The Laws of the Skies by Grégoire Courtois (translated by Rhonda Mullins).

[midnight_birth]

Title: The Laws of the Skies.
Author: Grégoire Courtois (translated by Rhonda Mullins).
Genre: Literature, fiction, horror, survival fiction.
Country: France.
Language: French.
Publication Date: 2019.
Summary: Once upon a time, a class of six-year-olds heads into the forest for a camping trip. The innocent children play games where they imagine monsters everywhere: the creaking of trees becomes a growl, a tree trunk becomes an ogre. But this fairy tale doesn't have a happy ending. Monsters really do exist: accidents, illness, the murderous impulses of a classmate. One by one, "happily ever after" evaporated for the children and their chaperons, as one by one, like all nature's creatures, they must learn the laws of the skies.

My rating: 9/10.
My review:


♥ The bus pulled away along the village road, and the parents' long shadows shrunk behind the condensation-covered windows.

And there you have it.

The children were on their way.

They would never return.

♥ Enzo was sporting his usual smile, and it was hard to tell whether it was the smile of a deranged child or a deliriously happy one. Regardless, anyone who met Enzo found him to be a creepy little boy, even if it was just an unpleasant sense of foreboding. The violence that came through in everything he did and everything he said made him a danger to be avoided. In his presence, people got in touch with their primitive survival instincts. Without realizing it, they tried to avoid him, and when they found themselves stuck with him, they feared the situation could degenerate at any moment.

♥ Enzo lifted his hand silently, shutting Fred up. "Then you're weak. That's what my dad says, and he's right. Strong people hit; weak people get hit."

The child's scowl pierced Fred's heart like a poison arrow. At just six years and a few months, this puny little being embodied the impotence the teacher sometimes felt.

♥ ..Nathalie was still so pale she seemed to glow with a ghostly phosphorescence in the shadows as the evening fell. Her son Hugo had noticed and had slowly moved away from his classmates and toward her to soothe her with a symbolic hand on her back and comforting words.

"Go have fun, sweetheart," Nathalie said. "I'll be fine.

But Hugo stayed, gripped by an uncertain feeling he didn't understand that was threatening to spread through his entire body, the feeling of suddenly finding himself alone, without his mother, in a hostile forest that was growing darker, surrounded by people incidental to his life who could never understand or take the place of his mother, who, despite her frequent absences, always listened to him, always heard what he had to say, and was the only one who could anticipate his needs and allay his fears. Hugo didn't say any of this, not even to himself, but because of the irrational fear that an animal was crouched not far off in the bushes, somewhere, anywhere, lying in wait for him, the feeling was gnawing at him. That his mother could die, or at least disappear, leaving him forever lost and alone in the unsettling forest of his peers, was a possibility he had never really considered, let alone felt in his bones, until this faint twilight.

♥ Just to be sure, he swallowed an aspirin to deal with any possible side effects, then walked to the garage with the assurance of a man who hasn't yet realized he is drunk.

♥ The forest was growing inside Olivier's head. Branches were climbing up his torso, roots were breaking through the floor of the car interior and winding around his calves. Whether or not he pressed the accelerator changed nothing further in his surroundings, the sounds, or the colours. He unconsciously concluded that he must be stopped, so there was no more danger. Parking and spending the night there might be a good idea. Particularly since Nathalie didn't seem to be in any discomfort anymore. She was asleep, wasn't she? "Time passing us by. Solitude. With everyone else thriving and seemingly enjoying fulfilling existences. That's the hard part, don't you think? You must feel it sometimes, feel alone and irritated at night, when the kid is in bed, and you can hear the laughter of people having a good time from the bar down the street? You must think about your body and your beauty too, and tell yourself that you won't be this beautiful for much longer, that everything is sagging and going slack, your breasts of course, a bit - but who sees them out of their bra anyway - but your ass mainly, its shape changing relentlessly, and no jogging or workout at the gym snatched from the mayhem of the week can change that. And maybe you tell yourself that, in the end, your child was a mistake, and the life you didn't quite choose took you down the wrong path. Don't you ever want to start over? To go back to being the child our children are today and make choices other than the one we made? Good or bad, just other choices. Has someone told you you don't get a second chance? That once you've headed down a road, resolutely, sadly, you can't go back?"

♥ Hundreds of walkers came here to unwind, to meander in the spring, pick mushrooms at the end of the summer. Had she even once seen in the papers a report of an incident here? A lost hiker? A forest ranger attacked by a wild animal? No. Nothing of the sort. This was hardly the German Black Forest or the Congolese jungle. At worst, you could end up walking in circles for a few hours, but getting lost never to be found again? It couldn't happen, although in the dark of the woods and the chill of the night, in the worrisome concert of scratching and cracking, the curious sounds of twigs snapping a few metres behind her - could a twig snap so crisply without a human foot coming down on it? - Sandra had her doubts. What if she were being followed? What if someone had intentionally obscured the pile of rocks so she would get lost? There were forest rangers here. Who knew the trails and clearings better than them? Isolation could have driven one of them mad, starved for sensation, reverting to his animal nature for a night, if not physically then at least in his mind, hunter and game, predator and prey, and then he would have seen, miraculously, a target in the sights of his madness, and the hunt would have begun. He just had to follow her, at a distance, and then closer and closer - where could she escape to anyway, if she were to detect his presence? - less and less discreetly, until perhaps she would panic and finally run out of energy, collapsing exhausted on the spongy ground to await her fate like a wounded doe. She had never seen anything of the sort in the paper, but Sandra was a rational person, and she knew that just because something hadn't happened before didn't mean it would never happen. There was a first time for everything. Had no one ever gotten lost in this forest? This could be the night. Had no one ever been slaughtered by a forest ranger gone mad? This could be the night.

♥ He was just lying on his back, eyes wide open, like he sometimes did when frustration had too powerful a grip on him - not to calm or collect himself, but on the contrary to enjoy feeling his rage boil inside him, to shove it down, and to stoke it and make it ten times stronger. He ruminated, he trembled, he gnashed his teeth: second by second, he was stockpiling an increasingly terrifying amount of dark, hateful energy. He became a little weapon that could scare even adults, a crowbar, a spiked mace, a bomb, a potential threat that the slightest thing could trigger, and that thing was him. He was the only one who knew how to use the weapon that he was, and he got complete satisfaction from it, a certainty in his power that little boys of six feel, that plenty of adults desire but never achieve. To be a master of his destiny, sure of his freedom - who could truly claim such things?

