* * *
“Sorry for making you come here at this time of the night”, Arthur said, when they arrived at Tibiriçá Ecovillage about eleven. “Tomorrow you work.”
“I only have to thank you for the nice night we spent together”, she replied, before the goodbye kiss.
He got out of the car and stayed still, with a smile on his face. Lara maneuvered the car and went through the road she would take for the second time on that day. If the attraction for Arthur before was almost fully physical, now that he had revealed facets of himself, they discovered much more in common than they suspected. At that moment, the only thing she could imagine was that he was all she expected from a man: delicate, polite, kind and, mainly, a person who was not resigned with the way the world functioned.
She was already missing him. And the road became suddenly dreadful; it was only possible to see up to where the car lights reached. She wanted to talk more, know what he was doing. She took the mobile and clicked on his picture that was already as the icon in the smartphone replay; when Arthur took the call, it was transferred to the car sound system.
“Hi. I felt alone in the car, it was good with you here and this way back is so dark without any lampposts.”
“How nice to listen to you voice again”, he replied.
She felt a heat in her chest when she heard those affective words. So, she remembered that she had not told him her story, although she would never do this by phone; a story so full of details and implications needed to be explained in a dinner or someplace better for long conversations.
“You know what; at last, I didn’t tell you my story about how I am a different person today. In our next meeting, I’ll tell you more about the old Lara, and about how things have changed since then...”, at this moment she realized the call was silent.
“Hello? Are you still there?”, she asked, but the answer was the silence. Well, he said sometimes the call came back and sometimes got silent, let’s wait, who knows? She wondered, attentive to the road that continued threatening her in the darkness of that night without moon.
She looked at the car panel; it was half past eleven of Sunday. She would get home about midnight without any sleep. She then recalled that afternoon in the farm, and the memory gave her shiver in her entire body. She wondered when they would have moments of major privacy again. There was something especial in what was happening between them, this was no doubt, and everything she wanted now was to see him again. It was not so far; they could get out for dinner in the middle of the week. Who knows on Tuesday?
The car went up the steeper hill and when it arrived at the top of the hill, the call returned, and the sound went back to the speakers, that transmitted a scream of Arthur, visibly disturbed:
“Damn, Giacomo!”
Lara got scared with the high-pitched scream that echoed inside the car. Then, in sequence, another voice appeared, in high volume:
“I’m not any shitty Giacomo! This is a kidnap! Hands back, turn your face and don’t look at my face, guy!”
Lara, frightened, stepped the brake abruptly, and the car skidded through the dirt road and stopped a little beside the road. Under the cloud of powder that involved the car, she saw herself stuck in the darkness of the night. Petrified, she could not speak. No. She should not speak. She needed to listen. Listen to what they had to say. She waited.
Giacomo? She had heard this name. It was the man from whom Erica had prevented her; the one who had supposedly blackmailed the mayor. Yes, he was the bastard who was kidnapping her lover. And she knew exactly where he lived. He was the guy of the corny Green Man statue in the garden.
The call remained silent. No sound. She wondered where the phone could be. Would it be in the pocket of his pants? If so, she would hear something else.
She felt she needed to do something. She needed to help! If the socalled Giacomo were to take Arthur out of the ecovillage, he would necessarily pass by her. She resolved to go back while she maintained her ears open to the call. She went in rear gear and accelerated so that she crushed on the ravine at the side of the road:
“Shit!”
She speeded up and went down the road heading to the signal shadow area that she had to cross to get to the ecovillage. She went in high speed, launching stones through the way and raising powder where she passed by. When she saw the sign that indicated the ecovillage entry, she turned right, with doubt if she could make a turn without sticking the car in the woods.
When she was in the darkness of that dense fog woods way all around, she realized what she was doing and the importance of that. If she wanted to do anything of that kind, she should do it right. She stepped the brake until the car almost stopped and, when she saw that, if she followed the way in a straight line, she would get in the community, she turned off the headlights and rode very slowly in the darkness.
When she arrived at an open field, her eyes were almost used to little light. In the silence of the night, the only signal of activity she saw was a brightness behind the garden. She followed in that direction until she could see a wooden sign where she could read with white paint: “Lodging”. Behind the verandah, a door was kept open, releasing light on the external darkness. There was no sign of anybody. She turned off the car and went down. She walked until there, slowly, and, when she got in front of the door, she realized there was not anybody inside the room.
She examined the lodging and saw Arthur’s mobile phone besides the coffee machine. She took the phone and touched the screen, it was blocked, but she could see the call was still active. She took her own mobile and called the police.
“Good evening, I want to report a kidnap being happening”, she said, with the strange sensation that was not real; she felt in an episode of Law and Order or some other canned film of the cable TV.
The police officer that received the call asked her for more details. She said everything she said and was informed they were transmitting the case to the Anti-kidnapping Department. They asked for the phone number and said they would contact her; she was to keep calm and remain in the place.
