So Hide Your Eyes

Chapter FOURTEEN - The Self-imposed Exile

CHAPTER 14

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"PRIEST SAVED YOU."

"He did."

"Priest saved you."

I opened my mouth to reply again, but Demon pressed a finger to my lips.

"Shhh. Shhh," he said and stood up.

"Priest saved you," he repeated, incredulity seeping from his tone.

Of course he saved me. What else could he have done? Ate me? I frowned.

"Ye-" I began.

"Quiet." Demon said.

It might have been the sun or how long and awfully hard his stare was. Or maybe it was the anxiety burning through my veins, but that moment I felt terribly small and condemned like an abandoned baby dolphin.

He paced around me as I sat and waited, wilting under his watchful gaze.

A moment later, the silence broke.

"You know," Demon concluded with a curious, owlish tilt of his head. "You have a horseshoe fly in your hair."

He proceeded to snatch it up and crush its tiny black body between his fingers.

I blinked. "Thank you." Too focused on his unusually focused stare, I hadn't even realised it was there.

"You're welcome. Nasty little fuc-flies. Flies, they are," he corrected and far too cheerfully marched off, his hand in mine.

I didn't say a word, and other than this small detail his acting was near perfect. As we walked - somewhere, Demon almost never tells me where we go - his face was a bright mask of blank bliss.

But all the while I could feel his hand quivering.

I could feel the tremors of an oncoming earthquake lurking just beneath his skin.

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Demon and I, we lurked at Wife's home for the next couple of months. I think we were there for two months, but I probably miscounted somewhere between day 24 and day 46 so the exact number of days we had spent - 53, at least I thought so - was questionable.

We locked ourselves in the house in an attempt to prevent further distractions from diverting our attention from finding the killer.

From our lack of actual progress and worthless conspiracies including that of Priest secretly being a cannibalistic fish, it evidently didn't work. The stuffy house, dusty air, Wife's complaints and my nightmares that woke everyone like an unfortunately effective alarm clock only worsened Demon's mood.

Other than to pick up coconuts for Wife every morning, - and when Demon had enough of Wife - we hardly went out. Frankly, I didn't quite mind the dry, rebellious atmosphere. It was fun.

Especially when Demon drew a picture of Priest as a cannibalistic fish to convince me of his theory.

"See his mouth here, where it bulges?" he'd whispered one morning. Wife's rants had drained him of patience and he'd dragged me out to catch some fresh, sandy air with him.

He prodded a stick at where he'd drawn a large portrait - Demon had taught me that word recently - of Priest in the sand.

"Y-yes," I whispered back from where I squatted on the ground. I marvelled at the smooth curves of Priest's cheeks and thin beard hairs. The portrait was terrifyingly accurate.

But the eyes were a little off. Priest's eyes were confusing, at once alive with furious sorrow and entirely dead. These eyes were plain. Normal.

Maybe it was the absence of blue in Demon's drawing of Priest's eyes. I wasn't sure, nor was I sure why we were whispering, but I supposed that Demon was just careful again.

You never knew when Priest would suddenly hobble out of hiding to get you.

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So far, Wife hadn't had another delirium. Demon told me that they rarely occurred.

I was just unlucky to have popped in on a day that he forgot to pick them up.

"You know, it's like god hates you," commented Demon one day. He shuffled the cards. I eyed them for a moment. The card faces flashed by - white and red and white and red - and in a blink, the boy I killed with my eyes was in front of me.

My first murder. The Khoel villagers had always accused of such, but I'd never thought that it would one day become true. I remember it clearly - his shirt was white. Then it was stained.

I looked away from the cards and rested my head in my knees.

The only way to live on was to forget, as Demon had advised me while he laughed and laughed while I cried. Or perhaps he was crying and I was crying too. The mundane days always seemed to blur together.

When I didn't answer, he continued. "It's like you have the worst luck in the world. Getting born with these eyes is bad enough."

"Upon the Diaviskais Taisnigum, what deed did you commit in your previous life to have warranted such misfortune?" He grinned. Demon always grinned after using big words and sounding mean and tourist-y.

"I don't know."

"Hmm. Okay."

The cards slapped against each other in rhythm. Wife yawned beside us and blinked her eyes sleepily.

As Wife slept on, he taught me how to play Poker. I could guess it was some tourist game. They always had ridiculous names. Though I never won, it was awfully enjoyable, even if the image of the dead boy kept me flinching every time Demon reshuffled the cards.

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It was on day 44 - at least I thought it was - that we managed to decide on a suspect: a shady Barnacle Man.

"Pssss! Devil," Demon began. It was late and the night was cold and only Wife was asleep.

I rolled over to face him. "Yeah?"

"I just had an idea of who the killer might be."

"W-who?" I leaned closer.

"There's this barnacle-looking man who's reeeally rich and he always hangs around Priest. I think he might've - well, you know."

"...I don't know," I said, abashed. My ignorance had showed again. Shame seemed to strain against my skin, as if about to leap out with an ink brush and scrawl "stupid" on my forehead for everyone to see.

"As expected, as expected, you've only been here for a few months after all." Demon waved his hand. "Well, Barnacle Man might have carved out the children's organs and sold them in the capital before throwing them out to sea."

"SHUT UP!" Wife suddenly roared. I jumped.

"All your whispering is annoying," she muttered.

Demon sat up. "Annoying? We're trying to being justice to dozens of little children that had been killed. While you're just lazing about being a pain in the neck!" he retorted.

I wasn't about to get any sleep tonight. But at least the nightmares would be kept at bay too.