For a second there Johnny thought he smelled the girl, the girl that had sent the cops after him, the girl that was at his home when he returned—which had been quite a shock when he’d just spent weeks trying to forget about her, put her out of his mind—the girl whose name turned out to be ‘Faye’ and who was now friends with his little sister. He thought he’d just caught a whiff of her girly smell… but it was gone now, he must have imagined it. It was the middle of the night, what would the girl be doing here?

He had a cage filled with rats by his side, and he was patiently waiting for Marlon (one of his ferrets) to come out from under the floor. He had already swept all the sawdust of the floor and tomorrow he would tell Tuto to put steel spring traps under each pile.

He sat listening with pricked ears, he didn’t hear Marlon. He believed the ferret must have chased out all the rats by now, but maybe he had bitten one to death, and was nibbling on it—he shouldn’t but this happened, Marlon was young and not fully trained. Or maybe a rat had bitten Marlon, this too happened. Usually rats ran, but if Marlon had cornered one it might put up a fight, and most rats were larger and heavier than a ferret, they could be vicious and ferrets could get killed. Johnny would give him another ten minutes, and then he’d have to crawl under the floor himself to have a look.

Damn! He heard the door of the large hall above him open. It didn’t lock, there was nothing of value in this old cobwebbed paper mill. He turned off his flashlight. It might be a policeman. Someone might have seen him or the beam of his flashlight, here in the mill, or earlier in the house, and they might have thought him a burglar. It wouldn’t be the first time. This was why old man Williams always notified the police where he had his man working, but sometimes he forgot. He was getting older every day. It had never been a big problem, most policemen knew him by now (calling him ‘Johnny the Mutt’ behind his back), and when a rookie took him in, things were quickly settled at the station.

But Johnny couldn’t get caught now, he wasn’t supposed to be in town. He quietly started packing up his stuff, when he heard a voice shyly say, “Hello? Anybody here?” This was no policeman.

She couldn’t see a cussed thing in the dark! She should have brought a cussed flashlight! Maybe she should try the house again. She hadn’t dared to ring the bell—would people still be home when a ratcatcher came? There was nobody here, were there other rooms? She wasn’t going to go further, she might hit her head, fall in a hole in the ground, or whatever, break a leg and get eaten by rats. Just as she wanted to try and say ‘hello?’ one last time, a voice from the dark said, “Hello?” She screamed like a girl in a horror movie.

“Whoa, calm down, it’s me, Johnny,” and he turned on his flashlight, showing himself, looking very ghoulish, but everybody looked ghoulish turning a flashlight on themselves.

“Oh, hi,” Faye said, and waved at him when he turned the flashlight on her. (Waving? Come on, she thought, what was she, the Queen of England?)

“I’m sorry, didn’t mean to bother you, I know you’re working, Tuto told me, that you would be working here, so I knew you were working here, and that I could find you here,” she was blathering, “I’m Faye,” she concluded.

“I know, Pearly told me about you,” Johnny said. He could smell how very nervous she was, afraid even, and he tried to think how to set her at ease. He was nervous as well to be suddenly talking to her, and felt all sorts of things he couldn’t quite categorize.

“Pearly, good old Pearly,” she said, and laughed oddly. “Ahem, how is she? Pearly?”

“Pearly’s fine, she—”

“I’m sorry!”

“—excuse me?”

“I’m sorry. That’s why I’m here, that’s what I came to tell you. Sorry for, you know, for putting you through, well… all of it.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad, really…”

“How bad was it?”

“Really, don’t worry about it, it—”

“No, tell me what happened. I want to know what I’m apologizing for. I mean first of all—I thought a lot about this, you know?—first of all I’m apologizing for what could have happened. A worst case scenario, what could have happened to you, to your family, to your community of lemurians that sort of depend on you…” (She realized she was on a roll, the words came out smoothly—which might be because she couldn’t see who she was talking to: it was very dark, Johnny had the flashlight pointed downwards, drawing a circle on the concrete floor between them, like a spotlight to step into. She could barely see his outline, but talking to the dark was very similar to practicing what she wanted to say with her eyes closed) “…but I’m also apologizing for what actually happened. I already apologized to Pearly, and I tried apologizing to your mother—”

“Ah, mother,” the voice from the dark said, “she always says ‘apologies are the currency of the incompetent.’”

