In my mind I pictured our school at night, with the light of the full moon shining through the windows, the corridor leading into the darkness. I imagined the classrooms as silent crypts with the desks covered in dust. The hands on the wall clock never move, they remain eternally still, always set to zero o’clock in the midnight school.

‘That’s all bullshit,’ I said. I learned that word from him. Bullshit.

‘No. I saw it,’ he said.

Karcsi leaned very close to me. His lips were white from powdered sugar and shiny with grease.

‘The meat worked,’ he said, ‘just not right away. Only in my dream.’

I got scared. I didn’t want him to tell me, but I asked anyway.

‘What did you see in your dream?’

‘I saw Mom and Dad. They came to me in my dream. Not like before when I used to dream about them, but for real. They didn’t look like they used to, and they didn’t talk like they did in life. They didn’t appear to me as people. They appeared to me as their essence.’

I swallowed hard. He went on.

‘They’re on the other side, in the midnight school. They told me how to get across to them. This is the place where I can cross. These lands. These fields. This is where the barrier is the thinnest.’

He seemed much older than his years as he told me all this.

‘Have you seen the place? The . . . school?’ I asked.

‘Only the shadows of it. There are no words to describe it.’

I didn’t even want him to.

‘They said they would try to come over. But it can’t be done here. You’re here as guards. To stop them from crossing. Killing them.’

‘We’re not killing anybody. The crops are not alive!’ I snapped.

‘Calm down. It’s good that they can’t come over. They wouldn’t be themselves. During the transition they would lose what makes them them. That’s why I have to cross.’

‘You?’

‘Yes, me.’

‘How?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? I have to die.’

Very few people commit suicide in the village. Nobody has any real reason to. Sometimes somebody does something that they can’t live with afterwards. For instance, Tibi Kovács ran over his own son in his truck. It was an accident, the child was standing in his blind spot. Still, Tibi still couldn’t forgive himself. I can understand, I couldn’t have forgiven myself either. Tibi hanged himself in the basement of his house. We buried him, just like everyone else. Or sometimes someone has a mental illness. You can sense a sort of melancholy in them, it lingers around them like a scent. They often end their lives out in the fields.

One thing about suicide victims, though, is they always turn out to be revenants. They always come back.