There was something in his eyes, something alien, something terrible.
My education in how the world works, as my father liked to call it, began when I was not even 7 years old. My father began his speech by telling me about the duties of a man who could call himself a man: to work hard, never complain, take care of his family and defend them at all costs. If a man could not defend himself or his loved ones, he certainly did not deserve to live among the decent people who lived in our neighbourhood or in our city. How many people tried to infiltrate the decent people, he told me, people who come from outside to steal, kill or worse, kidnap children by any means possible, whether it was the candy offered outside the school with the worst drugs inside or the infamous white vans to pick up distracted children who would never see their families again.
I was afraid, I knew my father was right. How many times at school, my classmates and I talked about what we heard around the neighbourhood, in our mothers' hushed conversations? Even on television, the local news was about disappearances, kidnappings and things that always made my mother cry. She always held me after each report punctuated with calm terror by the news anchors in suits and ties and then, she went and prayed to her holy pictures on a coffee table in the living room, invoking their protection and strength against all that horror.
When I turned 14, my father thought I was old enough to defend myself from criminals and kidnappers of all sorts; I had graduated from middle school that year, but it was then that I felt I had reached the real milestone. I was becoming a good man, just like my father.
It was toward the end of September that I saw him for the first time.
It was a morning that had no qualms about making us feel the first chills of the autumn cold and I reluctantly got out of bed to go to school. Tightly wrapped in my jacket, I took the path to the neighbourhood park, kicking pebbles and abandoned cans, almost without looking ahead: the neighbours' children and I always played there and, moreover, I had always taken that shortcut since middle school, to the point that I could have walked the path from one entrance to the other without having to worry about tripping over a flowerbed.
As I was walking lazily, I felt a shiver run down my spine and I almost stopped suddenly. I instinctively turned around and then I realized that it wasn't the cold that morning, but the look given to me by a stranger sitting on a bench to my left. It wasn’t his clothes or his appearance that struck me, completely anonymous and indistinguishable from those of my friends’ fathers, but his eyes that I could feel very well as they pierced me. That expression on his face was a mix of calm and almost indifference but he was staring at me as if I were the first living being outside of himself. There was something in his eyes, something alien, something terrible.
I ran along the pavement, not paying attention to the pebbles that skipped by my sides: I had to get away from there, I had to escape from the gaze of that stranger. Run away if you’re still shorter than the kitchen liquor cabinet, Dad said, fight if you’re big enough to break someone’s teeth. I reached the exit of the park and turned around: the man hadn’t followed me, but I could still feel it inside my soul. That man was still watching me.
When I reached high school, I was still out of my mind with terror. I ran to the bathroom and threw up the last 2 or 3 meals straight into the toilet. I sat on the floor and hugged myself shaking, my teeth chattering. What would Dad say if he saw me like this, reduced to a larva just because of a stranger's gaze? If it was one of the men I had been warned about, he would have tried to capture me, right? He would have approached, maybe he would have taken out the candy and asked for one, they always did that. It was just a stranger with a strange look, maybe he was one of those who worked the night shift at the neighbourhood shops and was resting on the bench before going home. These and a thousand other hypotheses and conjectures managed to calm me down and give me the strength to go to class.
My father sent me to bed without dinner when he read the demerit note written by the teacher in my diary for skipping first period of class, and neither he nor my mother would listen to my lie about having a bad stomach-ache. Besides, how could I possibly tell them that I had been terrorized by some random man for no real or rational reason? I went to bed, prayed as usual to my mother's patron saints for protection, and then fell asleep, confident in a sleep without nightmares.
The next morning, on my way to school, I stopped at the entrance to the park. I took a deep breath and stepped out praying that I would never see that man again. I walked slowly, looking around for the slightest sign of his presence, but I didn't see him at the bench where I had seen him sitting yesterday, and that gave me strength and comfort. However, as soon as I stepped out, I felt that feeling of agonizing terror again; perhaps my patrons hadn't heard my prayers, because that man was there. Leaning against a lamppost, the stranger was smoking a cigarette and smiling. He hadn't been smiling yesterday, but if he had, I think the fear would have killed me right then, as it was about to do now. I ran away again, hating myself with all my heart for that, after having convinced myself not to be a coward anymore and to believe that this was just an ordinary man, but I knew that there was something wrong with that man, with his abnormal look and smile.
During recess, I found the courage to talk about it with my friends, Giorgio and Luca, but what I had feared the day before happened: neither of them believed me. Sure, those thugs who kidnapped kids existed, but I was just exaggerating: after all, what harm had that man done to me? He hadn't offered me drug-laced sweets, he hadn't approached me but had just limited himself to staring at me from afar. So I asked them to accompany me to the park the next day, so that they too would see that man and understand my fear.
Going home, however, I couldn't know that it would never happen.
Around 8 pm, someone knocked on the door of our apartment.
My mother went to open it and found Luca's parents in front of her, their faces completely distraught. My mother made them sit inside the house and called me almost screaming. Luca's parents asked me if I knew where Luca was, if he had told me he wanted to run away from home or something else. Confused and terrified by those disturbing questions, I said no and they told me that after leaving the house three hours ago to buy bread, he had not returned home. They had gone to the store, walked around the main streets of the neighbourhood but had only found the cloth shopping bag abandoned in a corner of the sidewalk that ran alongside the park. Starting the next day, the police searched every corner, every tree, every blade of rotting grass on the sidewalk, but they found no trace of Luca, not even a hair or a drop of blood. My friend Luca, who I had known since we were in kindergarten and who I played with every afternoon, had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.
