Chronicles of Mystery

The dead girl and the fallen angels

But there had been Eva. Eva who had arrived. Eva, a normal person, without deformity like him. No, she was perfect Eva, she was so beautiful Eva. Eva who had looked at him like no other human being had looked at him before. She looked at him as if he was normal too. She smiled at him as if he deserved to be smiled at. As if he had the right to gaze at her for so long. As if he wasn't absolutely disgusting.

And Eva had returned, several times. She never seemed bothered by his presence. She climbed the wall that separated the camp from her house, declaring that she was her neighbor who had come to visit her. And she avoided problems, being the daughter of the camp masters. They only lectured her, they were afraid that Jonas would end up rotting her a little too, dirtying her, so beautiful, so clean. They had thought about punishing him, but Eva was so sweet, they didn't want to make her cry.

At first, Jonas was reluctant to talk to her, but gradually he began to look forward to her visits. He spent long hours near the wall where she joined him, waiting like this before her return. As if she were this fire that he had waited a long time for this winter evening. She had been the only bright spot in his life, the only thing that justified living another day, the only thing he had ever looked forward to. Eva was not afraid of him. She always gave him her most beautiful smiles, as she always did, timidly lifting the corners of her lips and putting all the kindness in the world into her eyes, and then he felt like the richest person in the world, richer even than these bourgeois at the table so well stocked on a Christmas evening. When he saw her, he had the impression that all the misfortunes of his life were fading away, as if she were a sweet balm settling on the blows and scars that his existence had inflicted on him. He could smile back at her, without worrying about anything. He felt less sad, less useless, less monstrous. He almost felt... human.

He had always known that he was bad, rotten to the core, but he was sure of it now because he was nothing like her. He would have liked to know why someone like her would love something like him.

He would have liked to stay by her side forever, if only as a dog, as a slave, simply because she had had the goodness, for a few moments, to believe that this beast, this miserable thing that was dragging itself to the other side of the camp was a human being. He was afraid that one day she would see how ugly and horrible he was and look at him with disgust too. He knew it would only be harder for him to be rejected again, to find himself alone again, now that he had experienced the warmth of Eva's presence. But, as always in his life, he would get used to it and agree to let her go, as she deserved, keeping her memory forever in his mind, like this home that he had seen and which had seemed to him to be the hottest thing on earth.

So, fearfully, without really daring to get closer, he stayed with Eva. These moments were like the passage of the shooting stars that he contemplated. So brief but so, so so beautiful. He would have had the happiness of living a few moments with her, with someone who dared to stay with him. And then he could watch her leave, he would give up on her, he promised, she would go away, go and illuminate of her brilliance those who really deserved it. For a few more moments, stay in the sun, caressed by its warmth. And her dog, her slave, would be forever grateful to her.

Before the darkness took him back, before Erebus whispered to him again in her tenor voice that this existence was the only one destined for him. A life of solitude, like the beast he was. The anomalies, the monsters, were not made to mix with the rest of the world. They remained with these voices that populated their minds, these voices that would forever be their only companions, until the end, until their damned souls joined the other side. Monsters had to stay on the other side of a cage, well out of reach of normal people. We shouldn't feed the monsters. We shouldn't approach them.