Black Tea

The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was dead

and had been replaced by another exactly like her.

I know not what philosopher has said:
"Old women are never lacking.

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

 

 

 

The man walked through the shadows, over crimson carpets, past the mesmerizing patterns plastered on the walls. The air was sultry with no windows or other apertures, just a never-ending progression of forking, dead-end hallways, scattered with dust-laden mirrors, stairs leading nowhere, vaulted arches groaning under concrete masses. The wallpaper concealed other doors leading to cubbyholes and more empty rooms. Dark shelves held up old trinkets thick with dust. The plank ceiling was moldy. Sunlight had been foreign to this place for years.

He looked down at himself, touching his clothes that clung to him like a second skin. He was wearing an Elite Maintenance waistcoat suit, a white T-shirt, baggy dark-blue cotton pants and work boots. He couldn’t remember his own name but he had a nagging feeling in his mind – a glimmer of consciousness dimmed by that still air in those dull, vacant hallways. Who was he? Where was he? And why?

He rummaged through his pockets and found a folded, squared notepad sheet with the Elite Maintenance heading at the top. Right in the middle, large capital words ground onto the sheet with a red marker:

DON’T TRUST THE OLD LADY!

SHE WANTS TO KILL YOU!

 

The man stood there staring at the words, his hands damp and trembling. What-the-fuck was going on here? An electric fever flamed up in his temples as he considered everything over again. He was some sort of special-maintenance technician. He and his team had been sent to do a job but then everything became a haze, names and faces dissolved into a grayish light, a shroud of sleep and forgetfulness.

What the hell was this place?

He walked on trying to understand and remember. A house – a large, empty house – with nobody living in it, its halls full of carpets and old drop-lamps exuding a hazy, murky, pestilent light; the walls plastered with old, damp, rotting paper with baroque patterns, dirty blue on a beige background, etched with alien, narcotic patterns, and in the air there as this stale, closed, sick smell. Hall after hall but no windows, no way out.

Countless twists and hallways later, he came to a wooden door with a colored glass panel. He could just see a vague shape beyond that opaque glass. A presence.
Nicola. His name was Nicola. Yes, Nicola was his name, and he worked for the waterworks. They were meant to do some maintenance along the Martesana waterway along the cycling path close to a Rom encampment, where a few isolated houses had sprouted up like weird mushrooms amidst neglected, yet luxurious greenery invaded by Milan’s July mosquitoes. There were four of them – that much he could remember. The rest had been swallowed up in a vortex of unreality.

He opened the door and on the other side he found a room, a small room thickly furnished with antiques: dark wooden wardrobes and highboys, a different kind of wallpaper even more morbid and hypnotic with its labyrinthine twists and turns, and a round table covered with a white lace cloth. From the ceiling hung a drop-lamp larger than the others. Once again, no doors or windows on the outside, no way out.

Sitting at the table, facing the door Nicola had come through, was an old lady knitting away with needle and thimble, both held masterfully in her tiny wrinkled hands. Her deftness was mechanical and nerve-wrecking as she sat there bent over her ball of pretty emerald yarn. She ignored him – in fact, she didn’t seem to notice him. She hunched over, working intently, her white hair done up in a fine bun, her body small and frail and dressed in a brown woolen robe.

Nicola took a few steps forward and swallowed – his throat was burning up. “Excuse me, madam…”

The old lady looked up. Her feeble, perspiring face glistened like a wax mask. Her eager blue eyes had thick dark bags underneath. The skin on her cheekbones fell in heavy arches like the skin on the face of certain lurchers. She had an earthy olive complexion. Her familiar, unctuous expression was reminiscent of a cherished old aunty you hadn’t met in ages.

“Poor dear, are you lost?” she asked with a buttery voice as she paused her knitting. She smiled sweetly.

“I… I don’t think I feel too good, and…”

“Have a seat then – have a seat! You’re tired and perspiring… I’ll be right back.” she said as she got up slowly, moving aside her wooden chair, laying on the table the unfinished sweater with her needle and thimble.

Almost overcome by some hypnotic command, Nicola drew up the chair (but he didn’t remember seeing it when he came into the room) and sat down. He leaned against the table, exhausted, his arms crossed, his head resting on them. Just a few seconds.

Just (don’t trust the old lady)

a few seconds’ rest.

He was so tired.

Details were coming back to him now but in flashes – grey flashes. The Rom encampment to the right, a sudden Polaroid in his memory. The still, dark green waters of the Martesana, to the left. Tall vegetation all around and in the background the chimneys of old factories, and a large, dark-grey mushroom-shaped tower – perhaps an old watertank. He and three other men, each wearing an Elite Maintenance vest, were walking through the high bushes, complaining about the heat, the thorns, the mosquitoes. Five o’clock on a scorching and murky August afternoon. A Polaroid of a dilapidated house, hardly visible on the horizon, behind a field of unharvested rotten corn. A piercing whistle ripped through the ice-blue sky.

