Gorgorito

The music was still full blast and the rain was drumming on the waterproof, and Axel was walking at a faster pace than he had walked in four years.

He walked three hours without stopping. In front went the circle of the headlamp and behind went everything else.

He stopped for a pee. And it occurred to him that, it being night and there being nobody about, he could pee right there, in the middle of the track.

So he did.

And there, standing, with the rain hitting his hood, he thought that this had no pipes. That there was no system. That it went into the earth and that was the end of the story. And he liked it, and it gave him a bit of vertigo, and both at once.

“Oi! You with the hose!”

He froze with his hand on the zip.

The music? No. The music was carrying on by itself.

He swept the headlamp round at face height and there was nobody, and his heart started going a different way.

He had been twenty hours without sleep. He thought that too.

“Down here, man!”

The voice came from below.

He shone the light at the ground, and there it was. A small figure was looking up at him.

It wasn’t a cat.

Or a kid.

What was that?

It was the size of a boot. The thing was still looking at him.

A little goblin. Two pointed ears sticking out of a red hat and a jumble of coloured scraps sewn together any old how.

And it was holding on to the bottom of his trouser leg with one hand.

“Hello?” It was the only thing that came out.

“Hello there, leaky, what’s up, champ?”

The urge to laugh came over him. It was the most absurd thing he’d seen in his entire life, and it was happening.

“Who are you?”

“Well, my name’s Gorgorito and I’m a Magikito.”

The little brownie looked up at him, waiting for his reaction, with a rascally grin that had something of a small child to it.

“A what?” was all Axel managed to come back with.

“A Magikito, mate. What’s up, are you a bit deaf?”

And what Axel did was sit down on the wet ground to talk to it up close, which is what you do with a kid, and not run off, which is what you do with something that doesn’t exist.

It had bare feet and round its neck hung a cord with an acorn shell on it.

“Hey, Gorgorito. That thing you said, I don’t know what it is… a Magikito?”

The little brownie shut one eye and studied him closely with the other.

“Well, if you didn’t know, now you do. So what, you gonna give me a chunk of chocolate or what?”

He sat looking at it too. He did have chocolate. The odd thing, and he thought it right there, was that it hadn’t asked him any of the three things anybody would ask.

“Yeah, I’ve got chocolate… here.”

He grabbed his rucksack and started digging around inside. He took out the speaker and turned the volume down a bit. He pulled out a couple of little bags, keeping them under his raincoat so they wouldn’t get wet, and from one of them he took a chocolate bar.

“Chocolaaaateeeee!” the little brownie yelled, snatching the bar out of his hands.

Axel burst out laughing, the doubled-over kind.

“Yeah, yeah… chocolate. You eat all you want.”

The creature opened the bar the way you open a letter you have been waiting for.

Good thing it was a tiny little thing.

And that’s what went on for a while. The kid watched the little brownie eagerly biting into the dark chocolate bar. It was still raining, but a lot less than before. It was about to let up.

After a good handful of bites, the little fellow spoke again.

“Mmm, lovely little chocolate, thank you kindly, sir.”

“You’re welcome, Gorgorito.”

Axel ate a piece of chocolate too before putting it away. A small bite, no rush. As he swallowed, his throat closed up for a second, as if his body remembered something.

Nonsense. It passed right away.

“Listen,” he said. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

The little brownie wiped his mouth with the back of his tiny hand and looked at him as if he had just been asked what colour water is.

“Well, being.”

“Right, but here. On a track, at night, in the middle of nowhere.”

“I go where things happen.”

Axel waited for him to say something else.

“And nothing happened at my place?”

Gorgorito let out a short laugh, one of the kind that stays inside, and started looking at the chocolate he had left, and didn’t answer that.

And while he was turning the music off and putting his things back in the rucksack, twenty hours of tiredness came down on him all at once.

He didn’t fancy walking any further, and that was new too: since that morning he hadn’t once fancied stopping.

He swept the headlamp along the sides of the track and saw it straight away.

“Where you off to, kiddo?” the little brownie asked him as the kid stepped off the path and headed into the woods.

“I’m sleepy.”

It didn’t take him long to find a perfect spot to set up the tent. He pitched it as best he could and crawled inside with his rucksack.

He poked his head out before zipping up. Not a trace of this Gorgorito guy. Funny thing… maybe he really was having hallucinations.

He got into the sleeping bag and lay there in the dark, and in those thirty seconds before falling asleep the day went past him, which was the thing from every night.

And nothing came.

He waited for it a moment, the way you wait for a sneeze that doesn’t quite arrive.

He was asleep in under a minute, and he didn’t wake up until the sun hit the fabric.