Diplomacia indígena desde el Programa de mujeres en la construcción de paz

Durability N/A, Size N/A, Structure N/A

Description: When most people get an email from an unknown source with a jumbled subject line and body text that simply says, “Click this,” they delete the message and mark it as spam. Some click the link, which brings up a video.

Usually, it results in a browser crash due to an archaic format and a missing codec. In those rare instances where it doesn’t, a 17-second black and white video plays. The video shows the floor of an empty bedroom. The image crackles and fades, but remains motionless. At the thirteen second mark, a pair of young women’s shoes fall into view, the audio offers up a thud, and the feet dangle a few inches from the ground, swing-ing slowly left and right for four seconds until the video stops.

Effect: The video causes suicide. Not for the viewer, mind, but for those close to her. It starts off in her pe-riphery; a casual acquaintance or someone that shares a class. But every week, the deaths get a bit closer to home.

Nothing immediately suggests the suicides are tied to the video. But after the second, the victim grows to suspect something, as the second death is always a hanging. Every seven days, another person turns up dead.

Shedding the curse requires the victim forward the email to at least two others. Those people must view the video, thus incurring the curse. A victim can find this solution after a bit of digging on the internet. Of course, the story is presented as an urban legend. The alternate solution is suicide on the part of the victim.

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He nodded. “What does the name William Dear mean to you?”

I was baffled. I said I didn’t know. A relative, maybe? He babbled something I didn’t catch, a name, Selby or something. He had lost me.

He wasn’t looking at me. I don’t think he was even really talking to me. He trailed off. I sat, embarrassed, in the smell. Did I mention he smelled bad? He smelled bad.

I started to ask if that was all he wanted. He cut me off. He said we were going to a meeting.

I said he’d asked me to do some stuff. Did he still want that done? He said, forget it.

I said, OK. Get anything you need, he said, we’re off now. He stood up, and I was greeted with an overwhelming smell of piss, and it occurred to me that maybe he hadn’t moved from that spot for a very long time. We walked to Edgware Road, by a route that took us the better part of an hour. And then we got on the Circle Line, to Kings Cross St. Pancras. The wrong way.

Anticlockwise. And then between Victoria and St. James’s Park, the thing stopped completely and we were plunged into darkness. Me, all these people, and his smell. I don’t know what was up with it. I mean, it’s normally terrible, you know that, but it took us three hours to do. And each stop, Stephen was looking straight at everyone who got on and off, even peering through the window at the end to see who was on the next carriage.

I think we’d got to Aldgate before I saw that Mary was in the next carriage along. She was staring right at me, without blinking. I tried not to let on that I had seen her. Stephen leaned over close — his breath was like rotten bacon — and whispered to me, “Don’t worry.”

I didn’t know what he meant.

At King’s Cross St Pancras we changed for the Piccadilly Line. Stephen refused to walk as quickly as the crowds around us, making the change a distinctly unpleasant experience as vile-tempered Londoners jostled and shoved us. It was as if he were making sure that Mary was following us. She was only five steps behind us on the escalators and got on the other end of the same carriage, although she did not try to approach me. We ended up back at South Kensington, which of course we’d passed about two hours ago, where again we changed and went in the other direction to Cockfosters, passing again through Kings Cross St Pancras. Which again took forever.

Each time we changed it seemed apparent that Stephen wanted Mary to follow us.

I finally said to him as we sat on the rickety District train, “Why are we going in such a roundabout route?” He smiled broadly, giving me another blast of his breath, and said, “We’re unlocking the Machine. You can’t just go there in a straight line, you know.”

As if that explained it all.

We got off at Southgate. Leaving the station, we took what must have been the most indirect route possible, finally arriving at three blocks, just off a main road. He stopped in the path, and turned back. And then he called for Mary. She ran to catch us up and walked in step with us as we advanced for the third, furthest block. I started to ask what we were doing here; Stephen hushed me with a hissing noise.

Mary tried to take my hand. I pulled it away and put it in my pocket.

