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Later, after the meeting had ended, the head of the committee beckoned Khieu and his friend Duch aside. "Tomorrow night, you two will stay at the temple and watch over the bodies."

"Why?" Normally, Khieu would never have thought of questioning an order, but the very strangeness of it made him ask. After all, corpses were corpses, and nobody bothered to sit over the dead that littered the countryside. "Why, First Brother?"

Even stranger was the fact that the committee head chose to answer. "You heard how some of the men were muttering? One-Eye and the rest? I’m afraid we haven’t been able to stamp out superstitions as thoroughly as we should have, here." He leaned close, smelling of fish paste and stale sweat. "I wouldn’t put it past some of our less educated comrades to...arrange things to suit their superstitions. You understand?" 

Khieu hadn’t, not quite, but nodded anyway. "Shall we leave in the morning?"

The committee head patted him on the shoulder, approvingly. "Not till afternoon. Stay there while they dump the bodies, and then guard them overnight. Once nothing happens the first few days, nobody’s going to worry about anything anymore. Remember," he added, "I’m depending on you."

Khieu felt joy flood through his young heart. The committee’s members never handed out praise or approbation lightly. "You won’t find us lacking, First Brother."

"I know I won’t." The committee head clapped him on the back and stood up, to show that the meeting was over.

***********************************

The temple was a roofless ruin, carved grey stone walls mostly overgrown with creepers. It had once been very large, but most of it had succumbed to the jungle. Only the entrance and the first two rooms still had anything resembling a recognisable structure.

It was very old. Nobody knew how old, not even in the village nearby around which the new town had been built to house the counter-revolutionaries and the intellectuals. It had been a ruin as long as the oldest greybeard in the village could remember, and the villagers told stories about it and avoided it. They said it was a "bad place."

When Khieu and Duch arrived, it was three in the afternoon and the sun was beginning to sink towards the west. The two boys had bamboo staves and an old M16 rifle with half a magazine of bullets, which Duch carried. They were just in time to see some of the older Khmer Rouge bring in one of the people from the town. The man was weedy, middle-aged and dragged a bandaged foot. He even wore glasses, one lens of which was cracked across, the frame mended with tape.

"Intellectual," Duch said. "Wonder how he was allowed to survive this long. With glasses too!"

The man turned his head at the sound of his voice. "Boys! Don’t throw away your lives doing..." He was about to say something more, but one of the guards struck him across the back with a bamboo pole, almost knocking him on his face. Two others grabbed him by arms and dragged him into the temple, the others following, one idly swinging a pickaxe. Khieu and Duch watched indifferently. They had seen all this before.

Duch was the same age as Khieu, but taller, tougher, louder, in all ways more suited for command. And yet for some reason it was Khieu who had the favour of the head of the committee and the older Khmer Rouge men. Maybe it was because he was quieter and more obedient, and thought to be more reliable. Duch didn’t like it one bit, but it didn’t prevent them from being friends.

The two of them waited until the noises from inside the temple ended and the four guards emerged, one of them whistling a tune. Another, the one still swinging the now bloody pickaxe, nodded at the boys.

"No more today," he called. "You two had better be clearing off too. Night’s coming."

Khieu said nothing. The man looked at them once more. "You heard me? The temple spirits will be up and about in a while. Go home!"

"First Brother said we were to remain here," Khieu said.

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