“And I tried to mend some of the damage I’d done, you know, since Tuto told us you provided for your family, I tried to provide something, support them a bit by giving them food. Because I felt real guilty about it all. So I’d like to know what happened, it can’t have been ‘not that bad’, as you say, because you looked terrible!”

“Thanks.”

“Well, you did. You don’t look terrible now…”

“Thanks,” he said, “you don’t look terrible either,” turning the flashlight on her.

“Thanks,” she said, squinting her eyes in the light. Oh god, she thought, they were flirting, weren’t they?

“Let me get my stuff from the cellar. I was just finishing up anyway. I store my case at my boss’s house, near the animal shelter. Walk with me, and I’ll tell you my story.”

“Okay, great!” Faye was glad, not too nervous anymore. She had finally said what she came to say and he clearly didn’t hate her, and he seemed as nice as she hoped he’d be.

He gave her the flashlight, and said, “Follow me down.”

“Do I have to light your way?” she asked.

“No, I can see fine, just mind your own step, it’s a mess here.”

He gathered his stuff, and put them in his large wooden case systematically. Faye shined her light on him, when all of a sudden something ran up his back! Faye shrieked and almost dropped the flashlight.

“Don’t worry, it’s only Marlon,” Johnny chuckled, “Hey buddy,” to the animal on his shoulder nibbling at his ear.

“Who?!”

“One of my ferrets. They help me catch rats.”

“I thought it was a rat..!”

“No, rats don’t do that, thank the stars.”

They walked the deserted streets, like two chums, the stars looking down on them. He carrying his case (the ferret had disappeared somewhere in his clothes), she taking her bike by the hand. He was telling her his story. He told her all that had happened from the arrest onward: traveling at night and sleeping during the day, almost dying of hunger, running from the hunters’ dog, going through the garbage for food, the woman wearing a lemurian’s skin for a coat, being knocked out by religious lemurians… He was happy to tell her, most of it he hadn’t even told to Pearly, since he didn’t want her to start hating humans like their mother.

Faye hang on his lips. Like Pearly, he was great storyteller. Each streetlamp they passed Faye would steal glances, taking a good look at this half-lemurian boy, his eyes glowing in the night, his face black and shiny, haloed by bright white fur. His hair wasn’t very greasy tonight, flopping in front of his face, looking seriously cuddly. The cute little tufts of white hair on top of his black humanlike ears, his slim lips, also humanlike, lemurians had no lips. Lovely lips, really…

“… this huge mean-looking guy in the doorway, with a shotgun pointed right at me! I could smell his rage, its stink made my eyes water. Behind him I could still hear his daughter howling—and then I blacked out again.

“I don’t know how long I was out, but I woke up again when a door was opened with a loud creak, and I heard two men enter, talking. I didn’t open my eyes, but I smelled I was still in the barn, on the floor, tied up real tight, with yards of rope, my legs bended up to my chest, and my wrists tied to my ankles. I think they call it ‘hog-tied’.

“ ‘No, this isn’t one of mine, Elmer,’ I heard one of the men say, standing over me, while I still pretended to be unconscious. ‘Mine don’t look like that, I think this is one o’ them half-breeds I heard talk about,’ the man said, with a real country accent.

“ ‘Oh, well, I just thought I should let you have a look at him first, before I called the police,’ the other man said, whose smell I recognized, this was the large man who’d pointed the gun at me.

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“ ‘Feller fixin’ to mess with your girl, I figure you’d a’ shot him by now,’ the first guy said, and the large guy says ‘I was gonna, but I think: first call Bill, see if he’s missing one of his critters. And then Missy explains to me how the whole thing was probably more of an accident, then an actual assault. So I don’t feel too good about just shooting the bugger, him being passed out on the floor, don’t seem like the Christian thing to do.’

