

English version

This ebook, in origin "Zed Experiments series", was published as an experiment in English language with Zed Lab.

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### Filip Fromell

## The checked Moon

English edition edited by  
Carmelo Massimo Tidona

www.quellidized.it

The checked Moon

Copyright © 2012  
Zerounoundici Edizioni  
Cover: Image by David Rossetti

"Do not fight the monsters!"  
"Why monsters? When a blind man, an idiot, a murderer is born,  
this seems to us disorder, as if order was known to us,  
as though Nature acted for an end!"

(Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pecuchet)

I'm a Howlin' Wolf

I've been Howlin' all 'round your door

I'm a Howlin' Wolf

I've been Howlin' all 'round your door

I see your smilin' face

You will not hear me howl no more

(Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf )

To my father

### The checked Moon

White. At last the room would be white again.  
Police investigations had not proved anything, and even if forensics did not explain the cause of the grooves on the wall, the case was closed as a suicide.

She was no longer in any danger, still she did not feel like calling the painter.

No one should enter the room. Not yet, at least.  
She would do that alone. She was accustomed to doing things alone.  
She had arranged everything she needed on the floor: old sheets, newspapers, rollers, brushes and paint cans.

White.

She loved white.

A ladder. To reach the ceiling.

There were stains as high as twelve feet, but it was nothing compared to the walls. It did not look like blood anymore, it was so dark and clotted.

She smiled.

Usually, things start from the bottom. A career starts from the bottom, a skyscraper is built from the bottom, she too had started from the bottom, a very low bottom, but a room must be whitewashed from the top.

And that's where she started.

The roller was swallowed by the paint with a thick gurgle and she thought they had all come to the same end.

They were all gone.

The only thing that mattered now was restoring the room to its natural white.

Because white does not ask questions.

White would cover the stains.

Then she had to take care of the bars. Certainly she could not take them off by herself.

But the blood first.

The blood had to be removed immediately.

June 15 – 19:02

Alida called Luca's mobile four times before starting to get seriously worried.

The heat wave news bulletin had been announcing since the beginning of the week had come, silent as a gas cloud, but that wasn't the reason why her forehead and palms were moist and sticky.

Why wasn't he answering?

In the elegant top floor apartment in Viale Romania, one block from Viale Parioli, the silence was broken only by the television. No one was watching it. Alida was too tense to be sitting in an armchair.

After travelling about fifteen miles around the whole house, reducing stress by munching an infinite series of bread-sticks, she walked barefoot to the kitchen and opened her phone book at letter D. Before calling, she looked at the cordless, hoping for it to ring until the last moment.

She was a rational, moderate woman. She knew how much Luca appreciated her balance, but discretion does not mean total indifference for one's companion.

The phone didn't ring and no one soothed her pain informing her that he was stuck in the traffic in Muro Torto.

Alida looked at her watch again.

The possibility that Luca had forgotten it provoked her violent palpitations in the middle of her chest, and she hated him for that.

Why did she have to feel so bad?

Why did he have to make her feel so bad?

She returned to the living room, turned the television off and stared at the screen, reflecting her slender figure dressed in white.

White had entered her life along with the rabbits.  
She dressed in white for them, as a sign of respect, from the day their meat had become indispensable for her.

It was Luca's idea. A proposal that she had initially frowned upon, but now, seeing the good it had done to her, she considered the best intuition to ever come from the mind of her husband.

Rabbits acted as a sedative. And not only. They also made the night pass more quickly.

She looked at the phone and thought that if Luca wanted to get into trouble he was free to do so. At least he would learn his lesson.

Sure, good Alida, very good! Then what?

The consequences would be catastrophic. She reviewed them one after the other, and realized with dismay that all of them led to the same conclusion.

They would trace him back to her in a few hours.

Eventually she made up her mind. She started the call and put the phone to her ear.

First ring.

I reminded him twice this morning...

Second ring.

I can't go crazy each time he's not back in time...

Third ring.

Could he have forgotten?

Fourth ring.

I must hear his voice.

Instead, she heard that of the secretary of the De Santis law firm, still lively in spite of the hour. She asked her to talk to Luca Menozzatti, introducing herself as his wife.

"He left an hour ago. He had an appointment" the woman promptly informed her.

"An appointment so late?" Alida asked, less than convinced.

"It is written on his organizer, have you tried to call his mobile?"

"Not yet, I will try now, thank you."

She hung up without waiting for her reply. She was annoyed that a stranger could sense her anxiety. That's why she had lied. Even if that woman was doing her job, she was annoyed that she could poke her nose in Luca's appointments while she, her wife, was kept in the dark.

She walked a stretch of the corridor and stopped in front of the door. The heavy security locks shone in the half-light. She decided that, if Luca wasn't back in time, he would find the door locked with the extra latches.

Oh yes, this time you'll need a cannon to come in. As far as I'm concerned, you can keep ringing the door bell until your finger bleeds.

Alida examined her nails. They always grew too fast. She decided to clip them, at least she would get her mind off Luca for a while. She went to the bathroom, but froze in the doorway.

She saw Luca lying on the stretcher in an ambulance launched in traffic in the throbbing sound of sirens. Under no circumstance, even if he had been victim of an accident, they could run the risk of letting him spend the night outside. She tried to rationalize. If a tragedy like that had happened, she would have been the first to know, and at least someone would have answered the phone.

She dispelled tension by rummaging in the bathroom cabinet, she took the toiletries and settled on the terrace of the dining room, taking advantage of the evening light to do what, under normal circumstances, she would have done once a week.

June 15 – 20:48

The phone rang again.

"Who the hell is it?" the girl in the Audi asked to the man dressed in blue linen in the driver's seat.

They were parked in a cul-de-sac in the countryside of Labaro, just outside Rome.

"Work," Luca said, straightening his trousers. Then he silenced the phone and placed it in the glove box next to the gear shift.  
Alida would keep calling until he got back home, which was what he would do if Giada let him go without questions.

By mid-afternoon, while examining some files, the physical need of her had overwhelmed him. He had ordered the secretary to update his organizer, making up an appointment, and walked out wondering if she had noticed the bulge in his pants.

Come on, you can admit it. You could not say no to a fuck in the car. What's the harm in that, except that you've been married for ten years?

When Luca had become aware that a quickie on the roadside was not even part of his early twenties experiences, anxiety to return home had become as heavy as a wet coat.

The sky above was darkening quickly.

"Giada, they keep calling me, we have to go."

The girl looked at him askance. He hated to be always the one who took decisions. Not even the time for a fucking cigarette.  
"We? It's you who want to go. Or rather, have to" Her blouse was undone and he could see the erect nipples in her perfect breasts. Giada was fifteen years younger than him. A difference which resulted in an unpredictable, stormy personality. Worse than a teenager.

With a sudden movement of her arm, Giada removed the keys from the ignition.

"I'm fucking tired of letting you treat me like a whore you can screw every time you want," she said aggressively.

"I'm not starting an argument now, give me the keys," Luca said, buttoning his shirt.

"And when are you? We've been hanging out for three months, always as it suits you best. Not only you choose the days, you even count the hours."

Luca opened his mouth, but Giada struck him dumb. "You watch the clock every ten minutes, which means you're thinking about your wife, cause she's the one who drowns you in questions if you're late for dinner. You feel free to use me as you please, and always in this lousy car."

Luca tried not to, but he couldn't resist. He looked at his watch again. Luckily, Giada did not notice, she was looking out the window.

"How many times have we done it in a bed?" she asked with a hint of sadness.

Luca ignored the question. The night was about to devour every bit of daylight. He had to hurry. "Will you give me the keys?"

"I asked you a question."

"You think I don't know? Never, we never did it in a bed, what can I do if you live with..."

"I didn't ask you to come to my house, neither I demand to come to yours. But you could make an effort and get a room. Any hotel. Anything is better than fucking once again in the middle of the countryside, even a filthy motel on a highway, at least I would have something to clean myself with."

Luca was nervous and had trouble hiding it.

Why is it so hard to pull something out of the hands of a woman?

He had to get the keys back, and immediately take Giada back home. And also start to think of a good excuse for Alida.

Are you really so sure you are going back to Alida?

"It may seem silly, but won't you like to have dinner in a nice place?" Giada asked, putting her resentment aside to resort to an almost childish, naive tone.

Luca saw a crack and dived blind into it.

"Of course, you know what? Tomorrow I'll book at the Finestre, the restaurant of a friend of mine. Have you ever been there? They serve fish."

"Fish sucks!" Giada snapped, immediately darkening again. With unexpected speed she opened the door, went around the car and, standing in front of the window, studied Luca as if he were a caged animal.

"Come back in!" he shouted, tapping his elbow against the glass.

Inspecting the car keys, Giada noticed there was another bunch dangling from the keychain.

"I suppose you open your house with these," she said, showing them to Luca, who did not answer.

"You think I don't know where you live?" Giada asked with a smile, "Via Matano 14. Or is it 12?" she wondered. "Never mind, I'd recognize the gate. Green iron, in front of an elementary school. I followed you more than once, and I even sounded the horn when you didn't go at a green light. You're an idiot, Luca."

"Giada! Don't you dare..."

"Dare what? Have a chat with your wife? I'd find her bored in front of the TV. She would be pleased to talk to someone since her husband, so he says, is always busy at work. You can even keep these" she said, pulling the car keys out from the chain and letting them fall to the ground.

"I won't lock you inside your lousy Audi, to think about what an asshole you are, only because I don't want to have you on my conscience. I'll walk away to call a taxi, no fucking signal here." Giada vanished in the dusk, waving her phone.

Luca opened the car door, picked up the keys and looked out the windshield.

Still nothing, but it was a matter of minutes.

How could he have been so stupid?

For no reason in the world he should have been there.

He elbowed the window once again, with the only result of multiplying the stars in the sky of Rome.

June 15 – 21:18

They could have found hundreds of fancier ways to refer to it, but they soberly called it the room.

During the week, the room door stood firmly closed, and neither Alida nor Luca, when passing by it to go to the bathroom, seemed at all troubled by the fact that that place of blood was less than three steps from their bedroom.

When Alida walked into the room, the rabbits looked at her standing still. She couldn't read in their eyes if they were scared or calm, if they were tired of the usual food or wanted fresher water in their plastic tanks. She couldn't even sense whether they were aware that soon many of them would no longer exist.

Alida and Luca never bothered to refresh the floor and the walls, and the wear and tear of the place was unprecedented. Why restructuring the room if, when they locked themselves inside once a month, their senses were so altered that they would feel at ease even in the depths of a landfill?

Only Alida set foot in it every once in a while. Just as long as needed to fill the tanks of the rabbits with water and food, make sure that none of them had died in the meantime.

The room was completely bare.

The walls, as well as deep grooves as if someone had ripped them open with a chisel, bore splashes of dried blood, coming not only from the devoured rabbits, but also from the wounds Alida and Luca caused themselves to soothe their torment.

The places in which the plaster was dirtier were those from which, at three feet from the ground, strong chains stuck out from the walls, facing each other. Each ended with a metal collar, padded with rubber to avoid chafing, and their length had been calculated so that they couldn't be more than twenty-five inches apart.

The flooring was covered in PVC like that of a hospital ward, and the armoured door could be further locked with heavier hinges and latches. The power sockets were rendered useless by iron plates. In the corners of the ceiling, a couple of grids that could easily be mistaken for air ducts, were actually speakers connected to the stereo in the hall.

In addition to rabbits, Alida loved music too.

A lamp shielded by a plastic protection hung from the centre of the ceiling, the only part of the room where the original white paint was intact, except for some sporadic spots.

Alida made her way through the rabbits and spotted it between the food and the water tank. She bent down and picked it with the tenderness of a young doctor helping a baby to come into the world for the first time. It was not the first time she had had the feeling that that rabbit possessed something special. What made it different from the others was not the single black spot on his head, but a kind of dormant form of intelligence that was visible in the background of its pupils, dark as chocolate pralines.

How much time had it spent in the room? Two months? Alida had lost track of time. Incredible how it could always survive. Either, having learned from the carnage its companions faced, he kept at a safe distance throughout the whole night, or it was just Alida who, subconsciously, spared him, feeling that strange attraction.

She gently stroked it and approached the window, protected by heavy iron grating. Beyond the bars, less and less cars went by slowly, but none entered the building gates.

She took out the phone and called Luca once again.

His phone was off.

June 15 – 21:44

Giada hated the place where Luca had decided to withdraw. It was the opposite side of Rome, and it made her feel dirty, cheap. Less than a mile away, on Via Flaminia, prostitutes of all ages fought against cold in winter and mosquitoes in summer every night of the year.

Night had fallen, and Rome from a distance looked like an expanse of broken glass on a sea of oil.

She stopped under a streetlight. The side of the road overlooked the fields and was bordered by the typical pine trees of that area, those that grow more curved by the wind the closer you get to the sea. There had been a landslide in a tract of land, creating a rift that dropped on a dark field sprinkled with electricity pylons.

Giada looked back to Via di Torre Annunziatella, perhaps one of the longest dead-end streets in the capital. Who ends up there by mistake cannot imagine that within two miles they will be forced to reverse, unless they want to reach Via di Grottarossa walking through the fields.

Except for a couple of houses with small gardens, some cars parked in front of the driveways, and the pylons that rose spectrally, there was nothing around Giada. She took a step and nearly pierced her foot on a nail protruding from a wooden board. When she kicked it to the middle of the road, the street light wavered, then turned completely off.

She did not care.

She was thinking of her threat that had made Luca go pale. She had lied. It was clear that she would not leave that way. Besides, what taxi could she ever take with less than ten euro in her purse? She had wanted to scare him just so he understood that it was time to play less and turn their fucking into something more concrete. If he believed in the two of them.

Otherwise it was better to end it there, once and for all.  
Anyway, the story about going to tell everything to his wife had worked great. The expression on Luca's face had been a blast, and elbowing the window must have hurt as hell. What a moron!

She decided to make him a prank. Something to ease the situation, like suddenly pop in from the car window. She stifled a laugh at the thought of him jumping, slamming his head on the roof.

Suddenly, out of her purse came the ringtone she had associated to Luca.

He wanted to ask her to go back.

What a loser!

He hadn't even bothered to get out of the car and look for her.

He can wait, the jerk, Giada thought, lighting a Merit while Luca watched with irritation his flat phone. Alida's calls had drained the battery.

He started the car, manoeuvred and slowly went down Via di Torre Annunziatella, jolting over the swelling made by the roots of the pines, pushing to get out of the asphalt that imprisoned them.

He saw her a few meters from a curve. Serene and quiet. She was smoking a cigarette as if it were eleven in the morning and she were waiting for the bus.  
He pulled over, pulled the handbrake and rolled down the window.

"As a pimp you're not bad. Elegant, nice car. I'd jump in on the fly," Giada said, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke that spread in the Audi.

"Then jump in!" Luca ordered.

"Why don't you come out?" she teased him, unbuttoning her blouse.  
"Giada, I'm not kidding. There's no time!" he cried, strangling the steering wheel in his fingers.

For the first time, Giada realized that Luca's agitation was not due solely to the apprehension of returning to his wife.

There was something else.

His eyes were different.

They shone.

They were almost trembling, like the distant lights of Rome she had admired earlier.

For a fraction of a second they reminded her of those of a frightened dog.

Animal eyes.

Giada took a step forward. "Are you okay? You have a face..."  
"Please, come in," Luca cried.

Giada poked her head in from the window.

"What have you done? You're all sweaty, why don't you get some fresh air?"  
"I'm not feeling well, I want to go home and go to bed. I think I caught something."

"How boring! Me, I felt like doing it out here on the hood. Doesn't the idea inspire you?"

"I told you that I'm feeling bad. Why don't you give up? I'm not asking that much!"

"Of all our problems, the main one," Giada said, releasing the handle of the Audi, "is that you are old, old and boring. I don't know how your wife puts up with you. Poor thing. It would have been a wonderful fuck! Your problem. Now take me home if you really want!" Giada sat back and grabbed the belt.

Luca released the clutch and the Audi began sliding like a shark in dark water, until a sudden explosion forced him to stop.  
"Shit!" he cursed.

"What was that?" Giada asked.

Luca got out and walked to the right front wheel, punctured by the nail in the board. Giada remained in the car, puffing like at an algebra lesson. After a while, she rolled down her window and stuck her head out. Luca was squatting in front of the fender.  
"Are you okay?"

He did not answer. He seemed to have fallen asleep with his head bowed between his knees and his hands resting on the hood. She called again, then opened the door, reached him, and laid a hand on his shoulder. She withdrew it immediately. The linen jacket was drenched with sweat and burning as if it had been in the sun for hours.

"What's the problem? If you don't have a spare tire, let's call a tow truck," Giada said, grabbing his arm.

Luca broke free with a jerk. He was struggling against his own body as if trying to quell a violent panic attack. He felt hot. Hotter and hotter.

"Do as you like. Stay there if you like it so much," Giada said, looking up to the sky while her eyes lit up as if she had seen a diamond necklace. She had rarely seen the moon so big and shiny.

Luca moved, and this time he wasn't in command of his movements.

"So? What do we do with that tire?" Giada's voice came to him from afar. He wanted to shout, tell her to run away, but the only sound he made from his swelling larynx was a low, constant whirl, like an engine humming in the distance.

Giada spun around and stopped breathing. Luca's eyes were yellow, his pupils small and black like an obsidian pinhead. Taking advantage of the last shreds of intelligence left him by the metamorphosis, he understood that he had to place himself at all costs between Giada and the roadside. If Giada had not tried to escape as soon as possible towards one of the houses on the other side of the street, she wouldn't stand a chance. He stretched his neck to the sky and howled his frustration, provoking a dog at the next house.

Its owner, a tall and sturdy man, took a lead, went out in the garden and led it into the house, unable to stop it from barking. It was the first time it behaved that way. The man peered out the window to see what had upset him, and the only thing he saw was an Audi parked in the middle of the road.

June 15 – 22:10

For every step Giada took towards the steep edge, the creature took one towards her. Nine or ten more feet and she would find herself in the void, her arms outstretched, looking for a foothold before the impact with the ground shattered her spine.

The streetlight turned back on unexpectedly and Luca walked hunched, with his long arms limp, like disarticulated appendages. His tapering, doglike face was covered with dark hair. At one end there was, a wet, black nose, like a coal nut, kept wet by quick strokes of his tongue.

Giada stepped back and did what she inexplicably had not yet done so far. She screamed until she felt her lungs burn.

Then, a cloud came to rest on the surface of the moon, like a fresh cloth on the forehead of a patient, giving back to the night the darkness of which she was mistress. The influence of the full moon suddenly subsided and Luca stopped his gait.

It was time to act fast. Giada had to move off the cliff, get in the car and call the police to tell them that...

... she had survived a wolfman?

Or perhaps it was better to use the term werewolf?  
The car was not too far. She could get around the creature and dash toward the open door in less than ten seconds.

Luca looked up at the veiled moon, feeling the hairs on his arms tremble as if someone were blowing on them. A sudden breeze, had arisen, a gust of wind that meant death for Giada.

The clouds regained speed and the moonlight overthrew the shadows like a milky tide.

Luca put one paw before the other, forcing Giada to take another step back. As a child she had studied ballet, but she didn't resist balanced on the tips of her feet for more than three seconds.

The ground collapsed and the void swallowed her.

June 15 – 22:50

Crouched at the base of the trunk, less than three feet from the collapsed edge, Luca had to fight against himself not to jump the metal fence, plunge in the garden of the house and tear to pieces the stupid beast that would not stop barking.

The lights on the second floor of the nearby house came on suddenly. That damn dog was waking up the whole street.

Luca could not afford to make more victims. What would have happened to Alida if they had identified and captured him?

For a split second he evaluated the hypothesis of jumping from the same precipice as Giada, in the hope to pass out and wake up the next day, human again. But he was aware that his survival instinct would never allow him to plunge into the field of electricity pylons, so the only remaining alternative was moving away, staying as far as possible from any light source.

Taking risks could cost him his life.

He thought about the room. He would have given anything to be inside it, on the chain and comforted by the bars and the sealed door.

There was a noise. A soft, disgusting sound. Luca knew it all too well. His cartilages were becoming more resistant to allow more elasticity to the bones. His sight had improved to the intensity of that of nocturnal creatures and his spine had taken a more curved shape, forcing him to lean his upper limbs on the ground. His hands had finished changing into dog paws, and his feet had undergone the same fate. Claws had pierced his moccasins, freeing two bony paws, entirely covered in fur.

Luca sniffed the air, excited, feeling a sharp smell of urine on the bark of the tree. Some dog must have marked the area recently. He sniffed the trunk, relaxed his bladder and flooded the earth with stinky piss.

Then a new sound made him crouch.

A man stepped through the entrance of a villa and stopped in the middle of the road, stretching his arm forward when the dog he kept at leash insistently pointed a shadowy area on the roadside.

Luca squinted and realized that the object the man was clutching in his other hand was not a stick, but a rifle.

