<<So… Tommy was gone, right?>>
<<Yes. Sara said she woke up without him.>>
<<And Fenny? Where was she?>>
<<In the room, where they left her. Sara slept with Tommy of course, and they had left her in a box. However Sara wasn’t worried at first, Tommy’s car was still in the house so she thought he was got out for a moment to do something. The others and I were very worried though. And very nervous. Marco wanted to take the chick and throw it away. In fact, Marco had wanted to do it for a while … he hated that chick, I don’t know why.>>
<<What have you done, though?>>
<<Nothing. We had breakfast and Brigitte continued to keep an eye on Sara, who became increasingly worried as time passed. In the end she decided to call him.>>
<<Did he answer?>>
Elia sighs <<Well … uh … here things start to get complicated. This is where people stop listening to me completely.>>
<<Try to explain what happened anyway.>>
<<He replied. But he said he was home and that she was the one who went out with us. He said we took the car. And the chick too.>>
<<Oh…>>
<<Yeah.>>
<<And at that point what did you do?>>
<<Well … we’ve gone crazy or something like that. Sara started screaming not to joke at first, then Marco took the phone out of her hands and talking to his father gave him an appointment in the living room. At one point both he and his father said they were in the room, but they didn’t see each other. We didn’t see Tommy, and he didn’t see us. A real mess. So we asked him to do something to prove that he was at home and wasn’t kidding us, and … he tried a little bit of everything. He turned the lights on and off, but nothing. He lowered and raised the shutters, still nothing. In the end he turned on the television.>>
<<And…?>>
<<Well… he turned on the television. For us too. The remote control hadn’t moved at all, so from our point of view the television had turned on by itself.>>
I nod <<How did you react to that event.>>
<<I was dying inside.>> the boy admits with an embarrassed smile <<I was shitting myself. Marco said to call the police. Sara was about to do it but Brigitte stopped them. She said that we couldn’t.>>
<<Why?>>
<<Because it was too stupid. More evident proof was needed. Turning the television off and on wasn’t enough to convince that her dad had become invisible, a ghost or something. And since we didn’t speak Greek the cops would have taken us for idiots or tourists who were playing a joke. We needed dad to do something more … “obvious”.>>
<<Like what?>>
<<Like driving the car. Except that it wasn’t there from his point of view, so …>>
<<So what have you done?>>
<<We tried to do something else. Meanwhile Sara had gone to retrieve Fenny. She thought that if it was the chick who had “cursed” Tommy then it might have been possible to do the opposite. Fenny was all bald that morning, and was smeared with ash. Seeing her in that state made me believe that it was really her fault.>>
<<What did you do with Fenny?>>
<<We put her on the table. The chick was very tired however, she couldn’t stand up. Brigitte gave her some sausages, and Fenny ate them slowly. She really looked like she was about to die. We asked Tommy to come over to that table and try to touch it where Fenny was. To help him Sara tried to send him a photo of where Fenny was, but obviously the photo came out all black. Brig had another of his insights and said to send the photo to dad anyway.>>
<<And did he see Fenny?>>
<<Yes. He saw the photo as normal. Following the photo Tommy stood in front of the table, but nothing happened. We asked him to take a photo where Fenny was … for him the photo was obviously empty, im mean … it represented an empty and very normal table … but by sending it to us we finally saw Fenny in a photo. She looked like a perfectly normal chick, but for us it was like umpteenth proof that Fenny was the problem.>>
<<How did things go on from there?>>
<<Between one photo and another we discovered that it was possible … “to see us”. If Tommy took a picture where we were, he could see us. By sending us the photo it wouldn’t happen though. We would’ve saw the photo as “empty”.>>
<<I understand.>>
<<So we did a lot of testing. We were all tense, but also a little excited, I must admit it. Those things only happen in movies, you know? So we were all a little … scared but not too much. I don’t know how to describe that feeling. It was something new … It seemed like a sort of half-dream half-nightmare and I was both scared and excited.>> he says <<After a lot of testing we found that that trick also worked with videos.>>
<<At that point what did you do?>>
<<We noticed a strange thing. Both us and him. His photos were darker. At first we thought it was the phone’s fault, but he confirmed that our photos were indeed brighter. We asked him to make a video of the house and… he showed the corridors, which were dark again because they had a lot of the doors closed. He told us he thought we left them like that. However he had already opened many doors, in fact the corridors appeared darker also for another reason.>>
<<That is?>>
<<The sky. It was blue … but there was no sun. Or rather, it wasn’t visible. There were clouds everywhere, it didn’t seem like a summer day but an autumn and rainy day. When Tommy showed us those things we all became worried. I don’t know why, but the desire to have fun and take pictures had disappeared and was replaced by a very strange rush… I don’t know how to describe it. I can only say that we wanted Tommy to come back to us absolutely. >>
<<And then?>>
<<Then the worst thing. Watching the video Marco noticed the television in Tommy’s house it was off. He asked him to turn it on, but using the remote control the television turned off in our house … but it didn’t turn in his one.>>
<<Oh…>>
