The Prison

by Stefano Pastor

  “He’s probably hidden.”

  “How do we find him?”

  “It’s him that’s going to find us.”

  “Do you want to… take it?”

  “Do you see any other solution?”

  We would have been safe as long as we didn’t get close to that object. As long as we didn’t touch it, he wouldn’t have done anything to us. We were lucky that Alessandro immediately ran to us as soon as he found it. If he had taken it, it would have been a tragedy.

  Yeah, Sandra was right, all of this had to end.

  I took a step forward.

  “No!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Doubts were building up in our minds.

  “We’re doing the wrong thing, again!”

  “Would you rather not do anything?”

  “No, no, but… How is it? Have you seen it? How’s it made?”

  “Briefly, you know. Just for a moment.”

  “But, how is it?”

  “How do you want it to be? It’s a monster!”

  “Yeah but… a monster like what?”

  I sighed. I already told her, more than once. “It’s small, something like a dwarf, but he’s horrible. Hence, a monster.”

  “Yeah but how is he dressed?”

  “Dressed? I haven’t seen any clothes! Why does it matter now whether he was dressed or not?”

  “Is it… green? Does he wear anything that’s green?”

  It was degenerating. “Stop it, Sandra! What’s up with you? I told you he’s a monster, that’s it.”

  “Oh, my God, my God.”

  She was becoming hysterical. At a certain point, she turned to me and took a few steps back. “We can’t do that!”

  “Sandra!”, I screamed, and she stopped.

  I headed straight for the object on the ground. “Let’s end this.”

  “No!” she screamed, realizing what I was about to do.

  I ignored her. I strongly grabbed the object’s borders and pulled. It came out easily. It was round, like a bowling ball, with a hole in the middle. The orange light was coming from that opening.

  “You did it!”, she screamed.

  I placed the object on the ground to free my hands and grabbed the carbine. “Shhh!” I told her. “Be quiet now.”

  She froze, right on the spot, and held the knife with both hands. She desperately looked around. “I’m scared!” she screamed.

  It wasn’t my fault that she moved away. She was a perfect target there. That worked in my advantage anyway. If only he moved forward, I could have hit him without any problem.

  Sandra was going crazy, she skipped on the spot, in an attempt to support herself on a foot, as if she feared a snake’s assault. “You shouldn’t have done that!”, she screamed once again.

  I was keeping an eye on the field, but there was very little grass there, it wouldn’t have been enough to hide a single sparrow.

  “How tall is it?” Sandra screamed.

  “Do you think I measured it?”

  “No seriously, how tall is it?”

  “Just enough to be seen, don’t worry.”

  “Tell me how much!”

  “I don’t know! Thirty centimeters, maybe thirty-five.”

  She rested both her feet on the ground. “Just that much?”

  There appeared to be disappointed in her voice. She looked at the knife in her hands, which was forty centimeters long, and made some proportions.

  “I thought it would have been more dangerous”, she said.

  I was stressing out. “It is! It is! Size doesn’t matter!”

  “You’ve always told me it was a monster”, she said.

  I didn’t like her tone; a malicious note was in it.

  “Does this look like the right moment for this? He could assault us any moment.”

  She looked around, far too relaxed. “I can’t see anybody.”

  “The ground! It hides in the ground!” I screamed, hoping to see her starting to skip again.

  It didn’t work. “The ground hasn’t been moved in years. It would have been evident.”

  I didn’t know what to turn to anymore. I couldn’t even understand why it hadn’t showed up yet.

  Sandra took a few steps towards me and gave me the usual disgusted look. “Come on, take that thing and let’s go home.” She then added, in a threatening voice: “Thirty centimeters! You made me live five years of anxiety, for thirty centimeters!”

  “Maybe thirty-five!” I muttered. “Yeah, thirty-five, I’m sure about it. Maybe even forty.”

  “Hurry up!” her scream was so loud that it made me jump. The carbine even slipped of my hands.

  I tried picking the object up. “It’s heavy!”

  “Sort it out yourself!”

  I strapped the carbine onto my shoulder and bent over. I grabbed its borders, with both hands. It was so heavy! I should have been happy, but…

  I bumped into two eyes, right inside the object. Malicious, yellow eyes. I had no time to retreat, not even to scream. The monster jumped on my face.

  “Argh!”

  “Don’t move, you don’t want me to hurt you do you?”

  “My nose, my nose! He tore it off!”

  “No, he didn’t, but it’s badly injured. Don’t touch it.”

  The pain was terrible, as I was anxiously looking around. Did Sandra close all the doors and windows? She told me so, but should I have trusted her? Would that thing have been able to get inside?

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “How am I supposed to know if you don’t either, and it was right in front of you!” Was that a sneer? “It looked like it was kissing you!”

  “Bitch!”

  She chuckled. “It was too quick to be seen. It immediately ran away. You were right anyway. Yeah, I’d say thirty centimeters.”

  “How can you joke about it? It now knows it was us! It won’t give us any rest! It will tear us apart!”

  “It didn’t look so dangerous.”

  “Look at how it reduced me! You don’t know them!”