The glass doors hung open and the foyer had a strange smell of deadness, to it, that’s the only word I can think of for it. Next to the lifts, someone had propped a very old-fashioned bicycle.

Stephen walked up to it and stared at it for a short time. And then he nodded, and said, “About time, really.” Over his shoulder, he said, “Lift’s not working. Stairs.” It was an order.

We climbed in silence to the ninth floor, and then along the corridor to room 913, where Stephen stopped. “This is an odd place to have a meeting,” I said.

Viral Video

Stephen told me to shut up and walk in.

The main room was absolutely silent. There were about twenty shop window mannequins standing there, old ones, some without arms or hands or heads. Mary seemed fascinated by them, looking straight in the painted eyes of each one in turn. She stopped by one and looked at it this way and that, saying to Stephen, “This one looks like you.”

Stephen told me to go on through, motioning to the door at the other side of the room. I did, walking into a back room containing a busted bedframe and a standard lamp with no bulb.

I called back, now what? Stephen came rushing in now. “This isn’t right. This isn’t right,”

he was saying. He lifted up the bed frame, as if to see under it, and then suddenly tipped it right over. It disintegrated into wood, metal, broken springs with a crash that shattered the silence and seemed to echo through the hall outside. Mary followed us in, looking around like a child, as if she was seeing a vista of wonder and strangeness, not an abandoned room.

“It’s not here,” said Stephen. He seemed close to tears.

What wasn’t here? I tried to calm him down, but he started to rave about his Purpose, about the Principle, about this Selby again. A voice cut him short.

“Are you wanting to be going somewhere?” It was the policeman. The comedy Irishman.

“I don’t understand,” said Stephen.

“You don’t understand?” I said.

“I wouldn’t be worrying yourself. It’s all according to plan. A plan of great intricacy and charm.” The policeman advanced on Stephen, as if to embrace him. The room was flooded with light from outside, but even so as the policeman came forward he seemed to expand and in some strange way fold — yes, that’s it, no other word, fold — outwards. He was between me and Stephen. I couldn’t see through the blackness, just heard a whirring and a clicking and then si-lence again. The policeman stepped back. A mannequin, an old chipped one, stood in Stephen’s clothes. It had something like his face. Mary jumped up and down and clapped her hands. “That was so clever,” she said.

“Can I be having your key, young lady?” said the policeman. She reached inside her shirt and pulled out what looked like a clock key on a tarnished silver chain.

“I’m terribly sorry, but it’s time to throw in the towel, as it were.”

She nodded. I suddenly felt a great deal of pity for her. Sergeant Fox reached forward and again, obscuring her from my view grasped her head and twisted it hard. I jumped forward, crying out in horror only for the policeman’s fat arm to shoot out and stop me dead in my traps.

“Calm yourself down, wee man” he said.

Mary sank to the ground, and as I watched, I saw her skin turn inside out. Real skin turned to what looked like very old leather, stretched over a frame of brass, behind which I could see hints of cogs and levers. A doll, legs wide apart, arms limp, head cocked to one side.

I sank to the floor, head in hands, elbows on knees. “I’m going mental,” I said.

Sergeant Fox ignored me. He pulled what looked like a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and set to work undoing fastenings on the back of the Mary-doll’s head. After a minute or two, he pulled something out and handed it to me.

“This is yours, I think,” he said. “You can do what you want with it.”

249

I put my hand out and took it. I still have the thing. I don’t think I can describe it, but I might show it to you when you get back. Or I might not. I don’t know.

“Get yourself up, now,” said the policeman. “I’ll walk you back to the station.”

He would answer none of my questions on the way back to Southgate, he wheeling the an-cient bicycle.

I called in sick and went home.

I keep looking at the thing he gave me. Trying to work out what I can do with it. It keeps giving me ideas.

I don’t know though.

I miss you.

I need you to keep me sane.

Come back to me, Gina. I’m counting down the days until you get home. When you do, I’m going to ask you to marry me.

I’m going to burn this letter now.

All my love Jon

bygones