Cape Horn

   The island had seemed so close, just a few minutes away from us. But the sea could never be trusted in that region. The weather changed in seconds and we were suddenly in the middle of gigantic waves and the most terrible wind anyone had ever experienced. We were prepared though; we had been doing calculations in order to properly avoid the disastrous things that could happen in that sector of our journey. But one thing is what you expect and one very different is the one that you get.

 The storm was fierce and seemed almost sentient, as if nature had no intention of letting us pass through. We were close and also so very far from our target and it felt almost like cruelty towards us that we were not being let to land on the island or to continue our journey. We wanted to set foot there but if that wasn’t happening, we could have scrapped it from our itinerary. But if we couldn’t pass to the other side, if we couldn’t reach the other side of the continent, shame would befall us back at home.

 We had sailed several weeks ago, promising to be successful. Many others had already done it in the past and we wouldn’t be breaking records or anything like that, but our small town was one proud of its seafaring history and we really wanted every single neighbor and friend to be proud of us. Besides, we were still very young in comparison to most sailors, so that was a thing we could play for the media, if we were successful. But first we had to overcome nature and she wasn’t letting us do what we intended.

 Wet and tired, still trying to make our yacht change course every two minutes, I remembered training with the group for months. Some did think we were idiots for attempting to do the journey, instead of just going to college and get a degree on something useful. Small town people don’t often care about dreams or things that are beyond themselves, they just want young people to know their place fast in order to keep the order and move along. They want some degree of tranquility and we weren’t there for it.

 What we wanted was to make something in life that would make us special or at least memorable. We all knew very well that our lives would probably not amount to much. After all, we came from a lost town in a place no one really cared about and we didn’t have money or fame to make us different, because that’s what makes people stick out in this world. We just wanted to do something that could make us proud in the future when we would have boring jobs that don’t pay well or we get to form families that we don’t really know how to envision from this young age.

 It was hard to explain it to them and that’s why we had to do everything by ourselves. The boat had been lent to us by a guy who had actually circumnavigated the globe several times. He was really interested in our story and came to help and train us. He even wanted to come with us but his doctor forbid it because of his health problems. He never really told us what was wrong with him but it was obvious it was quite serious. After we trained, he would often seat alone for ours, just staring at something in the horizon.

 His training was rough. He made us do in a few months what all sailors have to learn in years. He tried to make us understand the passion that makes a sailor become in love with the ocean and he taught about so many other things that relate to navigating, like the lives of marine creatures and many legends that had been told to him on his journeys around the world. It was amazing to listen to him and really feel that he loved what he did. His passion made us feel that what we were about to do was not crazy or stupid.

 Our parents and other friends did tell us that several times. Even journalists from small radio stations and television channels that came the day we departed, asked us if we were insane to do what we were going to do. And we all laughed and joked and just shrugged it off because there was nothing that they could say that would derail us from doing what we intended to do. It was already something that we had in our heads, deep in there, and it couldn’t be moved, changed or destroyed. We had to do it.

 Some were sad the day we left but not because they felt regret but because they missed some of the guys and girls that had decided not to go with us. Many did, almost half of the initial group to be honest. But I think we understood where they were coming from, because it’s not so easy to say that you’re leaving and don’t even know if you’re coming back. Because the trip is not about us and our skills as sailors, it’s about the world that we live in, the kind of people we may find and nature’s relentless struggle to be all-powerful.

 It was nice though, to feel the wind in one’s hair and sniff the salty air all around. That first day and first night were the pinnacle of many of our lives. We felt like adults, like really fully adults, for the first time since we had graduated high school. We felt like men and women capable of doing things that no one expected from us. Everything around us and our senses told us that this had been the right idea all along. We were right and we were going to prove to every single person in the world that no one can be taken for granted for any reason. We had our chance to prove them all wrong.

 We stayed in that storm for two whole days. Rations were beginning to go scarce but we had a good person managing that, in order to resist for at least two more days. We were even thing about going back to the last port and just try some other day, but going back also proved to be very difficult. In every direction, waves were beginning to grow larger and larger, the sky was always grey and the wind pushed the boat in the opposite direction. It was almost impossible to be sane in such a situation.

 We decided we couldn’t stop, we couldn’t just give up. Pushing through was the only way we were going to move on to something else. So we checked the equipment, we confirmed it on the outside and we pressed on. The idea was to go through the storm and then head straight to the nearest port in the coast. It would be a very small town, but that seemed suitable for a group of people that came from a very similar place. Actually, we were all looking forward to the kind of hospitality only given in such places.

