Darius

by Christos Makis

His foot sank into a mud puddle and when it got out, it felt “as heavy as lead. He hated his shitty job, the walking in the forest, the reckless driving, the killing, the destruction of evidence. But he had no other choice. He tried to imagine what his new errant might be.

He thought that maybe this time he had to go to the mountains or something. Why not? He knows his boss talks nonsense and that he had done a lot of extraordinary things in the past. He tried to remember that time, when he went into a mine and killed a man by stuffing his mouth with coal. The look on his face formed in his mind but that image scattered when the sound of thunder conquered the silence.

Darius had seen at the weather forecast that the weather would be terrible that day and as expected, big, scary and angry clouds took over the sun and they were not likely to leave anytime soon. He smoked through his teeth, as his left foot got stuck between a log and a huge rock. Those big boots were not making things any easier after all. He put his fingers beneath the brown piece of wood which was covered with green moss and tried to move it aside. The rain made it slippery. It was pointless.

He kneeled and pushed his back along the log. He managed to move it a few inches, enough for his huge boots to escape. His lungs were hurting but the tree was no more than twenty meters away. He had walked this route so many times that he could find that oak tree and return back home blindfolded. He found the bush, he turned right and then made a few steps on the left of "the Cat". "The Cat" is a cliff which, when an earthquake took place back in 1998 and half of the mountain collapsed, was shaped in a way that the rock, with a little bit of imagination, looked like a cat'’s snout.

Darius finally arrived at "the Hanger" and he felt shivers going down his spine. That terrifying old oak tree got such a name because, during the Industrial Revolution, countless tanners lost their jobs and in a moment of despair they committed suicide, one after the other, hanging themselves from the oak’'s branches.

He slowly looked around. The mysterious messenger from his boss, whom he was supposed to meet at "the Hanger", was nowhere to be seen.

Silence.

The face of the man he had killed in the mine formed again, decisively this time, in his mind. He could see his face which was frozen with terror, his eyes glazed with death’s cold breath, his mouth stuffed with coal in an appalling expression… his body, a pathetic shred dumped in a dark corner of the craggy cave.

Darius sighed wearily.

And went his way.

A cursed, dark figure walking with difficulty in the mud ...