell you we must get out of here soon, for instance, right now", said Duílio opening his car's door and tucking me in. I wanted to open the window, but Duílio was faster and closed it again.

A black mass sprang from the inside of the store (spreading the people at the square all over like they were pigeons and they screamed running to the surrounding streets) and smashed its face and nose against the glass of the window I had wanted to open. A black dog. A monstrous one.

Desperately, Duílio maneuvered the car onwards brusquely hitting the dog on its side and making it almost go over the car, falling at our back. I never knew Duílio to drive so fast in the narrow streets of the town. We took no more than ten minutes to be back on the farm Taurinos safely.

Night fell over Taurinos. I asked Duílio to drive me home directly. I offered master Danilo to sleep over and he ended up agreeing to, so frightened he still was. When we got to the gate in front of my house, chills filled the spines of the three of us: there was a black horse tied to my house's gate. Duílio glanced at us interrogatively, master Danilo and I glanced at Duílio as interrogatively as he did. Renan? He didn't have the keys of my house. There was no one in front of the house, there seemed to be no one at the porch either. Unless they were behind…

…or inside the house.

Master Danilo, Duílio and I got in by the other side of the fence, avoiding to pass near that horse. The light of the stars was the only light in that dark pathway to my porch. We approached the house slowly using nothing more than our eyes used to the dark of the night to see through the path. No one at the porch.

I turned on the porch's light and the moths and other nocturnal little creatures had already started to land on the porch wall attracted by the light, casting weird and twisted shadows across the brick surface. I turned the key as slow as I could. The two men watched me in astonishment as I did it. I opened the door very slowly too. Turned on the room light and there he was, sitting in an armchair in the dark.

Knowing beforehand it might be him didn't soothe the impact of seeing him in the penumbra of my room. He had a key-chain in his hand. Said it was extra keys in case I needed them and dropped them on the coffee table. He stood up and went away, passing the men that stared more astonished than before. I went out to the porch to talk to him but there was no one there anymore. Neither he nor his horse were there any longer. Not even a sound of a horse departing and galloping away.

"He went home, "sá" Stella, or on Police duty, since he is in black", said master Danilo as he saw me back in the room. Duílio still had his eyes as big as saucers while he crossed himself madly on the couch.

I told Duílio that he could wait until coffee was ready. He did. We were talking about today. I insisted that what I saw leaving the store was a black dog. They said they had never said it was not. Said what they really doubted was that Anderson had any dog at his store.

"So the big dog which sprang from inside the store was…"

"It was, Miss Grisam. This is why I was crazy to get out of the place. Didn't you see the crowd being spilled all over like they were beans? That's what the people say, a horse, a dog or a duck, these things."

"If didn't shut the car window he'd get in the car, "sá" Stella; well it would be hell if he made it past the window. He's just passed me by and see the chills will never end."

"And he is just one of these boys that live in this town, that's all he is", added Duílio.