“Then the first guy says, ‘I think he’s awake, now.’

“So I open my eyes, slowly, like I’m just waking up, going, ‘Uh, where am I?’ like that, and my neck hurts when I turn it two look up at the two men towering above me. The large one, now without his shotgun, with his thumbs hooked in his belt, his face almost hidden behind his large gut, and the other man, older, smaller and wiry, with a weather-worn face under a large white cowboy hat, dressed in a light-brown expensive-looking suit.

“And I still feel really sick, and dried out, so I ask for a glass of water, and the big guy goes, ‘A glass of water? You think this is a restaurant?’ But the older guy tells him to get me some water, for god’s sake.

“The older man pours the water in my mouth, slowly and gently, and now that he’s so close to me, I can, very faintly, smell a lemurian scent on him! Not one lemurian, but several, it seemed. So I think, I must try and talk to this guy alone, maybe he will get me out of here, help me, but then the big guy comes back, and says the police are on their way. And I start explaining to them how I’m lost and I’m sick and how I only got into the barn to shelter from the rain, but they aren’t very interested and leave me in the barn, closing the door behind them.”

“When finally the cops arrive and I’m finally untied, I hurt all-over and can barely get my legs straight again. And the big guy, Elmer, tells them what happened, and one of the cops says, ‘This feller looks sick,’ and Elmer says yeah, and the cop says he doesn’t want me in his car, ‘who knows what kind of diseases these furballs carry.’

“Then the older man says, ‘He’s just got a fever, it won’t kill ya.’ And they seem to respect this guy, so they put me in the back of their car, and I almost pass out again right there. Maybe I do pass out for a moment, and the two men are talking, the one in the passenger seat says I don’t look too good, and the driver tells me, ‘You’d better not cough at us, boy!’ And the other one says, ‘Maybe we should take him to a doctor,’ And the driver says, ‘A doctor? Shouldn’t we take him to a veterinarian?’ And I don’t think he was even joking. I must have passed out again, for quite some time, because the next thing I remember is waking up from a whirl of fever dreams on a cot, under a coarse shaggy blanket.”

“I was in a small wooden hut, and from the window I could see little lemurian children playing amongst similar huts. A few adult lemurians walked past, some carrying babies, but there must have been many more lemurians around, considering the amount of children I saw. I had never seen this many children in one place, there must have been dozens. In the distance I saw a small group of humans. And most extraordinary of all: the lemurians all walked with their tails out. I wondered if I was still dreaming.

“I tapped on the window, and caught the attention a few nearby children, some came to the window, others ran off yelling, and one small brave boy came into my room. I asked him where I was, and he said, ‘home.’ Then an older lemurian came in, and put a cold wet cloth on my forehead. I asked her where I was, while more curious children poured into the room. She took my pulse, and looked into my eyes and mouth, as she told me I was on the estate of Master Billings, where a group of lemurians had lived for generations and worked on Master Billings’ land, cultivating cotton, tobacco and sugarcane. She then shooed children out of the room, and closed the door behind her, telling them to leave me be. They clowned about my window, and when the woman returned with soup, I asked her if they were slaves here on Master Billing land.

“ ‘Lordy, no!’ she said. ‘We can leave as we please, we nobody’s slave. But nobody in their right mind would want to leave! Live’s good here! We was born here and we will die here, without anybody bothering us.’

“And I asked her if they got paid for the work they did for Master Billings. She said, no, what would they need money for? They had everything they needed right here, they grew their own food, and made their own clothes. ‘Adam and Eve didn’t need no money in Paradise, now did they?’”

“I spent days in that bed, recovering slowly. Sometimes some children crept into my room, but besides the old woman taking care of me, none of the other adults ever talked to me. The old woman would sometimes read to me from the Bible, and she’d tell me how lucky they were to be here, and what a terrible place the outside world was. And I wondered, was human society really as bad as this woman, who had never left this estate, thought? I wasn’t so sure, at that moment. I never used to think it was all that bad. It was an unfair world, sure, but, well, life was unfair. Nature was unfair, everything was. ‘Fairness’ was just something people had thought up, it was just a concept, not something real. But after my hard times trying to get home, I honestly wasn’t so sure anymore. The world was certainly a lot of trouble.”