♥ "She can fly! She can fly!" Fred repeated, to the children's applause. "For the first time in the history of the world, a mouse was lying! People had seen squirrels glide and small rodents be carried on the wind, but this was something different entirely. The little mouse hadn't had to learn. She simply felt the air under her front legs, and her natural strength carried her. She managed to steer, ascend, and dive, so spirited and agile that she seemed to rival the big birds that had been flying since they were young. Speaking of which, wasn't that the featherless silhouette of the old seagull in the distance, coasting on an updraft? 'Seagull! Seagull! Look at me, Seagull!' she cried. 'I did it! I'm flying, just like you and your friends!' 'You are!' the seagull answered, looking surly. 'You are one stubborn mouse.' 'Stubborn and flying,' the little mouse added. 'True,' said the seagull. 'And now that you are flying, you can follow me to learn the laws of the skies.' 'The laws of the skies?' asked the mouse. 'Follow me,' was all the seagull said, diving toward a precipitous ledge on which were crammed dozens of seagulls, albatrosses, pigeons, crows, even a few sparrows. The old seagull and the little mouse touched down in the middle of the winged assembly, and silence fell when the birds noticed the curious interloper. 'My friends,' the seagull began, 'I have brought you this strange creature to teach her the laws of the skies.' The little mouse puffed out her chest, proud to be part of such a marvellous family.'

.."'Birds have always flown,' the seagull continued, 'and they have always been the masters of the air. We let insects fly so we can eat them without having to land.'"

In the little mouse's stomach and the stomachs of the children around the campfire, there was an unpleasant stirring. Something was wrong; they all felt it.

"'We have often encountered stubborn creatures who wanted to fly at our side, and what did we do?'

"'We taught them the laws of the skies!' the birds cried.

"'Precisely,' the old seagull said, setting his heavy webbed foot on the mouse's tiny paw. 'We taught them the laws of the skies. Do you want us to teach you the laws of the skies, flying mouse?'

"Trying surreptitiously to free his paw, the mouse spluttered and, gripped by a sinister feeling, didn't quite know what to answer.

"'I.. I don't know,' she managed to say.

"'What do you mean, you don't know?' the old seagull said, scolding. 'You went to all the trouble of joining us to the air. It took you so long to become the first and only flying mammal. Now you can fly, we won't deny it, but you have to learn the laws.'

"'Law number one,' said the assembly of birds.

"'The skies belong to birds and birds alone,' the seagull said, snapping his dented beak a few centimetres from the mouse's snout.

"'Law number two,' the birds continued.

"'Anything that is not a bird and that flies through the skies is considered bird food.'

"The mouse tried to break free by pulling on her paw with all her might, but the old seagull kept its grip firm.

"'Law number three,' said the gulls, the albatrosses, the sparrows, the crows, and all the other scary winged creatures, their circle gradually closing around their prey.

"'What cannot be eaten by the birds and still flies should not be allowed to admire the wonders of the sky,' said the seagull, staring at the mouse in hostility.

"There was silence on the ledge.

"'What does... what does that mean?' the mouse stammered.

"'It means,' the old seagull replied, 'that we will allow you to fly, but you will never again see the sun's rays.'

"Suddenly, the old bird jammed the tip of his beak in the little mouse's eye." Around the campfire, the children who were dozing off jumped, and some screamed in horror and disgust. To calm the rising clamour, Fred continued, raising his voice, and while the children wanted to scream a cathartic scream into the night, they also wanted to hear how the story ended.

"'From this point forward,' the old seagull said, 'your eyes shall see no more.'

"One after the other, the birds on the ledge took turns pecking at the flying mouse: in the eyes, on the nose, all over the little rodent's face, which was bleeding, splitting, growing deformed. From the scarlet, oozing gaping hole that had once been her mouth, but that no longer looked like one, the martyred mouse emitted a piercing, unbroken wail.

"'You will no longer see the sky,' the old seagull continued, 'you will crawl along the ceiling of caves, waiting for the night, and you will feed on night insects and the pollen of flowers that open only in the dark.'

"The little mouse shrieked, and then shrieked louder still, from the pain of the pecking that wouldn't stop, but also from sadness, an endless, bottomless despair at no longer being able to admire the sea from the skies that she had spent so long conquering.

"'Those are the laws of the skies,' the seagull said, 'and now that you know them, leave this place and go to the damp, dirty caves where vermin who learned them before you live.'

"The little mouse felt the large bird remove his foot from hers. But she was aware of nothing else, because she couldn't see anything, and that horrible, piercing, awful scream kept ringing in her ears, her own scream, which came from the depths of her wounded throat, such a penetrating cry, which held so much sadness that no one could hear, or at least no one but her, because she alone could understand how filled it was with woe."

It was a little strange, unpleasant sensation to scream for yourself alone, to scream silently. Nathalie didn't do it for long. When she woke with a start, horrified that a hand was gripping her crotch, her shrill voice filled the car, but in less than four seconds, the car went off the road and plunged into a pond a few metres down, the shattered windshield letting in thousands of litres of stagnant green water, and instantly her cry was stifled as she swallowed the cold water, not even understanding that she was dying or why. Screaming for oneself, screaming silently, is a curious sensation, and there are few things more unpleasant than the endless frustration of not being able to release one's rage, one's fear, hatred, or pain by letting loose a liberating wave that could echo for kilometres. The car came to rest at the bottom of the pond, Nathalie dead in the death seat and Olivier at the wheel, his skull fractured on the metal door that the impact had hurled him into. The duckweed gradually settled back into place on the pond's surface, the eddied and the ripples slowly disappeared, and calm was restored to this corner of the forest while, a few kilometres away, Hugo and Jade's class, Océane, Louis, and Mathis's class, Lucas's class, and Enzo's class were getting restless, chattering and shouting either bafflement and fear, picturing the end of the tragic story of a little mouse whose efforts - how could such a thing be? - would forever be in vain.

