A light brushstroke of gold caressed the grey buildings of the town of Ceremo.
The fresh, crisp air of the early morning accompanied the four boys on their walk while the first rays of sunshine kept them suspended in a still empty reality, a floating world punctuated only by the infinite repetition of identical buildings.
The fluttering of a flock of pigeons, the cawing of a crow – for those who knew how to listen, the place was certainly not dead.
Soon that street would fill up with people, but for now there were only them.
They walked briskly, accustomed to the cold seeping into their coats and the occasional chirping of birds at that time of morning.
They knew the streets of Ceremo well, they knew where to go.
It was at yet another bend that they stopped for a moment: on their right, the buildings finally gave way to the horizon, to the distant hills from which the rising sun stained the whitish cold of that day an orange hue.
Sunrise and sunset are sometimes quite similar.
They stood there for a few seconds, on a Friday in September.
Then they started walking again.
"Is it open yet?" Luca asked. He was still turned toward the sun, and the warm rays illuminated his round face and the hazel eyes beneath his messy brown hair.
"Last year we came at this time. It's ideal, just us and the vendors." Nicola replied.
It took them a few minutes to reach the fair which, as expected, was as silent as the rest of the city.
In each of the many small stalls there was at least one vendor, and they all carefully arranged packages of pasta, costume jewelry, old tools...
The boys immediately started looking around; they were almost the only customers.
Luca darted towards the gazebo of an old librarian and began leafing through some dusty volumes.
Within minutes, he'd spent all the little money he'd brought. He put his books in his backpack, then turned to his friends.
Andrea was looking around curiously. His eyes, as black as his curly hair, darted from stall to stall, never settling on anything. He was tall, taller than Luca.
Davide, a stocky boy with a square face and short, light hair, had bought a notebook.
"Model student? I don't think we're going to school today at all." Nicola told him with a smile, before going back to rummaging through the antiques she'd been eyeing.
He wore black, square glasses, straight blond hair parted in the middle, dark eyes, and a bony face.
The appearance of those boys was perfectly ordinary, bordering on generic. If anyone had seen them at that moment, they might have easily thought that skipping school that morning had been the most unusual act of their still-short lives.
As he watched his friends, Luca didn't notice the moment the orange of dawn faded, leaving behind a clear blue sky.
"How about we go to the garage later?" the boy asked.
"Yes," Andrea smiled. "We should really give it a dusting."
Everyone nodded, then each returned to the stall that had best captured them.
Among the many costume jewelry and a few old watches, Nicola's attention fell on a large metal pin engraved with a strange symbol: a half moon touching what appeared to be a perfectly circular eye.
It was dirty and battered, and still had some black fabric caught in the buckle.
He picked it up to feel its weight and stared at it for a long time, lost in thought. Where had he seen a brooch like that before? It reminded him of something... No, it reminded him of someone.
"How much do you want for the pin?" asked a tall man with a thick mustache and a bony face. He wore a suit and tie, and the gray of his suit was only slightly darker than his graying hair. Over his right eye, a small monocle with dark lens was tied with a chain to a small earring.
"Look, the boy is here first," replied the salesman, a pot-bellied old man with a straw hat on his head.
"Young man, give me a fiver and it's yours. Take it or leave it. If you don't care, leave it to the gentleman."
Nicola immediately accepted the offer and ran to the other three.
"Look at this! Let's go to the garage right now, I have to clean this thing out."
"What is this?" Luca asked confused.
"A brooch, right? I bet I got a great deal." He approached his friends, lowering his voice. "The guy who wanted to buy it for me is still staring at me!"
"So we've already given up on school?" David asked.
Andrea smiled, he was already heading towards the exit: "It seems so."
The group set off through the streets of Ceremo,which were finally starting to fill up with people, and in just over half an hour theu reached the old garage.
Nicola bent down, moved the doormat to get the keys and opened the small metal door.
More than a garage, it was a small throw-in: it was, in fact, a small room that could have housed one or two cars, but which the boys had always used as a meeting place. Narrow but comfortable, it proudly satisfied all the needs of the four: there was a table surrounded by four armchairs, a chest of drawers, and a few paintings, all purchased at the flea market over the years.
Nicola immediately opened a drawer to take a cloth and a bottleof alcohol,then he sat down on the ground and began anxiously removing all the layers of dirt from the pin.
"Look, no one's chasing you," David smiled.
"Yes, I knew it!" he smiled halfway through, as if he'd found an old memory in his hands. "I've already seen this brooch on my grandfather. Or at least one very similar."
Andrea came closer to observe it, intrigued.
Without taking his eyes off the book he was reading, Luca commented with a smile: "Now you're just like him."
From his friend's tone, Nicola wasn't sure whether to feel honored or mocked - it was emotion that made him lean toward the former hypothesis as his face was slightly reflected in the metal of the brooch.
"It almost looks silver-" Andrea tried to say, interrupted by a cold, firm knocking amplified by the iron door.