 Everyone performed admirably, as if they had done this all of their lives. They were all essential in make the boat go through the toughest waves and pulls and pushes of the wind. We risked our lives and we did feel death looming close by. But we couldn’t back down in that moment. We had to push through once and again and again, until we could finally rest and leave that horrible storm behind. For a moment there, it was almost certain that we would die and it seemed we were ready for it, like never before.

 But nature suddenly seemed to feel kind and generous. The waves started shrinking and the wind also calmed down a bit. A hole through the clouds opened and we could see the sun, shining brightly over our tired heads. And then, very close once again, we saw Horn island. It felt so close again and we were tempted to try and land there but we decided against it. We couldn’t let the storm trap us there. So we decided to salute the island and move on up the coast, towards something more certain.

 The people on the village we docked in were extremely nice and friendly. They gave us food and even let us use their washing machines for our laundry. We were going to sleep in the boat but they also insisted we should all sleep in nice beds that night, so that’s what we did.

 We ended up staying there for four days, after fixing some problems with our ride. Then, we said goodbye and moved on to the next port. We would go north and then on to the open ocean again, to cross the Pacific. We were still a long way from home and we were very thrilled about it.

The place beyond the mountains

   Lakia ran in front of her owner and then waited for a bit. After all, Madame Greska was an elderly woman that needed a cane to support her weight. Even so, she liked to take a walk around the village every single day with her dog, as she had done for years and years. Her husband used to join them for the walk but he had died very recently and now a stroll around the fields was the only thing really making her feel alive. There was nothing more for her in this world, so she took what little she had around.

 And one of those things was the nature and beauty of her village’s surroundings. It was a very small town, deep into a very steep mountain range, so the modern world had been kept largely at bay. There was electricity and hot water but that was basically it. Very few people came but those who did chose the town precisely because it seemed to have been frozen in time. Madame Greska’s clothes were even the traditional attire for women of the region, something women did not wear anymore elsewhere.

 But in that place between the mountains, people lived a different kind of life. As she smelled the deep and beautiful smell of the lavender fields, the woman looked at how peaceful it all seemed, how untouched and perfect the countryside was and that could also have been said about the town itself. The homes had been built almost three hundred years ago by hand, stone by stone, and they had been kept in the same conditions since then. No major changes had ever been done.

 Even when electricity came, people came up with ways to install the whole thing without having to modify their homes or the general look of their town. And it was a success because no one would have ever thought those interventions had been made there. The town was made up of about twenty to thirty houses, all very similar, some of then containing the post office, the mayor’s office, the restaurant, the bar, the hotel and some other dependencies needed in the town’s daily life.

 They celebrated festivals in the summer as well as in the winter and they also had a small church on the outskirts to praise the Virgin Mary, the protector of the mountain towns. It was there that they prayed for days and days during the hard times, that had never come to the mountains but that had been looming around them for quite some time. The town was never in the middle of any historical occurrence but they had been very close in a number of times and only prayer and keeping their traditions had seemed to do the work and keep all the bad things at bay, away from their paradise.

 One of those bad things was war, both great wars in this case. During the first one, Madame Greska had not been alive yet. But her parents told her when she was young how they feared for their lives when a messenger arrived, having been sent by the royal house hold in order to announce all over the country that the war had begun. For them, it had been the announcement of a tragedy; something that they just knew would change their lives forever. So they prayed and prepared, and waited and waited.

 But the war never came to them. The small town stayed as it had been for hundreds of years and its people, although fearful, were able to live normal lives, plowing their fields and harvesting their crops. They had animals and even did a little bit of commerce between themselves and neighboring small towns. It was only in those opportunities when someone would come back, updating everyone about what was happening beyond the mountains. But somehow, all of it just seemed like a bedtime story.

 No soldiers ever came and those machines that people had invented to fly had been simply considered exaggerations. No one there ever saw a tank or even a rifle. They had no idea what mustard gas was and how it affected people. In time, many years after the end of the war, some travellers did tell them about what they had heard and seem. So the war did become a little bit more real but probably not real enough. For the people of such a small town, all those grandiose stories were just that, stories.

 Madame Greska grew up during the times between the wars and she remembered those days fondly. She remembered frolicking around the meadows in the spring, catching tadpoles with her sister and running after some dog, probably Lakia’s grandfather. Something she had always loved was when, in winter, they would offer her ice cones in the town’s festival. They were made out of ice collected in the mountains surrounding the town and they would then add some flavoring, most likely some kind of berry.