♥ "What?" he said, seeing the children looking at him, their little eyes wide and filled with disbelief - or fear? Was it fear too? - and conversations about the destiny of the blind flying mouse were abruptly forgotten. "What?" is what came to mind because nothing seemed to explain the sudden silence, and then the silence didn't matter quite as much; the reason for the silence and any other mystery here on earth instantly faded to the background of his worrying, because the most important question had just imposed itself with the intransigence of rock and the violence of war. Fred dropped to all fours in shock, stunned and lo longer understanding who he was or what he was doing there, in the middle of the woods, with this excruciating pain at the back of his head. With precise, methodical movements, Enzo had slipped around Fred, picked up a large rock, and brought it down on his teacher's head, had struggled to raise it against the black sky of the forest and brought it down a second time on the back of the head of the teacher, who had collapsed on his belly on the ground, as his petrified students looked on. Enzo raised the rock a third time and again brought it down on Fred's head, the cranial bone making a sharp crack. This time, the rock didn't rebound but rested at the point of impact, as if planted in Fred's scalp, and his head gave a final jerk. A blank-faced Enzo then kneeled near the adult's body and again grabbed the rock in his hands to raise it above his head and let it fall in the exact same spot, this time producing a pink-and-grey spatter that stained his pyjamas and his face, which was already flushed with effort. The rock was heavy, and Enzo was still just a child, so he didn't feel strong enough to repeat the gesture as many times as he would have liked. He was already out of breath, and his biceps and shoulders ached, although he didn't want his dumbstruck audience to know it. Mustering all of his energy, he managed to raise the rock once more and let it drop on Fred's exposed brain, raised it again, let it drop with a new sibilant splat - the same sound as a soaked sponge hitting the ground when Dad washes the car, he thought - raised it one last time, dropped it one last time on the bloody pulp, brain matter, and bone fragments that were now Fred's head, and finally rolled the weapon of his crime to one side, panting. Yasmine started to cry, silently at first, fat tears rolling down her little pink cheeks, then louder and louder, sniffing and sobbing, trembling and hiccupping more and more uncontrollably, while Enzo stayed bent over his work, plunging his fingers intro Fred's massacred brain.

"What is going on in your head," he repeated, "eh, Fred? What is going on in your head?" picking up a limp grey piece of brain with the tips of his fingers, studying it with interest, as if it were an unusual plant or an amusing insect, and then tossing it on the ground to take a look at another.

This was the first time any of the children had seen such a thing, and no one knew how to respond, so everyone just went with their first instinct, after a few inevitable minutes of horrified astonishment. Yasmine's muffled sobs changing to resonant, uncontrolled crying was the trigger that roused in each child the need to act. And the first of these actions was to scream again, in unison, as loudly as they possibly could. Screaming and crying, screaming and running, screaming with more power than they had ever had before or would ever have again. Fred's class was no longer Fred's class, because there was no more Fred; this disgusting mess could not be Fred, and now they were no more than children lost at night in heart of the forest.

♥ ..because the forest during the day is different from the forest in the evening, and different still from the forest at night. As responsible as she was, as much as she was supposed to be a reasonable adult, she felt rise in her something that bore a strong resemblance to a child's sob. Lost, at night, in the middle of the forest, who wouldn't, like her, be enveloped by a spooky mist of lore, the cold stab of fear, thought to be forgotten but still lurking deep down inside, a primal fear of the dark when the bedroom door isn't open a crack, of the wolf that is said to attack children when they are alone, of the thief who sneaks into houses through windows left open in the summer, throwing children in a large burlap sack and carrying them far away from their parents, to sell them or simply devour them. There is also the fear of evil spirits who torment the credulous for kicks, who make beams creak and gutters squeak, the fear of falling asleep and never waking again, the fear of being buried alive, the fear of sinking into quicksand, the fear of being snatched by a shark, the fear of being pursued by a giant beast that makes the ground shake with every footfall. Really, where is there to hide? How do you escape? All the fears that used to fill our days and our imaginations, how can you avoid being suddenly seized by them once again, here, in the dark, with the whispers of the trees and the invisible beasts?

♥ Yasmine's sobs ended in a noisy gulp as she looked at the macabre scene before her, terrified: a little boy in sky blue pyjamas, kneeling on the ground, his bum resting on her heels, his hands dripping with blood, his forearms and his sleeves stained with blood, his pyjama top splattered with blood, his knees soaking in an adult's blood, a headless body in the dim, reddish glow of the embers, a pool of black blood spread in the dirt and the pine needles, and murderous, vengeful, reproachful eyes driving into her like the hook of a line he just had to wind in to make her his next victim.

..Holding hands, the two little girls leapt to their feet and ran for the nearest trees. Without looking back or checking with each other, they plunged into the darkness of the woods, because there was no darkness scarier than the one about to give chase.

♥ Every morning Enzo would shove Lucas, and Lucas alone. It was his special treatment, and every morning, before being shoved, Lucas dreaded the humiliation, fearing he would be hurt when he fell, as he sometimes was, but fearing mostly that the inevitable shove would happen in front of all the other kids at school, that some would laugh and make fun of him. But what terrified him most was that once again he wouldn't have the nerve to say anything, wouldn't respond, wouldn't even defend himself, confirming to everyone that he was indeed an impotent worm you could treat any old way, a daily affirmation that that was his station, his caste, his social status in the schoolyard, until he decided to react. Although some children never do (something he had no way of knowing), and every morning of their lives until their last, they are greeted by terror that knocks them flat, whether blatantly, directly, or not. Long after they have left school, every morning until their last, they wind up flat on their asses, with everyone watching, as they lie frozen in fear, paralyzed by the attack, and then in fear of the next attack, which they know is inevitable. Who had come to his aid since the beginning of the year? Who had had the courage to stand up to Enzo - after all, two people are stronger than one, right? Or three? Or eight? Who had had the guts to stand beside him, even just to help him up? What would it have cost them to hold out a hand and lend some support? Nothing. It would have cost nothing. But no one did, not one of this stupid bunch of green-eyed monsters had ever reached out their hand..

♥ With a spongy snap, Lucas crumpled to the ground after a fall of barely three metres, and his dislocated, immobile body formed a pile of flesh, limbs, and children's clothes, lying together in a surreal order. The impact didn't kill Lucas instantly. His heart kept beating for about ten seconds, the nerves sending a series of brief impulses to disobedient limbs. The brain was the first to cease all activity, as if signalling to the other vital functions that it was over. His body temperature started to drop, slowly, silently, the heat gradually escaping and rising to the treetops, and maybe beyond, to a sky dotted with tranquil stars.

♥ As he trampled on the damp leaves and soft moss, Hugo's mind raced, not like an adult's mind would race, even when gripped with panic, but like a child of six's would, with needs, images, and nerves more than with rational conclusions. Hugo wanted to find his mother.

