He knew it was all inside his head. But it was one thing to know something and quite another to really believe it. Anxiety and fear are slippery beasts, hard to tame once they’ve escaped from their cages.
When the sun finally showed itself above the horizon, he had slept no more than a couple of hours.
After spending a while struggling with the controls of a gas stove that looked as old as the island itself, Roberto brewed a pot of strong coffee. While the aroma pervaded the room, he took a quick shower to wash away the last traces of sleep. He shivered in the tepid trickle ofwater, but once he was dressed and had a mug of coffee in his hand, he began to feel better.
Until he opened the fridge door. There, on the top shelf, inside a plastic bag, was the rabbit’s head, tangible proof of the previous night’s events.
He closed the fridge and went outside. The sun occasionally peeked through the clouds, which were racing across the sky toward the mainland, driven by a wind that set the tops of the trees swaying. Sipping his coffee at a moss-covered stone table in the middle of the yard, he replayed what had happened.
Applying the same analytical reasoning he used when constructing the plots of his novels, he took out a leather-bound notebook and began to write.
He knew there couldn’t be many more than thirty people on the entire island, and none of them lived very near the cottage. On top of that, nobody had driven there, because he would have heard the engine. At the same time, if someone had come on foot, surely he would have seen the glow of their flashlight.
It was true that he didn’t know the terrain like the locals, but he doubted that anyone could find their way along those rutted tracks without some help. And he had done a circuit of the property before setting off on his walk, so the possibility that somebody had been lying in wait until he left could also be ruled out.
He crossed out one after another of the lines he had written. He glanced over at the plastic bag containing the rabbit’s head—he had brought it out with him, and it lay on the table next to his packet of cigarettes.
He ran his fingers through his hair. His quiet getaway wasn’t turning out precisely as he’d hoped.
You’re imagining things. The most likely explanation is that some predator caught the poor creature and just dropped the head on your doorstep.
That made more sense. His pen scratched furiously on the paper as he developed the idea. No doubt a fox or a weasel had killed the rabbitand dragged it there while he was out. Startled by his return, it had fled, abandoning the head. As for the door, perhaps he hadn’t closed it properly, and the wind had blown it open. It definitely made more sense than all the crazy ideas that were bouncing around inside his head and were no more than feverish imaginings.
None of that explains the absence of blood,insisted a small voice.If some predator had been devouring a rabbit on your doorstep, there would have been a real mess. But there wasn’t a single drop of blood.
“No,” he said determinedly as he circled what he had just written. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
The rabbit had been caught and eaten, like dozens of other creatures that had no doubt encountered the same fate that night, in the never-ending game of hunter and prey. The predator carried the head in its jaws to finish off the feast in a quieter location and had ended up at his doorway. End of story.
The idea felt liberating. Suddenly, all the fears and concerns that had haunted him throughout the night evaporated like morning dew.
Everything was going to be okay. He’d write a great manuscript, his agent would be happy, and the world would give him a break for a while. Nothing could go wrong.
How easy it all seemed by the light of day.
He went inside and tidied up, and it was only then that he realized that the previous night, with everything that had happened, he’d forgotten to charge his laptop. The battery icon flashed red, mocking his expectations. And, of course, now there was no power.
Roberto wasn’t going to let that ruin his good mood. He would leave the computer plugged in, and as soon as the electricity came back on, it would start to charge. Anyway, he was a night owl when it came to writing, so it wasn’t such a big deal. He could use the time to go for a walk and acquaint himself with the setting of his novel.
With that in mind, he left the cottage, making sure to lock the door behind him. As an additional measure, he plucked a hair from his head and delicately fixed it across the corner of the doorframe. Itwas virtually invisible, but if someone were to open the door, the hair would be dislodged, giving him a sure sign. It was a trick he’d learned years before, from a member of the Gulf Cartel in Tamaulipas. It was a precaution against being ambushed and caught in a hail of bullets when you walked through your front door. He wasn’t envisaging anything like that here on this little Atlantic island, but better to be safe than sorry.
Setting off, when he reached the track, he turned in the direction of the main cluster of houses on the island. He wanted to explore at his leisure and, if possible, take a walk along the island’s beaches—he was planning to set the start of the novel on one of them.
Under the pale winter light, the narrow track he had ascended the previous day in the SUV seemed positively bucolic. He was beginning to see why vacationers might choose to return year after year.
The sea shimmered in the distance, and flocks of seabirds wheeled overhead. He turned off the track onto a white gravel path that snaked its way through dense thickets of juniper. Occasionally it skirted a copse of trees that looked like tormented sculptures in a land thrashed by salt-laden sea winds. Almost the whole island was a vast, uninterrupted expanse of low scrub, although even that was relative because, in some places, the untended vegetation grew to the height of his head.
The island had been densely populated in the past, but over time, with widespread emigration, nature had reclaimed almost every inch of it. Roberto half glimpsed the occasional weed-choked stone ruins of an old fisherman’s hut. He imagined what it must have been like in centuries past when the land was cultivated. But nothing remained of that now other than memories and tumbledown walls.
Gravel crunched beneath his feet, and he realized he was actually walking on a layer of cockle and clam shells, crushed and spread across the path. No doubt there would be dozens of similar paths all over the island. He was wondering to himself just how many decades it would have taken to create them when, up ahead, he saw somebody approaching.
In one hand the stranger carried a bulky sack, while the other gripped a short pole with a blunt, rust-spotted blade at the end. The man seemed to be just as taken aback to find Roberto there, but it was too late to pretend they hadn’t seen each other.
The man was about fifty, tall, and well built, with brown, twinkling, watchful eyes. His beard was badly in need of some attention, and although the same went for his hair, that was at least meticulously combed back, with just a few curls tumbling over his ears. His clothes, worn but practical, looked as if they belonged to someone accustomed to hard work.
They eyed each other with a mixture of distrust and surprise. Finally, the other man broke the silence.
“Morning,” he said in a gruff monotone.
