The Last Christmas On Earth

"And then, if the situation is so serious, why doesn't Abel make his move?"

"Do you think it's so easy for her?"

"We'll need a lot of luck," Eve said after thinking a lot about his words.

"It's not about hoping for luck, you said it yourself," he said.

"We can start," Helen said when all the agents sat in their seats.

"Why did you rush us back?" Agent Dower asked politely raising his hand like a schoolboy. She decided to skip the preambles and immediately went to the point. "If someone of us still doesn't know, there we have two corpses, we found them this morning aboard a car without a license plate and they had no identity documents. Dr. Stevenson has just finished the autopsy and failed to establish the cause of death, and to make matters worse the bodies were found in the wooded area that we swept several times last night in search of James's son. The Coroner would put his hand on the fire that those two were already there, dead at least from the day before, how is it possible that none of us noticed anything?"

"It's strange," the giant Joe considered with his cavernous voice.

"That's right," Helen agreed.

"Then they may have died elsewhere and been dumped there tonight," said Claretta Jones in a faint voice because of her shyness.

"It's impossible since the car doesn't work," explained the Sheriff.

"And couldn't it have broken down afterward?"

"No, the control unit indicates that the car has stopped approximately when they supposedly have died."

"It's a nice brain teaser..." Claretta commented.

"Exactly ... and this means that we all must work to solve this case as soon as possible, because, in a small village like ours, voices run quickly. I'm sure that a lot of looky-loos will come soon and when this happens we will have to be able to answer their questions."

"So what do we do now?" Asked Agent Benelli.

"It has absolute priority, we must give up everything we are working on at the moment to dedicate ourselves exclusively to this case. We don't know who those two were, but sooner or later someone will surely come alive to look for them."

"How should we proceed?" Dower asked.

"Claretta, you're going to take a nice stroll around, to ask here and there, showing their pictures.

You will start from Spring, then you will pass by the Country Hole and the Boe emporium, then from the gas station, and since you are there you will also go to the pharmacy... maybe someone noticed them and will give us some information. Benelli, you go and take another look at the place of their discovery, I want a nice photo book. Dower, you go to the Motor Vehicle Office with the car's chassis number to see if you can trace the owner, then call the mechanic and ask him if he has figured out what caused its stopping. Coming back from the Motorization, stop everywhere to ask questions. Joe, go to the terminal and look for cases like this, if you find something we could have a trail to follow." Joe nodded silently but deep down he was unhappy, she hadn't let him go for a while because he was old, and being confined within those four walls, he did not like it at all. In addition, Helen had assigned him a computer task and he hated computers because his fingers were so big that he always took at least two keys at a time. He thought, resignedly, he was going to have a nervous breakdown , but he didn't protest because he knew it would be useless.

"Finally you, Cindy, call the phone company and ask if they have the tape with the recording of the anonymous call, because what we have is barely understandable. The call was made by a public telephone, if it is part of the chain of those monitored, we could have something more to work with."

Harry had been working on his model for a while, but James was so upset by his behavior that he couldn't find the right concentration to devote himself to his beloved plants. He looked at the last one he had fixed and judged he had really sucked, so much that for a moment he was tempted to squash them for good, in order to vent his anger. Furthermore, his headache rather than fading, it had intensified and his temples were pounding ruthlessly. Realizing that he was no longer fit to continue, he decided to settle down and then finally bring Harry to buy his new glasses.

He also thought he had been selfish because he should have taken him first. He consulted the clock and thought that if he hurried, they would still be able to get to the store before closing time. He bent over his tools and as he put them back in the wooden box he stared at the circular flowerbed of violets, convinced of being in a dream: the plant Harry caressed an hour before, it was practically resurrected. The slender trunk had regained its vigor and had almost completely straightened, soaring upwards, the ties, that held it to the stick, which he attached as a reinforcement, had loosened, the leaves and petals had spread out again and appeared smooth and shiny, alive. James was wondering how it was possible when he thought he caught a movement in the bush beyond the hedge, something very similar to a fast-moving black shape.

He jumped up scanning the spot where he thought he saw it, but there was anything strange. Immediately after that, he was seized by slight dizziness, because he had risen too quickly and his temples were hammering even harder.

