The Collector of Names (17 page)

"He’s going to the campsite," said Aco. "If he keeps walking along the sea that’s where he’ll end up. We’ll cross the island and we’ll have at least half an hour, maybe more, advantage over him. It’ll do. In the meantime, we’ve got to find out as much as we can about how to destroy him."

"Destroy him?" Raf moved away from Aco.

"Yes, of course. We can’t kill him."

"Well, I should hope not."

Raf was not sure if he really understood the joke.

Aco nodded:

"He’s been dead for a long time and I was there when he was dying. Now we’ve just got to destroy him. And before that we’ve got to find out as much as we can from this one."

He pointed to Max who was lying there, his tongue pointing up into the air, as if he were licking an invisible ice-cream.

"Father, just a little kiss!"

Aco sat on Max’s stomach, put his hands on Max’s shoulders and pushed him down. Max was trying to lift himself up, desperate to kiss the figure above him.

"Just a little kiss, a little kiss, that’s not much, just a little kiss!"

The captive was lifting his head and reaching for the face above him with his tongue. Saliva stained with blood trickled from the corners of his mouth.

"You’ll get a kiss," said Aco, "You’ll get one. You just have to tell me something before."

"I will, father, I will!"

"Did you see the child?"

"Yes, I did. In that room, in the dark. You weren’t there, father, and I was scared. I’m not scared now. Just a little kiss!"

"You’ll get it. What did the child say?"

"Mama, he said. That was the first thing he said. But mothers don’t matter, just fathers! Mothers come and go! That’s what they’re like!"

"Mama? And then?"

Max, in between pouring out his emotions, finally managed to tell them what had happened to him in the villa. He did not forget to mention how the boy did not have to open his mouth while he spoke and Aco asked him to repeat that bit twice.

Slowly, Max started losing the plot more and more and talked only about love and kissing his father. He kept jerking forward with his tongue out, trying to lick his interrogator, until Aco got up and moved away. Max writhed on the ground, tirelessly repeating his litanies.

Raf watched him and after a long absence that cynical voice which had been so active on the ferry but had then vanished, as if it had returned to the mainland, reappeared. He remembered their form-teacher’s words spoken during the final celebratory speech. He had asked them to look at each other as that was the last time they would see each other as they were then. Next time they met, a few years later, they would be different, something would have happened to them. It’s true, said the little voice. Just look at that body on the ground, remember Alfonz’s face, remember yourself. Who would have thought that you would become like
this
in just a few days.

Aco came over to Raf and said to him:

"It’s time to talk."

*

Ana realised how everything she had done in her life had been guided by rules and reason. At the same time, she knew that that was the way which suited her best, but she still wondered when the last time was that she had done something instinctively, under an impulse, on the spur of the moment.

Her instinct was telling her to leave. The whole night she had been waiting, the whole night. Some strangers came and told her to wait. Just like that.

She knocked on the door firmly and decisively.

"What now?" the window opened.

"Will you take me with you when you go after my uncle?"

Luka looked at her in astonishment.

"But how, you’re a woman?!?"

She swallowed thickly.

"Where are you going?"

"Well, to the villa."

"The one on the other side of the island?"

"Where else?"

"The one near the campsite?"

"No, the campsite is in between. A different path leads to the villa. Further than the camp!"

"How"

"I haven’t got time for this! It’s time for action!"

He slammed the shutters and started to clatter around, moving things again.

So that was it! Even if she waited there until the morning or even until doomsday, they would not take her with them because she was a woman! So!

She remembered her mother who was always waiting for something: with lunch for her husband, with a towel for her when she was having a bath. Always. The first signs of puberty manifested themselves in Ana’s wondering when her mother would rebel. She would have been able to respect her a lot more if she had ever raised her voice or done anything her own way. Stopped waiting.

It’s night and I’m free, she told herself.

I’ll go. Now. On my own. They’ll be sorry for not taking me with them.

*

Behind them, Max was calling for his father while Raf and Aco sat next to a bent pine tree. Aco talked and Raf listened:

"I’ll tell you just the most important details, we haven’t got enough time for the rest. When I was eight I looked through the cellar window of that villa," he pointed in the right direction, " and I saw"

He had to take a deep breath and lean his head back before he was able to continue.

" something. A woman killing her child. Slowly, drop by drop, she took his blood as if he was an inkpot and with each drop she wrote down a name in the steam from the glowing amber. About the others who were there, the strange demons, I won’t talk. Towards the end, I screamed. I don’t know if I’d interrupted their ritual or not. I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter anyway. The next morning the woman disappeared and everybody thought she’d left with her son. She was from India, her husband had been born over on the mainland and he’d brought her here when he retired. He died before his son was born. There were lots of rumours going around the village about the child not being his. The child was born exactly nine months after the husband’s death. I was too young to understand it all then, but the rumours stayed around till I grew up.

I never told anybody what I’d seen. Nobody. Not even those who took me there that night. But it got out somehow and the villa became a no go area for the villagers. I believe that new generations of young boys have all tested their courage there. How many small boys must have stood there swallowing hard and trembling. But nobody ever went really close. There was no talk about the villa being haunted or anything like that, we just never mentioned it at all. The whole village wiped it out of its memory. It wasn’t there anymore, do you understand? I know, we should have gone there and burnt it down. I thought of it many times, but our daily life here is so boring and uneventful that it puts you to sleep. Whatever you can put off till tomorrow, can’t harm you.