The architect switched off the phone taken by a sensation of impotence: she would not remain there, waiting for a call that would never come? There was something wrong in that situation. The police were not used to respond to the occurrences quickly; in the countryside, they were slowly, and if they had to activate an anti-kidnapping elite force, when would they arrive? On the next day?
No. She did not even want to think of what would happen if she had to wait up to the next day. She needed to do something, even if it was to spy Giacomo’s house, try to discover whether Arthur was there. She left to the soft breeze of the night, made the sign of the cross and took a deep breath, searching for a strength inside her for what was to come. She forgot the door of the car open, and the lights in the car were the only light, forming the image of a yellow carpet on an dust floor.
At that moment, she thought of evoking some servant that she had created when she practiced Chaos Magic. She could use a dagger created by her mental force to make the banishment, and the place was excellent for that. But, in the other hand, if she did it, she would be destroying the greatest magist deed she had ever proposed herself, which was the ego break in an effective and complete way, because for killing the ego, she needed to abandon her previous convictions and embrace others. And she was really embracing other convictions. It would not be fair to take a step back. She had already trodden almost all the way, now she should keep firm to finish it.
Yet, why counting on a servant that was only strengthened by her vital force and power when she could have an entity fed by a powerful Egregore that rescued from the bottom of hearts in despair an energy that she could not supply, nor the Chaos community could? She got on her knees and covered by the diaphanous light coming from inside her Picanto, back to the darkness, she asked for the protection of the St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Sacred Face, asking for forces to cross that night of darkness imposed to her, recitin
g the pray her mother had transmitted to her:
“Be raised, God, by the intercession of the blissful Virgin Mary, St. Michael the Archangel and all the celestial militias. That all of your enemies be disperse and that all who hate you escape from your face. In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
She remained silent for some time, searching for the non-thinking for a fraction of seconds, knowing it could give her the calm and the lucidity she would need to come through whatever she had to that night.
She got in the car imagining that a Legion of Angels was following her that moment. She turned the car on and followed in a line parallel to the constructions of the ecovillage. When she got to the point where a street was built for the community to construct houses, she parked the car and went down.
The high heels of the shoes she was wearing to impress Arthur would certainly betray her on the paving stones of the street. She took off her shoes and passed her sweating hands in the jeans of her pants. She thought it was better to take of her long-sleeved blouse and remain only with the top. She stared at the black carp tattoo on her arm and the flying dragon Ouryu: the most evolved form of dragons. Two figures adorned her arms as elegant tattoos in the yakuza style; but one day they were also servants she used in her magical practices. Could servants engraved on her skin abandon her?
She got out of the car and went through the street she knew would take her to the house of the kidnapper, protected by the darkness of the street. As she approached the house, she realized a shine breaking the darkness of the night and, when she arrived in front of the house, she observed a shine was coming from the back of the house, probably some spotlight positioned in the garden.
She looked at the front of the house; she needed at least a piece of wood if she intended to get in it. She searched for something she could use as an arm and then the shine of a stone encrusted at the top of the Green Man’s cane drew her attention. It was a cane imitating Gandalf’s, from the film The Lord of the Rings, by Peter Jackson, with a greenish stone stuck at the top. Lara raised the cane and, removing it from the hands of the green man sculpted in wood, she felt a little more confident.
The houses of the ecovillage did not have walls or fences, some dwellers used living fences to limit their lands, but this was not the case of the kidnapper’s house. She realized she could get to the back of the house by passing by the side way, a grassy way between the houses; at the bottom, there was a fence she believed she could skip. She went there, walking slowly not to make any noise, feeling the soft grass under her feet. The fence was still protected from her sight by the side of the house; from this point it was not possible to view the garden of the backyard yet.
Oh, my St. Therese, she thought, while she climbed the wooden fence of one-and-a-half-meter height, if this fence falls with my weight... She went up and held the fence firmly on the other side, going down slowly not to make any noise. She managed to pass the cane under the fence and raised it.
She lowered and kept on supporting herself on the house wall up to the point where she could spy the garden of the backyard covered by the spotlights light. There was an area all paved by a wooden deck, and around this space, there were several types of ornamental plants in large vases of concrete and ceramic; at the center, the garden igloo, with all the protection plates that prevented from looking inside. But the igloo access door was open and, inside of it, she saw Arthur on a cushioned wicker sofa. He was tied, gagged and with his eyes blinkered. Moreover, he had earphones set to an iPod. There were poufs outside the igloo and pieces of cardboard, strings, silver tape, knives, scissors and everything the kidnapper used to build that confinement.
She saw Giacomo’s back; he was opening a large green cardboard box where one could identify it was a portable air-conditioning set. He was trying to take the thing from within the box, but the polystyrene garnishes used to protect the product made the task difficult. When he raised the content, the box went up together. She looked for the gun, he might have a gun, a fatty and clumsy man like that would never have caught Arthur if he did not have a gun. She searched with her look until she could see something that appeared to be the handle of a gun, under pieces of cardboard on a pouf at some steps of the accountant.