 Her parents her very caring people, the farmer type. They had a couple of cows and would sell the milk in the town’s market, every single day. Her mother was the one that had to do the heavy work and her father was in charge of selling the product. She never knew why her mother had to carry such heavy buckets and walk the cows to a prairie where they could eat. Her father didn’t seem to do that much at all. But he was such a nice and funny guy that, no one ever really seemed to be able to be mad at him. He was just the kind of person that would lift your spirits any day of the week.

 That was until the Second World War. The town was left untouched by that one too but they were more affected by it in ways very few people can understand. Again, no soldiers ever stepped on the stone streets of the small town nor they walked among the lavender fields. But it was people that heard about what was going on and how now it seemed to be worse than the last time. The atrocities people talked about were so heinous that some people even qualified them as fabrications and dismissed them completely.

 But by the end of the second year of the war, people noticed that it did seem like something completely different that before. More and more, people that had been beyond the mountains would tell everyone in town about the battles being fought and the threats being fulfilled. And those people would almost always come with some kind of proof, mostly in the shape of flyers and newspapers, which had become easier to find. They came with detailed stories and even with pictures of the horrors.

 This caused town to prepare once again. And even knowing the war would probably never get to them, they did try to cut off some ties with the outside world in order to prevent anything bad from coming to them. Some youngsters were even thinking about the bigger picture, what would happen if the enemy won the war and was able to take everything for themselves? They thought about it for a long time until one day, something happened that made them take a step that their families would regret for life.

 One night, a large group of planes passed over town. They were noisy and seemed to be flying really low. Most villagers thought their tie had come. But no, the planes continued for a bit and then started dropping their payload on a neighboring town, much larger than Madame Greska’s village. It was beyond the mountains but the explosions were so potent that they could be seen from afar. This event caused many young men to decide joining the army and fight for the freedom of the whole nation.

 None of them ever returned. Only letter with their uniform and a picture of their battalion would get to their families, who would mourn them forever. Brave young men that had decided that their ignored village was more than enough to be able to fight tyrants and monsters.

 Two of those men were Madame Greska’s brothers. And she was so affected by the tragedy that she was never able to have children. Her body was able to do it but somehow inside seemed to prevent any pregnancy. It seemed her soul had always been in mourning and would always be.

The day he wanted to be someone else

   Trying to sleep on that big room was an impossible task. Not only the windows had cracks that let the cold wind of the night in, the stone floor prevented anything to be very warm, even under the covers. It was a dreadful place to stay for a night and John had to stay there for, at least, a whole week. It had not been his choice to go on such a remote place for a vacation. If it had been for him, he would have stayed in his cozy tiny apartment, with his cat Michael.

 But a letter had come on the mail telling him to wait for its writer during that week. It didn’t specify a date and the only thing he could learn out of it was that, whoever had wrote the letter, he or she knew a lot about him and about his family. In three pages, he wrote things that only a family member would know. It was very eerie but John had a sister and a brother, so his first reaction was to think it was one of them, or maybe even his parents, who would be most likely to actually written a letter in paper.

 After finishing the letter he emailed his family and told them it was a very funny joke, especially with his birthday approaching, but they all responded that same day telling him they had nothing to do with a letter. They even joked that the world was too advanced for such thing and that they hadn’t touched a piece of paper or a ballpoint pen in years. And to be honest, John hadn’t done either of those things either in a long time. Paper and pens where only in banks. So who was behind all of it?

 He decided not to respond and just doing nothing. Maybe it had been mailed to him by mistake or maybe it was just a very bad joke. There are people in the world that don’t really have a good sense of humor. Many have a deviant kind of humor that only a few people understand and sometimes only them. But the letter was not even funny, on any level. Maybe it was just a random thing, someone hoping to get a reaction out of the blue. It was possible, John said to himself.

 However, as the dates in the letter grew closer, John received another letter. It had the same kind of calligraphy but this time it was way shorter, more concise and had a certain air of urgency. The person that had written knew that it was difficult to believed someone that knew him so well was written but it clarified that it was a matter of life and death. The letter begged for John to go to where it was indicated and wait there for more information. He had to trust his instinct. And then the letter finished with a simple but resonating phrase: “You have to come because you need to close that chapter for good”.

 That really scared John. He had never discussed his past with anyone else. Not even his family knew everything that had happened to him when he was younger, the things he did when he was out of the house. John had always been the kind of child to stay behind, to have a small amount of friends and prefer to play with toys or videogames at home instead of going outside. But he did try to be another kind of person and it was then when it all happened. The trip reminded him of everything.