Nicola opened his eyes and looked up. The old lady, smiling, had walked up to a stove with a kettle boiling on it. The plastic whistle (it sounds like a cock, not just any old bird, listen carefully, you waning wanker, you human waste, you bottom feeder, it’s a cock, Jesus) was emitting that obtuse hiss. Nicola realized that when he entered the room there was no stove, no kettle boiling. But there they were now, yes, and tea was ready.

“I’ve made you some nice strong black tea – it’ll perk you up!” The old lady’s shadow sprawled out contortedly.

“But where are we? I can’t… I can’t really remember, and…”

The old lady laughed, shrugging slowly. She turned sideways to look at him. “Don’t bother yourself about it- It’s the heat, this terrible heat – it’s scrambling your brains. You’re in my home – Villa Bartoli.”

“We’re from Elite Maintenance,” said Nicola slowly, more to himself that to his host. “We were just meant to fix the main… well, something.”

“Of course, my dear,” said the old lady as she brought a black enamel tray with a teapot, two teacups and a plate of cookies to the table. “You went to the greenhouse – that’s where the pipes are but it’s even hotter there – I did tell you to take a break. This house is very large and (may Hell regurgitate you, you bastard sodomite) old; my husband Alfonso designed it – he was an eccentric architect, may God bless him, and it’s quite easy to get lost amidst.”

“What?” said Nicola, bringing a hand to his forehead. He felt feverish – that fiery fever from before that cooked his senses.

“I said if you wanted to try one of these butter cookies – I made them myself in my wood oven,” she said, handing him a cookie.

Nicola took it and started to chew. The taste multiplied a thousandfold. A sweet, toffee-like taste; the dough was chewy and melted in his mouth.

But there was that sheet of paper in his pocket – the sheet with those words on it. He was starting to remember now and his throat burned so much it hurt.

“Drink up, have some tea – it’s black tea and it will make you feel better,” said the old lady, as if she had read his mind. She got back to her knitting, smiling all the time, and lifted her long metal needle, studying its tip.

Nicola seized the china cup. His hands were shaking. The old lady stood again and walked up holding her long knitting needle. “Drink up, drink up.”

Nicola took a deep breath and brought the cup to his lips. The hot steam filled his nose – an intense, sweet fragrance of blossoms.

Polaroid: the four of them walking up to the porch of that very house – a house that seemed to have been abandoned for years, its windows barred shut, the grass unkempt, the sun choking everything in a metal vice. In the terse heat, a dog barked from far away, – a suffused, rhythmic bark, as if he were in the midst of a dream. Around them, a desert of rotten, dark yellow wheat. The world seemed to end there.

Nicola’s lips touched the cup and he sipped the tea. It was delicious. He’d never tasted anything as good. The old lady stroked her knitting needle. “Do you feel better now?” she inquired.

Nicola put the cup back down on the table. “I’m such a fool, Madam. The heat just got went to my head. I must’ve wandered about looking for the bathroom and then sss ss sss…”

His throat snapped shut like a trap. Fiery fangs gouged at his carotid and vomit burst up his throat, a morbid mix of stomach acid and blood, a purplish slop erupting from his nose and mouth as he shot up and staggered back. Tears welled in his eyes. He gasped and flapped his hands blindly, grasping at the lace tablecloth, pulling it and upsetting everything – the teapot, the cups and the cookies. Twitching convulsively, he saw the old lady smile and come toward him, her arms spread open, as if to embrace him. Her face was sick greasepaint, a hybrid accumulation of maliciousness and distorted craving, her torso tapering sickly into a toothless mouth that clicked and clicked like castanets.

Nicola backed toward the door and it opened behind him. He collapsed in the hallway and a gust of rancid stench covered the taste of blood and vomit in his mouth; it was the old lady croaking and clawing at his vest. Nicola was quick enough to wriggle his arm free and get out of the room, and he slammed the door shut. The old lady was imprisoned again in her room, and the door remained shut.

Nicola crawled along the carpet and felt a second stomach spasm more violent than the first. The tea was tainted. He knew he was done for – he realized it with the last flickers of consciousness leaving him. There were the others. The other guys on the team. He had to resist for them. He had to resist a few more seconds.