  “And do you?”

  “I informed about them. They’re vengeful! They never forget!”

  “I don’t think so…”

  “You saw it yourself, it has come back! It even set us a trap! And we fell for it, just like fools!”

  “You fell for it”, she pointed out.

  “What should we do?”

  Once again, the only possible solution wasn’t even hinted at.

  “Where is it? Did you leave it there?”

  “What?”

  “You know what!”

  “Oh come on! I already had to drag you, you seemed to be dying! Let alone carrying that thing! And who knows what else could have been in there!”

  “You know what was in there!”

  She gave me a weird look. “Did you want that? Did you also want that? How could it have been of any use?”

  “I…”

  I felt cornered. I touched my stitched nose and sobbed.

  “What will happen now?”

  She sighed. “What could happen? You go to bed.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Would you rather go to the emergency room? They could give you an anti-rabies, you never know. I’m curious about the explanation you’ll come up with.”

  “Don’t you believe me? Don’t you believe it’s going to try and kill us? It knows we’re here, and will attack!”

  “Go to bed, it’s best that way.”

  “It’s a monster!”, I screamed. “A monster!”

  I then went to bed.

  She brought me a broth, and gave her a horrified look.

  She was wearing curlers while coming to be. The horror rose.

  “See? Nothing happened. Don’t worry.”

  “Did you…go out? Did you go take a look?”

  “Look at what? Oh, you wanted that too? Go and get it yourself if you can’t live without it.”

  The thought of going outside terr
orized me.

  “It’s in here, I know! It’s in this house!”

  She laid and switched the light off. I screamed as if I was being killed. She immediately turned it back on.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I couldn’t take any more, I was breaking. “It wants to kill me!” I mumbled. “It wants to kill me, I know.”

  She got out of bed, annoyed.

  “Stop! I can’t take any more. If we have to live like this I’d rather end it!”

  She left the room with determination, wearing her nightgown. A moment later, I heard an unpleasant creak.

  I jumped off the bed screaming and realized it could have been there as soon as I put my feet on the floor. I looked for a weapon to defend, but the only thing I could find was a trumpet, hung to the wall, just like a trophy. Using that, I checked under the bed to make sure it wasn’t there.

  “You’ve gone crazy!” my wife shouting while seeing me. She then said: “Come on, lend me a hand, I can’t do this alone.”

  When I realized she lowered the attic’s ladder, I screamed again. “What are you doing?”

  She said it. That so feared sentence.

  “I want to give it back, no? So that it will give us some rest!”

  “But… but…”

  “Look, it’s not ours. It only gave us trouble ever since we found it, it transformed our life in a nightmare. What else could happen then? Will you have to go back to work? Aren’t you tired of not doing anything, all day long? We won’t die for this.”

  But actually, we would have died, she couldn’t understand that. She couldn’t have known.

  “Come on, help me go up. Hold it still.”

  “No, no!” I kept repeating.

  She started climbing up, not listening to any reason.

  The attic was clean and tidy, we often went there. It was the perfect place to hide it, where kids could have never found it.

  It was packed with old armchairs and relics of the whole family. Sandra went straight for a huge armchair and opened it.

  It was empty, except for an odd round container. She took it and placed it on the table.

  Something was magic about that object. Looking at it was enough to feel the greed growing inside of us. Out there, in the field, it didn’t give me that sensation, but we had other problems in that moment.

  It was very similar to the one we saw outside, almost identical. It looked a bit bigger, but it was lighter on the other hand. An orange light was coming from the inside, and it projected itself on the wall, in the attic’s darkness.

  We stared at it for a long time, fascinated. I then couldn’t resist, and put a hand inside it.

  I grabbed a handful of it, and held it tight.

  “Is this really the time for that?”, Sandra asked. “Haven’t you caused enough troubles already?”

  There, we already got to that point, she was blaming me.

  She pushed the object towards me. “Give it back already.”

  “Me?” I screamed, and what I was holding fell on the table. They sparkled, and looked like golden nuggets. Sandra picked them up and threw them back inside the container.

  I didn’t dare whispering.

  “Yeah, you. Go outside and give it back. We don’t need it.”

  I started shaking my head, unable to stop.

  “You stole it, and you very well know that. I don’t know what that thing is, if it’s an actual leprechaun. The gold in this pot clearly never runs out. The more we take the more there is to take. So, if you’re that scared he could get revenge, take that pot and give it back.”

  I wouldn’t have touched it for anything in the world. I completely paled.

  “I can’t”, I mumbled.

  “It’s fine”, she conceded. “It’s also my fault. I could have refused, but all this gold blinded me too. It’s right that we do it together. I’m coming with you.”

  I started shaking my head again, like an idiot.

  “Is it possible to know what’s up with you? You don’t want to do without it, do you want to keep it? You’re the one that’s scared to death. And that’s even in front of a thirty centimeters tall creature!”

  I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. “It’s not the same.”

  She stiffened. “What’s not the same?”

  “The thing. The monster. The… leprechaun. It’s not the same one we stole the pot to.”