 He arrived to that sad hotel the day the week indicated in the letter began. He had to ask for a special permit in his office, permit that was strangely granted very fast. It was not very common for him or anyone else there to get permission to leave for a whole week that easily. The whole situation felt really strange, as if someone else had had some sort of hand in the whole matter. It was a very scary situation but he decided to ignore those facts and just do what he felt he had to do.

 The hotel was the only one in that small town, located about three hours away by road. As he had decided a long time ago not to drive a car, he had to take the bus and that experience was worse than anything because of the delays and all of the walking he had to do. It wasn’t that he hated walking around or anything, more that he really didn’t wanted to move more than necessary for whoever had lured him to that far away place. The town was made of maybe twenty blocks, more or less.

 The hotel felt more like a cemetery than nothing else. The only difference was the fact that there was a roof over his had. Aside from that, you could really feel the same kind of cold weather; the same ripe smell all over and that very sad light that makes you feel unhappy about being alive. The second day there, he woke up rather early. After a cold shower, he decided to walk around town and hope he could find the person he was looking for right then. Or should that be the other way around?

 The cold wind was powerful, descending from a mountain range that seemed to be really close. A woman in the grocery store told him the temperature was always the same every single day of the year. No summer days, even if the sunny was high up above them. The rays of sunlight also felt cold in that part of the world. She also realized John was a visitor and she recommended him to go to the nearby hills for some fresh air. She assured him it was much less depressing than the small town. Hearing her say that, gave him a little bit of hope, which felt out of place.

 He went to the hills every single day, for the next few days. On day six, he decided to leave the following morning very early. All that time in such a small town was making him insane. He wanted to hear noise again, to hear babies complaining and people being awful to each other in the street. He wanted to hear the sound of cars and planes and trains and he wanted to have his cat Michael next to him to warm up his feet before going to bed. He didn’t belong there.

 That day, he walked all over the place and stayed in the hotel lobby for at least three hours after lunch in order for his so-called host to come and tell him what it was that he knew, what the hell he wanted to speak with him about. He waited and waited, hearing the sound of the clock and the snoring of the man that tended the front desk. He wanted that awful week to end and was furious to have been made to spend one of his legal holiday weeks in such a sad a depressing town.

 In the afternoon, he headed off to the hills again. He did like to see the landscape, the mountain and a river far away. Sometimes there were some sheep around and he loved to caress them. That day they came again and he wanted to touch them one last time but they left suddenly, as a figure wearing a large overcoat walked towards him. It was a man, a very frail looking man, maybe the same age as he was. When he was closer, John was able to see a scar above one of his eyebrows.

 Then, he gasped and walked back a bit, scared of this vision of the past. Even without saying a word, he knew who that person was. As a teenager trying to get people to like him and having friends, John had stolen the keys to one of his classmates’ parents’ car. It had been done on a dare. He had to steal the keys and drive the car down the road. It was a short trip, a crime without victim. Or so he thought. The man standing in front of him was the kid he had run over that day, so many years ago.

 He had always thought the kid was dead. He had left them there, on the pavement, to die. He had turned around the car and left it at that. He always thought the police would find him. But nothing ever happened and John eventually learned not to think about that day.

 And yet, there he was, the victim of his attempts to be a normal kid. John wanted to be someone else and all he could produce was a horrible accident. His victim had traced him down for a long time and had been watching, waiting for his moment to come forward.

Claudia's new life

   Rain had fallen all night long, forming little ponds all around the house. As it was surrounded with dirt, the water had converted the landscape into a horrible mixture of mud and overgrown foliage. However, the weather had improved over the morning, which Claudia took as a permission to go outside and check on her beloved plants. Normally, she would have carried all the pots inside before the tempest but that storm had come in such a way, no one had predicted it to land just there, on Hownhall.

 The small town still preserved much of its architecture and every year one of them was chosen as the prettiest in the entire county. The contest was only a month away and Claudia had a lot to do to make her estate be at its most perfect. She had already won the prize for two consecutive years and she planned to do so for the remainder of her life. Being seventy six years of age, she knew that wasn’t much of a time window but it was something to put her mind into.

 Her husband Jim had died only two years prior and that same year she decided to enter the contest. She had loved the man for many years, but he wasn’t the type to like a lot of people in the house. They would spend entire days enclosed in there, reading and not talking. To Claudia, that was torture. She liked when the children visited and brought the kids but Jim had always dreaded those visits because he had never really being into children, which explained why their own had such a tense relationship with him.

