پسری که فرار کرد

The Boy Who Escaped

Once upon a time, but not long ago, there lived a Child Eater in an ancient forest. The villagers who picked up the deadwood under the trees to get through the winter called him the Pale Man. His victims were so numerous their names covered many walls in the halls he’d built underground, below the forest. He made their bones into furniture as delicate as their limbs, and their screams were the music that accompanied his feasting at the very table on which he’d killed so many of them.

The winding corridors of the Child Eater’s lair had been designed to make the chase more enjoyable. Children could be surprisingly fast, as the Pale Man knew. After all he’d been human himself once, but his murders of children had turned him into something else, faceless and ageless, one of his kind.

Cruelty had been his craft since he was a boy. Even then people called him Pálido, for he didn’t like to be in the sun, so his skin was always as pale as a watery moon. He first practiced on insects, then birds, then his mother’s cats.

He killed the first child when he was only thirteen—his younger brother, who he had both loved and envied.

Shortly after that, he went to work for a priest of the Spanish Inquisition, the terrible tool the Catholic Church used to persecute and kill all those who questioned its dogmas. The priest taught Pálido the most intriguing things about torture and numerous methods to kill, and after three years, Pálido’s skills had surpassed his master’s, so he practiced his skills on him. He consumed the priest’s heart while it was still beating, as he’d read that cruelty could be multiplied by devouring it. And indeed, Pálido felt an even more devious darkness after that meal, his own cruelty enhanced by the priest’s righteousness and missionary zeal.

One night when he’d outdone himself with a victim, Pálido’s own eyes couldn’t bear to watch his deeds any longer. They dropped out of their sockets like overripe fruit and the Pale Man carved holes in his own hands so from then on he could wear his eyes in his palms. At times they could prove to be a great hindrance when he was hunting. Three children managed to escape because his eyes failed him. The Pale Man kept two of their names on his walls nevertheless. But the third he erased. It was the name of a scrawny boy, barely six years old, who he’d stolen from a village south of the forest. Serafín Avendaño. . . . Although the Pale Man chiseled the name off his walls, he could never forget it.

The Child Eater always used a silver dagger with a gold handle for his murders, an instrument of extraordinary beauty and sharpness that he’d owned for more than three hundred years. It had been a gift from the Grand Inquisitor and he kept it, wrapped in velvet the color of blood, in a locked compartment in the wall of his dining room. The Pale Man had never kept where he stored it a secret from his victims. What for? In the end they were all doomed to die.

Serafín Avendaño had six older brothers who enjoyed to chase him and beat him as their father did them, so the boy had learned from a very young age how to run fast to escape. Serafín had slipped out of the Pale Man’s grip as smoothly and swiftly as an eel and, while his captor was reaching for his eyes, the boy had grabbed not only a golden plate filled with food from the bloodstained table, but also the golden key to the compartment in which the Pale Man kept the dagger. It was all Serafín could do for the other captive children who were crying and sobbing in their cages underneath the monster’s dining hall.

The corridor Serafín chose to escape seemed endless and soon he heard his captor screaming behind him. At that moment the boy blessed his brothers, whom he had always thought to be the curse of his life, as he streaked past pillars made from bones that lined the corridor. The Pale Man’s servants cleaned the tile floors every morning, but they had overlooked a trace of blood. Serafín jumped over it—six years weigh so much less than the 353 years the Child Eater had seen—but the Pale Man slipped in it, and while he was on his knees searching for his eyes, Serafín reached the end of the corridor—and one of the many doors through which the Child Eater made his way in and out of the forest.

The boy stumbled through the door, slamming it behind him, and managed to bar it with a thick branch. Then he ran into the forest, shaking with both terror and relief. Serafín didn’t know where he was going. He only knew he had to get away and somehow back to his village and his family.

By the time the boy ran past the mill, where years ago a nobleman’s soldiers had drowned a witch, the key he still clutched in his hand felt like a curse. What if it could draw its owner to him? Serafín didn’t notice the huge toad watching him when he hurled the key into the pond, nor that it had the eyes of a man. Neither did the boy see the toad swallow the key with its wart-covered lips. (That is another story.) Serafiín Avendaño escaped that day and, later on, he became an artist who throughout the rest of his life painted images of great beauty to light up the darkness he’d seen as a child.