The dog, a giant schnauzer, barked again, with less certainty this time, as if to show that it understood it was helpless against the fury of the thing hidden in the shadows. When it hauled his owner towards the tree, Luca uncovered a row of sharp teeth. The more the danger approached, the more clearly he felt the heat of the meat he would soon tear apart.

He got excited instantly.

His pink penis came out, swollen with blood, very sensitive to the slightest breath of air. The beast was completely dominating him, and the flow of the adrenaline invaded every muscle fibre.

Blood.  
Bodies alive and moving thanks to

Blood.

Human. Animal.

Was there any difference?

Reality diluted to a single instinct; quell the ferocity invading his soul.

He left his hiding place with a leap, gaping jaws foaming, drooling.

The man freed the Schnauzer and Luca studied it going around it, flattening down until his belly rubbed against the asphalt. Then he heard a shot. The man had fired. Luca threw the Schnauzer against the side of the Audi and jumped against its owner, who fired a second time, but not before he felt the claws of the beast ripping his shirt and the flesh of his chest.

The shot he exploded was not aimed at the sky. Although his hands were trembling like jelly on the tip of a fork, the man was a good shooter. Or a very lucky one.

Luca was hit full on, and his head exploded in a cloud of shredded meat and bone slivers.

June 15 – 23:16

On their first encounter, Alida and Luca had only needed a touch to know they were slaves of the same constraint.

It had happened on the bus line 80, going directly from Villa Borghese to Piazza Dalmazia.

Luca, looking for the ticket in his wallet, was swaying like a duck towards the cancelling machine and nearly ruined to the ground when the driver suddenly braked. In trying to grasp the support, he involuntarily gripped the wrist of a girl and they both felt something they later described as a kind of electrostatic shock, but much stronger and more painful.

Looking into each other's eyes, the first thing they thought was that fate had not abandoned them. It had only taken time to hit them when they least expected it.

Meeting, and consequently having someone to talk to about the evil inhabiting their bodies, was the relief they had been waiting for their whole lives. They married immediately, and the fact that their stories were almost identical was unbelievable.

They suffered from hereditary lycanthropy, they had experienced the suicide of a parent. If Luca had had to find the lifeless body of his mother on the back of the building, after she had flew down for five floors, fate had been a little more cruel with Alida; she had witnessed her father's death as the man shot himself before her eyes. No silver bullet for the occasion. That only worked in movies, comics, or in some horror novels accumulating on the shelves of those who love stories of blood and death.

Luca's father did not know that he married a woman suffering from lycanthropy, as well as Alida's mother was unaware of living with a man who, when going on a business trip, spent the night of full moon in a hotel room, bound with leather straps to the heater. When the children were born, the illusion that they had been spared the curse lasted until their seventh year of age, when the disease broke out with brutal violence. The shock was unbearable and both Luca's mother and Alida's father decided to end their own lives and the torments of their bodies. The respective spouses, terrified of having to raise creatures in whose veins there wasn't human blood, whose bodies, every four weeks, became receptacles of obscenity by means of blisters, deformed joints and flickering tongues, entrusted them to two different institutions, along with a broad sum of money.

Disappearing without a trace was the easier part, but also the most painful.

Alida and Luca grew well and, upon reaching legal age, considered moving away from Rome to unknown destinations. The possibility was ruled out immediately, since no benefit was greater than the security of a familiar place. A new city would have hidden traps too, although the opportunity of meeting others like them often teased them.

The effects of a night of full moon were the same for both, as well as the way they faced them, unchanged over the years. Both Alida and Luca used what, when they went to live together, they named the choke. A crude but effective method, perhaps the only really good one among the several they had experienced until then.

For a period, before starting to chain herself, Alida took massive doses of sleeping pills two hours before the full moon. Her body sank into a trance until the next morning, when the metamorphosis had completed its cycle and her human features had been restored. A system that had never failed, but with which she had risked not waking up anymore.

The night that Luca was killed, the same old horror movie was being broadcast at the usual time; the body of Alida began to burn from head to toe. A feeling similar to a powerful and extensive sunburn.

She locked the front door with the bolts, picked a Howlin' Wolf CD from the pile, put it in the stereo and pressed play. She went to the bathroom and undressed quickly, trying not to think about what would happen to Luca if he hadn't been back home within the next five minutes. She maxed the volume and the roar of the bluesman reached her. Completely naked, she checked her skin in the mirror over the sink. It was still smooth and flawless, but the first effects of the metamorphosis had already affected its colour, which was now a pale pearly shade. The area of the body where the burning intensified to the point of being unbearable was the back. She cocked her arm back, touching the central vertebrae of her spine. They had become more prominent and sharp. Even jaws and teeth were changing before her eyes. She ran her tongue over her teeth, but gently, since they were already as sharp as blades.

She felt excited, sensitive.

A thought that just a few minutes before wouldn't have even touched her came to her mind. She wanted to be fucked on all fours, she wanted several men to mount her together.

She felt the pleasure spread through her.

How could Luca resist the mating instinct every time the metamorphosis burst in their bodies?

She never thought that he was cheating on her. Their bond was too strong. They belonged to one another.

It had been the pain to join them.

She walked into the room.

The temperature was lower than a few hours ago, but she didn't perceive it. The temperature of her body was almost 39C°.

"Moanin' at Midnight", one of her favourite songs of the bluesman of the Mississippi, came out of the speakers, saturating the air.  
The rabbits moved against the walls, trembling. She tried not to look at them.

She was already feeling guilty for what they were going to suffer, but the music hardened her senses, and she firmly approached the chain.

She lubricated the metal ring, padded with soft rubber, and did the same thing with shoulders and neck, to prevent chafing and the consequent sores. She turned off the light, opened a niche in an opening on the floor and picked a key she used to open the collar and put it on. She put the key back in, crouched and waited to get used to the darkness, while the eyes of the rabbits brightened.

She closed her eyes, abandoning herself to the electricity coming from the speakers. When she opened them again, while the pain in her chest was intensifying and the little animals were starting to move again with suspicion, she received with a retching of bile the huge full moon that appeared behind the grid. No cloud was surrounding it, and the bars of the window drew on its immaculate surface the grid of a checkerboard.

How many times had her eyes absorbed that image?  
There it was, as punctual as midnight. And imperfect, because of the iron bars crisscrossing over its bright belly.

A checked moon.

But were those bars really there to protect her, or so that the world could keep living without knowing of her existence?

She would have given her soul for a mountain moon, a desert moon, a polar moon a thousand miles away from any human being whose safety could be in danger.

Alida didn't tie herself for herself. She tied herself for others. If there were only creatures of her species in the world, she would not have needed chains. The choke would never have existed. But she was the minority, the mistake, the monster, the murderess, the atrocity. She was Saturn, evil carnal example of gloom and doom.

When a solitary cloud leaned on the moon, turning it into a yellow blindfolded skull, Alida felt a pleasant sensation of freshness. She thought about Luca and wondered if he too, wherever he was, were benefiting from that weakening of the moonlight. The comfort only lasted a couple of minutes, and when the moon shone again, a rabbit landed softly next to her, with a jump like the frame of a damaged film. Hydrophobic, Alida grabbed it between her teeth. She clenched her jaws until she heard the snap of its spine, then arranged it in her mouth, adjusting the fragile head under her molars. She closed her jaws and shattered it like a walnut in a nutcracker.

She howled, and many people shivered in their beds.

June 15 – 23:00

When Luca fell to the ground, his head blown away by the shot, Manuel Bracconieri ran to the Schnauzer, lying on its side next to the Audi. He knelt and knew immediately that nothing could save Balbo. Judging from the bump on the car, the force with which it had crashed had been devastating. It was no longer breathing, its pink tongue was limp as a flag in a windless day.

Manuel ran toward home. He had to call the police and ask for an ambulance. The wound in his chest was burning as if someone had rubbed salt in it. The claws of the wolf must have cut deeply.

Where the fuck did that beast come from?

He had seen enough documentaries on TV to know that the size of a wolf wasn't close to that of a Saint Bernard.

Before going through the iron gate, he looked back at that being he had been lucky enough to bring down without further damage to himself. That beast, and for sure police would confirm, must have escaped from the garden of one of those rich men with villas outside Rome, who kept tigers and crocodiles by their pools.

How can you keep a two hundred pounds beast in a house? What do you feed it, human beings? But above all, what...

What the fuck...

Panic.  
Intense vertigo and blurred vision.

Impossible...

One moment...

Manuel's knees buckled like the bottom of a water-soaked cardboard box, he laid on the ground and slowly backed away, rubbing his ass on the asphalt. Nausea came as the immediate consequence of what his eyes were unable not to watch.

The body of a man laying on the asphalt.

His clothes torn as if he had been the victim of the wolf.

No fur, no fangs.

Skin, normal skin, pale and colourless, since his heart, given that a shot had devoured his skull, had obviously stopped beating.

He lay where a few minutes before the creature had collapsed, as if someone, to play an evil trick on him, had switched the two bodies while he was crouching on poor Balbo.

The police lights, preceded by the cry of sirens, lit up the last stretch of Via di Torre Annunziatella.  
An ambulance was coming, too.

To Manuel, time started flowing again only when he saw the agents getting out of the car in front of the house before his.

A couple in bathrobe and tracksuits pointed at him from afar. It was them who had called 113 after the double shot had ripped the stillness of the night. Manuel did not move. Next to him, with his fingerprints on the trigger, was the rifle with which he had killed a stranger.

Everything will be fine, he kept telling himself, while his eyes kept going from the agents to the corpse of the man in blue linen.

I am not a murderer.

The cops got back in the car, set it in motion and reached Manuel's house.

I killed a wolf, not a man.

He was chanting that like a prayer.

I killed a wolf, not a man.

I killed...

Manuel left the ground when two cops hauled him by his arms.

June 16 – 00:32

Together with the forensics, a second ambulance arrived on the scene.

The girl, identified as Giada Bascherini and found lifeless at the bottom of the slope after a twenty feet jump, was the first to be taken to the hospital for further tests.

The driver and nurses who would take care of transporting the second victim, the lawyer Luca Menozzatti, were smoking silently, watching the operations of the agents around the corpse of the man. The adrenaline rush and the anxiety to provide for assistance quickly had abated as soon as they had realized that the face of the corpse was a chunk of mushy meat.  
Manuel Bracconieri, in shock, sat handcuffed in the backseat of a patrol car while, a few yards away, inspector Brembati was patrolling the area, wiping sweat from his forehead from time to time with a crumpled handkerchief.

June 16 – 08:12

Four of the rabbits in the room had survived.

The smell of the blood of the tattered animals, mixed with that of the food in the tanks and the sweat of Alida, was unbearable.

In various places, the floor was covered with not-yet-clotted blood, and this time a few shreds had reached the ceiling. A chunk of meat fell to the ground with the soft thud of a wet rag.

Alida's fury, amplified by her anxiety about Luca, had been more violent than usual. The music had been over for hours, and the only sound was that of the traffic, coming through the grid.

She opened her eyes and took a few seconds to realize she was still alive. Her temples were throbbing, and a loud and familiar sound kept coming to her head at regular intervals.

A distant, urgent ring.

The phone!

She opened the niche in the floor, picked the key and freed herself from the collar. The chain fell to the ground with a loud noise, scaring the rabbits scattered around the room. Before leaving, she made sure that the spotted rabbit was still alive. There it was, next to the food tanks. It stared at her motionless, attentive, its ears pricked.

Alida reached the kitchen supporting herself on the walls of the corridor, as if she were on a ship at sea, and answered in a faint voice.  
"Yes, it's me" she said, wishing for a robe with which to cover her body.  
She looked out the window. No one was at the window in the opposite building, so she felt less uncomfortable.

She sat and listened.

When the policeman stopped talking, the cordless fell out of her hand.

She ran into the dressing room, and before she could dress she had to sit down on the bed and wait for the dizziness to grow less intense. She was weak, she should have eaten something, but her stomach was still upside-down.

She wore a light dress and sandals, she picked up the car keys and left the house.

In the elevator she noticed that her mouth was still stained with blood. She wiped it as best she could, then looked at her hands. Blood under her fingernails. She tried to clean them, then she decided against it. There was no time.

Before reaching the police station, where she had been summoned, she stopped at a newsstand and bought a newspaper. Back in the car, she opened it at the pages with the news about Rome and read in one go the article on the murder of Labaro.

Terror at the gates of Rome. Manuel Bracconieri, 34, interior designer, was arrested at dawn, following the double murder of Giada Bascherini, 23, and Luca Menozzatti, 40, north of the capital, in the town of Labaro. According to the reconstruction of the investigators, the first victim was pushed from the edge of the raise in Via di Torre Annunziatella, falling to the field below, while the man, a prominent lawyer living at Parioli, died after a gunshot exploded at close distance. The relationship between the murderer and the couple who was looking for intimacy in a street off Via Flaminia remains obscure, but it is possible that the man may have acted out of jealousy, having an affair with the girl in turn.

The article went on reporting the testimony of two neighbours, who had raised the alarm awakened by the shots, and the detail of the dog of the murderer found dead next to the victim's car.

Alida had ceased to store the information.

In her mind, there was only the sentence in the first few lines, multiplied: the couple who was looking for intimacy in a street off Via Flaminia.  
She had bought the paper to be prepared for the interview with the police, but had not reckoned she could not be ready for what she was going to read. At least she had no more doubts: Luca's metamorphosis was less angry and deprived of sexual instincts simply because he resorted to other methods of venting them in his everyday life.

He fucked girls.

Alida looked up from the newspaper and stared at the buildings of Piazza Ungheria. It was not the heat to make their contours sway, but the tears that had started filling her eyes.

June 16 – 09:47

A young cop made Alida sit down in a room smelling of ammonia and cigarettes. The walls were yellow like the skin of the fingers of a heavy smoker.

After a minute the door opened again and in came an overweight man, looking exhausted, with bags under his eyes and the large belly hidden by a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was boiling hot and seemed to be straight out of a six-hour interrogation that had not given him the answers he was hoping for. Before introducing himself, he lit a Marlboro 100's, sat opposite Alida and exhaled from his sweating nose two strands of smoke that spread over the table.

"You smoke?" inspector Brembati asked.

"No," Alida answered.

"I'm sorry for what happened to your husband." There was little conviction in the man's voice. As well as in his eyes.  
Alida did not speak.

"Don't be tense, we summoned you here just to ask a few routine questions about your life together."

"I'm not tense. Maybe you know more than I do."

"You mean the woman in the car?" the inspector asked, wiping his bald forehead with a handkerchief in bad need of being wringed out.

"That's what I read in the paper."

"Papers like to dwell on unimportant details. Dr. Menozzatti was with a younger woman, that much is true, but we can't be certain that they were intimate."  
"What do you think they were doing? Looking at the stars?"

"Perhaps at the moon," the inspector said.

Alida's throat clenched like a fist and she did not swallow until Brembati continued.

"I mean, until we receive the lab results we cannot discard any hypothesis. We are currently examining the bodies for signs of sexual intercourse, but you understand, in other words... if you already knew that your husband had an affair, that would speed up our operations."

Alida gripped the arms of the chair. "I thought he was faithful, at least until an hour ago. I know nothing about that woman."

"Does the name Manuel Bracconieri mean something to you?" Brembati showed Alida a photo of the murderer. "Maybe there was bad blood between him and your husband. It might have been a settling of scores."

"Because they dated the same woman?" Alida asked.

The inspector agreed with a nod.

"I don't know who he is," Alida said.

"Had your husband made any enemy? People who bothered him?"

"Not that I know."

"You sure?"

"Inspector, can I ask you a question?" Alida asked, staring into his eyes. Only now she realized that a dense patch of capillaries had exploded on his left cheekbone. Stress, maybe. Or alcohol.

Brembati leaned slightly forward. "Tell me."

"Did this Manuel Bracconieri" Alida asked, glancing again at the photo "suffer any injuries or wounds that don't heal and don't stop bleeding?"

The inspector didn't answer, his face remained blank, but Alida understood she had hit the mark.

"Are you wondering how I know? Don't be surprised, maybe newspapers like to fictionalize facts, but the journalist who wrote that article had to be well informed. One who liked details."

The inspector moistened his upper lip. He did not need to. Even that part of his body was sweating profusely. He spoke in the tone of someone confessing some dirty deeds to a priest, "The murderer was wounded in the chest by what looks like a dog's paw."

"His Schnauzer, probably," Alida suggested.

"Probably."

Although the idea of an innocent man in prison because of the man who had betrayed her hurt her more than the bite of the moon, she could not afford to say anything.

The secret of the race. Before anything else.

"Have you analyzed the dog's claws?" she asked, studying the small eyes of the inspector.

"What?"  
"To look for traces of skin or blood of the murderer."

"No need, it was the only animal at the murder scene. No one else could have inflicted those wounds to Bracconieri."  
A nervous silence fell in the room, broken only by the air-conditioner. The police were taking a glaring mistake, for the first time not due to incompetence of any department or individual agent.

Alida felt the first drops of sweat accumulate between her breasts. It was not heat that had created them, but the thought that soon Manuel Bracconieri would turn into a wolf in a prison cell, in front of the eyes of everyone. A very serious event for their species, who had been guarding the secret of the moon for millennia.

Tell him Alida, I beg you, tell him... they think I am a murderer, you must help me out of here! So she thought that Manuel would have begged her if she went to visit him, his face pressed against the plastic partition of the visiting room.

If she talked, no one would believe her.

She could only do one thing. Avoid more deaths.

How, Alida? How are you going to?

"Madam, are you listening to me?" the inspector asked, choking his cigarette in the ashtray. "If something else occurs to you, this is my number. Call me at any time of day." He pulled out a business card and pushed it along the smooth surface of the desk.

Alida took it without looking and dropped it in the bag resting on her knees.

Before she left the room, it seemed to her that the walls had become even more yellow.

June 16 – 23:50

The subway doors shut with a bang and the train started.

Alida looked around. There was no seat left in the carriage. She grabbed the vertical support at the centre of the carriage and waited for her stop, examining an advertisement for hearing aids. On the poster, an old man listened, smiling, to what a freckled boy had to whisper in his ear.

At the Coliseum two boys with an asphyxiated Labrador on a lead got in. Poor beast, Alida thought. Then all happened too fast for her to move out of the way. The dog, pulling the arm of its owner, approached her leg, sniffed it and bathed it with a sudden splash of urine. Alida stepped back, treading on the foot of a man who was reading the newspaper. She turned to apologize, but the man had already turned his back.

No one had noticed anything.

Not even the owner of the dog.

The only one watching Alida was the Labrador, with a look of satisfaction on its muzzle, as if to say didn't see it coming, uh?

The smell of urine became more pungent and Alida wondered if she was the only one to smell it so strongly. Probably she was, since the passengers were still not even glancing in her direction.

The train slowed down crossing near a construction site and Alida felt a tingling in her belly, that soon turned into an unbearable itch.

She had to pee!

The smell of the Labrador pee had stimulated her bladder and now holding it was impossible. Her hands moved by themselves and quickly unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down along with the panties. She squatted on the rubber floor and did it there, at the base of the pole to which other passengers were holding.

While the stream of hot urine flooded the floor, spraying her buttocks, the only look level with hers was that of the Labrador. It stared at her, its tongue lolling at every jolt of the train. Its eyes had changed. They were no longer fun and playful, but sad, incredibly human and familiar.

Alida awoke with a start at 03:21, with her bladder in pain. The first night alone in the big bed.

She went to the bathroom and peed for so long that she almost fell asleep again, then she went to the kitchen, annoyingly disturbed by the dream that had no intention of wearing off.

The look of the dog. Lost, hurt.

She had always believed that dreams were a kind of evacuation, like the nocturnal pee she had got rid of. She opened the fridge, took the carton of milk and drank half a glass, leaning out from the window.

Shortly after, she remembered the mug shot the inspector had shown her.

Manuel Bracconieri. The murderer of her husband.

That's who those scared eyes belonged to.

June 17 – 14:01

The rough and impersonal facade of the prison of Rebibbia reminded her of the orphanage where she had grown up.

As a child, she believed that that place was a former prison, where children were locked never to be let out again. Or maybe a prison proper, disguised as an orphanage, because even there, even though no one had ever gotten in trouble with justice, windows had thick iron bars, the same that would have accompanied her for the rest of her life.

Her room looked over the large courtyard where, in daytime, she played hopscotch or with those big rubber bands bound to the ankles, but she would have given anything for a room whose view was obstructed by a hundred-stories skyscraper or a mountain touching the clouds.

At least she would not have suffered the torments of the moon.

The checked moon.

She had begun to call it that as a child, because of the bars behind which it appeared to her.

Those pieces of iron seemed to her the most useless thing she had ever seen. They should have protected her, instead they made her feel like the most fragile being on Earth.