"This whole thing has shaken me too much, I'm becoming paranoid," he said to himself aloud as he bent down again to pick up the toolbox, but again he suddenly felt like he was not alone. He brandished his hoe and walked uncertainly toward the edge of the woods to check the situation, but found that everything was perfectly still. Perhaps too much still, he told himself, it wasn't singing a single bird and not even a poor cicada. But he seemed to perceive, from far away, the dull sound of the Black Hawk that he had just seen circling above the roof of his house. Suddenly, he reminded Harry's terrified face and words, he turned to look at the house and noticed that the front door was open. Caught by a bad feeling he let go the hoe to run and take a look, but before he could move a single muscle, he felt a sting in his neck and his strength abandoning him; a moment later he was lying unconscious on the ground.

After spending a couple of hours intensely studying documents and photographs, notes and scribbles, Helen went to the locker room and removed her uniform to wear shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers. She has been running on the treadmill for several minutes now and kept staring at the material she had scattered on the floor. She used to do so when she felt the need to isolate herself to reflect and trigger inspiration, and more than once this ploy worked. But this time the right intuition just seemed not to arrive and she kept wondering what she could do to solve the mystery that bordered on the absurd. At the moment she had no pretext to hold on or a single trace to follow. Benelli's first inspection of the crime scene, if it could be called a crime, had been completely unsuccessful. The agent did not find a single print of feet or tires that did not belong to the corpses and their car, but nor even a piece of fabric or hair, or any other element that could in any way indicate a track to follow, a modus operandi, a physiognomy. Research at the local Telephone Company had been in vain because the anonymous call was so brief that it gave no indication as to which equipment had been used to make the call, so they could not go to the site to attempt to take fingerprints. Furthermore, they did not have a decent registration because the author of the call had disguised his voice, it was not even clear if that hoarse whisper belonged to a man or a woman. All she had in his hand was, therefore, a tape in very bad condition that he should have sent to some technician to try to clean it up, and this would have taken days. Besides all this, some things prevented her from reasoning clearly: it was the anguishing sense of unreality that took over her because of her sleepless nights, the inexplicable temporary disappearance of Harry.

The chilling image of those lifeless fluorescent bodies that did not want to leave her mind. Moreover, the fact she had found the same unusual luminescent powder on the bike of James's son also indicated that between the two accidents there must necessarily have been some kind of connection, but she absolutely could not get an idea of what it could be. Thinking of the powder, associated with the sweat, woke the itch on her finger. She looked at it and realized that Stevenson was absolutely right, it was shabby; on her first phalanx a sort of plague had formed but did not secrete any liquid, it was quickly drying himself like a dead appendage. And yet, judging by the pain and itching it gave her, his little finger was far from dead. She made up her mind to go to check it as soon as possible, she scratched it again, holding back a groan of pain, and began to reflect. The first hypothesis that occurred to her was that Harry found the bodies, or even witnessed the double murder and ran away scared, hiding who knows where. Then, after many hours, he would finally find the courage to come out and return home. In reality, this hypothesis seemed too trivial, but the alternative saw Harry more directly and more deeply involved in the affair. Thinking about it she judged that such a thing was impossible, it should have gone in another way, but even though she tried hard, she could not get even a vague idea. During the morning, the temptation to call James repeatedly, she raised the receiver and started dialing several times, but every time she ended hanging up, she was convinced that after what he spent the day before he had something else to think about. Moreover, knowing him she knew very well that at the latest she would see him the next day, so she forced herself not to disturb him. She also considered the idea of personally making another inspection, but she knew that it would only be a waste of time because Benelli was a pain in the ass, but he was also damn good. If there had been something interesting, he would not have missed it during the second inspection he was carrying out at that moment. She hoped with all her heart that the coroner was wrong and that from the toxicological examination it turned out that the two had been killed by a new synthetic drug, as unknown as deadly, because the situation that was occurring was too tangled and she feared that she would never manage to deal with it. A dull grumble from her stomach informed her that it was lunch time, but after having participated in the double autopsy eating was the last thing she wanted, at ninety-nine percent, she would vomit the meal. Experience taught her that if she kept the gas generated by the gastric juices for a while, they eventually would fill her stomach, giving her a temporary and illusory sense of satiety, so she opted to resist. She stopped the treadmill and worked out to stretch his muscles. The police station was practically deserted and so she decided that after a shower and a couple of phone calls she would take a nap. Collecting all the sheets, however, her eyes stopped again on the photo of the two luminescent bodies and an idea came in her mind. She pushed the intercom button. "Cindy?"

"Yes, Sheriff ..."

