Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
Because although I had told myself I was going to head home and quietly destroy my fortune for the rest of my days, and forget about pursuing the man who’d ruined my life, when I left Marseille I knew I was not done yet.
I still wanted him.
I had destroyed his big house in the woods, but I doubted very much that he had been killed in the fire. I’d seen people outside before I left; he would certainly have escaped too. I knew that house must have represented some of his fortune. Maybe it was insured, maybe not. But I knew he would still have money, somewhere, just as I had. And with that money, he could afford to start again, start taking people’s lives again.
I began taking holidays in Yugoslavia, to Slovenia, where that house had been. Private tourism was opening up in the country; all that was needed was a tourist visa, and now, with my new, clean identity, and my fortune intact, that was easy enough.
I drove around the area I thought I’d been held captive in, and after a few excursions over many weeks, I finally found the ruins of the place.
I stared at it long and hard one dry evening as the sun set, and set myself to talking to the locals about it.
Yes
, they knew the man who’d owned it.
No
, he had gone away, after the fire.
So, he had survived it, news that did not surprise me greatly, but which renewed my determination. Did they know where he had gone? I asked.
No
, they did not.
I was on the point of leaving when one of them, an old man but with a lover’s eyes, referred to the man who’d owned the big house as the Italian.
Italian?
I asked.
You’re sure?
Quite sure.
So began my years of wandering. I stumbled and stalked almost at random through Italy, following dead ends, asking strangers strange questions, digging here, hunting there, and always moving.
The months went by and I had nothing to go on, and before I knew it the months became the first year, much of which I spent coming to terms with losing the thumb on my dominant hand. I learned to do things differently, but even now I still sometimes reach out without thinking, expecting to clutch something with a thumb that is no longer there.
I travelled the length of Italy, and then I gave up on it. I hunted in Switzerland, Austria, back in Yugoslavia again, staying for one night here and several weeks there, always with one thing on my mind. The desire to possess him, to find him again and take possession of him, as he had done me.
Finally, in Slovenia, I did find out a little about who he was, or who he had been. It seemed he really was Italian, that he came from a vastly wealthy family, but that his wayward behaviour as a child and teenager had made him the family’s black sheep. He had fought in the war, on both sides, and at some point in the fifties he had bought the mansion I had burned down, buying anonymity and protection from the local party official. Some even said that his bribery went as high as Tito himself, who frequently holidayed nearby, at Lake Bled.
I didn’t know the truth, but truly, I did not care.
One year became two, and then three, and as I moved on, always hunting, I almost forgot what I was hunting for. But not quite. Always, deep down, in the depths of whatever it was my mind had become, was the thought of him, of what he’d done to me, and of what I would do to him.
I reflected little on the past, if at all. My vision was always forward. My memories seemed to be no more than broken pieces, fragments that had skittered away to hide in the corner of my mind. If I thought of the past at all it was only with a peculiar sense of wonder over the passage of time, how endless our lives seem when we’re young, how time flows faster and faster as we age, the way the sand in an hourglass appears to flow faster as it nears its end. That thought alone filled me with terror, that my time would run out before I had done what I wanted to do, what I
really
wanted to do.
I forgot everything else. I forgot Hunter, though I bore his name. I forgot Marian, and Giovanna. I forgot why I cared about how Arianna was linked to Sarah, I forgot my old name, but still I kept moving, moving. I saw nothing but the road, nothing but the suggestion of his presence in every bar in every town. I tasted nothing I drank, savoured no food I ate. Every part of me closed in, shut down, until I was little more than a machine in human form, a machine with one purpose.
And then, finally, I found myself in Italy, and I began snooping around the family of young Giovanna, something I should have done long before. What made me think about it was a small revelation in the news. Their tragedy had disappeared from the world’s view a few weeks after Giovanna went missing, but one day I read in my improving Italian a small item in the paper: the deathbed confession of a woman who had once worked for a clinic in Lausanne; who had been sent to collect Giovanna from Italy; and who, she admitted in her final moments of cancer, had been paid a vast sum to smuggle the girl from the train that night. For whom she had been working, if she even knew, was not revealed.
The item caused a small stir, one that lasted no more than a week or two, but it reminded me of Giovanna’s parents, who were said to be grief-stricken at this awful revelation. A few weeks later, having engineered my way into an interview with them, I could see her loss was as raw for them as it must always have been.
I pretended to be a journalist, following up on the possibility of Giovanna’s sainthood, something else the newspaper article had briefly mentioned. Of course, I told them nothing. I didn’t tell them how I’d found their girl’s lifeless body in a cellar in Slovenia. I didn’t tell them how I hoped to have burned it. I waited for them to speak, through the tears, waiting to pounce on the slightest hint, on any possible clue, to the man who’d paid for their daughter to travel to Switzerland.
But they gave me nothing. They knew nothing, and there was nothing to give. But it was when I left Rome that I found myself heading into the east, where, in a bar one night, I heard some wild stories about the foreigner who’d bought a ruined village, up in the hills.
They called him the Slav, and though no one knew who he was, or what he was really called, I knew it was him when they spoke about his disfigurement. He has terrible scars, they said, as if from a fire.
I smiled.
Chapter 2
I’m close now, but I’m slow and dead. I am not fast any more. But I do not feel pain or fear; I am not scared. I am ready, that’s all.
I watch for days, making my way up from the valley each morning, bringing enough food with me to see me to dusk, and I sit and watch, slowly dying in the awful Italian heat. And then, after three days of scouring the village through the binoculars, I see him.