She only liked one thing of that grid. It was the only thing in the world that could harm the moon. The bars made her suffer, yes, because they maimed her. Since she hated the splendour of that perfectly round disc, she was pleased that there was something that could ruin its image, branding it as a slice of grilled cheese. The moon burnt her skin, but most of the time it was Alida who challenged it, laughing in its face, shouting that it was ridiculous with that kind of checkerboard on, as if a brave child had climbed up there and scribbled on it to play tic-tac-toe.

Entering the prison, she thought that it hadn't been difficult to obtain the permission to visit Manuel Bracconieri.

She had fished out from her bag the business card of the inspector and called him, saying she wanted to see the prisoner.

"I think the wife of the victim should be granted that," she had said. "And I want to look the man who made a widow of me in the eyes."

The inspector had surrendered easily and set an appointment for her the following day, right after lunch.

Down the corridor the guard on duty had told her to follow, Alida approached another policeman who escorted her into an antechamber, where the inspector was waiting. The only difference from the day of the interview was the packet of cigarettes sticking out from the pocket of his shirt. Marlboro red. Soft. They must have been out of 100's.

"Remember what I told you on the phone," Brembati said. "We are exceptionally proceeding against the norm, so you are subject to more restrictive rules than those of a normal visit."  
Alida did not flinch.

"A guard will be there for the whole duration of the visit, which will not exceed fifteen minutes. You are not allowed to bring anything inside except this." He gestured to the policeman to hand him a bug that Alida studied, frowning.

"You want to record us?"

"You're not the only one who wants to hear what this man has to say."

"Problems with the investigation?"

Brembati smiled bitterly. "I don't remember a single case for which we hadn't. There might be developments, an accomplice. But it is still early to speculate."

An accomplice on all fours?

Or have you wondered how a man taking out his dog to pee turns into a murderer all of a sudden?

Alida grabbed the bug between index and thumb, as if it were an insect for real.

"I can do it alone," she said to the policeman who had approached to help her disguise the device under her clothes.

"That's why you agreed to let me see the prisoner," she said while hiding the bug.

"We are doing you a favour, do one to us. Fifteen minutes" the inspector reminded her, turning his back.

The policeman opened the door and led Alida in a room with large windows, from which the sunlight reflected on the surface of the tables, arranged in five rows of six.

"Please sit down, I will be behind you," the policeman said.

Handcuffed to two handles attached to the table was a man of stocky build, shaved hair, dark eyes that seemed to chase a truth impossible to grasp.  
Alida sat down opposite him, hearing behind her the noise of the policeman taking place on a chair.

Manuel and Alida looked at one another for several seconds without saying a word, although the available time had already started to flow.

Manuel was the first to speak: "It wasn't me," he said in the tone of a sentenced person to whom pardon has just been denied.  
If there were more prisoners in the prison than the times those walls had heard that sentence, thought Alida, it was impossible for the system to work properly.

"I didn't kill your husband," Manuel repeated, and Alida wondered if it had been the inspector to inform him of her relationship with the victim. "And they're right not to believe me..." he added softly, as if not wishing to be heard.

"Why you say they're right not to believe you?" Alida first words sounded fake to her own ears. She wondered whether Manuel had had the same impression.

"Because I don't believe those who say they saw the devil."

Alida felt a chill run down her arms and found a better position on the chair to dispel it.

"The police don't believe you because there is no evidence of what you saw."

"So much the better, really. The fact remains that what they have seen is not what happened. Only I know what happened, because I was there, and I was the only witness."

"What happened?"

"You mean that you don't know?"

"Why should I know?"

"He was your husband. I don't believe that you don't know what he really was."

"You're crazy. Why can't you convince them that you are innocent?"  
"Ten minutes left," the guard behind Alida said.

"I tried in every way. You want me to say it again? I didn't kill a man, I killed a monster."

"A monster, indeed, and what kind of monster?" Alida asked, feeling the room shrink around her.

"A hideous creature, a beast, a wolf!" Manuel hissed through clenched teeth. His eyes darted from side to side, stopping on those of Alida. They were terrified and bewildered. She hadn't been wrong, they were the same eyes she had seen in the dream.

"You know, don't you?" Manuel spoke in a voice so low that Alida had to read his lips to understand what he said.

"What should I know?"

"The truth."

"The truth is that my husband is dead and there were your fingerprints on the rifle. I guess that's enough."

If to save me I show myself for what I really am, they would lock me up as well. At first to examine me as the scientific breakthrough of the century, then to make me go around the world as a freak.

"You his wife, weren't you?"

"We have been married for ten years."

"Then you're lying. You don't want to say what he was because they would lock you up too. Not here, but in a psychiatric hospital."

"For doing what?"

"Because you are covering him and because for your silence they are about to give me thirty years."

"You will be given them if you deserve them. Justice..."

"What Justice? Do you think that justice works?"

Manuel laughed softly. Alida felt like a fool. She thought exactly the same about justice. Manuel persisted with a question that almost threw her off the chair: "Can you live with a burden like that on your conscience?"

Come on Alida, answer. Can you?

If she could live with their monstrosity, it did not mean that she would be able to bear the burden of not having saved an innocent man from a conviction he hadn't deserved.

"Are you sharing a cell with other prisoners?" she asked, wriggling out of the grip of her thoughts.

"Why do you change subject?"

"I asked you a question."

"We're four right now. Two sexual deviants, judging by how they look at me, and a neurotic drug dealer. They were out of single cells."

"You must have them send you in solitary confinement," Alida said, not caring what would happen when the inspector would hear the recording.

"What?"

"You must at all costs make them change your cell."

"Why? You can't suggest such a thing and pretend you said nothing."

"You let it hurt you, right?"

"Who?"  
"The creature."

"It managed to scratch my chest. Had its claws been slightly longer, it would have torn it apart."

"And doctors still don't understand why the cuts won't close, and they burn terribly, right? Especially at night."

Manuel's eyelids blinked twice, violently, as if to recover from a bad hit.

"Who are you?" he asked softly.

"Five minutes!" the officer thundered.

"I want to help you, but you must listen. Make up a fight, assault, anything against the rules, anything as long as you change cell, hoping it's empty when they put you in it."

Or those who are with you will end up in pieces under the blows of your claws, and I bet the guards won't think twice before ridding you with bullets.

"I'm sorry," Alida said, looking deep into Manuel's eyes.

She rose from her seat and the cop did the same.

"Help me," Manuel said again. "Do something to get me out of here."  
Alida turned her back and felt faint. She could feel his pain and anguish.

Manuel yanked the handcuffs that bound him to the table, large veins swelled on his neck.

"You must talk! You must save me," he shouted. "Do you understand? Your husband was a monster, but nothing compared to you if you don't do anything to..."

Manuel's plea was cut short by the heavy door that the guard closed after escorting Alida out of the hall.

The inspector had not moved from where she had left him. Alida pulled the bug out from under her dress and handed it to him as if she could not wait to get rid of it.

Brembati's face twitched in an unusual way, and the expression that ensued reminded Alida of her father when, at six years, hitting the desk with the roller blades she should never have used at home, she had dropped the model of a ship on which he had worked for months.

Anger, confusion, disbelief.

At first she did not understand, then the words of the agent explained: "Inspector, I think I forgot to turn it on..."

Brembati said nothing. In his place spoke the vein that began to pulse on his forehead, and Alida understood that disciplinary measures would be taken as soon as she left the prison.

Suddenly she understood why the man looked twenty years older than his age.  
She felt like smiling, but repressed it.

June 17 – 15:48

Someone called her and Alida turned promptly. She had just left Rebibbia and was going towards Via Majetti, where she had parked. The day had grown sultry, air clinging to her skin like an unpleasant film.

"Riccardo?" she asked in wonder.

Usually she did not like to meet old friends, she was always under the impression that she was behaving unnaturally, but Riccardo...

Riccardo is different.

The man who had once been a beautiful child and an even more beautiful young man approached Alida with a smile.

"I was behind you when you spoke to the guard at the entrance, didn't you notice?"

"I didn't see you, I can't believe it, what are you doing in a place like this?" Alida asked, looking in the large clear eyes of her dearest companion at the orphanage.

His were the first lips she had brushed.

Riccardo Reati looked away. "Let's say that the only jobs I was able to find lately are those for which, after a while, you end up with a policeman knocking at your door."

"What do you mean?"

"They have released me today," he said hastily. Only then Alida noticed the cardboard box clutched under his arm.

"Personal effects" Riccardo explained, slightly embarrassed. "All that a man can need in three years in a place like this, as you called it, is in here."

"Three years?"

"Remaining sentence. I served six."

"For what?"

"Complicity in robbery."

"How is that? You made up a team to rob a store?"  
The laughter of Riccardo hadn't changed, it was just louder and more powerful.  
"No, it's better to stay away from robbery, it's like heroin. If one goes fine you never stop, and it's easier to end up with a hole in your head than in jail."

Alida noted with pleasant curiosity that his facial expressions were the same as when he was a child. His eyes still darted from side to side, awake and feverish, and he had not lost the habit, when he was listening, to bite his lower lip with his incisors, that age and cigarettes had only made less brilliant.

"And you, why are you here?" Riccardo asked.

Alida opted for a half-truth: "Visiting a friend I had not seen for some time."

"You have to know someone quite high if you have been given permission to come today. Tuesday is not a visiting day."

Alida felt the gaze of Riccardo become heavy and fared well improvising: "I worked as a social worker and sometimes I am rewarded with favours. It's the least they can do considering how few they paid me. Where are you going now?" she asked, trying to understand if he had believed her.

"At an old aunt with whom I lived for many years. She thinks I have been abroad," Riccardo said, sporting a sad smile.  
"Raffaella?"  
"You remember her?" Riccardo was surprised. In fact he couldn't know that the only thing Alida remembered about that woman was the hatred she felt for her.

Raffaella, back then a skinny spinster, not yet forty years old, with a womb as dry as the Sahara, had taken Riccardo from the orphanage when her sister had sent her a letter saying that, before covering her tracks, she had left a son – of whose existence nobody knew – in foster care at the Children of Jesus Institute. Raffaella had thought that God had answered her prayers and, rubbing her barren womb with the gentleness with which you'd touch the neck of a child, had left the house enjoying the moment when she would be back holding the hand of his nephew.

"Of course I remember. She was the wicked witch taking you away from me to a shack in the middle of a lot of rotten trees, so I would not see you ever again," Alida said, reliving in front of her eyes the day in which Raffaella had disappeared through the heavy iron gate of the orphanage, separating her from little Riccardo and his lips that she wanted to kiss again and again and again...

"I must say that you were close. The house where we lived the first years is pretty close to what you had imagined. You always had a horror-writer imagination!"

"That became even more disturbing with age."

"Then I shall refrain from guessing what you're thinking."

During the silence that followed, neither of them felt that need to lower their gaze which often occurs when the words are inevitably lacking. Alida was certain that, with another man, that silence would have made her uneasy. With Riccardo it did not happen, because she recognized on his face the features of a child who had suffered as much as her.  
And who still suffered like her.

"If you want I can give you a ride" she offered, jingling her car keys.

Riccardo pondered the offer, curling his upper lip.

"Thanks, but I'd like to walk. Why don't you give me your number instead? I'd give you mine too if I had one."  
Alida marked with a pen the number of her mobile phone on a side of Riccardo's box.

"Call me anytime!"

"If I still remember how to use a phone."

Alida burst out laughing. They said goodbye and walked in opposite directions.

June 21 – 09:20

Brembati welcomed the news of Manuel Bracconieri being put in solitary confinement quite suspiciously.

The man had a clean record, and so far had distinguished for his more than mild, almost catatonic, conduct, resigned by now to the sentence that would earn him no less than twenty-five years of prison.

Why this sudden explosion of violence that had sent two of his fellow inmates to the infirmary?

The fact had happened at night.

Bracconieri had simply left his bed and assaulted with his bare hands the man sleeping under it, then the one who occupied one of two single beds, until the fourth prisoner had intervened and, trying to block him, had shouted loudly, alarming the whole block. Summing up the damages, he had managed to break a nose, a cheekbone, a jaw, an eyebrow arch, and half a dozen teeth.

All with fists and elbows.

What made the brutality of that episode even more discomforting, according to the report of the fourth prisoner, was that all the while Bracconieri was weeping bitterly, mumbling incomprehensible words.

Now he was in solitary confinement in an eight-square-meters cell, he had no one to talk to and he had a bog where to shit without being watched.

The only way not to think about the surprise that his old cellmates would prepare for him when he would be reinstated with the rest of the prisoners, was to focus on the crazy burning that tore open his chest.

Rather than healing, the wounds seemed to be gaining inches, sending such painful fits that he would have rather been massacred by his old cellmates than prolong that agony.

The new medications had been useless. His flesh throbbed and no scab was forming. In its place there was a mushy and purulent layer of yellowish secretion which edges, red and raised, made him jump at the slightest touch.

The nurse, after yet another check, had called the doctor for a consultation, and the two of them together, perplexed, had stood there, staring fascinated at the sores that did not heal. Their brilliant conclusion had been trying a new medicine.

After checking again the wounds and reapplying the large patch over his left nipple, Manuel lay on the mattress, slightly thicker than a cracker. He had done well to follow the advice of the woman. Something would happen soon, he could feel it inside himself, just like when an illness is about to burst out. His body was trying to tell him. Someone else's blood had begun to flow in his veins. Infected blood. The end of the month was close. Full moon. He had been wounded by a wolf. Stuff for movies. For bad Z-list horror novels.

Staring at the dark patch of moisture that had appeared in a corner of the ceiling like an evil omen of death, he felt the anxiety mount in him, oppressing him.

What would happen?

Although his only hope might be demonstrating that he had become like the man he had killed in self-defence, he could not banish the memory of those sparkling eyes that stared at him as he pressed the trigger of the rifle.

He didn't want to turn into a monster.

If the pain from the wounds was already unbearable, what would he suffer when the actual metamorphosis began?  
The lights in the corridor were switched off, throwing the cell in the darkness.  
A prisoner shouted: "Good night, assholes!", then started to laugh hysterically.  
Sleep didn't come to Manuel for a long time, and when it did it was the only consolation of the day.

The next morning he was awakened by the sound of the metal keys the jailer was fitting in the lock. With eyes still clouded from sleep, he saw the guard open the cell door.  
"You're lucky, you're going back to your friends!"

Manuel sat up, leaning against the wall.

"What happens?" he asked sheepishly.

"What happens is that moisture is bad for bones. There's a big leak upstairs and you can't stay here. Cheer up," the guard said, standing in the doorframe.

Manuel looked up at the ceiling.

The patch of moisture he had noticed the night before had grown and started to drip.

"For that?" he asked without looking down.

"That is against health regulations. Get up."

"I have been put in solitary confinement just two days ago," he said, looking back at the jailer.

"And now you're out of it. You'll be in company again, since we're running out of cells. Lately they're not behaving out there."

The guard approached Manuel, who cowered against the wall like a bug expecting to be crushed.

"If you move me there will be casualties," he said quickly, raising his knees to the chest. The guard snapped his fingers at the jailers who were waiting outside, ready to intervene if necessary. They were two and they looked identical. They immobilized Manuel as the other handcuffed him.

He made no resistance. It would have been useless.

Within two minutes he was placed in a cell on the second floor, occupied by a small, lean, swarthy man who greeted him with a creepy, satisfied smile.

Manuel did not care, he had grown accustomed to that kind of characters. He looked through the bars of the window. The clouds that the night before seemed like sponges swollen with dirty water had disappeared, and the sky was a blue so intense it seemed painted.

July 12 – 11:40

Usually it was Luca to buy rabbits.

He went to Campagnano, about twenty miles from Rome, at a farm whose owner had been a client of his a few years ago. He sold them to him at half the price and never inquired about why he needed so many and so often.

Alida had gone to Campagnano with him a couple of times, but that Saturday she would go there alone. She had never paid attention to the road, given that Luca was always driving when they went out together, but getting there wasn't going to a problem: the destination was stored in the GPS.

The phone rang as soon as she opened the door. She stopped at the doorstep, left the door ajar and answered the kitchen phone.

"Hello, may I speak to Alida?" a man asked, with warmth and a touch of shyness.

The voice of Riccardo cheered her up immediately, and she almost had the impulse to ask him to go with her.

"It's me! It was a close call, I'm going out." Then she thought about what he would say when he saw what she was purchasing, and decided that it was better not to.

"I didn't recognize you. We'll talk when you come back then, I have gotten a number!" Riccardo said with satisfaction.

"Welcome back to Earth!"

Riccardo laughed.

"Wait, I take a pen," Alida said, finding a pencil next to the remote of the small TV she kept on as background when she cooked. Riccardo dictated his number and she wrote it on a post-it notes.

"Is this the number of your aunt?"

"Yeah," he confirmed, dejected.

"Is she happy that you came back?"

"Yes, she is happy, she doesn't stop cooking."

"Then take advantage of that, I found you a little wasted." It wasn't true. He had looked in great shape; broad shoulders, muscular arms, no visible belly. In prison, he must have trained a lot.

"I am, this is why I wanted to ask if you'd like to go out, I need to walk to work off what she's stuffing me with."  
There was a moment of silence in which a faint embarrassment flickered. Riccardo was the one to speak first: "If you're busy no problem, I don't know your schedule. For now, mine would leave me plenty of time to complete the vessel of your father that you disintegrated."

Alida was stunned, then burst out in a laugh so clear that she was surprised to be still able to make such a joyful sound.

"How can you remember it?"

"Why? You, too, remembered my aunt, and then you told me just more or less twenty-two years ago."

"I remember your aunt because she unwittingly ruined my childhood." Perhaps she had been too honest. She tried to say something to make the statement less bitter, but she could only find words that would have been out of place.

Riccardo came to her aid speaking rapidly: "I'd like to see you again, really, have a chat, a glass of wine. Only if it's fine with you, I don't want to bother you, after all I don't even know if you're married."

"No, not anymore," Alida answered.

"Then you got my number" Riccardo snapped. "If you call and my aunt answers, try to speak as loud as you can. I found her deafer than she was."

Alida giggled again. When she hung up, she felt strong and full of energy like she hadn't been for a long time.

In Campagnano she bought twelve white-haired New Zealander rabbits that the seller split into two large cages, six in each. She also took new bags of food and a bag of sawdust to spread on the floor to absorb the blood.

The discretion of the seller, who clearly had not read the newspapers, ceased that day. He inquired about Luca's health, since he had let her go there alone, and Alida improvised that he was in bed with a fever. There were no more questions, she paid quickly and backtracked along Via Cassia towards home.

She parked the car in the garage and had to bring the cages to her apartment one at a time. They were heavy and the rabbits, moving, unbalanced the weight, making them hard to carry.

She freed the new arrivals into the room and engaged in filling the food tanks with crushed seeds and bread. There was water enough.

When she found herself with nothing to do, in that quiet and perfectly tidy apartment, she was hit by a depressing empty feeling that she decided to fight with blows of strawberry milkshake and yogurt.

She went to the kitchen, put the blender on the shelf of the sideboard, and her attention focused on Riccardo's number.

The first digits were 5 and 8.

Trastevere.  
It would have been nice to walk through the cool lanes after a good dinner at an outdoor restaurant.

She took her time for a short while, and finally called.

The voice of a woman with a strong Roman accent answered.  
Alida greeted her warmly and asked to talk to Riccardo, enunciating every word and speaking twice as loud as she would have done normally.

July 12 – 20:16

"The last time a woman came under my house she had a truncheon and was going to Rebibbia" Riccardo joked while getting in Alida's Yaris.

"I was thinking about a less crowded place, a pizzeria, for example," she said, starting the engine.

It was a relaxing and entertaining evening. Alida had to admit that Riccardo had the rare power to put her in a good mood. Two years older than her, he was a man who was still a boy and knew no middle ground. He said what was going through his head with great spontaneity, did not worry about the judgment of others, and listened attentively, smiling often, as if what he had experienced had slipped off him without a trace.

After the dinner Alida, who badly needed someone to positively affect her, could say she had found it at the same time when her life seemed to have sunk for good.

Riccardo asked no questions about Alida's love life. He was afraid to do like that time when, playing in the garden of the orphanage, he had raised a rock and found a coiled snake.

It was Alida's look to suggest him that.

Sometimes it was veiled by a dark patina. The glow of the black pupils was overshadowed by a fresh pain, hard to identify. She would open up if she wanted to. They stood in silence, waiting for the coffees and enjoying the cool evening. They had chosen an outdoor pizzeria, and Riccardo took the opportunity to light a cigarette. After the first breath he pointed to the sky beyond the shoulders of Alida, who turned and was kissed by the moon.

"I missed it as much as the sun," Riccardo said breathing deeply, as if he could benefit from the moonlight.  
Alida put on a forced smile. "I would gladly do without it."

"How can you say such a thing? It's wonderful, and it thrills me when it's full. Doesn't it happen to you?"

"It's not full" Alida corrected him coldly.

Riccardo looked at her, puzzled. "Are you sure?"

"You can trust me, it's missing a quarter."