♥ Hugo furrowed his brow, remembered his mother's instructions when she had to go out for a long time in the evening. "Try to call me. You remember my number?" "Yes, Mom," Hugo answered, reciting the ten digits in a single breath. "And if you can't reach me, if you're hurt, if there's a fire, if you're in danger, if someone is trying to get in the house, you dial 112 - that's a 1, another 1, and a 2 - you wait for them to answer and you tell them what's going on, okay?" Nothing had ever happened the evenings Nathalie wasn't there; Hugo simply waited in fear that one of those terrifying things should happen, his personality no doubt being shaped by the thought that at any moment tragedy could strike, that a threat weighed constantly on every living being, promising to snatch him away someday, to abuser him or snuff him out. And tonight, the tragedy had actually occurred, an evening when, like so many other evenings, Nathalie had left her son lone in the dark. It wasn't really her fault this time, but she had still left him alone in the dark in the middle of the forest, like so many little characters in the stories she never read him.

♥ Inside the tree, the smell of wet wood was overpowering. It was the smell of the forest, and while you notice and savour it while on a Sunday walk, it penetrates and possesses you when you slide into the putrid bowels of one of these plant cadavers. When you are six, and you crawl into the damp insides that crumble under your fingers and wet your palms and knees, and you are in the dark, afraid of never seeing your parents again, or your brothers or sisters, or maybe even the light of day, it smells and feels like the tree is eating you.

♥ Yasmine and Emma hadn't noticed the astonishing gastric rumble, and they continued on their way, limping like a single organism, arm in arm, occasionally looking back over their shoulder with a worried glance, drawn by some indeterminate point far ahead, where the forest ended or where only a few metres remained between the trees ans civilization, normalcy, safety, basically everything not cut from the cloth of savagery, horror, and blood spilled in the dirt.

♥ However, the unspoken rules governing relations in Fred's little elementary class were hypothetical; did the rules still apply, now that a child had killed an adult? Without an indisputable authority figure, what remained?

♥ Lilou let out a sob, as if she suddenly felt authorized to make a sound now that Hugo had confirmed that Enzo was far away.

"I want my mommy," she stammered between sniffles.

And her cries were echoed, because now Raphael gave in to his sorrow.

"I want my mommy too," he whined.

And a lump formed in Mathis's throat, as perhaps it finally dawned on him what was going on, and in Jade's throat, as she also started calling for her mother, and, finally, by contagion, because crying begets crying, in the throat of Hugo, was was now crying silent tears. Somewhere, far away, Yasmine and Emma were sobbing too, as were Nathan, and Océane, and Louis, and in the dark forest, in the little perimeter that represented one one-hundredth of the entire wooded area, if you cocked an ear, you could hear a tearful symphony of "Mommy!" rise above the treetops, whether spoken or simply thought so hard that it had resonated in the sap-filled hearts of the broad, deciduous trees and the towering evergreens. The cries of the children calling for their mothers had filled the space and made everything tremble, tremors that reached the most obtuse of sensibilities, moving anyone who could detect the vibration, that is, anyone other than you, dear reader, who have the privilege and the curse of grasping the unbearable bird's-eye view of a forest, plunged into the darkness of one inconsequential night, from which rise the cries for help of children left to their own devices, and chiuldren who have died, or who will die, and whose salvation you can do nothing for. That is your lot, and that is theirs, tragic roles that each will have to play as best they can, until the last page.

♥ "Nonsense," Océane said. "There is such a thing as trolls. I've killed one!"

No sooner was the sentence out of her mouth than she believed it. In her memory, she had created the story of the fight, the difficulty she had defeating the abominable creature, its noxious smell, its disgusting buboes that when pierced seeped their curdled pus, all concrete elements of this heroic confrontation, which she was now convinced had taken place. And seeing the conviction in his friend's blue eyes, Nathan had a moment of doubt, prattled on for another moment, said, "Ah?" and then nothing more, which meant that he believed her, just as she had begun to believe her fairy tale, because, on the damp soil of the Morvan forest, eyes recently filled with the blood and terror spurting from their teacher's shattered skull, anything could be believed. It was believable before, and even more so now. And yes, Nathan allowed, trolls exist, and my friend Océane has killed one, and if I want to survive this night and the monsters that inhabit it and maybe even the nights that follow, I would be better off at her side and I shouldn't annoy her. We're lost, we don't know where, it's dark, it's night, ti's cold, animals are prowling, as are things we are too little to have learned the names of, so yes, Océane is a little girl, but she is a little girl who can hunt trolls and, more importantly, who is not scared, who is so strong, confident, and so pretty too, has been so pretty for so long. Why, for so long, has she not understood that I, Nathan, like her and want to hold her in my arms and kiss her and most of all, yes, most of all, I want her to want nothing more than to be near me, for me to be near her, for her to talk to me and want me to talk to her too. So yes, okay, you're right, you must be right, you're the one who decides, Océane, you are the troll hunter, and if you say we go this way, then that's the way we will go.

♥ Nathan didn't know what to think or believe, like when Christmas was coming, and everything pointed to the fact that Santa Claus didn't exist, when clues were piling up, but his parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts kept talking about reindeer flying through the air and an old guy who could deliver millions of gifts in a single night, when everything, all year long, was depressingly matter-of-fact and made total sense and then suddenly, for one night, magic existed, and he had never really thought about it this way, but what was more likely, when you got right down to it? That magic didn't exist, except for one night a year, or that adults, our own parents no less, all got together to tell children cruel lies? Neither of the two options was acceptable, and for a whole year Nathan didn't know what to believe or think about Christmas. Similarly, on this night, he could not be certain about anything, neither about the shameless lie told by his friend Océane, nor about the presence of hideous, slimy creatures all around him in this dreadful night, disguised as trees, ready to grab him by the arm to stuff him into their fetid mouths and devour his fresh flesh. Around any of the trees, a monster lurking, in any of the shadows draped around them a mortal danger, Enzo or a wolf or something even worse, so without the certainty that would have led to a clear decisions, he had gone with the flow, with the direction chosen by his friends - were they truly his friends? - smack through the middle of the monsters and ogres and child-eating beasts, but at least he wouldn't be alone. When no decisions can be made, we go along with the decisions of those we trust, and if there is no one to trust, we follow the ones we love. Because maybe, yes, Nathan loved Océane a little more than he was willing to admit when people teased him, and even if she wasn't really a troll hunter, and even if they were just a bunch of terrified children lost in the woods, he preferred to be terrified and lost with her than without her, and maybe be devoured by a troll or have his skull caved in by that lunatic Enzo, but devoured or crushed or starved or bled to death or poisoned with her rather than without her.