“When I got back on my feet, still a bit wobbly, I walked around the estate, where the lemurians were hard at work, from dusk till dawn, four and five year old kids already pitching in. It certainly seemed like slave labor to me, but they really did seem like the healthiest and happiest lemurians I had ever seen. The adult lemurians didn’t pay much attention to me. I had seen the looks they gave me my whole life, most lemurians intuitively disliked halflings like me.

“A man in a cowboy hat came up to me. I recognized him immediately: it was the older man who’d been brought in to have a look at me when I’d been tied up in the barn. He introduced himself as Bill Billings, this was Master Billings, and he shook my hand. I thanked him for taking care of me.

“ ‘You mind your manners while you’re here, you hear,’ he told me, ‘don’t go fillin’ my folks head with silly talk. They are quite happy as they are, and don’t need no outsider telling tales about the outside.’

“I said okay sir, and told him I had to leave soon, anyway, as my family was waiting for my return. And I wondered: even if these lemurians were allowed to leave, wasn’t the believe they had of this place being a Paradise on Earth also a form of imprisonment? They had nothing to compare it with—wasn’t their ignorance as bad as iron chains?”

“The next day I prepared to leave, even though I was still feeling weak, and the lady that took care of me said I should stay another week and I was being pig-headed. I was given provisions for my travels, but when Master Billings came to see me off, I was sure he was going to stop me, tell me that I had to at least work off the debt I owed him now. He didn’t. All he said was I was always welcome here if I got tired of how the outside world treated me.”

“As it turned out, I hadn’t rested enough. My illness returned and I barely made it home.

“Looking back now on those days at the estate, it all feels very unreal. I had strange dreams there,” (He didn’t tell Faye some of those dreams featured her…) “and now that whole episode feels like one big fever dream.”

It was as if he had timed it: they arrived at their destination as he finished his story.

“My,” said Faye, “that was sure one great big adventure. I mean it was terrible, everything that happened to you, but it also sounds, well, very exciting, in a way.”

Johnny had to laugh at that, “Hey, I love a good story, but now I know that listening to a story can be a lot more exciting than actually living through it!”

He stored his carrying case in the back of his employer’s home, and when he returned with his bicycle Faye said, “I’ll ride you home!”

“Shouldn’t you be getting some sleep by now? Don’t you have school in the morning?”

“I’m not sleepy at all, I don’t think I’ve ever been more awake!” She was feeling great! She felt great about herself, about Johnny, about the whole damn world! She didn’t want this night to end. That girl that had to go to school tomorrow seemed like a completely different person. That wasn’t her!

“You know what,” Johnny said, “how about I’ll ride you home? Then you can get to bed. Did you sneak out of the house, or what? Your parents don’t let you get out this late, do they”

“No, I snuck out,” Faye said proudly, “first time ever! My parents are pretty liberal, so I never had a reason to snuck out before.”

Johnny wanted to say he was delighted to be her reason, but he didn’t. They rode their bikes, and Faye told him about her parents, and how they had never meant for him to be deported, and they, too, were sorry about it all, and were nice people, really.

Then they talked about Pearly, and Faye told him about her history teacher’s plan to have her visit class someday, which she hadn’t told Pearly herself about yet, and Johnny said he was amazed (which he was), and said maybe he had been mistaken about humanity all this time (though he didn’t really think he had).

He really wanted to ask her if Pearly had ever told her about the lemurian concept of truelove, but he didn’t. It would be too forward.

Arriving at her home, they said goodbye. Johnny watched her clamber up a tree, in that clumsy way humans had, and he knew for certain, in that moment. Even though it made no sense at all, even though he had believed it to be nothing but a myth, there was no doubt in his mind: this was truelove.

Faye waved at him from her bedroom window, smiling wide, and he almost died.