Riccardo looked more carefully at the moon. "You're right, it's missing a piece, but it's imperceptible."

Alida fiddled with her napkin.

"Are you okay?" Riccardo asked.

Alida opened her mouth, not knowing what to say, and in that moment the waiter put the coffees on the table, saving her from embarrassment.

Riccardo took the opportunity to ask for the bill.

"Sorry, you were about to say something," he said after the waiter had gone.

Alida shook her head, feeling uncomfortable, and wriggled out of the impasse by asking him to tell her more about his past, to talk about some of his stories.

"You want me to talk about women?"

"Why not?" Alida said, resting her elbows on the table.

Riccardo chuckled, thought for a while, then told her of when he had been on the verge of marriage with an American. He was drifting on his memories, but Alida saw nothing but a mouth moving soundlessly. The view of the moon had deeply shaken her, like the presence of an enemy eavesdropping her secrets.

The bill came. Riccardo did his best to pay for both, but had to yield to the insistence of Alida, who managed to pay her share.

They left the restaurant, walking towards the car.

The moon was no longer behind Alida but straight in front of her.  
A shudder shook her. Riccardo saw it and put an arm around her. He wanted to kiss her, to hold her tight, and not because he hadn't felt a woman's body against him for years. That woman intrigued him. She was still a child, yet it was as if she had aged prematurely.

Under Riccardo's house, before he got out of the car, Alida reached up with the speed of a robin on a crumb of bread, and kissed him with the same delicacy as twenty years ago.

A light kiss on the corner of his mouth.

Riccardo wished her good night and got out of the Yaris.

Alida went along Viale Trastevere, climbed up the slope of Belle Arti and reached Parioli.

It did not matter how many bends she took or how many corners she rounded; the moon was always visible in the middle of the sky. If it disappeared for a moment behind a building, it stuck out even more dazzling at the next intersection.

Alida went home and listened to the voice mail while sipping a glass of mineral water.

"Mrs. Menozzatti, this is inspector Brembati. I wanted to ask if you can meet me. I have something to ask you. Call me whenever you can, thank you."

Alida stood motionless in front of the phone, sure that something serious had happened after she had talked with Bracconieri.

Maybe he listened to me and managed to be put in solitary confinement.

Before going to bed she deleted the message of the inspector. She was bothered by having his voice recorded on her phone.

July 15 – 12:31

Manuel Bracconieri had lost count of the days. He only knew that it was Friday because it was written on the blackboard in the refectory.

While eating without tasting any flavour, and not for lack of trying, he carefully looked around, his gaze passing over the heads of the inmates bent on their trays. The buzz coming from them between a spoonful of food and a bite of bread was low and constant. A quiet prayer that did not reach the ceiling, let alone heaven.

Affixed to a column behind two wardens, Manuel saw a calendar.

He had to check.

He had to know when it would happen.

"Do you ever think about the darkness?"

Manuel looked at a balding man, with lips as thick as those of a groper, who could not stop fiddling with the spoon in his dish, as if he had lost something among the fusilli. "The darkness inside our body, do you ever think about it?" he continued. Manuel ignored him.

The guards had not moved from the column. Hoping was useless. They would leave only after the last prisoner had raised his bottom off the chair.

"I believe that in our body there is no complete darkness. In the stomach, lungs, between bones, there must be a little light. Light that filters from the outside, you understand me?"  
Manuel continued to pretend not to hear.

"One day I was about to find out, I was almost there, but they found out before I could look into Sandra. I told her, I told her so often that sooner or later I would look inside her." The man took a spoonful of fusilli, sucking one between his moist lips.

Manuel stood up leaving his dish half finished, he piled up the tray in the proper container and walked over to the guards, who instinctively shook their truncheons.

"Walk away," the tallest said.

"Yes, go take a walk," his colleague added.

"Do you have a cigarette?" Manuel asked, quickly watching the column. He had been lucky: the calendar was one of those displaying moon phases as well.

"Do I look like a tobacconist?" the guard growled.

Manuel pointed his thumb to the room, over his shoulder. "Does this look like a refectory? Yet they give us food," he said, focusing on the days of the last week of June.  
It could not be earlier than that. The visit of Mrs. Menozzatti had been on the 22. He remembered that because, as they were bringing him back to his cell, he had been able to read the date on the screen of a television tuned on weather forecasts. Another week had passed so, if the cycle of food in the refectory was unchanged, it should be the last day of the month.

"Either you walk away on your own or we move you after we settle you on a wheelchair," the guard threatened, taking a step forward.

Manuel stepped aside just long enough to see the calendar a couple of seconds longer.

Next to number 31, Friday, stood out a black-filled circle.

July 15 – 23:49

"Wow! Some activity at last!" The pervert in the cell warmed up as soon as Manuel took off his undershirt and threw it on the floor.

His skin had started going on fire.

"I was wondering when you would make me have some fun!"

"Shut up!" Bracconieri growled, leaning forward with his head between his knees.

He could not sit still, it was as if someone had placed a layer of burning coals under his mattress.

He got up, walked over to the bars at the window and gripped them hard. He needed air. The night only allowed him a faint puff of warm wind that helped to increase his breathlessness.

He looked at his cellmate, who was staring at him with sparkling eyes. "Call the guards," he said breathlessly, "you're in danger. Do you understand?"

"What game do you want to play? Are you planning an updated version of cops and robbers?" the prisoner croaked with a watering mouth.

"Have them move you to another cell as soon as possible."

The little man smiled, showing a row of small and perfectly aligned teeth.

"Aren't you going to shed those?" he asked, pointing wantonly at Manuel pants. He reached out to touch them, but Bracconieri drove his hand away with a sharp blow, emitting a strangled sound.

"I like you so aggressive, come on, let me see something more."

With great pleasure, thought Manuel, while a twinge of pain crossed his back from the first to the last vertebra.

He looked at the window. The clouds had thinned and the moon floated in the sky, a cyclopean eye in the middle of the bars crossing it like the dark alleys of an ancient city. Mitigating the darkness of the cell, its rays opened small sores on Manuel's skin, from which shaggy hairs started to grow.

He grunted. The pain was unbearable.

He grabbed a tuft of hair and pulled it until he tore it away. Others sprang out, dark and hard, replenishing the bloody layer of skin.

The pervert cowered against the wall, grabbed the blankets and brought them to his throat, mumbling in terror.

Manuel raised a fist and his sharp nails pierced the inside of his hand. He brandished it over the head of the inmate, spraying it with the first drops of blood that dripped down his wrist. The man closed his eyes, waiting for death, but when he opened them again the scene he saw stunned him more than the punch that would have cracked his skull open.

Manuel was mauling his own face with his bare hands.

He struck viciously, cutting his lips, cheekbones, forehead. His eyes had disappeared behind a bloody shroud. After a final punch that dislocated his jaw, he seized the hands of the other inmate, staining them with blood, then yelled loudly: "Guaaaaaaards,"  
He barked again, twice, three times, then threw himself on his bed, blinded by blood soaking his eyes.

In a moment, two young guards came running.

"This man attacked me, take him away, please!" Manuel shouted from his bed, pointing at his cellmate. The darkness prevented the guards to see what he was changing into.

"It was him, he's crazy!" the other prisoner shouted, rubbing his bloodied hands on the sheets. "He started hitting himself!" he roared, moving closer to the bars.

The guards looked at one another in alarm.

"Get me out of here before he kills me!" the prisoner pleaded.  
"Step away from the bars," a guard threatened him, with a glance to Manuel who was slowly rising from his bed. His bones bent, an invisible weight bent his spine, forcing him to hunch. When the light of the moon illuminated him completely, the guards stepped back, supporting one another.

In the cell, in that moment, there was only one inmate.  
The other had been replaced by a hellish creature, which was coming forward jerkily like a praying mantis.

"Don't go, you must help me," the prisoner cried as he saw the cops back off. The creature grabbed him and tossed him to the farthest side of the cell.

The guards raised their weapons.

Barking furiously, Manuel hoisted the prisoner against the bars of the window until the contour of his head matched the outline of the moon. He raised his other paw and slashed his chest with a strike of his claw.

The prisoner slumped to the ground, and the eclipse he had produced, darkening the moon, vanished instantly, allowing the moonlight to revive the creature.

The policemen opened fire simultaneously, but the reaction of the beast was the same as that of a child hit by a blowgun.

There was a second burst of shots, more intense and prolonged.

The creature dropped to the floor, crawled a few feet then stopped.

When the guards moved closer to the bars again, the alarm sirens were already wailing.

"Shit!" the man who had fired first said.

The other could not speak, his gaze was fixed on the inmate mangled by the bullets.

July 15 – 22:53

The night that Manuel died, Alida decided not to chain herself. She faced the moon free from any constraint. She wanted to blow steam off, let her body burst without brakes, abandon herself to her instinct, maybe thinking about...

Riccardo?  
The preparations were the same as the previous month, except for the artist she put into the stereo. This time it was Muddy Waters, of whom she chose the album "Sail On", published in the '69.

She entered the room naked and was surrounded by music.

I'm a Howlin' Wolf

I've been Howlin' round to your door

She thought she would not mind letting Riccardo spy her, let him look at her elastic and nimble physique.

I see your smiling face

You will not hear me howl no more.

Sex, in Alida's life, had always been a secondary factor, since once a month, her body suffered so many upheavals that she couldn't demand more of it.

When I start Howlin'

Dig me a hole down into the ground

Not that her desire was weak. The problem mainly concerned Luca; he had never done much to please her.

Been there, done that.

Yeah, she understood why now, even though such a thought had not even touched her back then.

Some people call me a black panther

But my baby, she knows the way I sound
A few minutes before midnight, the moon pierced the black sky like a bull's-eye on a desert stage.

The metamorphosis had the usual devastating effects, but even without the chain the situation seemed to be under control, at least for what concerned the injuries that Alida caused herself with bites.

Suddenly she felt excited as never before. Her vagina throbbed to the point of hurting, and the desire to be dominated drowned every other impulse. The explosions of anger became so violent that, within a few hours, the rabbits were exterminated from the first to the last. Hungry and disoriented, suffering for the orgasm she would not reach, she raged with nails and teeth against the remains of the animals, achieving no satisfaction whatsoever, then started tormenting herself, biting on her right paw until she saw blood.

It wasn't enough. She threw herself against the wall, hitting with her head the iron rings of the chain. Blood flowed down her muzzle and into her mouth. She pulled out her tongue and lapped it eagerly, then her vision became dark and her legs wavered. She fell to the ground, unconscious, at the same time when the guards in Rebibbia pressed the triggers of their guns.

July 16 – 08:18

The news of the death of Manuel Bracconieri bounced from one medium to another. News, online news and press, vultures that feed on horrors and misfortunes, did not waste time to sniff the smell of carrion, and inflated the news pages with what was described as the cold-blooded execution of an inmate by two guards.

Alida, survived to the massacre she had subjected herself to, learned of the news by connecting to the first page of an online newspaper.

She had medicated her wounds, but as soon as she read the article she felt the bandage around her thigh dampen suddenly. Her heart pumped faster and blood began to well in the wound again. She kept reading, and when she ascertained that the report did not mention anything concerning creatures out of nightmares or wolfmen, she thought that Manuel had been killed before the metamorphoses affected his physique.

She heaved a sigh of relief and went hobbling to the bathroom to replace the bandage.

Manuel hadn't made it. She was saddened, but at the same time relieved that he had been killed during his first night of full moon. He would no longer suffer, and by his death the danger of being discovered had been buried too.

The secret of the moon was just hers again.

She unwrapped the bandage and touched the wound to make sure that it didn't need stitches. It was an extended cut, but not too deep. It would heal if treated properly.

July 16 – 08:31

That same morning, Romano D'Abbagli, one of the two policemen who had fired on Bracconieri, could have slept all day, as he had been suspended from service, but habit, clinging to him more than the sense of guilt, had made him start the day as if he had to work.

Except for the bartender, the bar under his house was empty.

Romano leafed absentmindedly through the Corriere dello Sport and noticed the man who had just walked in only when he ordered a coffee in a glass and some orange juice.

Romano ignored him, took a bite of his croissant and sipped the coffee, scalding his lips with the hot cup.

"Be careful! This is why I always take it in a glass," the impeccably dressed man said. The bartender put the coffee on the counter and he drank it in one gulp. "And no sugar," he said after having tasted it as if he was playing a part in a commercial.

Romano turned. "Do I know you?" He was sure he had seen him before.

"Not yet, but I'll fix that in an instant. Mauro Betti," he said, holding out his hand.

Only then did Romano recognize the LA7 television presenter who he had often called, to annoy his wife who stood vacantly in front of the TV watching his show, a scoundrel and, to use his exact words, half a fag too.

The finest moustache of a musketeer (now he could say for sure, having him a few inches from his nose) was not painted as it looked on TV, and the tan did not come from a layer of foundation, but by the clear overuse of lamps.

Romano was still a cop, and the best cops, his father used to say, are those who observe. He had never paid much heed to those words, but had to change his mind because he was convinced that the guy was up to no good. If someone like him had gone up to that miserable Tiburtina bar for breakfast, it meant that the news of what had happened in the cell of Bracconieri had somehow leaked.

After losing his job, Romano had been strongly reprimanded by his superiors, who told him never to mention what he had repeatedly reported during the interrogations.

The investigations were still ongoing, and awaiting the tests on Bracconieri's body, so that no one could have any doubt that it was the same prisoner transferred from solitary confinement a week before.

The newspapers already had enough filth in which to feast, there was no need to stuff them with more shit, especially not with stories of monsters and werewolves.

"Mr. D'Abbagli, if you have a couple of minutes, and I think you do given the events of the last few days, I'd like to offer you an opportunity. How about if we sit down?" the reporter, as well as presenter of 2030 – which was the broadcast time as well as the title of the show – suggested sweetly.

"I have nothing to say," Romano cut it short.

Mauro Betti did not flinch, he took the juice that the bartender had placed on the counter and opened a sachet of sugar.

"The juice, instead, I like it very sweet," he said, upending the sachet in it, "although I found out that I could do without it."

After stirring the juice with a long spoon, he drank a hearty swig.

"You see," he said rubbing his fingers along the hairline of his moustache, "I discovered that the particles that make up its vitamins are light-sensitive. If they are crushed while squeezing or even breaking a segment in two, this triggers a chemical process whereby they lose their nutritional value. An orange should be eaten in whole segments, to be sure to benefit of it. Between drinking this and a glass of coloured water there is no difference."

He drained the juice and scooped up the sugar on the bottom of the glass.

"Why drink it then?" Romano asked, jumping into the spider's web on his own accord.  
"I drink it out of habit," Mauro Betti said, staring in Romano's eyes, "the same habit that prompted you to leave the house this morning as if you had to go to work, knowing full well you would go back to your apartment after a walk to the newsstand, with nothing to do to pass the time before going back to bed."

Romano felt the need to swallow, but could not.

"What is the question you ask yourself the most these days?" the presenter asked him, "when you will get your job back? How long will this agony last? Whether you will end up on the other side, with rapists, murderers and psychopaths? Legitimate questions, I'd be the first to ask them myself, but for once stop tormenting yourself and listen to someone else's voice. Mine, for example."

Betti sucked on the spoon, smacking his lips, and laid it on the ceramic dish.

"How much is it?" he asked the barman.

"Five euro," said the man, punching the price on the till.

"Tell me exactly what you want," Romano said.

Betti paid, waited for the change and looked at Romano.

"Why, didn't you realize? I want to make you earn quite a lot of money," he said as his moustache became the frame of a devilish smile.

July 18 – 19:35

"What happened?" Riccardo asked in a concerned tone, holding a bottle of white wine.

Alida, on whose forehead a medication stood out, let him in house, explaining that, while she was trying to take a purse from a shelf, a box containing old jeans had fallen on her.

Riccardo grimaced in pain. "Sure you're okay?"

"I'll be better after a glass of this," she said taking the bottle. Riccardo followed her into the kitchen, noticing her slight limp.

"You can open it right now, it's still cold," he said, not realizing that she was already equipped with a corkscrew. "Forget it."

Alida poured two glasses and gave one to Riccardo, who rattled the rim of his against hers. "So here I am at your home," he said after the first sip.

Alida smiled as the wine tickled her palate. "Excuse me, but I'm not one of those who makes house tours for each person visiting for the first time," she said, leaning on the cabinet where the TV stood.

"Why, anyone does?"

"It happened to me."

"Exciting! Have you been living here for long?" Riccardo asked, looking around and finding the place clean, fragrant and tidy.

"About ten years by now."

"Always alone?"

"No, not always."

Alida put the glass down and walked to the window. It was evening. The sky, speckled with occasional clouds, was lit with warm colours. Her face was almost invisible against the light. Unable to see her expression, Riccardo was in doubt as to whether inquiring deeper in the subject or leaving it alone altogether.

"Are you hungry?" Alida asked, moving away from the window. Riccardo saw she was calm, but decided not to ask other questions nevertheless.

"Enough," he said. "My aunt is used to have dinner at seven!"  
"Oh, then I'd better hurry before you faint. I was thinking of cooking a potato tortilla, what do you say?"

"I say I'll give you a hand. Peeling potatoes is one of the few things I'm good at in the kitchen, aside from drinking wine."

"I'm usually quite good at that too. Actually it's better to take it easy"  
Alida arranged the ingredients for the recipe on the table, gave Riccardo a couple of potatoes and told him to cut them into dices no larger than two centimetres. When he was finished, he sat sipping wine, watching Alida move with confidence and studying her forms under the light dress, that occasionally gave glimpses of new inches of soft leather.

Then he remembered the game and asked if he could turn on the TV for a moment, just to see how Rome was faring in the Italian Cup semi-final.

"Sure. Do you like football?"

"Only when Rome wins."

"A true sportsman," Alida said, opening the eggs box.

The score was 0-0.

To pass the time, Riccardo zapped through the channels and stopped on LA7.

"I hate him," he said, pointing the remote control at the TV.

"Who?" Alida leaned back.

"The man presenting 2030."

"I don't watch much TV," she said, putting her head in a cupboard in search of paprika.

"Mauro Betti. One who should be in jail for what he has done. But there he is. What arrogance."

Alida approached Riccardo with the bowl in which she was whisking the eggs with salt and paprika.

"Is the moustache real?" she asked amused, without losing the rhythm.

"Come on, no one would grow a moustache like that."

"Turn the volume up. Since we're watching, at least let's hear what he says."  
"Nonsense," Riccardo said, doing as Alida asked, "That's a talk show that brings together evidence of supernatural events passing them off as real."

"Sounds interesting."

The show had just begun. Betti was in the middle of the television studio surrounded by a series of guests, among which Riccardo easily recognized Romano D'Abbagli.

"I know that man," he said, pointing at the screen.

Alida stopped beating the eggs for a moment.

"The man on the right of the presenter," Riccardo continued. "He's a guard at Rebibbia, we must have met a million times. He's the one who shot a prisoner, haven't you heard?"

To Alida it was as if someone had replaced her knees with ball bearings. The wound in her leg started throbbing again. She put the bowl down on the table, took a chair and sat down before she could plunge to the floor.

The framing of the studio of 2030 widened to show a large screen placed behind the guests, on which loomed the image of a wolf's head with fiery eyes, foaming at the mouth. Above it, in large block yellow letters, the words HOMO HOMINI LUPUS.

"What did I say? Bullshit!" Riccardo repeated caustically, without taking his eyes off the screen on which a close-up of the bold and lamp-tanned Mauro Betti appeared.

The presenter raised an eyebrow and began to speak in the tone of a magician before his final number, "The crime news in this morning newspapers reported the killing of Manuel Bracconieri, an inmate in Rebibbia prison in Rome. What was omitted is that, after his death, the agents accused of being his murderers were subjected to individual interviews, during which they reported the same hallucinatory version. I don't use the term hallucinatory lightly, since what they have described is that the man upon whom they fired was a sort of monster, a demon, or rather... a werewolf."

Betti paused and turned to Romano D'Abbagli, who seemed to have just swallowed a brick, then looked again at the camera, with an even more penetrating gaze.

The shot widened and there was an overview of the studio, with the voice-over of the presenter, "Toxicological tests performed to verify the assumption of drugs showed negative results for both. At present they are still suspended from their job, waiting for judgment."  
The camera zoomed on the face of Betti.

"Where is the truth? Where does nightmare begin and reality end? What did they actually see before shooting on the body of Manuel Bracconieri? Let's ask Mr. Romano D'abbagli, the man who claims to have killed a murderous beast that night, before it regained human shape."

D'Abbagli coughed, stammered something, then began to speak softly.

"You see now why I like football?" Riccardo asked, ready to change channel.

"Wait!" Alida started forward, knocking over the bowl with the mix, snatched the remote from the hands of Riccardo and, after having turned the volume up, kept staring at the TV, heedless of the eggs flowing slowly towards the sink.