He took his sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, staining it with his blood. He took his pen from his coat pocket – the pen with “Elite Maintenance” etched onto it – and, as he lay in a heap on the crimson carpet winding through the endless maze of hallways defaced by dead ends, dusty mirrors, stairs to nowhere, that abandoned and endless house that corrupted reality, its architectural entrails rent by inhuman pangs, he wrote something, and as he wrote, behind him, beyond the ground glass of the white wood door, a shadow moved, a small diaphanous shadow.

 

There were two left. Lying in the greenhouse, wearing their Elite overalls, in opposite corners, every now and then they glanced at each other but didn’t have the nerve to utter a word. They had clearly heard the choked sobs and wheezes of Nicola. He hadn’t made it. And now there were two left.

The short one knew his name was Marco. That much he could remember. They had come here with a task and, from the papers strewn on the floor, he could see it had something to do with the pipe works. Of course – the greenhouse. The human rampart in this nightmarish hell. The stop-over, the last refuge. Things here worked more or less normally – time and space were not the demented distortions of some obscure power reigning over the abandoned mansion. Here, everything was still and there was no smell of mold – two important factors. But the third… well, the third was that the old lady couldn’t get in here.

That wasn’t all. The normality of this niche – a four-by-six-meter patio some grotesque sense of humor had dubbed a “greenhouse” – a vertical concrete duct, scorching under the perpendicular sun up there, and ornate with creepers like huge macrophages chewing on their grey guest, this normality was represented also by the regular functioning of the memory. Marco remembered. In gusts, with wrenched thoughts like a rag drenched in black scum, but something was there, for God’s sake. Something was there. But out there, outside the greenhouse, passing through one of the two wooden doors, you went back into the house, into that perverse, multiform maze of halls and dead ends and secret rooms and barred doors and impossibly high windows, closed off by rusty steel lattices, and that – that was the old lady’s realm.

He could remember the cycle path filling up with cyclists when they came in, along the road, beyond the weeds. That was the last vision in Marco’s mind. The cyclists with their glitzy outfits and their reptilian helmets, catching sight of them as they arrived on the house’s porch. Then it all became confused – a phosphoric fog possessed his mind. Dark, heavy hallways, with scarlet carpets, arabesqued wallpaper with dizzying patterns, small windows like portholes, closed off by intertwining lattices, and the old lady coming to the door to welcome them in – the old lady. Smiling, genial, petite. She led them to those roomless hallways and there something changed, something inside them broke. The four men looked at each other dumbfounded, astounded, unable to recognize each other, or even recall what they were doing there. The only reason they hadn’t questioned anything had been the old lady’s calm, persuasive voice – a chirping voice that calmed them, cajoled them, but concealed under its warm modulation an age-old secret, an invisible mask, beneath that nice-old-lady voice Marco could distinctly remember a different plane of reality, a deviated din, a miasma of raucous, underground voices.

She had led them into a room – the only one that seemed to make any sense, with a hint of normality (but the bodies of dead children hide and crawl behind that arabesqued wallpaper, you polymorph bastard, the bodies of dead children are oozing out of that wallpaper), she’d had them sit around her knitting table, she had served them cookies, buttery greasy cookies (guess what they’re made of, you sick dog, think beyond the wallpaper), she had made some black tea and, while they looked at each other, without saying a word, like freshly reanimated corpses, like overdosed opium junkies, their eyes languid, glimmering, begging for mutual help but unable to do anything but mechanically reach out for a cookie, bring it to their mouths, chew on a morsel, swallow slowly, and then start begging again; well, the old lady came back to them, she approached Mastorna, the foreman, and emptied on his head the entire content of the teapot – a liter of boiling black jasmine tea.

In the greenhouse, Marco crawled on the floor of the dusty patio, covered with tiny dried-out leaves from that morbid and ever-present creeper, and he remembered what happened after, in flashes of memory. Mastorna didn’t even manage to scream. He just sat there, with the boiling water eating away at his bald head, with a sound of sizzling oil; it dripped down his ears and on his face and his look was one of petrified devastation, cookie-crumbs still in his mouth, and at that point they had all stood like weird puppets, trying to overcome the oblivion that surrounded them (like that shitty creeper, but in their souls), each of them moved by their own feeble instinct of survival, they had walked out the door, the first, Nicola, the second was Lotfi, the Egyptian guy, and he was the third. Marco had turned around before leaving the room and saw its true form.

It wasn’t a little living room with antique furniture – none of that. It was a cube with impossible corners, with a multitude of impossible corners, it was like the inside of a wooden prism, its furniture writhing like living creatures as they bent and twisted following those skewed slants, and the old lady was the same as always but she was also something else, something that didn’t show itself, hiding within the folds of reality, slithering between those folds as quick as a scolopendra, barely more than a wild smirk and that look in her eye, and Marco knew that Mastorna was the old lady’s meal, and he knew he’d end up in pieces behind the room’s wallpaper, he’d end up like

“Marco,” mumbled Lotfi as he pushed himself up on his elbows. With a superhuman effort the Egyptian guy tried to get up; he got on all fours, then to his feet, clutching at the creepers and tearing them away. “She got Nicola.”

