Sticks and Stones - Part 1 of 3

 

Photo by Luca Maffeis on Unsplash

1

”No! You missed it, dude!” Farouk snapped as the huge piece of stone failed to hit the smaller ones lined up on the sandy ground, rising to his feet from where he was crouched and utterly devastated that his team was losing. Again. “How can you even miss it twice in a row!?”

Betül rolled her eyes before picking up the carefully chosen stone with the uneven edges, one she had successfully used over the course of a year without once missing the mark. That is, until today. She couldn’t say what it was, but something felt off. Whether it was the overcast weather, the increasingly darkening sky, or just something innately inside her, she did not know, but whatever it was, it made her skin crawl and mouth run dry like her whole mouth was made of sandpaper.

Christoffer, on the other hand, was a team of his own and older than them by a year. He celebrated his miraculous win with his signature gesture, shaking his shoulders in an Egyptian dance and making loud noises to annoy Farouk on purpose – going as far as turning his back to them and shaking his butt like a real Arabian belly dancer.

“Woohoo! Losers!” he said, making a huge ‘L’ with his hand, before extending his hand. “Now give me everything you stole!”

Farouk, cheesed off, “Stole!? We won it fair and square, you little—”

“Hey, easy, you two! And you,” Betül said with a firm voice as she turned to face Farouk. “Give the guy back his stones and shut it.”

“Uh… what’s with her?” Christoffer mumbled.

“Do I look like I know?” Farouk said. “Here, these were yours, right?”

Christoffer studied each piece of stone as if it were a jewel. Farouk had fetched from his pockets a full of valuables and picked up three jagged stones seemingly at random. It was a mystery how those huge stones even fit into his pocket, not to mention on top of all those smaller ones in there, too.

“Yeah, seems like it,” Christoffer said, placing the stones inside his folded shirt since he did not have pockets of his own. “When on earth did you even win all those stones? You have no social life or something? No school?”

Farouk lifted his head with a proud smile, so much in fact that Betül thought for a brief moment that his crooked nose would stay suspended mid-air and wanted to smack him back to his senses. But she didn’t do that, of course.

“Dude, like, who do you think I am? I am the Farouk!” he said. “I always have time for victory!”

“Victory?” Betül repeated, her tone laced with sarcasm. “More like defeat! Besides today, have you ever truly won without my help? Like ever?”

Farouk met her sarcasm head-on, his eyes narrowing and lips curling into a pout. “You’re seriously going to live as if stuck in the past? What matters,” he said, grinning wide, “is what we win today, in the present. Which means, I win. Not you, sor-ry!”

“You’re so dumb, you know that?”

“Who you calling dumb!?”

As the two teammates were about to clash and get into a huge fight, one in which Betül would emerge as the winner since she was larger in build than Farouk, who hardly had any meat on him, Christoffer nimbly intervened and separated them before they could start throwing punches.

“Yo, calm down, you two! Hey, you guys hear me!? Geez! Stop it! Both of you!”

Betül ran a hand down her hair as she was the first to retreat, before Farouk too calmed down enough for Christoffer to stop holding him back. “You guys are craaaazy. How did you even end up being friends?”

“Friends? More like enemies!” Betül said, adding. “I recruited this idiot after seeing him win once, and then he just kept losing ever since!”

“You mean twice! I won twice!”

“Dude,” Betül exclaimed as she realised what he was referring to. “Winning against those homeless people… you call that a win? Like, seriously!?”

“Well, you didn’t dare, remember?”

“Yeah, but only because they are homeless, duh!” she said, adding in one single breath before he could interrupt, “and don’t act like you don’t know the rumours, you idiot!”

“What rumours?” said Christoffer.

“Don’t mind her, they’re just rumours!” said Farouk. “See! Nothing bad happened to me!”

“Just because it didn’t happen that one time, doesn’t mean it won’t happen ever! Just how stupid can you even be?”

Farouk glared, rolling up his sleeves to throw another future punch when Christoffer interrupted. “Hey, guys, what rumours?”

Betül and Farouk both turned to Christoffer at the same time as he was about to repeat himself, both of them seeing red and too furious to explain stuff to him. “SHUT IT!”

“Uh, what?” Christoffer said, the tone of his voice giving away just how offended he was at being shouted at out of nowhere. “You guys… got some loose screws or something? Dude, I was just asking.”

Betül, now a tad calmer. “You haven’t heard the rumours? Is that it?”

“Why would I ask if I knew?”

Betül then exchanged a knowing look with Farouk before gesturing each of them to come closer, so that they hunched down in a tight circle of three.

“I’m not sure where the rumours come from or who spread them,” she whispered, dragging each word on purpose to get her words across. “But I don’t doubt them. Not even for a second.”

Farouk, “Me neither.”