Endless exchanges about what Manuel Bracconieri had become rose among the experts, prodded by Betti. Their thesis sank in legends dating back to Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Medieval European cultures.

After the testimony of Romano D'Abbagli, still unaware that he would not receive a single penny for his intervention, the numerous cases of lycanthropy occurred in France in the sixteenth century were mentioned. They talked about Gilles Garnier, killing and devouring children in an area infested with wolves in which, in the same period, four others were accused of lycanthropy, victims of an epidemic that expanded into Germany.

Also in Germany, a further case, that of Peter Stubbe, was renowned for its inaudible violence.

Thanks to the extensive historical data and the accuracy with which he referred to documented sources, Alida recognized among the guests professor Cesare Seda. She knew his studies, having read everything there was to know about the evil afflicting her.

With a balanced tone, contrasting sharply with the horrors he was describing, the man went so far as to demonstrate, by analyzing ancient links of kinship, an illuminating (and entirely accidental) bond of kinship between Bracconieri and Stubbe, considered one of the first serial killers in history. Accused of killing seventeen victims, women and children, he used to drink their blood and pull out their guts, acting in full moon nights.

What would Bracconieri think, had he been alive, of the sobriety of his ancestor?

The cynicism and rhetoric of the presenter made Riccardo burst: "I go to the bathroom to wash my hands and try to vomit."

Alida didn't even look at him, fascinated by the screen as if she could enter it at any moment.

Peter Stubbe.

Of course, now she remembered.

She had read with morbid seduction of its atrocities several years ago, in a book written by Cesare Seda himself, called True Werewolves.  
In the book, along with biographies of historically established werewolves, the man had devoted an entire section solely to the methods he considered valid to defeat lycanthropy.

Cannibalism.

There are stars at night...

"Cannibalism" explained Seda, who had started to expatiate on the subject, "is the practice for which a human being eats the flesh of another human being, as well as a term used in zoology to describe the act of eating members of their own species."

imperceptible if you turn your eyes on them...

"When an animal eats a fellow it is not for hunger, nor obviously as a cultural custom, like in the ritual cannibalism practiced among men, but it serves a therapeutic, healing function, which is triggered by times of maximum exhaustion of the beast, or during prolonged periods of illness."

but if you look at them shifting your gaze a little to the side...

"Animals are cannibals unconsciously and by necessity. It is as if their instinct suggested chasing a beast of the same species and eating its flesh in order to heal the illness of their own."

they shine more than any other.

The poem, stimulated by the words of Cesar Seda, reoccurred to the mind of Alida like a body resurfacing at great speed.

How did it go on?

She looked down the hall. The bathroom door was closed and the water opened by Riccardo flowed into the sink. She left the kitchen and went to the bedroom. She opened a drawer and pulled out an old notebook. She glanced at the pages, stopping at a point where, she did not even remember when, she had scribbled some verses, dedicating them to Luca.

There are stars at night

imperceptible if you turn your eyes on them

but if you look at them shifting your gaze a little to the side

they shine more than any other.

I hope that my eyes forever fully lay upon you,

that forever your retina carve my surface.

The word "carve" had been underlined, not by Alida. The line led to an arrow pointing at some words in capital letters: "about carving... I hope you never decide to slice me and see how I taste!"

Alida swallowed, but her throat had narrowed to the point that its walls were touching each other.

After reading True Werewolves by Cesare Seda, she had told Luca about the discoveries made by the man while studying cases of cannibalism among animals, and how he was convinced that cannibalism was the only way to heal lycanthropy. Luca had looked at her as if she had just strangled a kitten, dodging the issue, calling it foul. A few days later Alida had written that poem (she wrote poems often, it relaxed her nerves) and forgot the notebook on the kitchen table. Luca had found it while he was about to have breakfast and could not help reading it and commenting it with a joke.

Alida turned abruptly.

Riccardo had knocked on the door jamb and was peeking into the room.

"I'll be right there," she said. She put back the notebook and closed the drawer. Before getting up she took a couple of deep breaths, trying to release her tension.

She felt restless and excited like a lover at a clandestine meeting.

Cannibalism.  
That was the only thought that swirled in her head like a giant moth around a neon light, preventing her from focusing on any other idea.

When she returned to the kitchen, Riccardo was busy gathering with a towel the last traces of eggs on the floor. 2030, luck would have it, had been interrupted by the advertising for a brand of kitchen rolls.

"Leave it alone," Alida said, bending down.

"I'm done." Riccardo squeezed the towel into the sink, then moistened it and swiped the floor one last time. Alida did not want to look into his eyes. She was afraid that he could see the aberrant project expanding inside her mind.

"What's that, another box of jeans?" Riccardo asked pointing at the bandage hiding the wound on her thigh. Alida had not noticed that, in that position, her dress let a significant part of her left leg visible.

"Oh, nothing, it is..." without giving her them time to make up another lie, Riccardo stretched his neck and kissed her on the mouth.

July 19 – 10:12

When Alida opened her eyes, Riccardo was fast asleep in the side of the bed that had been Luca's.

They had made love, and it had been so intense, because the only memories she had of him were related to the innocence of the orphanage.  
After the intercourse, however, she had been overcome by a deep sadness, knowing that the pleasure was going to be nothing but a fragment of a life in which there could be no room for someone who was not of her same...

species...

... the act of eating members of their own species...

The memory of Seda's sentence gave her a rush of adrenaline that had the effect of a dozen coffees. When she got out of bed, Riccardo let out a deep breath and turned on his side, showing a cotton gauze which protected a wound or a burn.

Alida went to the bathroom, washed and disinfected her wounds, careful not to wet the gauze. Then she went into the kitchen and wrote a note to Riccardo, informing him that she had things to do.

Before leaving, she went to the door of the room to lock it, but a sound caught her attention. She turned the handle and peeked inside.

The air was unbreathable. The blood had clotted like stains on a butcher's apron. The food tank was upturned and moved imperceptibly. Taking care not to trample on the remains of the rabbits, scattered like banana peels in a monkey cage, Alida entered the room and picked up the container. The rabbit with the spotted head looked at her with eyes full of gratitude.

It had been imprisoned for several days, yet he was still alive, only witness of the night in which its kidnapper had been on the brink of death.

"How do you do?" Alida whispered without taking her eyes off it.  
Half an hour later, without straining the injured leg, she crossed the large hall of the National Library of Castro Pretorio, unaware of having been followed all the way.

July 19 – 11:46

The edition of Cesare Seda's book was the same that Alida had loaned from the library and read a few years ago, during her studies on lycanthropy, with the certainty that her husband, while she crouched down on the sofa in the living room, was going in and out of immaculate courtrooms and influential law firms.

You were damn right about him going in and out, he just chose slightly narrower places than the door of a court.  
While she was looking for a quiet place in which to review a copy of True Werewolves, resentment reddened her face, the reading room made her strangely uncomfortable. It was quieter than a church. Instead of the pungent odour of wax and incense, there were those of the disinfectant used on the floors and of the paper aging slowly in the cubicles of the shelves that doubled as room partitions. She sat next to a large window looking over a sunburnt courtyard where two girls in shorts were drinking from a fountain. The one in yellow shorts splashed her friend. They were having a good time, but their laughter did not scratch the silence of the library, making the scene look unreal, as if it wasn't happening just a few yards away.

Before opening the book, Alida wondered how many other hands had leafed through it from the day she had returned it.  
Judging by the excellent state, there wasn't a great demand for it. Or maybe it was just a different copy. On the cover, two animal eyes stood out against a black background. Alida turned the book and Cesare Seda smiled at her from the back cover. He was thinner, with no moustache and more hair, curly and black. Sitting on a stylish leather armchair, he was showing like a trophy, a large and menacing wolf skull with dagger-like fangs.

Alida started reading the index.

She found what she was looking for after the large chapter devoted to German folk legends. The ideas expressed in the pages did not differ from what Seda had stated during the show; he argued and confirmed that, among the various methods to stop the curse of a werewolf, the most common, especially in the sixteenth-century Germany, was to eat the flesh of another werewolf.

A concept which clearness made Alida dizzy again.  
She went on reading, refreshing notions she had already assimilated, but forgotten over time.

In the years following the fall of the Roman Empire, the meat of werewolves – regardless of whether it came from an alive or dead specimen – was used not only to defeat lycanthropy, but also to prevent it. To this end, especially among the wealthiest families, werewolf meat, highly priced, was given to children from an early age, minced and mashed up to obtain a soft pulp called sugus, since they could not munch it.

Alida then dwelled on the case of Bernard Biop, the cannibal of Paris, wondering why Seda has put it in that part of the book.

She obtained the answer after a few lines. The true story of which Biop had made himself protagonist validated the thesis of the professor about cannibalism as a cure for the curse of the full moon.  
Biop, a student of English literature at the Sorbonne, invited to his apartment Doriane Thomas, a classmate, for a revision in view of an examination. While she was repeating some verses, Biop rose from his chair, took an iron bar from his cabinet and repeatedly hit his friend's head until he was sure to have killed her. After having stripped her, he removed several parts of her body, including her right breast, a stretch of her lower right limb and part of the left buttock, for a total of three pounds of meat. He laid the amputated parts on the stomach of the corpse and devoured them within the hour. What many newspapers omitted were the numerous testimonies of Bernard Biop's neighbours, and in particular the one provided by Alexianne Morel, who lived next door. The woman said she had heard many times howls come from the apartment of Biop, always at night. She had called them chilling, especially considering that the young man had no dog.

At the time of his arrest, Bernard admitted that he would never have eaten the body of Doriane if they had not been alike. No one understood the meaning of Biop's sentence, but for Seda those words corroborated his studies; that afternoon, in Paris, a werewolf had stopped his curse by eating the flesh of another werewolf.

Without realizing it, Alida had started breathing heavily, resulting in little gasps that had attracted the attention of a woman sitting at the same table. She closed the book and looked through the window.

The girls were gone and, seeing the spout of the fountain, she regretted not having bought a bottle of water from the bar at the entrance. She badly needed it.

The woman had stopped staring and gone back to taking notes.  
Trying to dispel the mist on her next moves, Alida acted on instinct and turned for the second time the tome in front of her.  
Seda seemed to have changed expression; his eyes were more winking and his smile seemed to encourage her.

To do what?

For over twenty-five years she had believed she would never meet a being with her same blood.

Now she knew two. And they were both underground.

July 19 – 15:24

"Do you remember the murder of Laparo?"

"Yes, I was in prison when it happened."

"The man who was killed was my husband."

Riccardo did not say a word. It seemed to him that the world had stopped.  
Just out of the library Alida had made two phone calls.  
The first to her house, but nobody had answered. The second to the house of Raffaella, where Riccardo had answered immediately. He had told her that, after reading the note, he had taken a shower and left.

Alida had an urgent need to see him and talk to him in person.

"I have a meeting for a job in Piazza Verbano in a couple of hours," he informed her, "we might meet there."

"What job? Riccardo, you said that..."

"It's not what you think. It's a job like any other, I'll explain later. So, you know how to get there?"

"Yes, I'm pretty close too."

"Wait at the bar next to the pharmacy. I'll be there-in twenty minutes."

Alida arrived first and sat outside. When the waiter came, she said she was waiting for someone.

"I didn't tell you right away for fear that you would not want to see me anymore. We had been married for ten years. The night when he was killed he was with a younger girl. She died, too Thrown off a cliff."

Riccardo took off his sunglasses and looked at her straight in the eyes.

"Why did you decide to tell me now?"

"Maybe because of what happened tonight."

The waiter returned with his block for orders.

"What are you having?" Riccardo asked, pushing back his chair from the table to cross his legs. Alida remembered his large blue eyes well, but not enough to avoid being astonished for how bright they were.

Like those of a wolf?

"Alida, do we order?"

She absently leafed through the menu. "An orange juice" she said to the waiter.

"Me too," Riccardo ordered "with two drops of vodka." Then he lit a cigarette, waiting for Alida to explain the reason for their meeting. She did not waste time. She was so direct that Riccardo, caught off-guard, had to ask her to repeat.

"You heard me, don't make me tell it again. I'm already making an incredible effort to talk about things I don't even want to think about. You must have done some weird stuff to end up in prison anyway."

"I don't think this is the place for such talk," Riccardo said, looking around. He drew a breath of smoke and blew out a long trail that remained motionless for a few seconds, waiting to scrounge a ride from a gust of wind.

"We're talking about it right here and now." The determination of Alida shook him up.

"Very well, as you will," Riccardo gave up, "the answer is no, I never dug up a body. How did you even think about it?"  
"Well, you could just say that" Alida said. She had never thought that one day she could have been disappointed because a man did not dig holes to exhume corpses.

"Let me finish," Riccardo said, bringing back the cigarette to his lips. "If you want to know if I ever managed to exhume one, that's another matter."

Alida's face lit up like a traffic light. "What's the difference?"  
"I know someone who deals with such trades. Once I was caught in the middle, but not directly. I waited in the car."

"Driver?"  
"Exactly."  
The waiter returned with the juices, put them on the table and gave the change to Riccardo, who had already put ten euro next to the ashtray.

"Will you explain what is happening?" he asked when they were alone again.

Alida, after a sip of juice, admitted, "I need to see my husband for the last time."

"Christ... what are you saying..." Riccardo could not find other words. He drank half of the juice, glad he had asked to spike it.  
"Whatever you might have read in the newspapers, the truth about the murder has never been written."

"And you think you know it?"

"Yes"  
"Why?"  
"Because it concerned us, and nobody else."

"Tell me."  
"I must first find a way to have his body in my hands."

"It's crazy."

"It's the only way to get rid of him."

"What do you mean?"

Alida took her time and answered Riccardo's question asking him another one. "Do you believe in our future together?"

Riccardo did not answer.

"If I don't do that for which I'm asking your help, it's useless for us to keep seeing each other. It would amount to nothing, and not because I want to. I have to untie a knot I have been bringing along for a long time, and if I can't, my life cannot evolve. There can be no happiness, nor you."

Riccardo shook his head and looked at Alida, wondering what he liked most in that woman. Her resolve? The constant melancholy in her gaze?

"Tell me something," he said, choking his cigarette in the ashtray. "The knot you're talking about was already tying you back at the orphanage?"  
Alida's eyes grew bright.

"Yes," she said.

In his life, Riccardo had learned not to ask too many questions, and acted the same way that time also. One day a friend had told him, "Too many questions that most often are bothersome to answer. For this reason I almost always say yes, not because I agree, but so I no longer have to talk." It was his philosophy.

"Okay, you seem determined. Let's cut to the chase." He rested his elbows on the table and put his face close to Alida's.

Another thing he had learned was that, before plunging headlong into such an undertaking, there were a few ways to tell if the person you're talking to is telling a load of bullshit. And the first was not getting carried away by emotions.

"How much are you willing to pay?" he asked with decision.

"I don't know, I don't know, you do the price for me, it will be alright."

"Me?" Riccardo laughed. Alida frowned.

"Listen, I don't really want to get back into trouble. I can give you a hand in organizing it, but I'm not even dirtying my finger."

Alida looked down.

"And I tell you already that you're not going to spend less than ten thousand," Riccardo said, lighting another cigarette.

"Ten thousand?" Alida repeated, staring at the glass. She did not seem worried by the figure.

"Maybe even more."

"Money is not a problem."

"Do you know where he is?"

Alida looked up.

"I am speaking of the body."

"At Verano, in the family chapel."

Riccardo did not flinch. "When do you want to do that?"

"Before the end of the month, do you think it's possible?"

"I have to talk to some people. If they still work as they used to, they will want an advance before the operation and the rest on the night they will act."

"What people?"

"What people are you expecting?"

Alida corrected herself, "I meant, can we trust them?"

"They trust people who make them happy. And it takes money to make them happy. Once you have paid them, you can rest assured that they will do whatever you want, faithful like dogs."  
Alida thought that her ex-husband, wolf for one half, was the proof that the saying should be banished forever from the man's mouth.

Riccardo put the stub in the ashtray. "You know the scandal at the cemetery of Colturano when the remains of Paolo Di Piano where stolen?"

"Shut up Riccardo, I knew you wouldn't take me..."

"I'm not kidding. How many bands of professionals you think are there in Italy dedicated to this area of crime?"

"I have no idea. Honestly, I never considered the problem."

"It would be strange otherwise. Anyway, less than twenty, it's a tight network, everyone knows everyone, and every time they organize a coup they inform one another."

"I don't know whether to be reassured or disturbed that you're so prepared."  
"It was you to start the subject."

"So you also know why they did it?"

"What? "  
"The corpse of Di Piano." Alida watched two elderly ladies who were talking quietly in front of their cups of tea. She wondered how they had taken the news of the theft of the remains of the old actor.

"Of course I do, but never mind," Riccardo said.

"We're not leaving until you tell me, and don't make it up, I'd realize if it is a lie."

Riccardo said through clenched teeth, "Collecting."

"Are you kidding?"

"No. The principal is the elderly wife of a wealthy industrialist from Veneto who started a chilling collection of dead celebrities. You remember when Umberto Cometti was hospitalized for that illness before going on air?"

"Yes"  
"Before the news came out, the collector had already contacted the band that would take care to bring her the body. Unfortunately for her, the doctors saved Cometti, so now she's anxiously waiting to know who will be the next celebrity to kick the bucket."

Alida was astonished. Not even the wind could stir up her hair. Riccardo looked at her for one last time before bursting out laughing loudly.

"That's bullshit?"

Riccardo had tears in his eyes. "So next time you learn to take me for a ride," he said, regaining a modicum of composure.  
Alida stood still, then, as if someone had lit a fire under her butt, stood up, overturning the chair. The ladies turned their heads, rolling their eyes. One of them let her biscuit fall in her tea.

"You didn't need to act as an actor for me to understand that you can't or won't give me a hand. I'll take care of it myself, thank you." Alida turned and walked away.

Riccardo ran after her and grabbed her arm before she crossed the road.

"Take it easy!" he said, making her turn.

Alida swallowed the saliva that was kneading her mouth. She didn't know how much longer she could restrain herself before bursting into tears.

"I'm sorry, okay?" Riccardo said. "The story you told me is not what one expects to hear at three in the afternoon in a bar of Parioli. Did you really believe I would have no doubts?"

Alida tried to wriggle away from his grip, which was holding her one step away from the road. Riccardo had more strength, he raised his hand and wiped away a tear from her face with a fingertip.

"If you don't believe me, let me go," Alida said as soon as she felt the light pressure of his finger on her face.

"I fear for you," Riccardo said. Sincerity vibrated in his words, and Alida realized it immediately. She got closer and buried her face in his chest, waiting for Riccardo to hold her tighter. She said something, but Riccardo did not understand a single word. He took her face in his hands.

"What did you say?"

"I said that if you really fear for me you can't abandon me now."

"Alida, I know I can't..."

The eyes of Alida, trembling like stones beneath the water of a river, took his breath away. He held her and she wept again, putting one hand on his shoulder blade. Riccardo felt the scratch send him a twinge of pain. He clenched his teeth and held her tighter.

July 30 – 15:49

"If you do a rain dance, don't be surprised if it starts to rain!"  
Riccardo turned to the subway exit of Monti Tiburtini, shrouded from the oppressive heat and fumes of the rubber flooring. Like a big rock in the middle of the sea, Oscar, a huge man, was planted in the centre of the passage, a few yards from the turnstiles. People were forced to change direction not to bump into him.

They had not seen each other for years. They hugged like brothers.  
"Christ!" Riccardo greeted him, "I had forgotten of your moralizing aphorisms. Jim Morrison this time? "

"Nope, the Doors suck. It was Pasquale, the gardener of the Pelican," Oscar said, touching his shoulder with one spade-like hand. He wore a Boston Celtics tank top slipped into a pair of faded Levi's, which seemed on the verge of exploding. A chain was attached from a belt loop to the wallet tucked in the back pocket of his jeans. His feet were stuffed into wrinkled cowboy boots which heels had been eaten by the asphalt.

"Still tagging along with that ugly bird? How is he?" Riccardo asked, moving away from the exit, followed by Oscar.  
"Always more plucked, but if he saw you I'm sure he would even grow a ridge."

"No doubt."

"He would have you dangling from your balls on a pool of piranhas and settle down in an armchair waiting for your nut sack to tear apart."  
"Great picture. What do they call you now, Oscar the poet?"

There was little to laugh. If the Pelican had put his hands on him, Oscar's fancy would have been nothing compared to what he would subject him to.

Riccardo and Oscar had been in the same band. They worked for a mobster of Abruzzi, whose double chin, although he had had it surgically removed some years ago, had earned him the nickname of Pelican. Before leaving the job, Riccardo had fucked his wife, a beautiful doll of twenty-nine. She no longer had the little toes. He had been good at not being found.  
"Ricky, I didn't think you were a gravedigger anyway," Oscar admitted, pulling out a dented packet of Marlboro red from the back pocket of his jeans.

"Then you didn't understand, I told you I'm doing a favour to someone."

"And this someone, are you sure it's coming?" Oscar lit his twisted cigarette and inhaled.