  Sandra grabbed a chair and sat at the table. “Explain yourself.”

  The shame submerged me, but I couldn’t be quiet anymore. “When I saw that rainbow, I…”

  “You told me hundreds of times already! I know how things went down!”

  “No, you don’t. I lied.”

  “Oh!”, she exclaimed, without adding anything else.

  “I was fishing. I saw the rainbow and… I knew it was foolish, but… it originated right from our field, so…I went to take a look, like that, out of curiosity. And it was really there! A pot, filled with gold! Can you believe that? It was absurd, but it was there. I put my hands inside and grabbed handfuls of gold. Handfuls, got it? I pulled them out and there was always more!”

  “It’s all exactly as you already told me the other times. Then you brought it home, and…”

  “No, first came the leprechaun.”

  “Oh yeah, you glimpsed at it and ran away with the pot.”

  “No. It didn’t go that way”, I sighed. “I knew that if there was a golden pot at the end of the rainbow, there must have also been a leprechaun, I had also heard that tale. It’s just that I expected…something else.”

  “A little man, dressed in green, with a hat.”

  “Uhm…yeah, something like that. But that thing instead… God how ugly is that! It was just like a monster!”

  “And it attacked you?”

  I became speechless.

  “It didn’t attack you?”

  “Well, that’s one way to say it. It was angry, yeah, clearly angry that I had taken its pot. It started walking around me, and it was angry. It gave off such growls!”

  “But it didn’t attack you?”, she asked again.

  “I…didn’t give it any time to do so. I grabbed a rock and…”

  “What did you do?” Sandra screamed so loud that the windows started trembling.

  How stupid, my eyes filled with tears, just like a baby. “I hit it, and hit it again. I continued until it stopped moving.”

  “But why?”

  I sobbed. “For the pot. I wanted that pot. I couldn’t think of anything else.”

  Sandra seemed exhausted. “You did that? You?”

  I sobbed even more. “I don’t know what happened to me I really don’t know.”

  “And what did you do with it?”

  “I buried it right there, where I found the pot.”

  “And you told me nothing! Nothing!”

  “I was too ashamed.”

  “You dragged me into this without telling me a thing! You said you found it! If only the rainbow had not appeared again some days later you wouldn’t have even told me where it happened and that you took it away!”

  “It’s looking for it!”, I whispered. “It’s one of them and it’s looking for it!”

  “One more reason to give it back.”

  “But it will realize we killed it, its friend!”

  “You killed it!”, she pointed out. “You alone! And it already knows by now, don’t you think so?”

  I sobbed. “It will kill us all.”

  “Come on!” she bursted. “It’s a thirty centimeters thing! You were even able to kill one with a rock!”

  I confusedly looked at her. “Do you…do you want to kill this one too?”

  “I don’t want to kill anybody! But I will protect my house if necessary.” She angrily grabbed the pot and a bit of its contents fell on the floor. I didn’t immediately pick it up for once.

  “Let’s go, come on, let’s end this!”

  Complaining got me nothing, and Sandra forced me to carry the pot
. I followed her through the house, but I stopped at the main door.

  “No!”, I said, I was determined. “No, no, no.”

  “You have to take it back where you took it!”

  “It’s dark!”, I reminded her.

  “You’re the one that fears it coming to kill you!”

  I insisted and won it. In the end, we agreed to open the door and leave the pot outside. We left it there, on the walkway, and hurried to lock everything.

  She shook her head, and then decided to leave it as that. “Let’s go to bed, now.”

  Sleeping? Is this a joke?

  I spent the night shivering, with the light on, and that bitch beside me was even snoring! I was starting to hate her.

  Every little noise I heard made me scream, and she didn’t even wake up. I suspected she put her ear plugs on.

  I was a nervous wreck in the morning, and it seemed like I’ve been through a compression roll. She checked my poor nose and shook her head in disgust. “It really sucks.”

  The pot was still there on the walkway, where we left it. Our expedient worked to nothing.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Bring it back to the field”, she said.

  Her wishes were once again orders. Like that, after a futile argument, I found myself hobbling between the fields, holding that precious pot, that only gave me troubles.

  Seeing Sandra handling that carbine was bizarre, I was just hoping she wouldn’t have shot me in the end.

  When we got close to where the other pot was, Sandra grabbed my arm and stopped me. She had a weird look, pointing at the middle of the field.

  I also looked.

  The leprechaun was there. Or at least, whatever that was. It looked more like a hybrid between a snail and an hippopotamus, a little bit of Godzilla, but who am I to judge?

  We saw it getting out of his pot and going around it. It had a clumsy stride, it looked like it crawled, like a snail.

  “What is it doing?” I whispered.

  It didn’t seem like he noticed us. It went around that pot, faster and faster, and it looked angry.

  “See? It’s green. I was right”, Sandra quietly added.

  Yeah, its back was green, but it clearly wasn’t wearing any clothes.

  It then did something so incredible that it left us with our mouths opened. It poured the pot and put it on his shoulders. Oh God, not that it had actual shoulders, it looked more like a snail carrying its shell. It started hobbling, dragging that mass.