Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

Paweł shrugged.

“That’s when I started writing, anyway,” the boy went on, starting to walk around the Lodge with Paweł in tow. “While I was in hospital.” He turned and winked at Paweł. “Word to the wise, Mr Pawluk. Anyone who tells you those bone-knitting devices don’t hurt? They’re a liar. Here, have a watch.” And he cheerfully produced from his pocket a complicated plastic box-thing containing one of the ugliest watches Paweł had ever seen, a chunky garish thing with a fat plastic bracelet.

“Go on, try it on,” the boy urged, and Paweł put it on, and the boy smiled. “There,” he said in a satisfied voice. “Don’t take it off, though. Good luck charm.”

SO PAWEŁ WORE the watch during the days and weeks of the boy’s occupancy of the Lodge. He hated it and was determined to sell it the moment the boy left, but he made sure the boy knew he was wearing it.

Not that he saw much of him. Sometimes he saw the boy out for walks in the woods near the Lodge, but mostly he stayed indoors – writing, Paweł presumed. Once or twice he walked past one of the unboarded windows of the Lodge on his way to do some chore or other, and he caught sight of the boy inside, using one of those computers where you typed in the air instead of on a keyboard and your arms got sore after fifteen minutes. There seemed to be quite a lot of computer equipment in the room with the boy, actually. Lots of things with screens and lights and cables. A lot more than Paweł remembered him bringing with him.

On the other hand, Paweł told himself as he got ready for bed one night, they’d had guests who were much, much worse. He remembered a party of Belgian businessmen who… well, it had put him off ever visiting Belgium. And then the six Maltese who never said a word to him, and possibly even to each other. They were spooky beyond belief.

He was too old, too slow. As he tried to turn a pair of strong, beefy arms wrapped around his waist and lifted him off his feet, waltzed him around until he was facing in the opposite direction, then a shadow lunged out of nowhere and stuck a length of gaffer tape over his mouth and before he had time to do anything about it a huge hand had grabbed both his wrists, pinning them together while someone else wrapped more gaffer tape around them. Three. Were there three of them? Or only two? It couldn’t be just one person; there were too many hands. He hadn’t even had time to try to shout.

Two. There were at least two. One carried his upper body; the other one held his feet immobile, and in this way he was carried through the cottage, past the body of Halina, lying on the kitchen floor with her throat cut, and out into the moonlight.

Where the boy was already kneeling, his clothes torn and his face bloody, hands clasped behind his head. Paweł was dumped beside him, forced to his knees, and he felt the cold muzzle of a weapon brush the back of his neck. “Teach you to steal from us ,” said a voice behind him.

The boy said something in a language Paweł did not recognise, and all of a sudden the clearing seemed to be full of bees and hot, sticky rain and the sounds of large things falling to the ground, and when it was over and he opened his eyes he saw five large black-clad men lying around the clearing, apparently chewed to death by something with millions of tiny teeth.

The boy turned to look at him, covered in blood, and unbelievably he was smiling. “You okay?” he asked cheerfully.

Paweł wiped blood off his own face and nodded mutely.

“Good.” The boy got to his feet and helped Paweł up, removed the tape around his wrists, and looked around the clearing. The wall of the Lodge nearest to them looked as if someone had attacked it with a huge cheese grater. “Better reload, just in case.” He limped up the steps into the Lodge, came back a few moments later with an aluminium stepladder and a couple of towels. He tossed one of the towels to Paweł, carried the ladder over to a tree at the edge of the clearing, and climbed awkwardly up as Paweł wiped gore off himself.

“Magic,” said the boy, reaching up into the branches of the tree to pluck something… invisible… “Magic guns.”

The sentry guns were matt spheres the size of grapefruit, and until the boy started to take them down from the trees they were completely invisible. Where his fingers touched them, irregular patches of mottled flesh-pink spread until, by the time he had finished reloading and resetting them, they were the colour of his hands.

There were more than forty of them, spread in a ragged ring around the Lodge, and the boy visited them all. As he replaced each one it began to disappear again, taking on the colours of its surroundings.

“I’m glad you wore your watch,” he told Paweł as he replaced the final device. “The guns are programmed to fire on my command at anyone who isn’t wearing one, but you could still have caught a couple of rounds if you hadn’t stayed still.”

Paweł said nothing.

The boy led the way back to the Lodge. In the dining room every piece of computer equipment had been smashed beyond repair. The boy stood in the doorway looking at it all.

“You’d better go,” Paweł told him. “Those five will have friends. They’ll be looking for you.”

The boy shook his head. “I’m not worried about that.”

“Well, don’t you think you ought to be?”

“They’re just hired muscle. I’ll be long gone before any backup arrives.” He sighed. “On the other hand, you’re right. Their friends will want revenge, just to save face. You should go, too.”

“Me?” Paweł laughed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The boy tipped his head to one side.

“There’s most of an SS rifle division out there,” Paweł told him, gesturing beyond the windows to the forest. “Came here in 1942 looking for Jewish resistance fighters. Only three of them ever came out, and my father said they were all insane. No one ever found the bodies. You think I’m afraid of the mafia ?”

The boy smiled. “I’ll leave you the guns, just in case.” He looked around the room. “You can have all the other stuff as well. Even the broken things can be sold for spares.”

“They said you’d stolen something from them.”

“Not true. I found something that someone else wanted. I’m going to do something with it. They hired the mafia to stop me. Or maybe not. Maybe it was someone else. I’m still filling in the blanks.”

“Who is this ‘they’?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know for certain. There are a number of possibilities. Lots of people, apparently. And possibly some people are in the background, helping me. I don’t know.” He beamed at Paweł. “Exciting, no?”

“Was it valuable, this thing you found?”

The boy thought about it. “You couldn’t go into a bank or a moneychanger’s or a pawnshop and get money for it.”

Not worth anything, then. Paweł lost interest in the subject. “You should go now,” he said, thinking of the components in the smashed computers. He could get them to Nowak by this evening, and be back here the next morning with a big wad of cash. Maybe he could buy himself a new sleeping bag.

THEY TOOK SHOVELS from the Lodge’s outhouse and went back into the clearing to bury the bodies. The boy searched the dead men, removed shredded wallets and lacerated phones, dropped them all in a plastic bag. They buried Halina too. It was slow, dirty, backbreaking labour but the boy did more than his share of the work, despite the obvious discomfort from his leg. It was almost dawn before they’d finished. Paweł leaned on his shovel and looked around the clearing, which looked exactly like someone had buried a number of bodies in it.

“There’s a phrase the Stasi used to use,” the boy said. “Something about washing a bear.”