"She chose the place, although I would have preferred a kiosk in a cooler place near her house."

"You'd rather not be in the cooler, you know that."  
Riccardo looked at his watch. Still four minutes to 3:30.

"We're a bit early. In a hurry?"

"I'm never in a hurry, but I like to hurry others."

"Try to relax."

Oscar leaned back against the wall.

"How you doin'?" Riccardo asked.

"Horribly. You?"

"The movie ended. The lights are on again."

"Listen to him, and he says that I speak in aphorisms. Are you out of the circle?"  
"I said that the lights are on."

"And I bet not one burned out, fuck you! If it's so good for you, though, something is wrong."

"What are you talking about?"

"If the movie ended, what did you call me for? Or is the director missing a scene?"

"I called you because we have to help a friend."

Oscar grinned satisfied, sporting a pair of gold teeth as yellow as grains of wheat.

"You've been out for less than a month and you've made a girlfriend already?"

"It's a childhood friend, we met again by chance and these aren't the details you should care for anyway. You're here to work."  
"Work! What a wonderful word, you're talented, you know? Not everyone can turn a trip to the cemetery into a business trip."  
A woman threw the two men an inquisitive look.

"It was exactly this that the Pelican liked in you. You were clever, good at fucking people. He certainly wasn't expecting you to go from words to deeds" Oscar laughed uproariously.  
"Unless you stop immediately, you'll make the trip to the cemetery in a wooden box."

"Alright, I quit, but I don't see the shovel."

"Oscar, go fuck yourself and offer me a cigarette, I finished mine."

Other people came out jostling from the subway turnstiles. It seemed that there was a conveyor belt down there, working to constantly churn out hundreds of people every ten minutes.

While Oscar was passing him a Marlboro, Riccardo spotted Alida, helping an elderly lady who was having a hard time dragging a wheeled suitcase whose wheels had stopped turning.

"There she is, come on," Riccardo said, shoving Oscar "and be careful what you say."

When Oscar stood in front of Alida she put her in shadow from head to toes. They shook hands and she felt that his was rough and dry, like that of one who worked hard for a lifetime. Oscar was careful not to tighten the grip too much: he was afraid that those small fingers could break like twigs. He smiled at her good-naturedly, but she did not reciprocate. She didn't look tense, mostly she appeared determined to attend to the matter as soon as possible and no longer have anything to do with someone like him.

Oscar knew how to read eyes and in Alida's were written the same things he had already seen in those of people who had hired him for jobs of all kinds. Those were the looks that people used to say, without opening their mouth, that there are two kinds of people in the world; honest ones and criminals.

Actually there was neither determination nor superiority in the eyes of Alida. Only a great fear. Fear that, for an intuition come out from the studies of a man that most people considered a charlatan, everything could end in a bloodbath.  
"There's a bar across the street," Riccardo said as Oscar and Alida finished probing the depth of each other's pupils.  
On Oscar's insistence, as he wanted to smoke, they sat outside, near the bus stop, where a group of kids was making noise around a footballers sticker album.  
"Let's hope the bus takes them away soon," Riccardo said, annoyed.

"Holy Virgin, seems like you never had twelve years" Oscar addressed him, pulling the chain dangling from his thigh to reveal a leather wallet swollen like a balloon. On the leather, the outline of a condom stood out. "I have a friend who has a warehouse and distributes magazines and newspapers. He gave me this," he said pulling out the sticker of a footballer.

"What's that?" Riccardo asked lightly.

Oscar's eyes widened, "Where did this guy live so far?" he asked Alida without waiting for an answer. "Watch this," he said, raising his voice to overcome those of the kids who, judging by the catcalls, had found a missing sticker. He called one with a whistle.

The boy pointed to his chest, Oscar nodded and he rose from the curb to approach the table. Holding it between two fingers, Oscar waved the sticker before his eyes. The boy opened his mouth so much as to dislocate his jaw. Alida looked at him curiously.

"It's yours if you convince your friends to move a few yards or shut up until the bus comes. We need to talk about more important things than a sticker album and you're making more noise than a stadium."

The boy nodded and ran towards the gang that had not stopped looking at him the whole time. He pointed to the table where Oscar, with a smile that flashed the gold in his mouth, proudly showed the treasure he had in his hands.

"Eugenio Francardi" he said, showing the sticker to Alida and Riccardo. "A last-minute purchase of Inter. It's been printed in limited edition. Virtually impossible to find."  
"It seems Francardi worked," Alida said. Until then she had opened her mouth only to say her name in front of the subway.

Oscar turned to the group of boys who did not take their eyes off him. They had moved a dozen yards and did not dare open their mouths. Oscar made the thumbs-up sign, put the sticker on the table, and struck it firmly with the palm of his hand a couple of times.

"Do we order? I'm thirsty."

"I am under the impression that table service is not taken into account in Monti Tiburtini" Alida said.

"I'll go in, what do you want?" Riccardo asked, rising from his chair.  
"A big Peroni and a sandwich with sausage and artichokes," Oscar said.  
Alida ordered a cold coffee and, when she was alone with Oscar, waited for him to break the ice.

"I've been knowing Riccardo for over ten years," he said, tapping the base of the packet to make a cigarette jump out "and if what he told me is true, I know that you managed to make him fall worse than ice on the road."

"What did he say?" Alida asked, trying not to be too exalted.

"That the lights are on, but there is one last job to do."

"The lights are on?"

"Yeah, just like when a party ends, you know? There's always the last one to leave, who keeps drinking the bottoms of the glasses of those who have gone and picks up the peanuts off the floor. That would be me. Then there are those who suddenly decide to say goodbye to everyone and go out to sober up and tidy up their minds. Riccardo."

"And what are you waiting for to go out?"

"I don't remember where I left my coat," Oscar replied with a bitter smile.

"Another aphorism of the Pelican's gardener?" Riccardo asked, leaving the bar with a metal tray laden with glasses, a bottle of beer and a couple of sandwiches.

"No, it's mine this time, but much deeper than it seems, isn't it, Alida?" he finally managed to make her smile.  
Oscar poured the beer and drank the first glass in a gulp. He virtually devoured the sandwich in just one bite as well.  
"Is this for you?" he asked, pointing to the other with his mouth full.  
"Yes, do you mind?" Riccardo said, grabbing it before Oscar could get his hands on it.

"Sir, the bus is coming!"

Oscar turned.

The boy, who had suddenly appeared, could not take his eyes off the sticker of Francardi. It had ended next to the Peroni bottle, from which large drops of water were trickling, and eventually would wet and ruin that valuable collectors item. The boy looked really worried. He would do anything to save Francardi from the condensation of the beer, but he didn't dare to move. Not as long as that sticker was still property of the biggest man he had ever seen. Oscar shielded his eyes with his hand as if he was on lookout duty on a patrol boat. "You're right, boy, here it is!"

For a moment Alida feared that Oscar would make the sticker disappear in his wallet and tell the boy to beat it, but that didn't happen, and she no longer felt so incredible that such character with a mastiff neck, gold teeth and a past in prison was the person to whom Riccardo had addressed to lift the lid off her husband's coffin. When the sticker passed from the giant hands of Oscar to those of the boy, she was not able to decide whose smile was the broader.

"Everybody is willing to do anything," Oscar said, "but everyone has his price."  
"And what would yours be?" Alida asked without much preamble.  
"The one Riccardo told you a few days ago. Ten."  
"Tell her about the guarantee," Riccardo said to Oscar, he grimaced like a salesman who forgot to give you your change.  
"Of course, this is a concession I never do, especially these days, when no one knows a good deal from a finger in the ass, but it seems to me that this is a special job, isn't it? Behold!" He spread his arms as if to consolidate in a great hug the union between Alida and Riccardo "I have here the old Ricky Lionheart and one of the most beautiful women in Rome, who I hope someday will become for him something more than a friend. How could I not meet you halfway?" he winked at Riccardo who ran a hand over his face to induce him not to tarry any longer. Alida looked at him questioningly, he reciprocated with a smile that seemed etched into leather.

"Our friendship is only our concern and I'd rather not have to return on this matter," Alida said, not taking her eyes off Riccardo. "You were talking about a guarantee, what is it?"  
"Nothing in advance. The ten thousand after the work is done and you'll no longer have the pleasure to see this ugly face, unless you want to invite me over for dinner sometime."

"And if for some problems we can't do what I'm paying you for?"  
"I won't ask for a penny, of course." Then he frowned and turned to his friend. "It seems to me that the lady has some doubts; she just said the word problems. Riccardo, did you tell her about me a little?"

"Yes, he told me about you," Alida answered first. "It seemed to me like I was at the cinema watching a crime movie by Umberto Lenzi."  
"I prefer Corbucci, I like to grin. If it was about taking your child to school or pay a visit to the tobacconist to pay a bill I would be the first to tell you to find someone else, but when it comes to jobs for which you need more than a drop of blood in the brain, there's no better artist than Oscar."

"Artist?" Alida asked, frowning.

"You don't have to listen to everything he says," Riccardo said.

"You mean I'm not an artist of crime? In my veins runs the blood of Pretty Boy Floyd or Dillinger or, what the fuck do I know?, Lupin!"

"Oscar, fuck you, cut it short, we have to put the pieces together to get everything organized perfectly, don't go talking about criminals dead in the thirties and cartoons, otherwise we leave immediately and thank you very much for your fucking useless help!"  
"All right, as you like, but then don't ask me to stop and sign autographs when you realize that you can be an artist without knowing how to use a chisel or a fucking brush."  
"When do we start?" Alida asked to put an end to the pantomime.  
Riccardo folded his arms across his chest and let Oscar speak.  
"The perfect day would be Friday."

Alida leaped from her chair as if struck by a shock. She looked first at one, then at the other man. "Friday? We said we would go before the end of the month."

Oscar rolled his eyes and glanced at Riccardo as if to say "is she always like this?"

"The perfect day would be Friday," Oscar repeated slowly, hinting that there was more coming, "because there will be a full moon and we could go without flashlights and without running the risk of being caught, but on my classy jaguar-faux-leather organizer the only white page is the day before, Thursday, after which I will be abroad for a bargain for the Pelican, and I don't know how long it will take."

Alida seemed relieved. "Thursday is perfect." she turned to Riccardo with eyes as bright as drops of resin.

"We'll meet in Piazzale del Verano, in front of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, at midnight. Walk, taking the car would be too risky and the area is well connected by night buses." Oscar had shed all traces of Neapolitan accent and his tone had become at once practical and professional. "You can also use the subway. It closes a few minutes before midnight. Get down at Policlinico stop. It is close to Verano, but if you get out on Viale Regina Margherita you'll be there in fifteen minutes top. I am going to be already there. Dress in black."

"What about the money?" Alida asked.

"We'll think about that after the work is done, but it must be in cash, so I suggest you start to withdraw it already."  
Oscar got up from his chair, grabbed the empty beer bottle and disappeared into the bar, announcing that he was thirsty again.

Suddenly Alida felt her stomach shrink like a dead flower. She had no fear for what she was about to do, but for how she would react if she found out that the certainties of Cesare Seda were futile ravings. She winced when Riccardo put a hand on her leg. She felt a little shock, similar to the one she had experienced on the bus when Luca was hanging on her arm.

Impossible.  
I'd have already noticed.

How many chances are there to meet another of my species?

It must have been a simple electrostatic shock, there was no other explanation. Fate had already complied once.

Oscar came back with a new bottle of beer and three clean glasses. He sat down, filled them, raised his and improvised a strange tribal dance that made his belly shake.

Riccardo, bumping against Oscar's glass, exclaimed in a perfect Neapolitan that surprised Alida: "Amma sperà ca nu chiov!"

August 12 – 23:02

It rained for three days in a row.

The temperatures touched 19° and Rome was hammered by hail. The water mixed with hard ice beads flowed through the streets, clogging sewers and manholes. It hailed on the bridges of lungotevere, on the streets of Pigneto, where pushers and drunkards found shelter in Indian takeaways, on the churchyard of St. Peter, turned into a dismal pool, in front of cinemas, in front of closed schools and on Corso Francia, where only SUV drove at more than thirty mph.

Alida found Luca's black oilcloth coat bundled up in the cabinet of the closet. She donned it. It was slightly too long. She considered whether to take an umbrella and decided to do without it; it would have been a hindrance. She only took the keys of the house and those of the burial chapel that the Menozzatti had left her. Unfortunately she forgot the scissors she had prepared on the kitchen table.

The hail had given way to a greasy rain that would have filled a bucket in ten minutes, and the windshield wipers of cars looked like grasshoppers legs kicking to break free from the trap of a spider.

It was cold as in November.

Alida waited for the bus at the stop on Viale Liegi with a scanty group of people hidden by large umbrellas they oriented depending on the wind. The rain was beating them up, down, right, left. She might as well sit still, close her eyes and patiently wait for the clouds to empty themselves altogether.

Piazzale del Verano was poorly lit, as usual.

The car slowed on the slippery cobblestones, and when Alida reached the clearing it seemed to her to be walking on the dark side of a mountain lake; the asphalt looked like an expanse of liquid tar.

Two motionless figures without umbrellas, wrapped in long raincoats, braved the rain, leaning against the iron gate of the cemetery. Alida crossed the yard, harbouring the hope that those dripping hoods were hiding the faces of Riccardo and Oscar. It was the latter who looked up, allowing her to recognize him. She was relieved, but when the other showed his identity she had to squeeze Oscar's arm not to let a cry escape her mouth.

It wasn't Riccardo, but an old man with an almost lipless mouth and a shrunken, perhaps blind eye, considerably smaller than the other. His protruding nose, from which water dripped like from a stalactite, was like the beak of a bird. Drops of rain were trapped in the wrinkles of his cheeks, making his face look like a drenched rubber mask.  
"This is Victor, he works at the cemetery and will give us a hand," Oscar said.

Victor did not speak, he put his hood back on and looked back down at the tip of his rubber boots. Alida assessed that it must not be the first time that he lent itself to that kind of work. She was annoyed for not having been informed of the addition of a new element.

"Where is Riccardo?" she asked Oscar.

"Here," a voice muffled by the roar of the rain replied.  
Alida turned and Riccardo smiled, slipping for a moment from under the rain jacket.

"I was behind you in Viale Regina Margherita, but I didn't run to reach you for fear of breaking a leg. We must be careful, it's worse than walking on ice."

"Come on, the earlier we go in, the earlier we come out," Oscar said. "This way. From now on utter silence."

They slipped into the darkness along the perimeter of the walls of Verano.

On Via Tiburtina cars sped like speedboats, splashing water that forced them to walk one behind the other. Alida wanted to pick up the pace, get a move. The three men, on the other hand, showed a calm and confidence she did not dare to break.

The old man stopped in front of an iron door in a niche on the wall. He opened it and they found themselves in a vast area of the cemetery with no lighting.

"Menozzatti chapel is on the other side, near the entrance of Scalo San Lorenzo. It is almost impossible to enter from there, so we have to get through from inside, until we reach the wall of Pincetto." Victor spoke in a low, hoarse voice, with a strong Roman accent. He was born and lived at Garbatella, where most likely he would die as well.

"First we stop at the tool shed," Oscar said. Victor started walking and Oscar approached Alida and whispered in her ear, "That man is indispensable, he knows the alleys of Verano like his own house. He wouldn't get lost with his eyes closed. He's been the undertaker for thirty years."

"And for how many years has he been rounding his salary by promoting crime?" Alida asked.

"From the day you were born," Oscar replied quietly.

"Watch your steps," the old man croaked.

The water had dug large grooves in the ground.

"Need help?" Riccardo asked, holding out his arm.

"No, don't worry."

The tin shed was engulfed in darkness. The rain hit the roof making a deafening, tribal noise. Oscar and the old man entered the shed and came out with a heavy tool box, a canvas cloth and a couple of flashlights they did not light immediately.

They resumed their march and Alida turned to check that Riccardo was behind her.

"Look out!" he cried, seeing her stumble on the stone edge of a flooded flowerbed. He grabbed her by the arm with wonderful reflexes, transmitting a new shock through the synthetic fabric of the k-way.

"Silence!" Oscar grunted, spouting water from his mouths.

"Calm down, who are you afraid of waking up?" Alida grew nervous.

Victor, his face hidden by the hood and the blanket of rain that enveloped him like vapour, stifled a chilling laugh. "She thinks there's just us here." He chuckled again. A clot of phlegm obstructed his throat, he spat it on the ground and the rain washed it away.

"You can't see them, but there are people who pray," he added, pointing to the entrance of the columbarium, a circular building where coffins were stored one on top of another.

The columbarium was not dark like the rest of the cemetery. The light came from a torch, illuminating a tomb in front of which a dark figure stood, topped by a big black umbrella. Impossible to understand whether it was a man or a woman.

"The pain drives people to hide behind the boulders of the shrines or in the bushes of the older graves. They await the final round of the guards, and when the cemetery closes they wriggle out like earthworms to spend the night with the dead."

Alida had read that the columbarium was the area of the Verano with the highest number of buried children. Maybe that was the mother of one of them.

"Chilling, huh?" Oscar whispered with a lopsided grin on his bearish face.

The light in the columbarium went out, the figure was swallowed by the darkness and Alida was sure she heard a faint cry, a soft weep. The idea that other people were praying and crying in the rain froze the blood in her veins.

"Come on, we're almost there," Vittorio said, moving on. "There are some stairs, I'm turning on the flashlight, stay close to me."

The marble steps had been smoothed by time and the water formed a succession of small waterfalls. The old man wrapped the flashlight in a strip of cloth, and lit it, producing a cool glow that barely showed the steps. Alida, leaning on Riccardo's arm, started to go down slowly, and it was at the foot of the stairs that she felt less disoriented.

She had visited that part of Verano the day of Luca's funeral and, if she remembered correctly, the elegant building in front of them was the tomb of the Capuchins.

Menozzatti chapel was two steps from there. It could be reached walking on a path that ran along one of the two sides of the large tomb.

Victor walked to the east side of the tomb, disappearing around a stone corner.

The darkness was more dense and Oscar also turned on his flashlight, shielding it with his oilcloth raincoat.

"Go ahead, I'll light you from behind," he said, approaching the wall of the tomb, allowing Alida and Riccardo to go past it. They emerged into a clearing that Alida, during the funeral, had reached from another path.

That of the old man had been another shortcut.

She had been wrong in recognizing the facade of the tomb, because they had bypassed it, coming from behind.

Without Victor it would have taken one more day to reach the tomb of the Menozzatti family.

"Give me the keys," Oscar said in front of the grave.

Alida slipped two fingers into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out a large metal key and gave it to Oscar, then she looked at the sky.

No trace of the moon.

The rain created a blanket of water that would hide from view the second floor of a building.

Alida approached Oscar, who fitted the key into the lock of the tomb.

August 13 – 00:16

"Inspector, we lost her" agent Iamiglio announced as he got back in the car, tuning the radio on the police frequency.  
"What do you mean you lost her? Where are you?" the metallic voice of Brembati asked from the district in Via Guido d'Arezzo.

Before answering, Iamiglio waited for Mancuso, a taciturn cop who would have benefited from a couple of months at the gym and a few less mugs of beer, to shelter in the car as well. He was soaked. Water dripped from the brim of his hat, wetting the leather seat.

"We are in Piazzale del Verano" said Iamiglio, watching Mancuso who was wiping his face with the back of his hand.

"Have you followed her?"

"As you ordered inspector, to the entrance. When we approached, however, she was gone. Maybe she had an appointment with someone. From a distance it seemed to us there were other people, but there's a storm, even the lampposts burnt out."

"Iamiglio, you said Piazzale del Verano?" the inspector croaked from the apparatus set in the dashboard of the patrol car.

"Affirmative. We are outside the main entrance, where there is the obelisk."  
"I know where the main entrance is," Brembati said with a hint of irritation. "Is Mancuso there?"

"Yes, he's here with me," Iamiglio replied, giving him a quick glance. Mancuso was still panting and breathing as if he had been running after a thug for tens of miles.

"Well, listen to me, it's not too difficult. If that woman felt the urge to take a night walk in the cemetery and found the way to go in, I want you to find it too and bring her here immediately. She probably used a secondary entrance. There are several along the perimeter of the walls, in small niches on Via Tiburtina. Got that?"

"Sure, inspector," Iamiglio said, staring at the lights of the radio.

"Very well," Brembati concluded. "You have raincoats."

August 13 – 01:26

Stubbornly working with hammers and chisels on the edges of the marble slab, Oscar and Victor showed in a few minutes that they deserved the money Alida had taken from the bank a few days before.

While Riccardo was on guard at the entrance of the chapel, Alida followed the exhumation, morbidly attracted by the movements and the ease with which the two men extracted the heavy coffin from the burial recess.

Oscar had placed the flashlights on the small altar in the back of the shrine. Besides providing light for their movements, they created on the walls a network of shadows as dark as cracks. The air was full of moisture, mould and the smell of withered flowers and burned candles.

