A blond girl decided not to join us for the rest of the tour. She would wait for us in the hotel, she said, and return to the airport with us once we were back. Her face was pale in the morning light, her eyes bloodshot, but her smile was filled with relief. This also serves to demonstrate that those who are not entirely dedicated to a trip like this one should not book any of the tours at Abaddon Travels.

The last I saw of her was her waving goodbye, then returning to the hotel.

We left town. The streets grew even emptier than before. It seemed like a movie set to me, something fake. It reminded me of a slaughterhouse at night, a place that lies dormant, awaiting a new batch of warm flesh to digest in the morning.

The bus driver didn’t introduce himself. He was a fat, balding, brown-skinned man. He chewed tobacco and at times spat out the window. A black Magic Trees air freshener hung from the rearview mirror. The radio was tuned to a local station that alternated between broadcasting news in the local dialect and playing the local pop hits, songs written in an atonal key and sung by voices imitating nightmares in the language of gods long dead. I think this kind of pop will be a big hit in the Western world someday, but we’re not ready for it quite yet.

The bus was stuffy, the bouncing was relentless. My hangover got the better of me and I drifted into a sort of half-sleep.

I awoke to a disturbance on the bus. All the passengers were gathered by the windows on the left-hand side like a flock of birds, everyone anxious to see. The driver yelled at them in his broken English, but nobody stepped away from the window. Jufus just sat in his seat, a peaceful smile on his face. He paid no attention to the commotion. Someone yelled at the driver to stop; he responded by putting the pedal to the metal. As the sight passed, the tension de-escalated, and the passengers went back to their seats. Nobody talked; they all sat frozen, listening to the top ten local hits on the radio. Behind me the German pensioners were quietly chuckling, and I figured they were laughing at the rest of the tourists – laughing at their shock.

‘What happened?’ I asked Nora.

She shrugged. She seemed past caring. Her black eyes looked out the window.

‘The girl we left behind. The blond one?’

I nodded impatiently.

‘She was there in the woods. Like a statue. She was impaled on a stick.’

She made a hand gesture to show the wood was sticking out of the blond girl’s body around her collarbone.

Now I understood the silence that had settled upon our fellow tourists.

‘I think she was still alive,’ Nora said, then kept on staring out the window.