Christoffer, utterly confused, arched his brows low and whispered, “What do you mean? You’ve… seen something?”

Betül drew a deep breath before finally speaking, letting her brown eyes sweep over the two boys for the briefest of moments as if to prepare them for what she was about to reveal.

“I was walking home from school one day two years ago. My sister was sick, so this was my first day going home on my own, and as you both know, our apartment is right around that dumpster those homeless people hang out at, drinking and pissing all over themselves. Like, ew, so, so disgusting… Anyway, so I was walking home, and then I felt something strange, like someone watching me. So, I looked around…” She paused, letting the silence stretch on for a tad longer than either of the boys wanted. “And, then I saw one of those people was staring straight at me!”

“W-What happened next?” Farouk croaked.

“Then he waved me over, of course!”

“And did you?” asked Christoffer.

Betül broke the tight circle. “Of course I didn’t, idiot! If I did, would I be here, you think?”

“I don’t get it. What’s this whole rumour thing, then? To me, it just looks like the guy wanted to chat or something…”

“It hasn’t been long since you moved here, right?” she said.

“Yeah, it’s been about four months or so. Why do you ask?”

Farouk, “There was this girl, let’s call her Ida for convenience. One day, as she was walking home from school, she disappeared. Just like that! The whole neighbourhood tried to find her, but when night came, she was reported missing to the police. According to the rumours, someone saw her talk to one of those homeless people before she vanished!”

“She was… never found?”

“No,” Betül said, “she wasn’t! The police wrote off her case as a typical runaway, but the poor girl was only eight years old when she went off the radar, only two or so years younger than what we are today.”

“You think… there’s some truth in those rumours, then?”

“Of course!”

“But didn’t you,” Christoffer turned to face Farouk, “just say that you played and won against those homeless people? If the rumours were true, then you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

“Yeah, but I was not by myself! All the neighbourhood kids were there too! Just imagine if I’d been there all alone?” Farouk shivered at the thought. “I’d be long dead!”

“Still, something doesn’t add up. Maybe the police are right? Maybe she just—”

“An eight-year-old runaway?” said Betül, adding before he could protest. “Come on, dude! Get real! No kid that age runs away, unless…” Betül gestured them to come closer again, closing the circle, “…something else happened to her.”

“Like what…” Christoffer said, his voice cracking from the growing dread in the air around them. “…exactly?”

“You two ever heard the story of ‘Lamia’?”

“Lami—what?” said Farouk, who was getting increasingly unsettled by the stuff they were discussing as the sun fell below the horizon every passing second in the background, casting the entire playground in deep shadows.

“It’s originally a story from Greek mythology, one only a few know, and luckily for you two, I’m one of those people in the know…”

“So?” said Christoffer. “What’s the story about?”

“Okay, so there was this super pretty queen named Lamia, and Zeus, the king of the gods, liked her – like, liked liked her – and his wife, Hera, got soooo mad. She was jealous and made Lamia go totally nuts! She took away her kids and made her into this scary children-eating monster!”

“Children…”—Farouk, peeking over his shoulder at once as if something had moved in the deepening shadows and crept closer to them—“…eating monster?”

“And get this, you two,” she continued without missing a beat. “Lamia could never close her eyes, like ever, so she just wandered around all night, looking creepy and sad and angry. Then she started stealing kids from their beds, and she’d eat them! Eat them all!”

As she said the last sentence, she raised her voice on purpose, and Farouk almost had a heart attack as he jolted up with a gasp and took shelter behind Christoffer. Christoffer, although equally scared, tried to play it cool.

 “What a stupid story. Why would a monster from Greek mythology even be here, in our neighbourhood? Stop making up stuff just to scare Farouk—”

“But I’m not making any of this up!” she interjected.

“Everyone knows you’re a bookworm,” Christoffer said. “You’re just telling us stories you’ve read! Anyone can see that, so stop pretending!”

Betül, “I didn’t read about it anywhere! I swear! I heard it from someone!”

“Really? Like from whom? Come on, go ahead. Tell us!”

Farouk, sensing the growing tension between those two, with his weak and antsy voice, then tried to intervene. “Hey, uh, maybe we should go home now? It’s getting dark and—”

“I-I promised not to snitch!”

“Promised!?” snapped Christoffer. “Since when do you keep your promises?”

“Are you saying I don’t?”

“Just admit it, Betül! You’re just making stuff up to scare us!”

“I already told you—”

“Guys, listen to me, it’s getting really dark and—”

“Shut up!” they both said in sync.

And for a while, the heated conversation continued back and forth with neither of the two backing off or throwing in the towel, not until the streetlights on the playground turned on and they found themselves way past their curfew, at which point it was too late to rue the day because Farouk’s phone now rang and pulled the three friends back to reality.

Part 2