She got angry when she saw Arthur again subdued faced with that pathetic figure. Yet before she could prepare any plan or reaction, the ringing of her mobile phone surprised her. In the silence of the night, the sound seemed amplified. Giacomo released the box in the floor and turned to Lara. She received the shine of the spotlights, her slim and athletic body cut against the darkness, her black fit jeans, her pale and muscular abdomen under the scarlet top, her golden hair sparkling under the light glow, her eyes like two yokes of determination and rage, in her right arm covered by tattoos, and the cane gave her the air of a figure taken from an urban fantasy tale.
She stared at that man who seemed at the same time terrified for being taken in the middle of a crime and baffled before the beauty of his invader, a black fairy during the gloomiest time.
Lara was not prepared for that either; her intention was to remain unnoticed, but when the stared those eyes full of fear, and, at the bottom, her man in chains, she did not know where the strength to react came from, but when she found yourself, an inconsequent rage had already taken her whole body. And she saw herself screaming in crazy horror, running to Giacomo with the cane raised in her both hands. The kidnapper turned to where he had left his gun, possibly evaluating his options. It was at some steps from him, but he did not manage to win this distance before the quick female figure had fallen on him.
When Lara knocked with the cane on the accountant’s head with all of her strength, the stone on the top of it and the rest of the elven decoration broke up on the face of the kidnapper, who already shouted before receiving the strike. It was all so fast that she did not even have any idea where the pieces had ended up. The stone, however, had torn Giacomo’s forehead up to the eye.
“Bitch!”, she cried, taken by the pain, with the blook from his eye and forehead hurt going down his face.
The kidnapper ran to the gun, with Lara going to him preparing the next strike with the cane that now had become a large piece of wood.
She turned the wood in the air and describing an arch, she hit the back of the head of the miserable man, who fell all unwieldy on the floor, at the base of the pouf, with a cry of strained pain, sneezing blood on the deck’s wood. When she knocked on the pouf, all that was on it went to the floor, including the gun that beat on the wooden deck, making a plastic noise.
The gun is a toy! she concluded.
When she saw Giacomo on the floor, on his belly, dizzy with the strikes, with one hand on his eye bleeding and the other supported on the floor, she did not have doubts, and raised the cane as high as she could and aiming it to his head she hit a blow right on the back of his head. With the impact, he shocked his forehead on the floor and fainted in an interrupted moaning. Without thinking twice, she ran to the garden igloo and took off the headphones from her beloved one.
“It’s me, Lara, I came to set you free”, she announced, loving the delicious way it sounded in her voice.
She pulled the tape that was shutting Arthur’s mouth. He twisted his mouth and tried not to complain, thankful for being set free from that nightmare. She carefully pulled the silver tape that was blinkering his eyes, but his eyebrows had been hurt in the process.
“My god! What happened?”, Arthur asked.
“I knew you were in trouble and did what I had to do”, she tried to undo the knot that maintained his legs tied.
“I’ll take a knife”, she raised, “remembering having seen a knife somewhere in that mess Giacomo’s garden had become.”
She got out of the igloo to search and saw that where she expected to find Giacomo’s fallen body there was only blood stains on the floor. She looked around and had no signal of him. Had he escaped? Or would he do like in those American cliché films, returnin
g from the kitchen with a long barbecue knife to have a furious fight and be killed by this very knife at the end? He did not seem to have any act of courage, probably he would escape at that moment, but anyway, the best thing to do was to release Arthur as quickly as possible and get away from there, she thought.
She took a knife the kidnapper had used to cut the string and returned to the igloo.
“I hit some blows on Giacomo’s head, the scoundrel fainted, but now I went there, and he had disappeared”, she informed Arthur while she cut the string tying his legs.
He was still handcuffed, but he stood up as soon as he got free from the strings on his feet.
“The handcuffs keys must be with him.”
At this moment her mobile rang again. She moved to answer to it, but there was a click, and the lights were turned off. They heard the sound of a car starting to leave in front of the house.
“He’s escaping”, Arthur concluded.
They got immovable in the igloo, lighted by the light of the mobile phone of Lara, who took the call from the police:
“I entered the confinement and set my boyfriend free”, she said, with the speakerphone activated not to lose the lighting of the display, and using the word boyfriend with some strangeness, but she did not want to say to the armed forces he was her crush!, “It seems the kidnapper is escaping by car. No, I don’t know what car it is, we are at the back of the house and he cut the power. Ok. It’s the house with the sculpture of a Green Man in the front. A wooden man, no, it’s not green, it’s wooden, its name is Green Man because it has some leaves on his face.”
So, they heard the sirens approaching.
“She said the police is arriving.”
“I think the police has never had timing”, he replied, retaking the good humor. “I would embrace you if I had arms for that, you know.”
She stared at him in the semi-darkness, seeing his hands stuck behind his body by the handcuffs, then she embraced him by the shoulders, without courage to turn the face from the darkness where the accountant could appear with the barbecue knife, like in a bad horror film.
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