A Daughter's Wish

A Daughter’s Wish (The World is Never Silent) A man and a woman lost their baby daughter. She was abducted in the middle of the night. They had no idea by whom. They searched desperately for her. For forty years. But there were no traces of her or her kidnappers, until… Suddenly, a clue here, a clue there… Nothing conclusive, but it led them on. They contacted the police who told them they didn’t really work cold cases. So they hired a detective who, after two months of silence, phoned them from Brazil, saying that he had a strong lead on their daughter’s whereabouts. “You had better come here for the confrontation,” he said. The parents, by now well into their 70’s traveled to meet the detective. They found him in a pool of blood in a hotel room, throat slit. But they also found notes that pointed towards a location deep in the Amazon rain forest. The parents flew there in a helicopter. They landed in a village built of white stones, immersed in dense forestation, with a palace at the center. Black scribbles ornamented the stones. The people who lived there were short, black-haired and dressed in white. The parents were shown into the palace. They recognized her immediately, although her face was covered in white powder. Their daughter sat on a throne. She spoke to them: “I have led you here, so that you may fulfill your duty.” She asked them to abduct a child that would succeed her, just as she once had been abducted by her predecessor’s parents. The mother refused and was speared by the guards. The father, however, complied. He was given an exact address: A single-storey house in a residential area between Madison and Janesville, Wisconsin. He waited outside the house, dressed in black, in the middle of the night, for the baby to stop crying. He entered through the back door. He used ether to anesthetize the infant and stood there, baby in arms, watching the exhausted parents whose faces glowed in the moonlight. The background noise: The buzz from the fridge. The distant hum of the freeway. A daughter’s wish. The world is never silent.