He shuddered and suddenly opened his eyes. Darkness reigned in the room. However it wasn’t that which impeded him from seeing. Lying on his cotbed, on the ground, Ayalal watched the remaining children. Their breathing was light, monotonous. The boy sat up slowly, trembling, clinging to the blanket. Altogether, counting himself, they were thirty-two children, lying a little more than an arm's length away from each other and - except him - they all were sleeping.
He tried not to make a sound as he got up. He took the blanket with him on his back, like a cloak that he dragged across the floor, and went out through the door that had been left cracked open. Ayalal walked only with the socks on his feet, stopping in front of the next door for a few seconds. Lysa, along with the other ladies who took care of them, slept in that room. He bit his lower lip and shook his head, carrying on to the lower floor. He was too old to ask her to sleep in her bed. He was too grown up to be afraid of the nightmares that would not let him rest. He didn’t want to give the other children another reason to make fun of him.
The child peered into the kitchen, making sure it was empty before entering to sit by the fire. A small flame swayed between the burned logs, struggling to remain lit. He curled up on the blanket and lay on the ground, huddled, only his face visible, watching the faintness of the fire. Sometimes it disappeared completely, leaving only embers in its place, only to be reborn, a moment later. Ayalal closed his eyes, unable to sleep. Outside, the wind that flowed into the city, coming from the various tunnels, shook the windows shutters, making its way in through the slits. It frightened him. It was a sort of invisible monster that, if it could get in completely, would devour him. He shuddered, shrinking more.
Ayalal didn’t know how long he was in that position. Out of the orphanage, the wind settled. The monster had grown tired and had gone. Outside the kitchen, the wood of the stairs snapped. Ayalal opened his eyes and hurried to crawl under the kitchen table, dragging the blanket behind him. He shrank, hugging his knees, as the candlelight timidly illuminated the entrance. He saw two feet peeking from under a woolen nightgown and advancing across the stone floor to the table. The person sat on the bench, silent, waiting.
The little boy waited, heart to beat very fast, until he gained courage and peered through the space between the bench and the table top.
"How did you know I was here?" He asked in a whisper.
Lysa smiled at him affectionately and reached out to caress his black hair.
"A fairy told me."
"I've never seen any fairies here in the orphanage..."
"Ah... well... I actually had a bad dream," Lysa confessed.
Ayalal frowned and climbed onto the bench, sitting down beside her friend.
“It hurts?” He asked with genuine concern. "Did the monster harm you?"
She hesitated a little.
“It was just a bad dream. The monster does not exist.”
"Doesn’t it really exist?" He asked suspiciously. “I think it exists. Otherwise, it wouldn’t hurt you when you sleep.”
Lysa was not quite sure what to answer.
"Well, maybe it exists. We have to defeat them, then. How was your monster, Ay?” She wrapped an arm around his shoulders, pulling him to her. She watched him, seeing not so much fear, but sadness.
"There were many," Ayalal murmured. "We couldn’t defeat them. I was in a dark room, they came through the ground and grabbed me. They started biting me and there was blood... I screamed, but there was no sound. They pulled my hair, they wanted to take my head off..." His eyes grew round, staring at his hands.
The young woman offered him a kiss on his black hair, letting him finish. Only then did she ask the question that had begun to hover with the description of the dream.
"Ay, did the other children beat you again?"
“No.”
The answer had been firm and quick. Too much so, actually. His small hands tightened, becoming paler than they already were. Lysa picked him up and sat him sideways on her lap, to hug him against her chest. All the children in the orphanage had an unpleasant history to tell. Although some, like Ayalal, have no real notion of that history, others, on the contrary, had been shaped by it. And in some of them, this had brought out the pleasure of hurting. Ayalal kept those wounds to himself. He told her only about the monsters who attacked him in nightmares, not realizing what they reflected.