The night of barking dogs has passed, and mutated into a brooding quiet as it does each morning. The early chill is burned quickly away, the dry heat rules everything again. I’m waiting, still waiting, and the hours pass easily, like flowing sand, until, sometime in the afternoon, the clatter of a door opening startles me.
It’s hard to be sure at first. I see the door stagger open, and I see an old man hobble out into the fierce August sun, propping himself up with a stick. He holds his hand above his eyes, and even at this distance I can see the red scars on his face and his hands. He has shrunk, and he walks with a limp, but it’s him.
Why he is living in this squalid ruin I have no idea. Maybe he has chosen this place, maybe somehow his money has finally run out. There could be many reasons, but I don’t care. I don’t care.
In all the time I’ve been watching, I have seen no one else. They said, down in the valley, that he bought the whole village from the last two families living there. I can see that most of the houses are falling down, their roofs caved in, their windows broken. Ivy is spreading over the broken tower of the church, and I know this area is prone to earthquakes. They said he lives there by himself, perhaps with the last of his fortune, but I wonder if he is completely alone.
I watch as he shouts at one of the dogs, the wild dogs that have made Sextantio their own. What they find to feed on, I do not know, but I suspect it’s not much, whatever it is; they are mangy and thin curs that scamper away as he waves his stick at them.
I don’t see him for long. He pulls a key from his pocket and opens another door. He seems to hesitate in the doorway for a moment, as if in anticipation, and then he goes inside.
That’s when I’m sure he’s not alone.
I crawl from my hiding place, and head down the hill in the heat. I’m sweating badly by the time I get to the narrow road that leads back up into his village, and I still have a steep climb before me. I don’t want to use the road. It’s too exposed and besides, I want to try and keep track of where I last saw him.
I can already see the village is a warren of alleys and leaning stone houses, of cobbled streets and cruel steps. I head up through an abandoned olive grove, and slowly climb up to a low broken wall, over which I slide, and then I lie, panting, trying to get some energy back.
The sun is burning my face, my hands, and I hate it, and I hate him for bringing me here, and then I stand, and realise I am lost.
A dog skips past me and I freeze at the sound, but I begin to explore. I realise I am on a small terrace almost underneath the one where I saw him disappear into the darkness of the doorway, but I cannot work out how to get from mine to his.
I set off through a small archway, but the steps beyond lead the wrong way, and all the while the stones of the houses, of the pavements, are throwing back the sun’s heat at me, sucking my energy, draining me of what it is I’ve come to do. My feet seem far too loud on the dry cobbles, and I stop, and take my shoes off, and put them neatly out of sight on the top of a wall.
Then, I make another turn, and as I do so I see a short flight of steps leading up on to the higher terrace. I move up them, slowly, trying to be as silent as I can, and just as I reach the top, the door opens again, and as he steps into the sunlight, he sees me.
He does nothing.
He stares at me, like I once stared at him. And does nothing.
His skin is ruined by the fire, all down one side. I realise it has damaged his leg too, because he can’t even stand straight.
His eyes meet mine, and I see that look on his face from so long ago, that look of curiosity.
There’s a sound behind him, from the room, and a young woman, a thin and frail young woman, scrabbles for freedom, but she falls, landing on the doorstep. She is his last victim. She is, perhaps, some local peasant he has abducted, stolen, and secreted in his prison village. Her hands are tied behind her back, which, like a dog, is keeping her leashed to some unseen point inside the room. She lies on her side in the doorway, blinking, struggling, crying. A gag has fallen from her mouth and hangs around her neck. There is blood welling from her shoulder.
I look at her briefly, but he raises his stick, stepping towards me.
I pull the knife from my pocket and put it into the side of his neck, and he falls immediately.
He doesn’t cry out, or make any sound at all, he just collapses with his hand to his neck.
There is no more. He twitches for a long time, trying to stop the blood coming out, looking up at me once or twice, trying to stop the blood, but he can’t, because I have made a large hole in his neck, and the artery is pushing, hard.
The blood rushes, the blood spurts. It gushes, as it always does when allowed to burst free of the body.
I watch him for a good time.
Someone is speaking.
‘Have you come to help me?’ asks the girl, in Italian, and I step back.
I turn and am blinded by the sun.
Now there is nothing left but the sun. The sun and the blood; blood pouring out on the honey stone. The sun beats down, beats. That’s what they say, the sun beats down, as if with violence, and I know it’s why I was born English, that I need the rain, that this sun would drive a man to madness, driving up the heat of the blood, sending it faster and faster round the heart, and into the brain, spreading whatever lurks in the blood to the mind, and that lurking thing is evil.
What is it we should fear the most?
After Paris, I had decided that what Verovkin did to that girl in the bunker was no worse than many of the monstrous things war makes men do. But now I know differently. War doesn’t make men do monstrous things. It
allows
them to.
What should we fear? It is ourselves, it is the monster inside us. That is what we should fear, and now there is nothing left in me but the sun. All through the long hot days it has been pounding at me, wearing me down, draining my energy, sucking me of life; a demanding god, one who demands that I make a sacrifice to replace the life lost from me. If I fill myself once more, I will be strong again, and then I can go on, go on another day, keep going, and going, until I find something worth finding, something that makes everything I have been through fall away. That something, I think, could be something like Verovkin had.
Everything does fall away, for there is only the sun now. Its heat burns its way into my heart, until I can bear it no more.