It was on that horrible night that I finally told my parents about the man in the park, and my parents' reactions, despite how my friends reacted, were closer to what I had expected: they forbade me to go through the park alone, to only walk on streets where there were familiar faces, and to run away as soon as I saw the stranger or one of those evil vans again. They said they and the other people in the neighbourhood would take care of the rest. From then on, I took a different route to and from school, while my parents and the other adults patrolled the streets at night and had one or two people to take turns patrolling the park in the morning. My father would come home after midnight, furious for not having found that man yet, and between one glass of wine and another, he would fall asleep on the armchair in the living room, while my mother would sleep in the bedroom after having cried and prayed for the fate of my friend Luca, kidnapped from his parents and dismembered by rich and powerful men for who knows what vile purpose.
But if my parents managed to sleep, some overcome by alcohol, some by pain, I remained completely awake at night. It was my fault if Luca had been kidnapped, I should have spoken from the first day of the stranger, I should have had the courage to do it despite everything. Nonetheless, after a week of anguish and pain, I understood that if Luca had been kidnapped in my place, it was precisely because he had not been afraid of that man. I, on the other hand, was sure of my fear, in the terror that had gripped me on those two occasions. I had managed to recognize the evil that my father had taught me about and to run away from it because I was not in a condition to face it. But now I could and had to do it.
My father, the other adults, they would never find him, but I, I knew he wasn't gone. I felt it in my bones, in my gut, that that man was still waiting for me somewhere and that even though the park was now under surveillance, he would find another place to stare at me, smile and finally make his move. My father had taught me how to be a man who protected his loved ones, so I would protect myself and my friends from that threat as I was right to do. I got dressed and put an old flashlight in my backpack; as soon as I was ready, I left my room quietly to avoid waking my parents. I took my keys from the hook near the entrance, opened the door and closed it carefully. Now I was ready for the hunt.
The streetlights in my neighbourhood gave off a pale orange light that barely illuminated the sidewalks, but the light of my flashlight helped me make my way through the shadows of the streets. I had to find that man, I had no other option: once I got home, it would be very likely that my parents would notice my absence and would punish me severely, preventing me from making any further attempts. I walked slowly for a quarter of an hour, looking at the lifeless shop windows, accompanied only by the constant thrill of my search. And finally I was there, in front of the park.
Last summer, Luca and I had discovered that during some public works in the park, a part of the fence had been torn down in an accident and had not yet been repaired, simply hidden by some hedges; the stranger was perhaps waiting for his victims by observing them as they entered or exited the main entrances, but he would never have expected anyone to enter from there. Making my way through the brambles, I passed that point and found myself at the edge of the park. It was pitch black, like I’d never seen it before; the trees were rooted in the sky with branches of a slightly lighter shade of gray, the benches seemed like piles of darkness thrown neatly onto the ground. Only the light from my flashlight could restore familiarity to what I was seeing.
Suddenly, I thought I felt something and turned off the flashlight. A faint glow seemed to waver in the void, like a mad firefly. I approached slowly, taking advantage of the darkness that would also benefit me as I moved from behind one tree to another. The firefly grew closer and closer, until I also saw fingers and a cigarette at the end of it, and finally a face I knew.
Only a few metres apart, hidden by a bench, I could clearly see the man's silhouette pacing back and forth, talking with his hand close to his face. Maybe he had a walkie talkie or one of those cordless cell phones. His tone was shocked and agitated, and it didn't help me understand what he was talking about or who he was talking to. I remember him saying that he needed to get back to the seventy-seven, that this first mission was about to be blown with the residents on high alert, that one person of interest to continue questioning would be enough instead of him hiding there for another opportunity. I had no idea what "seventy-seven" was, but it was obvious that this man was talking to the people he had handed Luca over to. But the most important thing was that whatever he was saying or not, he was confident enough to smoke and make that phone call, confident that no one would see or hear him. It was my moment.
I lunged at him, not giving him time to react. I pushed him to the ground, knocking the cigarette and the device he was talking to out of his hands. He looked into my eyes, filled with rage and fear, as he was about to grab a gun strapped to his hip with his right hand, but before he could pull it out, a tentacle pierced his sternum. The man began to shake, his throat gurgling with blood that began to drip from his mouth. His hand released the gun and slumped to his side, his head still making that grotesque sound; finally, his entire body gave out and he collapsed lifeless on the blood-soaked pavement.
It was over.
I withdrew my tentacle from the stranger’s corpse and examined it more closely. The bony spines that covered it had allowed it to pierce through like a paper doll with a pencil sticking out of it. Just like Dad had taught me. I took a breath and let the tentacle re-enter my changed abdomen and just as it had been generated, it reabsorbed into my body and wedged itself into my sternum, along with the others. Now I could go home a man, just like Dad would have wanted, a man who defended his loved ones. I could already imagine Mom crying and hugging me, thanking our patrons, St. Nadocchio first and foremost, for having brought me back safe and sound, and the men of the neighbourhood who would raise their ribs to the sky, making them clash together like insect jaws, applauding my courage.
Before returning home, however, I still had one last thing to do. I approached the corpse, determined to see that face for the last time. And it was there, in that grimace of pain that transfigured his face, that I felt again that sensation of horror that had gripped me in those mornings: the sight of those terrifying eyes, with a single iris per eyeball.