The Republic of Miracles

Chapter 3, in which a rabbit hunter has fun spying on intruders

Motionless in the thickets, a boy had not missed the arrival of the two intruders in his hunting territory. Coming to raise the snares he had set in the hope of catching a hare or a white-tailed rabbit, Philibert Tremblay had noticed Sécurpol's car parked where the road had collapsed into the river. A guy in a funny uniform and a tall, athletic redhead girl were talking near the vehicle and he could figure out that their destination was the ghost town.

His traps had yielded nothing and it was far too early in the season to pick berries, so he decided to have fun tracking the visitors. Before leaving the scene, the man wearing a sort of cop uniform activated the car's self-protection system. Philibert knew what that meant. His father had warned him against the cruelty of those he called the Urbans. In his mouth, the name sounded like an insult, to the point of spitting on the ground every time he said it. You could never be wary enough of them, he insisted.

Philibert therefore knew that, as soon as he touched a metal part of the car, a powerful electric current would pass through his body, strong enough to paralyze him, knock him out or even kill him. He decided to keep away from it. He had also noticed the weapons that the man carried slung over his shoulder and on his belt and he had no desire to serve as a target. It would be a good exercise to be able to follow them while remaining invisible.

Once he arrived at the lake, he observed the couple enter the large house with two chimneys, the one he preferred, the most beautiful, the one where he would have wanted to live if he had lived in the Ancient Times. He expected them to come out empty-handed. He had visited it often himself and knew that it had been emptied of anything that could be of any use and that could be easily moved. But they didn't come out.

However, to his knowledge, there remained in the house only a few pieces of furniture too large to be transported and a few ripped mattresses on which he himself had occasionally slept... As he approached the door, he heard their voices, but he understood nothing of what they were saying.

His mother often criticized Philibert for showing too much curiosity for what it could bring to his clan. His father added that he had more courage than sense. His father who, according to his mother, didn't have much sense either. He had concluded that it must have run in the family... "In any case, Philibert, your day is ruined," he said to himself. So, he entered, but not before having developed an escape strategy in case of emergency. If the couple ever noticed his presence, he could always run and take refuge in the basement of a neighboring house.

The voices came from a room at the back of the house and he headed that way. Arriving at the stairs that led to the cellar, he couldn't believe his eyes. A hole was now clearly visible on the landing wall! A door? He must have passed this wall a hundred times without even imagining that it concealed a secret passage. He remembered all the stories about hidden bunkers he had been told. In fact, several had been discovered, even here in this village. But each time, they no longer contained anything of interest.

He walked down the steps to the landing and peered into the hole. He crossed to the other side, leaned down and saw, far below, the cop and the redhead. He heard "...be ready to close it if I give you the order. Go ahead!" He then saw the girl pull the door towards her and then, not long later, the two of them disappeared into the opening.

He wanted to follow them, then he said to himself "I have to go tell that to Grandma! She will know what to do". He ran back upstairs and left the house. He was barely twenty minutes from his clan's encampment.

He thought, "They won't believe it when they learn out what I found. I will become the hero of the day, of the month! No, of the year!"

This is the translation of my novel published in French on Wattpad, under the title "La République des Miracles". For this translation, I used Google and Chat GPT (among others). I don't claim to be perfectly bilingual, so any suggestions are welcome to improve it. THANKS.

*** All the illustrations that accompany this novel were created using Artificial Intelligence on the NightCafe Studio website.