After a few seconds of silence, David approached the door with a smile: "Who is it?"
"Good evening." A calm, deep voice came from behind the door. "We are the Ceremo archaeological association. We understand that you have come into possession of an ancient brooch, an artifact of no small value and artistic merit that deserves to be displayed in a museum."
"Well, the grandpa treated himself right!" commented Luca, who was still reading. This time, there were no doubts about his sarcasm.
Nicholas stood up and motioned for David to come toward him.
"Could you give us a moment?" David asked the stranger.
"Of course," he replied.
"It can't be that old," Nicola whispered to his friend as he tightened his grip on the pin in irritation. "It cleans itself too well, it must be only a few decades old. It must be the guy from the market who's trying to make money off it, send him away."
David returned to the door:
"Look, I'm sorry, but we'd rather keep it. Have a good day."
After a few seconds of silence, there was that voice again, now sounding annoyed:
"Please reconsider. It goes without saying that you would be well rewarded for your contributions to the museum."
Davide turned to Nicola, but he shook his head.
"Thank you, but no, we're not interested in money or other rewards."
There was silence as an answer.
Then the door was quickly wrenched open by the powerful shoulder of a man. He wore a green shirt under his jacket and black tie, and his bald head made his angular face and cold gaze even more menacing. Behind him, the market man was following him.
"The pin," the latter said dryly.
Davide pushed the door off him and stepped back, approaching the other three who had remained paralyzed. "Well?" the uninvited guest pressed.
"Is this pin worth that much? What do you want from us?!"
said Nicola raising his voice.
"It's worth more than you think, for those who know what it is. And this isn't you. You're too old to be throwing tantrums like this," the man in gray replied nervously. He looked like a giant under the low ceiling of the garage.
The man began to slowly approach Nicola, from one side of the room to the other.
"Give it to me and no harm will come to you."
"You've already caused one, the door." Luca said, closing the book and getting up from his armchair.
"I'll pay you back with interest in exchange for the pin."
"We're not selling it," Luca replied coldly, stopping in front of the man, who put a hand in his pocket.
They looked into each other's eyes for a few seconds.
A giant.
With his eyes fixed upward and a drop of sweat running down his forehead, Luca didn't have time to take a step back when the man in black came at him with a punch in the stomach that made him fold in on himself, asphyxiated. "I wouldn't waste too much time, Captain Crissanti," he said coldly.
The man in gray remained silent.
Luca crawled with difficulty to the wall, then looked up at Nicola. He had opened the chest of drawers again, thrown the pin in, and was now frantically searching for something. Luca's eyes widened as he stared at him: if he understood what, his friend must have gone crazy.
A moment later, the boom of a gunshot reverberated off the tin walls of the garage.
Everyone looked at the hole that had been made in the ceiling, everyone looked at Nicola who was shaking with a small black revolver in his hands.
The man in gray approached Nicola, pulling a pistol from his pocket, then slammed the handle into the boy's hand, knocking the weapon out of his hand and eliciting a scream. He then bent down to pick up the pin from the drawer.
Among old comics and a few copies of newspapers, his gaze then fell on a golden, shiny object: it was a valuable, well-preserved watch.
"This will make up for the trouble. Let's go back to Serece. Move."
They vanished in an instant, but the boys would never forget the man's appearance.
Heads down, Andrea and Davide still stared at their friends, petrified. Luca slowly stood up while Nicola massaged his hand.
The warm morning light entered through the hole where a door had been a short while ago.
"The watch…" Luca muttered to himself. "They took the watch…"
He walked slowly out of the garage, still a little tired, and saw the two figures moving in the distance.
When Nicola was next to him, the boy had his gun again. His hand was sore, and he would never have been able to do anything from that far away. All four of them knew it well.
"We can chase them," Luca stammered.
"What?" Andrea looked at him confused.
"That watch… Don't you remember where it comes from?"
The three looked down.
"They said they are going towards Serece… I don't know where or what it is, but… We can follow them."
Immediately, Luca started running.
He ran as fast as he could, trying to always keep a certain distance from the two men without ever losing sight of them.
He heard his friends' footsteps behind him. They had followed him.
He closed his eyes.
His breath was getting shorter and his legs were starting to burn, but his body didn't stop.
Those minutesthey seemedan eternity, yet they passed in an instant.
Having reached the very edge of the suburbs, they stopped, hiding behind an alleyway. All four were out of breath. When they looked out, they saw them.
The two men freed some horses they had tied in front of the large stone wall that enclosed the town, then pushed aside a large container to reveal a crack in the wall.
The boys frowned as they watched the two mysterious men lead the horses out of the ordinary and close the passage, dragging the container behind them.
Those men had left civilization.
Andrea immediately ran toward the container, clambering up with difficulty and managing to peer over the wall. The others followed. The men, on their horses, were traveling in a straight line and had already traveled far from the town.
"Serece…" Andrea wondered in a low voice. "Is it a land of the dead?"