I became the leader of a gang of those boys, together we joined the forces and fought for the allies during the last war. I became a professional soldier later. What else could I have done?

I got a whole load of medals. I’ve still got them somewhere. I survived everything. Everything. I was brave only because I wanted to die. But all along I knew I would have to come back one day and deal with what I saw as a child. But I didn’t have the courage! I was afraid! AFRAID! That’s why I was always in the first lines of attack, the most exposed positions. That’s why. I received wounds and medals but never an absolution from that original duty. God is very generous with the former but he finds it hard to give the latter. Once, when I was at the peak of my strength, during the Korean war, I even wished for the demons to return that very moment. But I knew they wouldn’t listen to me and I’d have to meet them when I was weak again.

Do you believe in God?"

"Me? No. I’ve never even thought"

"I was brought up to believe. After what I saw in the cellar I often thought about God. For some time, that was all I thought about. This is how it is, I think. The only time we’re in contact with him is when we sleep. And dreams are our defences, our earthiness, trying to lead us away from Him. If we fight them and break through them we come into contact with Him. That’s what we call a nightmare. The more horrible the nightmare, the closer to Him we are. And that’s why in our everyday life it doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or not: but when your life starts becoming a nightmare that belief is the only thing that can save you. There are no decisions when you’re in contact with God. There’s no free will. And that’s what makes the nightmare so horrible. Things happen to you. Horror is the prayer of our time."

"What about the devil?"

Aco hissed with contempt:

"Ach, names!"

Then he shook his head:

"Let’s leave this, I’ve strayed. I’m glad to have you with me. If I was alone I’d go mad with fear. That’s one advantage of being in the army: you’re never alone. You’ve always got somebody with you and I’m the sort of person whose courage feeds on someone else’s fear and thus smothers his own. But let’s forget this. We’ve got to talk about that thing out there walking towards the campsite. It must never get there! It mustn’t! It would bring to them the madness and the slaughter it brought to you. And then it would go to the village. The ferry comes again tomorrow and it would get on it. And so on. We’ve got to destroy it! Here! Tonight!"

"The child?"

"NO! THAT’S NOT A CHILD! The child died in front of my eyes. This is a
thing
which which is doing what it was created for. Don’t you ever forget that! It’s not a child! IT’S NOT! It’s not alive either! IT’S NOT! It’s a machine, that’s what it was made to be. I was an army instructor and I’m telling you, I made machines like that, according to my best abilities and within the means at my disposal."

"Yes, but"

"I’ll tell you things about which I’ve heard and which are coming true tonight. When I travelled the world I talked to many people. I made friends in the Indian regiment. I heard about a sect whose priests collect names and who believe that when they’ve collected every name there is, these names will embody God. They believe that God divided himself among all living beings during creation. And I heard rumours that heretics from that sect who’d split away many years ago and who claimed that the names found, remembered or written down by a priest are not the names of real people, but are just the priest’s imagination. They said that every collected name had to come from a real living person and that it had to be taken from them. I’m surprised they left this thing here and not in America where they have a name for everything. Anyway, God had divided himself among his creatures. And everything that exists has a name. Because if there is something new, really completely new, that does not come from God because it hasn’t got a name. That’s why some people say that something really new can never happen. If it ever did, there’d be no God. The thing from the villa asks people their name. You heard how your friend Max keeps shouting how he hasn’t got a name anymore, and Alfonz said something like that too. But all this is just philosophising. Maybe it isn’t true and I’m telling you made up stories. But even those are better than nothing."

Raf felt a disbelief which vanished the moment he remembered Alfonz’s grinning face.

"So, this thing goes around collecting names?"

"Yes. He asked both victims for their names and they told him. You saw what happened to them. Listen, they both said he didn’t open his mouth when he spoke to them."

"Yes, I noticed that."

"That’s what’s worrying me most. Those strange abilities. I don’t know, but it seems that he can read peoples’ minds, at least from nearby, and I’m afraid we’ll have to destroy him without coming close to him or we’ll have to distract him somehow, entrap him."

"We haven’t got"

"We haven’t. The gun is lost and we can’t wait till the morning. All we’ve got is this knife and a plan. I’ll tell you about it later. My niece is waiting in the village to wake my friends."

"The girl from the ferry?"

"Yes. They will"

"What’s her"

"There’s no time for that now. My friends will come and they’ll be armed. But they’ll be too late and the thing will already have done its job in the campsite so we can’t rely on them. Maybe it wasn’t a sensible thing to call them at all. They’ll be expecting monsters and all they’ll see is a child. If you see them you’ll have to explain that to them."

"How"

" will you recognise them? Oh, that won’t be difficult. You’ll hear them as soon as they start off, they’ll come with a lot of noise. Do you remember the pensioners on the bench?"

"Them?"

"Yes, them."

Raf’s head just fell forward. Four pensioners, four senile old men, who had spent their whole life stretching on the bench, moaning about their various ailments, will be the rescue party.

Aco smiled.

"Young people, young people, always judging by appearances. Don’t worry, I’ve been expecting tonight’s events for a long time, so we have worked hard to acquire weapons."

He became serious and got up.

"Let’s go, it’s time to attack."

"What about Max?"

"We’ll leave him here."

"Alone? Tied up?"

"Yes, we won’t carry him with us because we haven’t got the time. We can’t untie him because he’s dangerous. There’s two of us and we can protect ourselves from him. What if he finds somebody who’s alone and weaker than him and he suffocates them with his outpourings of love? He stays here."

Raf looked towards his tied up friend who called him father and he nodded.