"Do me a favor, find me the chemist Larry and suggest him to show up here at fifteen o'clock with all the equipment. If he makes stories, tell him that it is a matter of life and death."

"All right, Sheriff. Is there anything more?"

"Yup. I won't be available for anyone until fourteen and fifty-nine, understood?"

"All clear."

Episode II

The plastic model

James suddenly opened his eyes, as if waking up from anesthesia, and his thoughts immediately turned to his son. The pounding at the temples had become a real torture and he had the feeling that all that pressure would literally blow his skull at any moment. He looked at the clock and determined that, by the time he had passed out, a maximum of six or seven minutes could have passed; without thinking about anything he picked up the hoe and ran inside home. He entered cautiously, trying to catch any movement, but inside there was absolute silence. He relaxed thinking that perhaps he had imagined everything and looked into the room convinced that at once he would find his boy there, intent on finishing fitting his new model, and instead, he sank into terror. The model was broken up into a thousand pieces, many of which were completely broken as if someone had hit and trampled them several times, the seats were moved and many objects were scattered on the ground, and James hypothesized that there had been a struggle.

"Harry? Harry?" He called softly a couple of times without getting an answer, and immediately heard some confused noises coming upstairs. In a moment his mind elaborated a terrifying theory: two days before someone had kidnapped his son, he had managed to escape but he had not spoken about it because he was too shocked, and now that bastard, whoever he was, had even the guts to enter in his house to try to kidnap him away again. After all, Harry told him earlier that he feared it would happen again. James threw away the hoe and went back into the kitchen, took his semiautomatic Colt, he kept hidden in the pantry, and threw himself up the stairs. As he reached the top floor he realized that noises were coming from Harry's bedroom, but now they had dimmed and no longer gave the impression that a scuffle was going on.

"That's not ... it is not so ..." a whining voice was repeating it obsessively, that at first James could not recognize as belonging to his son. Then he forgot to be careful and ran into the room. The bedroom door was ajar, he peeked out, and the blood in his veins became thick and cold because it seemed that a hurricane had just passed in there, without stopping, he breathed deeply and broke in with his arm extended forward, he turned of three hundred and sixty degrees and discovered that Harry was alone. Still upside down, he put the gun down on a high shelf of the library and took a couple of deep breaths attempting to calm down himself, his son was standing in front of the giant picture of the Giza Plain and repeating always the same sentence.

"Professor," said James, approaching him, but he ignored him as he did before in the garden.

"Professor ..." he repeated in a louder voice without being able to earn the attention of his son, who seemed to be on a different planet again. Then he reached out his hand to his son's shoulder to shake him out of that sort of trance, but as he was about to touch him the boy turned and looked at him in a way he had never looked before.

"Harry, you're scaring me ..." he murmured, taking a step back.

"It's not like that!" He shouted angrily, then he got ahead giving his father a push that made him fall backward, and went to sit at his desk, where he started to look at the photos on some open books.

James got up and took courage, grabbed the back of the swivel chair and turned it towards him.

"Dad," Harry shouted in dismay.

"If this is a joke, you scared the hell out of me!" James rebuked him. A moment later, a stabbing pain forced him to kneel on the floor, holding his temples. The boy looked at him as if he had not understood the meaning of his father's words, and then he frowned at the area where his father was in pain. James sat on the ground with his shoulders resting on the edge of the bed, closing his eyelids, because he could no longer even keep his eyes open.

"Here it is," said Harry, kneeling in front of him.

"... what ... what ..." James started to answer, but he couldn't finish the sentence because the pain was so intense that it even prevented him from speaking.

"Your migraine," Harry replied seriously. He grabbed his father's wrists and gently stretched his arms at his sides, then brought his palms an inch away from his father's temples and began to whisper something.

"Harry, what are you doing?" James tried to oppose, opening his eyes, but Harry ran his hand over his father's eyelids to close them again and began to murmur his litany again. After a few moments, James felt his head get very hot and the pain increased in intensity until it reached its climax, but only for a moment, immediately afterward he had the sensation that his son was literally pulling it out of his head. He relaxed and over two minutes he felt as good as he had never experienced before. After the treatment, Harry traced incomprehensible signs in the air with his hands, then returned to sit in his chair and made a happy expression for having managed to heal him.

"How ... how did you do it?" James asked him when he finally found the courage. Harry answered him by spreading his arms and he shook his head, resigned himself to not understanding anything anymore.

"Who was here with you?" He questioned then, pointing to the open window.

"... no one, who should have been here?"