And they had arrived at the pond, or the lake, or whatever this endless expanse of black water was, and the three children stopped and didn't look at one another, because their attention was drawn to the opposite hidden shore. Santa's sleigh had just crashed in front of their eyes, and once again, they had to make an arbitrary decision.

♥ Jade was crying, crouching against a tree. It hadn't even occurred to her friends to tell her to be quiet; they were all consumed by the same emotion as soon as she had said the magic word, Mommy, which generates in every human being, in every era and every country, a simultaneous shiver of comfort and absence.

♥ No one would tell him to shut up anymore, and no one would punish him anymore, and no one would tell him to go to bed, or to clean his plate, Enzo thought. And if he liked the idea of taking revenge on the two little pests by beating them with all his might with whatever he could find, then no one would stop him. No one would stop him from doing anything now, he thought, heading west, not even knowing it was west, but since Yasmine's cries could be heard for miles around, he would have to be a pretty pathetic hinter to let that sort of prey get away. It would be easy with her, and her friend, and then he didn't really know what he would do, but he was delighted at all the options available to him; he could hunt down all of the imbeciles and crush their heads one by one, or he could reach the road and flag down a car and go home to take care of his father, doing the same thing to him that he did to Fred, because, if there was anyone in the world that Enzo hated or feared more than Fred and his stupid punishments, it was his father, his incomprehensible shouting, his punches and kicks that landed without Enzo knowing why, his insults, his humiliations, his hateful habit of treating his son like an imbecile, a weakling, a good-for-nothing. He might finally change his mind with a rock sunk into his skull, and maybe in looking inside his open head, Enzo would understand what was wrong with him. Would his blood be as red as Fred's? And would his brain be greyish or bright white streaked with fine scarlet veins, like the brains he had seen in the display in the meat department at the supermarket? There must be something wrong in his father's head, in the heads of everyone who spent their time chewing him out and preventing him from living his life.

♥ "Océane!" Nathan cried.

"Océane!" Louis cried.

The two boys couldn't hear their friend anymore, not her voice or even the splashing they had been able to make out just two minutes earlier, but that had given way to the terrible silence of water that no wind stirred. Nathan and Louis shouted, and shouted, even more fervently because they realized what had happened. They shouted to prolong the moment when they were both pretending to have hope, as if the sound of the desperate splashing of their friend's arms and legs as she drowned hadn't reached them, as if her little voice, filled with water and tears, had not called out "Mommy" a few metres in front of them, just a few metres, but still too far for them to come to her aid. They shouted to try to shed as much of their responsibility for the tragedy as they could, shouted to externalize the guilt that filled them.

♥ A few seconds elapsed before Nathan could collect himself, dazed by his run-in with the branch. When he tried to get up, he felt a terrible pain pierce his spine. A cry shot out from the back of his little throat. It took him a few minutes to risk moving again and to try to identify his injuries, but now that he was stuck on the ground, his broken legs wrapped around each other like the legs of a puppet, he would have all the time he needed to assess their seriousness, their irreversibility, and the consequences for the night, which promised to be very long. Once again, between the century-old trunks, the nocturnal fauna heard a cry ring out, made by a small human, the wunderkind of the animal kingdom, master of fire and metal, but just as fragile when it collided with the laws of physics and the cosmos.

♥ The sun had come up, revealing a cloak of damp fog that had risen from the ground and gotten tangled in the trunks and the branches, gently cooling them to let them know that a new day had arrived, filled with the quiet savagery so typical of natural spaces, where plants try to develop faster than animals can consume them, and where animals try to draw on the plants' energy to avoid the fangs of their brethren for one more day. Except for Enzo, who was still sleeping, all those whom this tale has so far spared had seen the sky grow paler, and then the first rays appeared on the horizon, because their sleep had been light, punctuated by fretful wakefulness, stifled sobs, startled awakenings that dragged them out of nightmares in which trees, beasts, and monsters grabbed them to bring their travels to an end.

♥ The little girl was trembling, her arms crossed against her torso, her mouth distorted in permanent sadness. When she closed her eyes, over and over she saw Fred's blood spattering by the campfire. She hadn't been able to sleep, hadn't even wanted to, huddled in the body heat of her slumbering classmates, but had stayed fully awake, eyes wide open to the dank darkness of the log. She couldn't get the horrific episode she had witnessed out of her mind, or understand it, or learn the slightest lesson from it. An adult, the only adult who was supposed to take care of her, had been killed, obliterated, destroyed, and this initial trauma reverberated in her, and its power destroyed every part of her budding personality. Dolls, princesses, sparkly dresses, pink strollers, a plastic stove, the "my darlings," the "my loves," life as she knew it, all the carefully constructed images of her future, assembled in miniature in her bedroom like a seed, like a fetus, that would grow, the stove becoming a real stove, the stroller a real stroller, and the dolly in it a real baby, on this stage, in this scale model that was the beginning and the end of her existence, none of it featured a smashed skull or spurting blood, and that was as it should be, but for Lilou, this posed a metaphysical problem. The event had infiltrated her, like a pebble in the gears, like a semicolon in a line of computer code, and she had crashed; she simply stopped functioning, her mind at least, her ability to think, her manner of perceiving the world. Nothing was working anymore, which was, to some extent, the case for all the children who had witnessed Fred's murder, but in Lilou it took on psychiatric proportions.

♥ "No one, no one," Lilou repeated, sobbing.

At these words, Raphael was gripped with fear. A lot of things had scared him during the evening and the night, but it hadn't occurred to him that, in fact, it was possible that no one would be coming to get them. All night, struggling in an exhausting half-slumber, he had wished with all his might for the sun to come up. He even dreamed about it, crying with joy when his cruel dream showed him the warm, heavenly, yellow body pierce through the trees, but now that day had broken, nothing had changed, no one had rescued them, and the possibility that that was how it would be the whole day, and the whole night, and all the other days, and all the other nights, had started to eat away at him right there, in his chest, at that blue place where tears are born and hope dies. So this is what it was like to be abandoned in the woods, like Hop o' My Thumb and his brothers, like Hansel and Gretel, lost in the dark forest where wild animals live, where chasms open up under your feet, where a child-eating witch may well have built her house. Who was to say? Anything was possible, anything.. ..Raphael felt the ball of terror in him swell and radiate through his body, making his hands tremble, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, but it also melted and ran down over his eyes, which no longer knew what they were seeing: a grove or buffalo? A creeper of ivy or a viper? And as the littler party started walking, he even doubted that his companions were there at all, with him, at his side, weary ghosts with hesitant movements and hushed voices. Enzo might have found them and killed them all in their sleep, everyone except him, or including him. What would it change? Who was to say what you see or feel and how you walk when you are dead? Maybe exactly like this.