 So when he died, Claudia decided to do something that made her feel alive and still willing to contribute something to society and to herself. She got the idea from the weekly newsletter written by several women of the county. They were a small group that gathered often in the town’s main square and discussed the many ways that they had at hand to improve their lives and the coziness of the region. They loved their part of the country and wanted everyone to know about it.

 So once she entered the contest, Claudia decided to simply be the best at it. She went out of her way to get the most beautiful flowers ever seen, which she bought from people that did walks on the remote mountains and in areas that were difficult to access. Practically no one else had all of that in front of their house, so it certainly gave her an edge. The other detail was that, when she was much younger, Claudia had learned a lot about design from her deceased brother Remus, who had been one of the top designers in the capital, a great artist in every way.

 As she prepared once again for the contest, stomping the mud and cleaning all the leaves and overgrown branches of the trees, Claudia heard some rumble in the house that was closest to her. As she lived in the outskirts of the small town, only one other house was close to hers and it hadn’t been inhabited since before Jim had died. An older couple had lived there for years but they had both died and no one had ever come to reclaim the property. However, that was about to change.

 Claudia continued to use her gardening tools but she moved slowly towards her fence, from where she could easily see the entrance of the other house. There was a moving van in front of the gate and two men dressed in couple carried boxes into the house. More voices came from there but Claudia couldn’t really hear much more than the typical noise people make when moving things around. Later, she was tired of not seeing anything and decided to leave work for the day.

 At night, the woman would always make herself a hot cup of chocolate, with some small marshmallows to enjoy in front of her favorite dramas. Jim had never really liked sweet foods or drinks, so now she enjoyed them continuously. Her doctor had told Claudia that she should measure her consumption of sugar a little bit but seeing she was and older person, he also told her it wouldn’t be wise to cut on any food. So she didn’t and decided to treat herself every night.

 A powerful revelation on her soap was obscured by a scream, a loud and powerful scream coming from the neighbor’s house. Claudia didn’t got up from her armchair. She clicked on the “mute” button of her remote and tried to hear something else. It was possible at her age to imagine noises, so it wasn’t really that scary. But then, a weaker scream was heard. She decided to stay still and think what the best response would be. Seconds later, she was calling the police.

 Granted, the police always took a while to arrive. Such a small town did not have a police force to help people in need. They came from another county, which made their trip around twenty minutes. Claudia did not hear another scream during that time. She didn’t stand up either. She didn’t want to get so involved in the matter. She just wanted to clarify what happened because maybe her neighbors were simply loud people and she wanted them to know early on that she was not going to stand up for that. She had learned to be like that from Jim.

 A young female officer and an older male officer arrived exactly twenty minutes after the call had been made. Apparently it was still raining in their part of the country because they were drenched. Claudia did not let them inside her house and simply repeated what she had heard that night. The officer looked at each other and they decided to investigate. She knew they had decided not to believe her but that didn’t matter. Anything to live at peace in her home.

 She entered the kitchen as they left, preparing them some tea. It was a nice custom to give a beverage to people that came to help. True, she wasn’t going to let them get the floor all wet, especially after seeing their boots live a trail of prints on her property. But she had to be gracious and look as if she was accepting of everyone. Claudia clearly wasn’t, as she had been prejudiced for a long time, in part because of her husband but also because of her very conservative upbringing.

 Actually, she had noticed that the policewoman was not from those parts, or at least her parents weren’t. According to what she saw on TV, she knew it was wrong to feel that way about people but she couldn’t help it. It was as if something manipulated her from inside her head. She tried to change her ways but, in the end, it didn’t work. So she simply did what she had done with her husband for so many years: she kept her mouth shut and didn’t get into “difficult” business.

 The police officers came back in a matter of minutes. However, the man ran to the police car, not saying a word to Claudia. The young woman entered the house without being properly invited, grabbed the phone on the living room and started dialing. As she waited for someone to answer, Claudia was livid: there was mud all over the entrance and on the beautiful white carpets. They were ruined. She looked outside and saw, in horror, that they had broken a pot with gorgeous roses when coming back to the house.

 Claudia did not hear when the policewoman alerted her precinct that a double murder had taken place. She didn’t hear the gruesome details, of how the wife had been decapitated and how the husband had been found without his genitalia.

 The older woman only cared about her contest, about her little world. And it was all thrown to the abyss because of that silly murder. She was so enraged at the matter that she decided to find out who had killed the couple by herself. It couldn’t be more difficult than her topsy-turvy life.