<<Tommy said that in fact it is since he woke up that the current does not work well. The lights turn on but they didn’t seem to glow at all, while the rest just don’t work. He also went to check the status of the generator, but there seemed to be no damage. Despite that there was practically no electric light in that house. And once he told us this Marco and Sara exploded, they immediately said to call the police and Brigitte gave them the “okay”, she too was hurried too.>>
<<So you called the police in the end.>>
<<Yes, and before the police arrive Brig explained what we had to do. She wrote a long letter in Greek with the help of the telephone translator, and then told us how to behave. We had to make the cops take pictures and videos with their phones, so they would believe it.>>
<<And then …?>>
<<Then we waited. >>
<<And … ? Did the plan work?>>
<<Not at all.>> Elia says <<The police never arrived. Sara called it a lot of times. We asked Tommy to do the same, but no one answered his calls. In the end, not wanting to stay there alone, Tommy did something … stupid I think.>>
<<What did he do?>>
<<He decided to go to the police station by himself. He went out on foot, staying in touch with us on the phone, and walked towards the city center, where the cops should be.>>
<<I understand. Did he succeed?>>
<<He walked a lot, but it didn’t seem to help much. After a while his phone starting to ran out of battery, but as he was still far from the town and there was no one around to ask for help, he decided to stop the call because he didn’t want to drain the battery too much, and we kept in touch via messages for a while. In the meantime we had lunch together, and we were super nervous about what was going on. Fenny was asleep all the while, she looked like someone had tried to burn her alive. Sara, who is a religious woman, said that maybe she was a creature of the Devil. You know … the Devil is in hell, in hell there is fire, Fenny seemed to be on fire … >>
<<Yes, yes, I understand.>>
<<We spent the day together. Sara accompanied Brig to the bathroom and Marco accompanied me. We didn’t want to walk around the house alone. And we had every reason in the world to do it this time.>>
<<And Tommy?>>
<<He stopped responding to our messages after a while. The last one said “I only have 3%, I’ll call as soon as I have news, I’m almost there anyway, I see the houses”. Then nothing. His phone died and it didn’t ring anymore. His number was considered non-existent. That thing scared us even more. It super scared us. Sara was pale. Marco and Brig as well. Maybe I was pale too.>>
<<Why didn’t you try to go to the cops yourself?>>
<<Brigitte did not want to leave the house. She said that something could’ve happened if we went away. Marco wanted to go but he too was afraid to do so. He was afraid of… disappearing. Maybe in the car. Maybe at the police station. The problem was also that the police answered our calls. Every time they said that some cops was coming, every time they said we had to wait for them … so going directly to them scared us a little. It almost seemed as if they were complicit in this whole absurd situation. We also didn’t know if it was worth taking Fenny with us or not. In the end we did nothing but talk about it and never really did anything. The more time passed, the more we did nothing. And then the icing on the cake: in the evening it happened again.>>
<<What?>>
<<That some of us get lost. We were all cooking together. We were all scared to death but we pretended we weren’t. Sara went away for a moment, but just for a moment, and Brig, seeing her leave the kitchen towards the corridor, which was dark, chased her. She didn’t want to leave her alone. Not in the dark at least. She followed her by saying: “Mom, wait, I turn on the light!”>>
<<And …?>>
<<She went ut of the kitchen but the light never turned on. Marco and I both turned towards the door waiting for the light to come on, but nothing happens. After a few seconds we were already dying inside. >>
<<Have you looked for them?>>
<<Fuck yes, we started looking for them immediately. Marco and I went everywhere in the house. We turned on all the lights, inspected every room … but they weren’t in the house. We made videos and took photos, but we didn’t see anything strange in there. We turned on the televisions in all the rooms to see if they responded that way, and we tried call them. But… fuck, their phones was in the kitchen. We have always kept them charged during the day, always connected to the current to avoid ending up “in the other world” with low battery. They had hung up the phones just when they disappeared, and therefore we could not contact them because they let the phone plugged in the kitchen.>>
<<So only you and him was left.>>
<<Just me and him, yes. But that loneliness didn’t last long. We were in the bathroom when the light went out. The light of the whole house. We screamed and immediately turned on the phones, and holding on tight we looked around scared. >> Elia says with a bitter sigh <<Outside the windows it was all… dark. Black. Nothing could be seen. It seemed that we have ended up under water. We turned on the torches and slowly moved towards the kitchen. Fenny was still there. She was standing on the table. It shone slightly, but much less than the night before.>>
<<What have you done then?>>
<<Marco wanted to kill her. He wanted to throw her out of the house. I didn’t want to but I thought maybe it was the best thing to do, but then we looked at the window and we got scared to death. It was all so … dark.>>
<<And you haven’t thrown her away anymore?>>
<<Not immediately. We hesitated. We talked about it. But then we took her to the front door, we open it, and Marco threw her as far as possible. The original idea was to throw her into the water, into the sea. It wasn’t far, but outside it was impossible to see anything so he didn’t want to go out. We didn’t want to kill her with knives or anything like that because at the time we were too scared to do that. We were rushed. We wanted to do things quickly.>>
<<And how did that end?>>
Elia sighs <<It is over that as soon as we closed the door of the house even the phones turned off. We were left in total darkness.>>