♥ Blood and grime covered his thighs, his shins, and of course his bare feet, which were showing not a single patch of clean skin, so much had he walked in the dirt. Realizing that his face must also have traces of his crime, he slowly stroked his cheeks and scratched off a bit of the solid film that covered them. He spent a long time looking at the tips of his nails without being able to identify whether they were covered in soil or dried blood. It was only once he was engaged in his morning ablutions at the water tank that he was able to differentiate the substance sticking to him that changed into a reddish fluid from the substance that crumbled into small black particles: one was blood, the other was earth. On his legs, arms, and face, he noticed clear rivulets grow soiled with one or the other. Was this what he was made of? Earth and blood? Dirt and hemoglobin? As if hypnotized, his mind in flight, he spent almost a minute watching the water run down him and mix with Fred's blood and the forest's mud, landing in a drab puddle on the ground, splashing his feet, his puny body gradually turning white again. Sometimes children like to lose themselves in the contemplation of simple things.

♥ When dawn broke, he didn't know it, his eyes closed tight on the disappointment of being alive..

♥ On the verge of death, a few seconds from the end, up to his last moment, Nathan hadn't thought of Océane, or his mother, or anything else for that matter. He thought of nothing. He died thinking of nothing.

♥ No landmarks, no plan, no idea, just intuition that turned out to be faulty, the glaring dissipation of which now set Hugo, Jade, Raphael, Mathis, and Lilou on an erratic trajectory paved with apprehension and a growing, gnawing, persistent worry. None of them were older than seven, so how could they make the right decisions? How could they remember important information, stay clam, and respond wisely? We're just kids! Hugo cried, in silence. There is no one left to help us, and we're scared!

All the children were thinking the same thing, but none of them said it out loud. Where adults would have torn each other limb from limb looking for someone to blame, the children grew quiet with sadness. We are all children, they thought, and none of us is equipped to deal with such an adversary. We go through life under other people's protection. We listen to instructions and try to follow them. We don't know what's true and what's not. What's fair and unfair. Our world is small. Our world is narrow. We do as we're told. We know we aren't big enough to think for ourselves or make our own choices. We walk along clear paths, we call out for kilometres around, we listen for an answer that never comes. We are alone. Why have you left us alone? Why must we always be alone? Is there no history? No experience? Is there no one we can trust who wields their past like metal stuck to their skin to protect them from what will inevitably happen, and who can tell us and show us how to do likewise? How can we bend the sheet metal and slap it against our forms and perhaps avoid, or at least absorb partly, life's next blow to the ribs? Is there no way to do that? Where are the adults? Where are the elders? The old people gathered around the tree, the campfire storytellers who deliberately hide the answers to future riddles in their fables? No one is telling any stories, and cries pierce the silence, offering no other information, cries of terror and screams of pain, rather than legends and their shimmer of ambiguity that would have guided our steps along the black trails carpeted with rotting leaves and needles. But no edifying story comes to our minds, and in looking for a tale to help us find our way, we find only ogres, witches, wolves and, worse still, parents who brought us here to abandon us. All of these stories, all of these tales, repeat ad nauseam that a child has no business alone in the middle of the woods, that no good can come of heading off-road. And yet here we are. No legend, no story, no myth to tell us what children should do if they ever have the misfortune of finding themselves here. If such a story exists, no one's ever told it to us. Birds have eaten the crumbs, and this is where we find ourselves. With no clues, no road, no camp, no sign, arrow, or map, in the twists and turns of a winding labyrinth, made of wind and wandering, we are here, with no hope of soon finding ourselves somewhere else or brutally and abruptly nowhere, and living simultaneously in the terror of being here and of no longer being, for good, a fear that burns almost as much as the hunger that grips our insides and that makes us say, "Hugo, please, Hugo, we are so hungry, and we want to stop to eat, look around, and kick up some leaves to find blackberries, or wild strawberries or bilberries or bananas, maybe, who knows?" Who among us knows what grows here or where things grow, so, bananas, why not? It would be a surprise, of course, but having arrived at this juncture where anything, even the worst things, seems possible, why not?

♥ "..don't touch any fruit you don't recognize and whatever you do, don't eat it."

No one dared say that none of them were acquainted with or had ever eaten any wild fruit, or berries, or seeds, because they were too hungry and too ashamed and too everything. "Because," quite simply "because," plain, raw silence, the docile approval, there you have it, "because," because I want my mommy, because I want to go home, because I don't have the strength to think anymore, or the desire to lie, because.

So the children stopped. They scattered like a drop of oil in water..

♥ Jade approached Hugo, who was fretting and motionless, while Lilou, Raphael, and Mathis grabbed handfuls of red berries and stuffed them into their mouths, chewing and smiling a smile sometimes twisted by the sourness of the fruit.

"You shouldn't eat that," Hugo said.

But they were so hungry, and it was just fruit, like the fruit the foxes and the Smurfs eat. It wasn't white-spotted mushrooms, harmful amanitas; it was fruit, and at worst they would get sick and so what? At least they would have eaten because they were hungry, and do you actually know, Hugo, whether or not the plant is safe?

"No, I don't know," Hugo said.

"So you see," Mathis concluded, shovelling February daphne berries into his mouth, "you see, you don't know and I'm hungry."

He kept gobbling them up like a deranged person, as did Lilou and Raphael, and the three children squealed in satisfaction as they greedily swallowed the appetizing red fruit of the Daphne mezereum, the juicy, tasty, terribly toxic fruit of the Daphne mezereum.

..They were forced to stay there for a moment, so that Mathis could vomit again, and Raphael and Lilou collapsed on the ground, taking advantage of the opportunity, holding their stomachs, silent or groaning, at any rate unable to stand up or get a word out. To say what, anyway? You were right, Hugo? We shouldn't have eaten those berries? The vomit hurled into the vegetation stunk badly enough to say it for them. And the sight of children writhing on the ground foretold the future that now everyone could predict in looking at them: no one would take another step. They had to take time to recover, or at least wait for it to pass, because nothing else was imaginable in this state. Or else what if they were all to die here, vomiting or starving, poisoned or dying of hunger? But this possibility had to be chased from their minds, nipped in the bud, because what then?

♥ A day had passed like a breeze that caresses no cheek, like the sound of a tree falling in a dead forest, not changing anything in the grand order of things that decides who shall die and who shall be spared. Help would not come, because no one had called for it. None of the children had found the road, because they were all dead or sick or stuck waiting for the sick to die.