"We're almost there." Oscar's voice echoed as if they had been in a cave.  
Half of the coffin protruded out of the tomb.

"Need a hand?" Riccardo asked, without abandoning his position.  
"If the old man doesn't die, we should be able to make it."

Victor, who had not yet removed his hood – for which Alida was thankful – yanked the coffin by its brass handle. With a last effort they succeeded in laying it on the ground.

Oscar was out of breath. The old man wasn't. He sat on the edge of a still unoccupied recess and pulled out a cigarette.

"See that you don't leave the butt on the ground," Oscar said.

Victor ignored him and rubbed the match three times on the wet wall before he could light it. The smell of sulphur added to that of death.

Oscar leaned on the toolbox, pulled out a crowbar and pushed it under the cover of the coffin. He levered with it and the wood gave way with the loudest noise they had made since they had set foot in the chapel.

Alida looked away and walked over to Riccardo, who kissed her lightly flushed forehead.

There were other rumours of broken wood, then that of the cover being placed on the floor as gently as possible, and then the voice of Oscar, tough, authoritative, "Old man, move your ass, the lady has things to do."

Oscar went out and stood in front of the shrine. "Our job is half done," he said to Alida, "I really don't give a damn what you have to do with the body of that poor thing, but do it quickly because in an hour at worst I want to be in a place where people speak and breathe. There is a towel next to the crate, you can use it if you want to lay the body on the ground. A minimum of caution seems due."

Alida felt ablaze. The worst offence she had committed in her life was occupying a parking space reserved for the disabled, now she had just been reproached by a criminal who drew a living uncovering coffins.

"We'll be waiting outside, hurry," Riccardo said, moving away from the entrance to let Victor out as well. Alida wondered if the plans of the old man included other exhumations, perhaps also with Oscar.

Luca's coffin was a few feet from her, defiled and dimly lit by the flashlights, placed too high to light it up properly. She walked to the altar, took one of them and lit up the body, immediately regretting not having entered the funeral home the day of the funeral. At least she would have been prepared to the grotesque effect of the aesthetic treatment made necessary by the shotgun blast that had devastated Luca's face. Those who had taken care of him had done an amazing job, but they hadn't been able to prevent his face from taking the unreal and sinister unnaturalness of wax statues.

Alida remembered the bloodless and unnatural face of Pope Giovanni Paolo II, repeatedly shown in the news during his funeral in St. Peter's Square.

She had had several days to reflect about how to act, but at that moment she could not move a muscle. It seemed to her that her senses, except sight, had stopped working. She did not perceive any sound, nor smell. Even the sensation of holding the flashlight was gone. She was only allowed to see what she had before her eyes.

Luca was wearing a suit she had never seen. After what had emerged from the newspapers, that the night of the murder he had been with a younger girl, none in the Menozzatti family had asked Alida to take care of the funeral, realizing full well that the man she married had died twice; once for the shot and once because he was unfaithful.

The body had withered to the point that the suit, rather than worn, seemed to be laying on the torso and legs, seemingly too large in several points. His hands were joined on his chest. His fingers had become withered twigs of a lighter hue than that of his coat, and he looked like an old man.

Death, if it catches you before your time, has a unique value. It is capable of showing how you would have become if your heart had not stopped beating.

"There are lights," Riccardo cried.

The blood of Alida froze as if the temperature of the tomb had lowered by 15°.

"Alida! Hurry up!" Riccardo peered from the entrance of the shrine. "We have to go now!"

Alida frantically rummaged in the pockets of her coat. The scissors were gone. Either they had fallen on the way or she had forgotten them home. She had imagined that moment a hundred times, since she had involved Riccardo in that insanity, and the scissors had to be used to cut one of Luca's earlobes. She would have swallowed it once she was back home.

She looked at the tool box, leaned over and poured its contents on the floor. Hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, nails, files. Nothing useful.

"Alida! It's an inspection of the police, Oscar and the old man escaped!" Riccardo cried.

"I'm done!" Alida hissed, crawling closer to the coffin. "I'm done!" she repeated, opening her mouth and placing her head next to that of Luca.

August 13 – 02:19

The agents Iamiglio and Mancuso found the gate of the Menozzatti chapel open. They stopped in the doorway, pointing the flashlights inside.

"Shit," Iamiglio said. Mancuso said nothing, but seemed to agree.

They entered.  
Near the uncovered coffin, someone had spilled the contents of a toolbox. Against the wall they noticed the uprooted marble slab.

Both were familiar with the grim piece of news of which Luca Menozzatti had been the victim; Iamiglio had been in the team sent in the night of the alarm in Via di Torre Annunziatella. What the uncovered coffin was doing on the floor of the family chapel was a mystery whose resolution did not depend on them. They had to return quickly to the car and inform the inspector. Iamiglio told that to Mancuso, but he took time to point the light on the thin face of the corpse.

"Look there."

Iamiglio looked at the freshly-torn ear of the corpse and vomited his dinner on his feet.

August 13 – 02:14

Alida and Riccardo had not the faintest idea about how to leave the cemetery. Retracing the way they had come was unthinkable. None of them had taken note of landmarks, and walking in the open they would run the risk of running into more cops.

"There may be more of them," Riccardo said, peering from an outer corner of the chapel of the Capuchins.

"Are you sure?" Alida asked, one step away from him.

"If they realized what has happened it's likely that they have already called for reinforcements."

"How did they find us?"

"Maybe it was a normal patrol. Too bad you didn't switch the flashlights off, now they will see the chapel from afar."  
"I had no time, I got out as fast as I could."

"We have to move, find a hiding place. Come!" Riccardo grabbed Alida by the arm and jumped back in the rain.

"I don't see anything, slow down," she implored him, trying to hold him back. There was no way. He would have even dragged her on stone rather than being caught again.

He turned sharply to the left on a marble staircase, identical to that which had led them to the Menozzatti chapel. He put Alida in front of his body and climbed, pushing her from behind. When they reached the top, they looked around.

"They're down there," Alida said, pointing to a spot where the other staircase was.

Riccardo said nothing. From there they had a very good view. In addition to the light beams of the cops, they could see the entrance of the chapel, still lit by the flashlights they unfortunately had not turned off.

"Who says they are cops?"

Riccardo looked at Alida. In fact he had not thought about that.

Oscar had been too hasty to draw that conclusion, and even faster to escape along with the old man.

"I mean," Alida continued, "you said that there are people in the cemetery even at night."

Riccardo looked back at the figures patrolling the plot of the cemetery, at the bottom of the stairs. Their attention was attracted by the light in the chapel. They found the gate open, entered, left after a couple of minutes, penetrating the surrounding darkness with their flashlights. Riccardo put one arm around Alida and they stood still while the men climbed the staircase, no more than ten yards from them. The crackle of a radio could be heard, and a male voice said various agitated words such as "inspector" and "Verano".

Riccardo grabbed Alida's hand and told her what he had in mind; they would follow the policemen to the exit, before more agents flooded the cemetery and started to comb it.

"What if they already called?" Alida asked.

"We can't know and we can't stay here to find out."

They moved at once. Within ten minutes, taking advantage of the noise of the rain that muffled their footsteps, and keeping a considerable distance, they let the cops escort them to the metal door that the old man had not locked.

The police turned onto Via Tiburtina in the direction of San Lorenzo. When they were far enough, Riccardo and Alida scampered off as well.

"Let's move," Riccardo said, taking cover behind the trunk of a tree.

"You came with public transport?" Alida asked, her voice broken by fatigue. She had run all the time crouched behind Riccardo, and the muscles in her legs ached. The wound must have been reopened.  
"Yes"  
"What do we do?"

"We go on foot, and we'd better not see each other for a few days."  
Alida nodded.

"Were you able to do what you had to?"

Alida patted the pocket of her coat, containing the piece of ear.

"I think so."

They separated in Piazzale delle Province. Alida went along Via Morgagni and arrived home half an hour later. Riccardo waited for the dawn, stopping at the bakery of an old friend, who owed him a few favours from the days when he worked for the Pelican. Then he took the subway to Piramide and the 280, which left him a few steps from Piazza Trilussa.

He reached home at 07:12. The storm had moved away and the heat was back sticking to the skin with suction cups. Riccardo's aunt was sleeping. He entered the small, shadowy living room smelling of old magazines, picked up the phone and called Alida. She answered at once.

"Were you sleeping?"

"No, I couldn't sleep."

"I'm collapsing. I'll call you later, okay?"

Alida looked at the kitchen table where, on a handkerchief, Luca's earlobe was lying. It was a little bigger than a bean, and the same colour.

"Alida?"  
"I'm here, sorry, call me anytime."

"Sure you're OK?"

"I'm fine. I want to see you."

"Me too."  
Alida put the cordless phone down and looked at the earlobe. She had not yet found the courage to swallow it.

She took a bottle of gin from the living room cabinet, poured two fingers in a glass and drank it in one gulp. Then, like a macabre Addams-family-version shot of tequila salt and lemon, she gulped the lobe down without chewing. The gin took the piece of earlobe down, burning her throat. She felt her guts twist. She placed her palms on the table and closed her eyes, trying to control herself. Now that she had found the courage to swallow it, she could not afford to be sick. She rinsed the glass, filled it with water and drank until the burning was gone. Her head was spinning. She went into the bedroom, lay down on the bed and immediately fell asleep.

August 14 – 22:58

Iamiglio realized that the man in front of the entry phone was headed to the apartment of the widow Menozzatti when the light of the top floor suddenly came on.

Mancuso had fallen asleep and, when Iamiglio turned on the radio of the patrol car stationed in Viale Romania, turned his head towards the window snorting, dejected. They had been sent back to surveillance after the reported desecration of the tomb of Menozzatti.

The inspector answered with annoyance, and Iamiglio gave him a concise account of what had happened. It might have been nothing, but it had seemed to him a good idea to notify the boss.

"Listen to me," the inspector started, busy coordinating the team sent at Verano," I thought I told you to inform me only in case of interesting facts concerning the investigation, not every time the lady flushes the toilet!"

Mancuso opened one eye and choked back a laugh.

"Excuse me inspector, I thought..."

"You did a good job so far, try not to spoil it now, okay? And call me only if it's absolutely necessary... What the fuck are you doing! Stop!" Brembati started to rant against other agents. Iamiglio kept listening, but the voice of the inspector became increasingly distorted.

When he closed the communication he realized that Mancuso was grinning like a schoolboy at break time.

August 14 – 23:02

Alida awoke with a start at the sound of the entry phone and got out of bed. She belched, and her mouth filled with a horrible taste.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"It's me. I'm sick."

Alida opened without thinking twice.

"What happened?" she asked, concerned, when she saw Riccardo cross the landing with uncertain steps. She sustained him and helped him inside.

"I don't know."

Riccardo was drenched in sweat. He was panting.

"Sit down." They went to the kitchen and Riccardo slumped in a chair.  
"What time is it?" Alida asked, more bewildered than before.

"When I left home it was a half past ten."

Alida immediately touched her face. It was smooth, soft skin. She stared at her hands. Graceful and elegant woman hands.

Normal woman hands.

Sustaining herself on the door frame, she left the kitchen and entered the room. She brought her hand to the switch, but withdrew it immediately. There was no need to turn the light on, as the light of the checked moon, sly and already high in the sky, had invaded the floor to the opposite wall.

The spotted-head rabbit jumped on her foot. She picked it up and approached the bars. For the first time she felt as powerful as the moon. Her skin wasn't burning. No torment was ravaging her limbs. The studies of Seda had been confirmed. She felt the desire to undress, lie down and let the full moon dress her up with its fresh silver coat.

"Alida," The voice of Riccardo made her turn abruptly. "Don't come in!" she shouted, but Riccardo had already turned the light on, freezing on the door, eyes wide open moving from one side of the room to the other.

The chains, the clotted blood, the tanks of the rabbits.

"What is this room? My God, Alida..." he said in a whisper. Strength was leaving him. He collapsed to the floor. Alida helped him.

"Riccardo, open your eyes, open them..."

Riccardo opened them, and in them Alida saw evil.

His pupil had a diameter of a pinhead and the irises had taken on a yellowish amber hue, like the eyes of animals used to see through the darkness.  
"The wound..." Riccardo whispered, clinging to Alida's dress, "burning."

Alida helped him up, led him to the bedroom, took his shirt off and made him lay on his stomach. Under the right scapula Riccardo had applied a makeshift bandage. Alida removed the gauze and for several seconds she forgot to breathe. If she remembered well, he had mentioned a scratch, but that in front of her was a purulent laceration that needed immediate attention, perhaps even stitches. From the folds of the flesh, tufts of dark hair stuck out, like the hair on the lips of a carnivorous plant.

"How did you get it?" Alida asked.

"It was a scratch..."

"Riccardo, how did you get it?" she asked again, trembling with fear.  
"In prison, in the showers. It was an accident, a man slipped on the floor and clung to me. His nails were sharp, I didn't notice, then it began to worsen."

Alida shook the quilt until her fingers ached.  
There was no doubt that it had been Manuel to scratch Riccardo, who was still in Rebibbia before Bracconieri turned into a werewolf and was killed by the guards.

One in a thousand.

Not all was lost.

Manuel Bracconieri had turned into a werewolf too, and he had been buried. They only needed to know where. They could think about it at a later time. Now they had to defeat the moon.

"You must come with me," Alida said, lifting Riccardo, who was shaken by the first heat waves. He pushed her hands away. Each touch burned him like embers.

"You must come, or it will be too late!"

Riccardo, skin burning, thrashed like a maniac, taking advantage of the springs of the mattress to make leaps that made it impossible to hold him down.

Then he suddenly froze in a trance, his eyes wide open toward the ceiling and his breathing heavy.

Although his skin was getting darker, veins stood out dramatically and it almost seemed possible to see the blood flowing in them. His ears had taken a pointed shape, and a thick hair stuck out from the auricle. Alida lifted his lips. His teeth were sharp. She had to use all of her strength to move him from the bedroom to the room of the rabbits, where she laid him next to the chain that had been Luca's.

The spotted rabbit left the room and slipped into the hall, hopping merrily.

Riccardo gasped as if wanting to awaken from a nightmare. He opened his jaws and blew a foul stench of death. With a stroke of his arm he sent Alida flying to the centre of the room and tore off his shirt, showing the signs of metamorphosis.

Standing, trembling and sore due to his cartilage subjected to the new arrangement of the bones, he stared at the body of Alida, who had lost all meaning, having become a single, living, piece of meat.

"Listen, you have to try to fight not to be overwhelmed... you have to tie yourself to a chain..." Alida said, moving backwards towards the wall, then she roared at the top of her lungs, "Riccardo, don't look at it!"

But Riccardo had already turned his gaze beyond the bars, where a huge silver platter gleamed under the light of a thousand candles. Its charm, however, was disturbed. The iron bars ruined the beauty of the that cream-filled moon, to which the beast felt wildly attracted.

He walked over the grid and, clinging to it, attempted to remove it.

He wanted to enjoy it, dip his eyes into the pristine surface of the moon, and those bars prevented him from doing that.  
Alida wasted no time. She rose from the floor, slipped out of the room and locked the door, sure that the hinges would hold for a handful of seconds.

A moment later a loud crash shook the whole house and the wood began to break as if it were plywood.

Alida recoiled. The door was only a step away, but what would happen to Riccardo if she ran?

The door came down with a thud and the creature jumped to the middle of the corridor, splintering the wooden floor with his claws.

Ravenous, Riccardo walked toward Alida and took a leap forward, harnessing the power of his new and perfect muscular structure.

Alida was very fast too. She opened the door and threw herself on the landing, then flung herself back with her full weight against the door, closing it again on the fingers of the creature, who had been able to stick a paw through the gap.

She slammed the door a couple of times until the monster flinched in agony.

August 14 – 23:40

In the living room of the house, the creature was stirring like a rabid gorilla in a cage too small. He scratched the walls until his claws cracked, bit the upholstery as if it were meat, tore the curtains, slashing them from top to bottom.  
Barking his frustration, he left the living room and froze a few steps from the kitchen.

On the ground, with its ears folded back and its pink nose that had stopped trembling, the spotted-head rabbit wiggled a couple of times its fluffy tail.

Riccardo did not fly into a rage, did not howl, did not foam litres of saliva and did not gnash his teeth. He opened his mouth a little, took the rabbit between his fangs and gently tasted its meat, barely piercing it with his canines, just to taste a few drops of blood before tightening the jaws that would break that delicate spine like a twig.

A silver light hit him in full.

He opened his mouth in ecstasy. With a trout-like flick, the rabbit slipped out of his mouth, fell on the floor and sheltered under the sink. The moon floated like a ghost ship behind the kitchen window, no clouds decorated it, no stars dared to compete with the lustre of its immaculate skin. No bar bothered it. It seemed that the sky had room only for it. Riccardo went to the window, stretched the muscles of his legs and prepared to jump.

He wanted to go into the moon.

August 14 – 23:58

The glass exploded when Alida threw the palace gates open.

"Son of a bitch!" Iamiglio shouted, bouncing on the seat of the patrol car as if someone had stuck a pen in his ass.

Mancuso, who had fallen asleep again, mumbled something unintelligible and shot forward, but the belt sent him back against the seat. When he managed to free himself from it, Iamiglio had already jumped out of the car to reach the point where he had seen falling what had seemed to him like...

an Alsatian of abnormal size?

As he approached the sidewalk with extreme caution, he thought of the story he had heard repeated ad nausea by his colleague Romano D'Abbagli about the creature that had appeared in the cell of Bracconieri. Even if he believed that it was a shitload of crap, and did not understand why Romano and the other agent had not made up something better, he still pulled out his gun from its holster.

Where the fuck was Mancuso?

Then he noticed the woman.

"Stay back!" he ordered her, approaching the point where the thing had landed.

Alida did not obey the officer and reached him near the corner of the building, where Riccardo had fallen between a motorcycle and a car. The body was crushed, limbs twisted like those of a mannequin mounted upside down. His clothes, torn and soaked with blood, gave the impression that, before jumping out the window, he had been on a tour through a meat grinder. His head was facing upwards. His eyes, wide open, were staring at the sky, and an ecstatic expression of bliss was drawn on his face, as if he had crossed the eyes of an angel during the flight.

Even Iamiglio turned his eyes to the sky.

All he saw was the moon.

August 15 – 03:15

The investigations and forensics observations in the apartment of Alida – who had been taken to the police station to testify about the events – took place under the supervision of inspector Brembati. Consumed by doubt, he had seen too many deaths not to know that, behind the most trivial cases, the opposite of what appeared used to be hiding.  
He could not believe that Riccardo, who had been in prison for a long time, had committed suicide that way as soon as he had regained freedom. Yet, the state of the facts seemed to leave no other option.

Agent Iamiglio, although at first he had mistaken it for something else, perhaps misled by the dim light, had seen a figure jump from the top floor. While it was falling, there was nobody at home, as the woman was leaving the building at the same moment when the man had thrown himself in the void. The police version was confirmed by the testimonies of a couple who was coming home after spending the night out.

In the flat in Viale Romania three types of fingerprints were found; those of the widow Menozzatti, those of her former husband and those of the man that the woman had described as a friend of when she was at the orphanage. The traces of blood on the glass shards fallen on the street and on the kitchen floor matched with the samples taken from the body of Riccardo as well. So far nothing unusual, except that also the saliva found on the furnishings and the destroyed furniture belonged to Riccardo.

It was as if, before killing himself, the man had been prey to a fit of rage and had ragged the upholstery of furniture and chairs, but not with his teeth, since he should have had fangs or pincers instead of jaws to cause that kind of damage.

The picture became even more bleak when the door of the rabbits room was opened.

Brembati arrived immediately, but from his look the agents knew that it would take time and hard work to unravel the mystery of the chains and the blood on the walls.

The inspector cursed himself. Having Alida sent to the police station to wait for him had been a mistake. He would have swallowed his badge to have her there now and drown her in questions. For the time being, he had to make do with vague hypotheses and gather as much information as possible, to be used when he would finally put her under pressure.

Entering what seemed like the perfect location for a Cronenberg movie, he mentally retraced the events of the last eight weeks.

The lawyer Luca Menozzatti had been killed with a gunshot by Manuel Bracconieri, a man with a clean record who, after a conversation with the victim's wife, had beaten his cellmates up in order to be put in solitary confinement, and had in turn been killed by two jailers who had mistaken him for something else. Two months later, a former inmate of Rebibbia, he too mistaken for some kind of large animal, had jumped from the building where the first victim lived, in a flat in which a slaughterhouse-room with blood-smeared walls was found. In all this, Mrs. Menozzatti went unnoticed like a nun in church, and even managed to be pitied for what she went through.

If that day that demented Mancuso had remembered to turn the voice recorder on...

"Inspector, we are done, we'll be waiting for you downstairs," the last forensics agent still in the apartment said.

Brembati, standing motionless in the middle of the kitchen, nodded with a mumble and lit a cigarette.

