Harmful Smile - Chapter 57 The swamps of the widow Ignatius

That day, Ayleen was playing with one of her new maids when she received a message from a magician from the Briere empire, who contacted her on behalf of Emperor Augustus Falseanus himself. Listening carefully to the content of the message, Ayleen’s face got a little ugly when she heard the latest news from that idiot Naofumi.

Considering the possibilities offered to her to help this pest, she sees only one. Sending a diplomat on his behalf to this powerful empire would certainly be considered an insult and should therefore be avoided at all costs, while his uncle would be too happy to see the Naofumi dead. Ayleen is convinced that he will never help her in this endeavour. Resolved, it is therefore silently that in the middle of the night, a silhouette escapes through one of the windows of one of a capital’s manor houses.

Six days later, a young girl walks around in a forbidden place. A place more feared than the underwear of the low-end prostitutes of the slums, the swamps of the widow Ignatius. Here, it is said that even the most experienced warriors can enter and disappear without leaving any trace of their existence in this world. Ayleen has always made a lot of fun of this rumour. For how could we know if a warrior was strong, if once he disappeared, nothing refers to the man he was? All these ridiculous legends that have passed through the centuries make her smile gently as she crosses these swamps filled with twisted trees. Yet, this little mocking smile changes to amazement, then a kind of fascination can be seen in her eyes as she gets closer to what she thinks is a magnificent natural phenomenon and never before seen.

In front of her, a strange opening hovers in the centre of a large sphere that rotates quickly on itself, emitting very high-pitched sounds. Ayleen, who doesn’t know she is this thing in the middle of the forest, finds it very pretty though and decides to get a little closer to it in order to touch it. But suddenly Ayleen is sucked into the center of this sphere. Deprived of oxygen, she panickes and screamed in this forest devoid of any human being who could help her. Her cry will actually be very brief, because as if something was consuming her, dissolving her, her body gradually disappears. Behind her, there is only a kind of blackish air left, which, like her body, is just as quickly carried away into the opening. The opening, closes immediately afterwards, then collapses on itself, leaving the place as silent as it was before its appearance.

This weekend John Stevenson and his friend Chuck Benson, both partners in the same law firm, decided to take a break and take their women and children camping in the Finger Lakes National Forest. They decided that for their children whose lives were a little too sweet and easy, that they would experience the joys of returning to nature, the barbecue, of the campsite, in short, the primary pleasure, the encounter of pioneer life in the great outdoors.

Stevensonis place. Aaron begins to cry in front of his father Chuck Benson who sighed. Chuck deplores the fact that his wife’s hand is sometimes a little heavy on her children. Did she need to slap him so hard for such a small pecker? “Aaron, what’s going on, big boy, tell Dad why you run your maggot in the air.”

Aaron, snot hanging from the nose, his eyes full of tears and the wet shorts takes his father in his arms. “Dad, the Indian altar, it shines red and black.”

Chuck smiled thinking that his son must be frightened by the stories about the Amerindians they have told earlier, but… “Dad, dad, the altar is strange, a kind of red circle appeared on it. Dad, why did Aaron piss himself?”

But when his 16-year-old daughter and John’s 17-year-old daughter come back out of breath and whiter than a German ass, he realizes that a mystery is looming. “Forget your little brother’s misadventure. John, women, children, let’s look in that direction. I’m sure it’s a very natural phenomenon that can be explained rationally, you’ll see.”

The 2 men, nevertheless suspicious, behaving like good husbands and fathers of attentive families, arm themselves with vegetable and sheep skewers and then left for this altar on which, who knows, perhaps they will do an encounter of the third type.