♥ "I don't know, ma'am, yes, maybe, I don't know. I got lost," Enzo answered, exactly as he imagined his part in the conversation, without saying anything to worry the already worried mother - oh, she had good reason to be - without giving her reason to keep walking, faster, and faster still. Appease her instead, encourage her to sit down and wait for night to fall and then spend it consoling this little boy lost in the woods and in the rest of his life.

♥ "Don't worry. Don't cry. We should rest," she said, "and then we'll find the others."

And astonishingly, Enzo didn't even think of making fun of such an idiotic promise from a woman who had been walking in circles in the woods for hours, and he settled for crying some more in the plump arms of this sad, substitute mother.

The person pretending to be lost but who wasn't and the person pretending not to be lost but who was found a carpet of inland pine needles that would serve as a dry bed and sat down, their backs against the threadbare conifer, huddled against each other, satisfying each other's need for the comfort and safety they had been deprived of the night before and maybe for all nights to come.

♥ "Can you tell me a story, ma'am?" Enzo asked, pressed against this plump woman and burning with an affection that was brand new to him. "I cant get to sleep without a story," he lied, surprising himself at having come up with this strange request, he who despised stories, who hated being told them more than anything, who seethed with rage in listening to edifying tales in which a ridiculous moral turned the entertainment to a gaping wound from which the pus of the lesson seeped, as if no story, no life, no event on earth deserved to be told if it did not contain the inevitable lesson that people revel in and that bore to tears first their children, then their fellow creatures, and finally the unfortunate cohorts of future generations once they develop a taste for writing them.

Enzo's life, and probably yours too, would serve as a lesson for no one. It emerges, endures, and ends without anyone arranging its episodes into a narrative, organizing them so that onlookers can take them in, ideally. Because there are no onlookers, and the lives that go untold are like pebbles thrown up in the air: their linear trajectory does not help people feel better, act better, be more understanding. Their abject monotony even tends to inspire the opposite: violence, madness, and hatred. And that is why no story is ever told that fails to have a lesson, because telling a story without a point destroys civilization a little. And while Enzo didn't realize it, this was why he hated stories, because he hated being told what to do, like his father did, like Fred did, like all adults did and would continue to do until the boy was properly trained, until he stopped once and for all wanting to destroy civilization, little by little, every day, in his own way.

♥ "Once upon a time," she repeated, in the clinging shadows of the evening, while far away, or maybe right nearby, Lilou, Mathis, and Raphael were twisting on the ground, moaning through the gurgling of their incandescent white vomit, their bodies under assault, trying to expel the poison through any means possible, not realizing that it was too late and that the retching, fever, and spasms would only make the suffering of little bodies that were already suffering too much to bear. Hugo held Raphael's hand and Jade held Lilou's, and no one was holding Mathis's because he was already unconscious, his head resting in a puddle of excrement streaked with green and red, mixed in with the dead leaves and needles, his hair wet with sweat and bile, sweeping the black soil to the rhythm of his convulsions as he lay dying. Hugo and Jade occasionally looked at each other in silence, gnawed at by hunger, but happy to be enjoying that privilege, miraculous survivors damned to witness the punishment of those who would not survive. It went on for so long, the cries, the groans, the terror, the silent calls for help from the three sick children, that the heavy looks they exchanged tended to show only the horror, gratitude, and distress that also awoke in them the shameful wish that it all be over soon, that they be able to let go of the chilled, damp hands and return to having both feet firmly planted in the land of the living. Let them die - no, don't let them die, but let them stop suffering and sleep, rest for the night by their side, let the cries peter out, so that they can once again be afraid of the murmurs of the forest, find a hollow trunk, perhaps, and huddle up against one another like last night, which was so pleasant and peaceful in retrospect, despite the worry about possibly being lost and the fear of discovery by Enzo. It was so peaceful because at the time they thought, supposed, or sensed that it was impossible to go through anything worse than what they were going through.

♥ And the three little children, twisting on the ground, didn't want to die, here, in their vomit, but that was what was happening. But you need to understand, and not be scared, because a child doesn't die like you, an adult or an old person reading these lines. Children die without having had a chance to picture the end, without a sense of it being born and maturing within them. They die the same way they get lice or a skinned knee. They die without understanding, with their childish naïveté imagining death the way they imagine April showers, meteorological inevitabilities that eventually pass, not knowing or realizing that this inevitability does not pass.

♥ Her final word, "story," was swallowed up in the gurgle of the blood spurting from here severed carotid artery. It cuts well, Enzo thought. It slices through meat. "What good is an unfinished story?" Sandra tried to say, instead making a comical gurgle that, even to her, made no sense at all. What was there to say or think now that it was becoming clear that it would be the last thing she would ever say or think? Send her love to her husband? And what would he do with it? No, Jade. She's the one who deserves to be the focus of the last seconds of her existence. Think of Jade and send her all the love she could imagine. But she didn't manage it. And as she died, what Sandra had in mind was the terrible suspense she had created: would little Elliott call for help? Would he make a sound for the first time in his life and save the child, who, without him, would sink to the bottom of the canal and into the night that is waiting to fall on every one of us? How ridiculous. How sad that her last moments should be wasted on the fate of an imaginary child, a ghost she had conjured, caught in the web of her own fiction. I could have thought of my daughter while dying, she thought, but instead I'm thinking about some little ninny I invented.

♥ Hugo and Jade were a few hundred metres, perhaps eleven kilometres, in any case a few centuries away, closer to each other than they ever had been or ever would be again, hands inextricably joined, curled up, spooning, entwined like lovers who don't love each other but who love being alive, together, at the same time, because that is enough to give them the strength to stay huddled up, holding tight, while those around them are in their death throes, dying in the loneliness of the night, Raphael and Lilou and Mathis, alive yesterday, they remembered, and today no more, talking and crying a moment ago and now nothing, no crying, no moaning, no heat, or just a little, now waning, so cold, abnormally cold, and not moving, incredibly, supernaturally. Have we ever seen, they thought, such complete immobility? Even our stuffed animals have more life in their faces and their eyes than the three twisted, ashen friends, lying among the dried needles of the undergrowth. How can we, and how, if we indeed can, be so still, when we are or have been alive? Objects now, not currently animated by breath. Children still warm. Is that what is in store for us? All of us one day, or just us, soon? Showing signs of life for how much longer? How long can we last, eating wind and drinking our own pleas?