There were other things he could not shed a light on. First, the tremendous furrows running horizontally along the walls of the corridor. Forensics had found in them shards of nails belonging to the victim, and was sure that the scratches had been made simultaneously, going from the end of the corridor to the kitchen. A completely inexplicable fact, given that the man's arm span did not exceed four feet and the walls were spaced one foot more than that.

The other doubt, although it left several possibilities open, disturbed him even more; why a man who chooses to commit suicide by jumping out a window does not check that it is open?  
Everything suggested that he had been running away from something, perhaps the same thing that had led the woman to rush out of the house.

The inspector breathed a puff of smoke, walked to the sink to put the cigarette out, and with the tip of his foot he touched something soft that immediately withdrew. He bent down, and found himself face to face with a cute white rabbit with a dark spot on its head. He grabbed it, lifted it up and looked at it carefully, while the insistent voice of his daughter returned to ring into his ears like the sound of a shattering glass, "Daddy, I want a rabbit, when are you going to buy me one, uh? When are you going to buy me one?"

For months, since when she had been at the home of one of her schoolmates, Silvia had been begging him to have one. Not a day passed without her asking for it again. At breakfast, at dinner. Good thing there was a refectory at her school, at least he could have lunch in peace. Who are those crazy parents who agree to keep a rabbit in the house? How do you find the time to buy one if you don't even have that to find a murderer?

He put the pet on the table. It did not seem scared. It stood still, breathing rhythmically. If Mrs. Menozzatti asked, he could always say that the door had been left open, since the agents were coming and going; most likely it had gone out on the landing, and ended up who knew where.

Silvia's birthday was on the 12th of September. He would hide the rabbit in the garage, in a cage covered with a cloth, and give it to her the day she turned thirteen.

"So cute. You don't bite, do you?" he said, stroking it carefully, then with more confidence. He drew another puff of smoke from the cigarette and blew it towards the rabbit, that backed against the wall, bothered. He reached out and grabbed it clumsily. The animal, touched where it had been wounded by the teeth of Riccardo, started and jumped down, hitting the floor with one side. Its eyes were now dark as chocolate chips and it trembled with fear. Even its breathing had become faster.

"What are you doing? Did you want to end up like that one?" the inspector asked, stroking it gently until it calmed down.

August 15 – 06:40

When Alida left the police station, after the long interrogation she sustained from Brembati in the tiny room with smoked walls, the inspector could not find peace of mind. Standing motionless on the steps of the police station, he lit the tip of yet another cigarette and watched the woman get into the taxi he had called for her five minutes before.

A new day had begun. And it had begun in the worst way.

The blood stains on the walls of the chains room had proved to be of rabbits, and Alida had not had the slightest hesitation in explaining that the place served as a location for her husband's favourite hobby: photography.

As soon as they had bought the apartment in Viale Romania, they had decided that the room would have belonged to their first child. But, not being able to have any, Luca had turned it into a private corner where to vent to his artistic talent. He used Alida as a model for his shots, and one time he had indulged in the whim of recreating an unhealthy environment with a grotesque atmosphere, inspired by the work of a Canadian artist he particularly admired. No animal had been abused or killed to set up the room. The blood, that Luca had demanded to be true for a more realistic effect, had been bought for a pittance in a farmhouse outside of Rome, from a rabbit breeder whose name Alida didn't know.

"So I guess you don't mind showing me the photos your husband took. I'm no expert, but I might find something interesting anyway," the inspector had said as soon as Alida had finished answering with confidence the first set of questions.

"Impossible. I decided to delete them after his death. There is nothing left after I found that he cheated on me. Cameras, equipment, I threw away everything."

"Sure you didn't get confused and mistook your friend for a camera too?"

"What you said wasn't funny."

"It wasn't meant to be."

"Riccardo was like a brother to me in the orphanage."

"You already said that to my colleagues before I arrived, a really nice story. Now I'd like to hear something less moving, for instance why that man decided to fly out of your kitchen window."

"If I knew I would have already told you, wouldn't I?"

"I don't think so. You are hiding something, and doing it very well, with obstinacy, which leaves me thinking that what you are covering is much bigger than I can imagine, or you wouldn't try so hard."

"Do you remember when I came to Rebibbia to see the face of the murderer of my husband?"

"Sure," the inspector replied with regret.

"It was that day that I met Riccardo again. It had been almost thirty years since we had last met, and in that time none of us had heard news about the other. But we made a sad discovery."

Alida paused and looked down at the edge of the desk, worn out by the armrests of the chair rubbing it too many times. Brembati studied her carefully, trying to understand whether she was playing a part. When Alida spoke again, her voice was full of sadness.

"We realized that our characters had changed for more or less the same reason: prison. Mine was called marriage, his Rebibbia. On one side there was a man who hadn't possessed a woman for too long, on the other a woman whose marriage, ended in disaster, had taken away from her the desire to open up to another person. I refused him and he flew into a rage. I got scared and ran away from home, like any other woman would have done. What happened next I cannot explain because I wasn't there, but I guess it was the result of a repressed instinct."

"Repressed instinct" the inspector repeated, weighing every syllable, "I'd like to believe it, and I might have said the same thing if I hadn't entered your living room and I hadn't seen the walls of the corridor. No one is capable of such a thing."

"Is it my fault if I didn't give it to him and he smashed my house?"

"Language."

"And you stop looking for what doesn't exist. There are people who can attest it, one of whom, if I am not mistaken, is an agent of yours. The moment I opened the gate of the building Riccardo fell on the sidewalk. I wasn't home when he went mad."

The inspector laughed, pushed his chair and stood, rubbing his big belly on the edge of the table with the risk of making a button of his shirt jump.

"The guys in forensics went mad when they discovered that your friend had made his arm grow three feet to flay the plaster of the walls of the corridor."

Alida was speechless. Brembati began to circle the table like a fat shark around a chunk of meat.

"You know what happened at the Menozzatti family chapel?" he assaulted her after tucking his shirt into his pants. Alida did not answer.

"Someone decided to visit your husband to make sure he was still resting in his coffin."

"And was he?" Alida asked, swallowing with difficulty.

The inspector reappeared in front of her.

"He was, but we're still wondering what happened to his right ear."

Alida's heart started to beat faster.

"Was your husband buried missing one ear, as far as you know?" Brembati asked with the naturalness with which he could have asked the time to a passer-by.

"No," Alida said, avoiding to look at him.

"Good, because those who attended the funeral said the same thing. You weren't there when he was buried, am I wrong?"

"You're not wrong. So what? What are you accusing me of?"  
Brembati attacked again.

"Mrs. Menozzatti, where were you last night between eleven and midnight?" he asked, starting again to walk around in the room.

"If you don't mind, I started using my maiden name again" Alida shielded herself regaining a bit of courage.  
"That is?"

"Zannelli."  
"It suits you."

"Does it?"

"Instead of helping me carry out the investigation, you show your teeth and growl like a dog. So, Ms. Zannelli, where were you last night between eleven and midnight?"

"At home."

"Alone?"

"No" After a brief pause she added, "with my rabbit."

Brembati hastened to go round the table and disappeared behind Alida so she could not see his face. "We didn't find any rabbit in your apartment," he said hurriedly.

"I guess your agents were so efficient as to leave the door open and let it escape."

The inspector sat down. "I'm not surprised that it escaped, perhaps he saw your husband's room and decided to look for an accommodation that did not look like a slaughterhouse."

Alida shook her head. "The fact that we started talking about a rabbit, as much as I was fond of it, makes me think that we are at a loss for words. Why don't you call me when you want to talk about something we haven't already discussed?"  
The face of the inspector was that of someone who has mistaken a glass of vodka for one of fresh water. "Your attitude..." he tried to say.

"Is that of a tired woman who recently lost her husband and her only friend. And I'm not talking about the rabbit. That you can even keep. Will you call a taxi for me or you'd rather I did it myself?"

The taxi made a quick manoeuvre and disappeared on Viale Regina Margherita, almost completely deserted at that hour of the morning.

The inspector finished his cigarette, threw it on the street from the last step of the porch and stared into space. He must find a way to frame that woman, but the only thing he could think about was the sun; it had already risen from a few minutes and was already heating as if it were full day. Truly disgusting.

How long till the end of summer?

How long till the end of that infamous job?

August 17 – 11:02

White. Finally the room was white again.

The day of Riccardo's funeral, Verano was a furnace. The dead would not resurrect even if it were the Judgement day, for how cool they were in the damp earth. The funeral was attended by Alida, the aunt of Riccardo and a few ex-convicts. The priest, an old, thin man, launched in a sermon that seemed destined to last forever. When he finished, Alida approached Raffaella, hugged her tight and looked into her eyes. The woman said nothing, neither did Alida. Cicadas chirped as if they were about to burst.

Alida found in front of her house two men wearing faded overalls spotted with paint.

The masons.

She apologized for being late, let them in, offered them drinks and brought them to the room.

She had done a great job the day before. The walls were spotless. The ceiling had never been so white. The chains were gone. In their place two iron rings with spring clips that the masons barely looked at. They moved to the centre of the room, exchanging a look of vague bewilderment. The walls, devoid of furniture, were in excellent condition. What had they been called for?

"The bars," Alida said. The men turned around following the finger of the woman. "The bars have to be removed. How long will it take?"

It took less than an hour.

Alida spent the most satisfying sixty minutes of her life standing in the doorway, looking at the precise and careful work of the masons. When they left, with the bars of the grid in a tin bucket, she looked at her old prison, wondering how her life would be from that point onwards.

The white blinded her.

She thought it was time to say thanks. She took a sheet of paper, a pen, sat at the kitchen table and arranged her thoughts. Her hand moved on its own accord, and what she read did not seem bad. It was at least spontaneous.

Dear Professor, my name is not important and it would be of no use to you to know whose calligraphy is flowing under your eyes. We do not know each other and I do not think we ever will. I wanted to thank you, I wanted to thank you for the time you devoted to your studies, the time you devoted to further topics that most people consider a primitive legacy of the dark ages from which it is better to keep their distance...

She wrote to the bottom of the sheet. She did not sign. She put the letter into an envelope and did not write the details of the sender, only those of Cesare Seda, that she had found in the web site of the professor. She went out, bought a stamp and put the letter in the first mailbox she found on her way back home.

Someone once had said that people are more beautiful when they don't show themselves completely. Alida did not believe that. She believed she had always been beautiful, even when she had shown the worst side of her. However she could not answer the question; was the nightmare part of the past or was the present part of a new nightmare? The only certainty was that the world would no longer be afraid of her; she had become like every other person.

Normal.

Now that the beast had been defeated, perhaps it would be her to be afraid of life. Afraid of others. Of the real monsters, those who kill their own kind, those who make their children cry, those who live a life in the shadows and all of a sudden are found on the pages of the newspapers.

She felt alone, she had no one.

It was time to bite life, and she had lost her fangs. It was time to climb on top of the tallest tree, from where to look at the peaks of her future, and she no longer had claws to grip with.

September 12 – 21:47

The full moon in September was met with the typical indifference men reserve to things that are larger and more powerful than them.

For Alida that was a special night, a night to savour.  
Her night.

In silence they would look at one another, and in silence she would admire its lazy sailing. They would greet one another with respect, like two rivals come to a showdown, and, without turning their back, they would arrange to meet the following month, and the next, until one of them would be left hanging from the ceiling of darkness for millennia and the other would be reduced to a pile of ashes, not heavier than a dead leaf.

Relaxed and incredibly receptive, Alida had cooked herself a great rare fillet. She felt in perfect shape. She took a chair and carried it into the room, undressed completely and, once sat in front of the opening in the wall – she had not yet replaced the bars with glass and perhaps she never would – she waited until the moon appeared, while a few miles away, in an apartment on the Gianicolense, a man and a woman had just finished celebrating the birthday of their daughter.

September 12 – 21:50

Paola Brembati, the wife of the inspector, loaded the dishwasher and wiped her hands on the rag hanging from the hook next to the sink.

She was tired, but happy.

From the hall came the cheerful voice of Silvia, who, with her father, was reviewing name after more imaginative name to give to her new little friend.

Bunny, Calù, Cleo, Bow...

Of those suggested by her father she did not like even one, she impertinently ruled them out even before they came out of his mouth. After finding the bunny in the cage under the table, while the lights were out for her to blow out the candles, she had jumped to the necks of her parents and had drowned them in kisses. Finally they could give the old beaver Popsy – her favourite plush toy – to her cousin. Now she had her real plush toy in flesh and bones.

"Dad, look!" she said suddenly, jumping up on the couch.

"Down with those shoes!" the inspector, sprawled beside her, scolded her. "What's wrong?"

"It has spots, the rabbit has spots." Silvia pointed at the animal crouching in a corner of the cage, resting on the floor.  
"I know, that's what makes it special, white rabbits with a spot on the head are very few, and you have one," the inspector said with superficiality.

"Not on the head dad," the girl said "there on his side, and on the other side too."

The inspector made a huge effort to rise from the couch. He brought his face to the cage and watched the rabbit breathing quietly. He had not noticed those strange wounds. They were holes in the flesh, dark but with a reddened outline. He must have gotten them scratching himself or rubbing against the walls of the cage, although it seemed odd, since there were no bumps of any kind on the bars.

"What are they, dad? Do you think he's sick?"

"No honey, it's only..." only? "We'll take it to the vet tomorrow, okay? You'll see it's nothing. Now go to bed, you have to go to school tomorrow."

Desecrated graves, drilled convicts, unexplained suicides... He just needed the veterinarian on top of that. Would he be given thirty seconds to wipe his ass?

He rose from the couch, picked up the cage and placed it at the foot of his daughter's bed. She was watching him with bright eyes.

"Can I sleep with Alida?"

The inspector, still kneeling on the floor, looked at Silvia like one would look at a motorbike about to run him over.

"Honey, what did you say?"

"I asked if we can sleep together, oh daddy, please!"

"That I understood, and don't even think about it. How did you call the rabbit?"

"Alida, you like it? Until I find a better name. It's the character of the book mom's reading me, it just came to my mind."

The inspector stood up too fast and his sight was weakened by a sudden drop in pressure. "I honestly don't think it's very suitable for a rabbit, there are better ones, you just have to think, and besides, who tells you that it's a girl?"

"Well," the child said innocently dropping with a soft thud on the sheets, "I did not see the little thing, did you?"  
Brembati coughed in the palm of his hand. "I haven't noticed, but then if it's a girl what about Jenny? You don't like it?"

"It's awful dad. Alida is much better."

"Oh yeah? And why?"

"Because it makes me think of snow, and she's white as snow."  
The inspector weighed in silence the answer of his daughter, then planted a kiss on her forehead, thinking that after all the coincidences were not only part of his job.

When he left the room, Silvia waited until the last noises in the house wore down to the last squeak of the door of her parents' room. Tiptoeing, she reached the cage where Alida slumbered quietly and gently grabbed her.

She was hot, very hot.

The soft belly was a real stove.

Maybe she has a fever, she thought. The thrill of the new house made her temperature raise.

She removed the pillow and settled Alida – she liked the name more with every second – near the headboard of the bed, then curled an inch away from her soft muzzle.

The breath of the rabbit, however, had a bad smell, like the breath of her father when he woke her up in the morning, and she began to breathe noisily, with more and more stinky gasps.

Silvia tried to resist, but the breath of the animal became so bad that it forced her to turn toward the window. The sky was no longer dark like when her father had turned the light off. Soon the moon would appear. She loved to see it rise clove after clove from the edge of the window. She played guessing whether or not it was full. This time she did not find out. She was too tired, and even if the rabbit was shaking from time to time, as if shaken by cramps, she fell into a black sleep that no moon...

checked, not checked...

checked, not checked...

would bright up.

September 13 – 00:12

Alida was playing at joining and separating her hands in front of her face, forming a sort of grid with her fingers.

The checked moon, the moon unchecked...

The checked moon...

The disease was over, but how much blood had been shed for this to happen?

You are healed. Don't look back. The road is straight and the sun shines.  
The air was cool on her bare skin, a light breeze penetrated the wall opening, hardening her nipples. She lifted her hands in front of her eyes and joined them once again, looking through her fingers at the unmoving checkerboard that burned with stubborn beauty. As if she was rehearsing for a shadow puppet show, she separated her hands slowly. She felt the need to blink, but refrained from doing so. She wanted to fill herself with light, with candour, like never before. Her eyes were burning, but she still resisted, until she was forced to blink twice.

Her tears, brightened by the rays of the moon, illuminated her face like a mask of diamonds.

No one would have been able to say which one shone brighter, if the face of Alida or the cunning face of the moon.

September 13 – 00:20

Opening with a kick the door of the room of Silvia – who had started screaming in the dead of night – the inspector immediately understood that there was only one thing he could do if he did not want that the child was mangled by the mouth bristling with teeth of the... the...

monster that towered and dribbled over her.

Holy Christ! How had that thing come in?

He had to fire, shoot, shoot now, and that fucking gun in his hands, that he could not stop shaking because of the shock, was just for that.

It was made to kill.

Then kill it, you idiot!

Kill that inhumane beast that is about to devour your daughter!

But he could not move a finger, he was paralyzed with terror.

When was the last time he had squeezed a trigger? Shoot, you jerk, empty that fucking magazine on the birthday gift you stole in the house of that witch!

The scream of the wife, who had appeared at the door, shook him out of the stupor in which he had fallen, and even his brain restarted deciphering what he had in front of his eyes.

He could only see the small feet and part of the left arm of Silvia. The rest was crushed by the weight of the giant being, foaming its appetite like a rabid dog. Some kind of cocker from Hell, with fifteen-inches floppy ears, and feet with claws longer and thicker than the beak of an eagle. The whiteness of its hair had not changed, as well as the stain on its head, now as big as a tablecloth.

"Call the police!" the inspector cried to his wife, who ran to the nearest telephone.

Will you shoot, you stupid dickhead? You are the police!

The inspector shot...

but towards the ceiling, raining shards of plaster that made him instantly white-haired.

Or was it the effect of fear?

"Daaaaaad!" Silvia's scream seemed to come from inside a well.

"Daaaaaad! Heeeeelp!"

The deformed rabbit replied with a bark.

The inspector pulled the trigger five times consecutively, and the same number of gashes opened up on the mantle of the creature. Very dark blood flowed out of them. The animal fell on its side, allowing the girl to fling herself out of the bed and into her father's outstretched arms. They looked into one another's eyes, then turned at once to the bed.

"Dad, the monster is gone! It was a nightmare," Silvia said.

The inspector didn't say a word, his eyes on the little rabbit, now with more holes than a colander, sticking out from under the pillow.  
In the distance they heard police sirens approaching rapidly.

"Mooooom," Silvia groaned, clinging to the legs of the woman who had reappeared in the doorway, as white as a corpse.

"It's all over, here comes the police, now they'll take care of it." Her voice cracked suddenly. "What have you done to your leg?" she asked in alarm, seeing the pants of the pyjamas all dyed red.

The inspector had not heard a single word. His head was a cyclone of spinning thoughts.

Monsters. Of course he believed in them. Murderers, rapists, ruthless criminals. How many monsters had he slammed behind bars? This was something else, something that had nothing to do with man, something that went beyond the rage and madness against which he used to fight. He looked at the window.

Full moon.

It again, the only clue that joined those nights of blood and horror.

The inspector turned to his wife. She seemed to have aged twenty years.

"You have to call an ambulance," the woman said. "Silvia was bitten."

"It's just a scratch" the girl minimized. "It's nothing, it doesn't hurt."

The pyjamas, raised to the knee, showed the flesh of the thigh, cut by a wound not longer than two inches. Blood was dripping down the ankle, staining the floor.

"Come to mom's bathroom. We must disinfect it," Paola said to Silvia, taking her in her arms. "And you call the ambulance, she needs stitches!" she ordered to her husband.

The inspector did not move a muscle. The police sirens went silent. Soon, the agents would enter the house, his house, as if he were a common criminal, and what would they find? A rabbit as riddled with holes as an old sock.

They would ask questions to which likely answers had to follow. Many questions and many answers. Why had he shoot? Had he tried to kill his daughter? What had happened to the beast he had seen? They would question everyone, but as usual no one would care to hear what the most important witness had to say. The friend of the shadows, the sister of death, the mother of monsters. The smartest, the most clever. Because it knows the secret, the secret of silence. She's always so quiet, her mouth well stitched.

No one asks questions to those who cannot speak.

Isn't it true, inspector? It whispered from above.

Brembati looked up, and for a moment he was under the impression that the moon winked at him. He shivered, but it was just a dark cloud that passed quickly over its pitted face.

The AUTHOR

Filip Fromell was born in Switzerland and lives in Rome, where he writes novels and screenplays for cinema.

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### The editor

**Employee, writer and translator in his spare time, the author has always been an avid reader and writer since he has no memory. Since 2008 he has devoted himself with greater commitment to this activity by giving life to the world of Anthuar in which this story is set.**

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