.."Are they dead?" Jade asked her friend, her chin resting against his shoulder blade, unable to cry or react in any way whatsoever to the question she had asked automatically, not worrying about or even wanting to know the answer.

"I don't know," said Hugo, who was smart and knew lots of things, who was sometimes at the head of the class, when it wasn't Lucas, but who was also a child, a small child. "You are a big boy now," his grandmother said when he went into Grade I. "You're a big boy." No, I'm not, I'm not, I'm a kid, a little kid, you get it? I'm not a doctor. I'm not a teacher. I'm tired. And hungry. So I don't know. Maybe they're dead. Maybe not. I'm scared too. I want to go to sleep in my bed, with my teddy bears, and my mommy, and I want to leave this place and never set foot in the forest again. And already on their knees, the huddled children lay down now that night had well and truly fallen. They pressed up against their classmates, as if to comfort them, console them for being dead, or maybe to help usher them into the next world, not knowing whether the next world exists, absently holding their hands until deciding they were too cold, clutching at their clothes like benevolent security blankets as they slipped into sleep, five little bodies hunched in the chilly north winds of the night, five little figures about whom it is now hard to know which were alive and which were dead, equally still, similarly broken, lost, alone, desperate, and just as helpless.

♥ Enzo removed his knife from Sandra's split eyeball and reached his fingers toward it to spread open the wound. Was there something glimmering at the back? When the end came, did people's eyes for a while keep a faint trace of what they had last seen? Did a few points of that light settle at the back of the dead person's eyes, slowly going out, like the ember of a fire that is no longer being fed? If that were the case, Enzo didn't see anything and found only pulp and blood as he searched the eyeball, dirty muck and disappointment at yet again giving up part of the magic he had been promised.

♥ Three bodies on the ground - their sallowness, their stillness, the armies of insects that were climbing all over them and crawling in and out of their orifices confirmed that they were no longer children.

♥ No answer, of course. Why would there have been one? Jade would never have left him of her own free will, even to pee, even for a few minutes. Hugo was little, but this was something he knew, and if Jade was no longer within earshot, it was because there was a problem.

..And something collapsed inside Hugo. Sobs rose once more, but this time they contained enough acid to dissolve him completely. Was there nothing left in this world that was worth opening your eyes in the morning and fighting for? Would the bad guys always win? Are our efforts to live in peace simply doomed to failure? Will the bad guys always be bad guys? Will the good guys spend their whole lives taking punches and throwing rocks into the water with all of their might and getting nothing more in return than a ridiculous sploosh and the shame of failure? And what about me, Hugo thought for a fraction of a second of despondency. Will I have to spend my life trying to convince dogs not to devour puppies? What do I have to do? How do I have to do it? Will I always have to think? Or sometimes, just sometimes, will I be allowed to run straight at the enemy, toward the source of my torment, and take him out, massacre him, beat him to a pulp, like he did to my teacher? Will I have the right to do that one day? Do I have the right to do it now? And, dragging himself enraged from the pile of scree he had become, Hugo swallowed the mucus that was caught at the back of his throat, lifted his head toward the source of his terror, and his hate, and his incomprehension, and his fatigue, and of everything that had put him here, starving and weak and exhausted and miserable and in shock, alone now in the middle of a hostile forest, gathering what may have been his last bit of strength before foundering like a rotten plank to the bottom of the ocean.

♥ But Enzo was there, standing on the tallest of logs, smiling, triumphant, clearly in fine form, his arms slowly swinging the length of his body, one of them made longer by the flash of a wet, dirty knife.

"The light," he went on, "doesn't stay in their eyes."

He paused, lifted his head to the white sky, then dropped it toward the knife.

"Or else I didn't see it," he said, as if bored.

♥ "You're mean," Hugo said, an obvious fact that needed staring - maybe it had never been stated. Maybe Enzo didn't know that what he was doing was wrong - one could always hope - and maybe these two words would make him see sense. Perhaps it was so obvious - "what you are doing is wrong," "killing people is wrong" - that no one had ever though to point it out. But did Hugo really want to? Did he want Enzo to put his head in his hands and cry in remorse? No. Definitely not. It was too late now, and the only thing that would release this tension was physical confrontation, with as much fury as possible, with vengeance, with all the brutality needed to ease it. Regrets? Apologies? Mashing his little face into the ground probably wouldn't be enough to forgive what he had put them through in recent hours, the horrors he had committed, the people he had dispatched, so no, Hugo wouldn't take any more; he would kill or be killed, to the extent that a six-year-old can understand what that meant.

"You killed my friends," Hugo said panting, seething with what was left of his rage.

..He shot Enzo a look devoid of empathy or even an ounce of compassion, a look of pure hate and vengeance, and he ran as fast as he could, ran, and yelled, a cry that was so solemn but that could be either the first or the last, as weak as the first, shrill and irrepressible, necessarily a bit ridiculous but primal, indisputable, one of those impulses that no one would be brave enough to mock, because sometimes despite their clumsiness and their awkwardness, despite everything, they could be fatal. So Hugo ran, like a bull, like a bison, like a buffalo, like a thing that charges, and, yelling all that was left inside, flying like a crossbow straight at Enzo's heart, straight toward where it should have been found, in his sworn enemy's chest, which was puffed out with pride.

♥ I knocked him out; he's just knocked out, Hugo thought. It's not over, he repeated like a lunatic, and then it was all too much, and he screamed, not articulating anything, no call for help, no victory cry, no invective; he just let everything he had held in up to this point come out, because there were the others, the onlookers in his mind, watching him and waiting and judging him and expecting the best. Because that was the role he had played for his classmates, for the rest of the world, for the world of classmates you can reign over peacefully, whether you are magnanimous like him or a tyrant like Enzo, but whose scrutiny you always feel, an expectation that weighs on you, that you forget but that clings to your back and your chest like a tight suit that you constantly feel and yet don't feel. So when Enzo collapsed, unconscious, suddenly that weight lifted, because for the first time since the beginning of this horror story, he was alone, truly alone, without his mother, who was far away, without his friends, who were dead, without his lifelong nemesis, who, from where he lay, no longer had the luxury of making fun of him. His scream carried all of his weariness, as the sun was going down on the world.

♥ Thirty or so police officers walked the dirt road alongside which Hugo had collapsed. Twelve others half-heartedly searched, without seeing, for a body that in that moment might still have been alive. It took dogs, handsome German shepherds with soft black-and-brown fur, for the rescue team to find Hugo, hiding under thick ferns, in the ditch where he fell. But the child had died long before, and, with him, our hope.