“Yes,” said Marco, and it was quite an effort. He tried to get up too. This place dragged you into an abyss of delirium. They had to fight back. They had to resist.

“Which of us is next?” he asked the Egyptian.

Lotfi turned his back to him. Then he took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. He drew out two cigarettes. He broke one. Then he clenched them, with the filter poking out. The two filters looked the same. He turned around and held out his fist.

Marco walked up to Lotfi and pinched one of the filters. He pulled. It was the long cigarette. Lotfi slit his eyes and a wicked gleam flashed through them. It was the gleam that strikes men right when their own personal world is threatened by other men – it was the natural predisposition to ferocious hatred that dwells within the heart of every man when he must share what is his, what he has exhaustively built up in his own miserable little life, brick after brick, through pain and tragedy, with unrelenting willpower, with – more often – fortune and misfortune; that sense of wretchedness so strong that one’s own little things, material or immaterial, just cannot be shared with or offered to another person; they must in fact be defended at the cost of bloodshed, because altruism leads to violence, to the unacceptability of the other’s existence. The other is the enemy.

Marco sensed this and realized that Lotfi would never accept the outcome of the lottery. They had done the same draw the first time and Nicola had pulled the shortest straw. Nicola had to leave the greenhouse and look for an exit, for help. The very same gleam had flashed through Nicola’s eyes too, but Marco and Lotfi would have surely overpowered him.

Now they were one against one and Lotfi was trying to figure out, in those instants, if he could get the better of Marco and if it was worth it. Marco anticipated his move. “We could both go.”

Lotfi’s gaze concealed what he was about to do. “That's a good idea.”

The two men seized the notepad and tore out a page each. They both wrote something – Lotfi in Arabic, Marco in Italian –, they folded their respective sheets and pocketed them. They went to one of the two doors. Lotfi opened it. A dark, red hallway awaited them, just like all the others. “And what do we do when we find the old lady?”

Marco took the pen from his Elite waistcoat. “I'll stab her in the throat with this.”

Lotfi gave him an empty look. “Let’s move it,” he said.

 

When Mastorna had met that gruesome end a few hours (or days?) ago, they had rushed into the hallway to escape. The old lady was right behind them. She wasn’t fast enough, though. Being outside that room, for some sick reason, became an exertion – she could move, but it taxed her. They moved slowly but still managed to distance her; still, they could sense that she was there, always one step behind them, always waiting around the next corner; no matter how far they got away, she was always on their tails. It was a silent escape and ended only when they reached the greenhouse. They locked themselves in, barricading themselves, and tried to talk, to understand. Their memories were hazy but in that patio things cleared up some. Maybe it was the open sky up there. It cleansed them somehow. Even if everything was distorted, even if they felt completely drunk, with the same nauseous feeling, the same reeling gait, the same babbled words of a drunkard, even though their thoughts were convulsive, intertwined, they managed to figure something out. They were imprisoned in that impossible nightmare. And the old lady was its kingpin.

Then someone had knocked on the door. Marco could remember it, as he and Lotfi walked through the house’s corridors in Indian file, among antique furniture, the silent but sick witness of their journey. Marco did his best to concentrate, to remain lucid, to remember. Not to forget.

Yes, because that was the problem. The man who had knocked on the door a few hours before was Mastorna. Horribly disfigured and almost lifeless, he had come to them. And he couldn’t remember the old lady. Those hallways, those rooms obliterated one’s memory. Only in the patio, in the greenhouse, did something come back. But leaving that place meant cleaning the slate, forgetting where they were, and thus forgetting about the danger. Forgetting about the old lady.

Mastorna had died soon after and they had had to toss him out of the door opposite to where he had come from. And they had come up with a plan. They had to get out; they would pull straws and one of them would search for a way out and alert the others. But what if he ran into the old lady? He wouldn’t remember who she was – that murdering whore – so they decided that whoever left the greenhouse would carry a sheet of paper with something written on it so as to remember and remain alert.

Nicola had pulled the shortest straw but things hadn’t gone according to plan. They had heard his screams. The old lady had caught him, just as she had Mastorna.

And now – and now Marco and Lotfi, oblivious to what had happened, looked at each other dumbfounded, not knowing what to do or where to go, through places like the squares of a sadistic game of snakes and ladders. Marco fished a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. The writing was familiar. His own? It bore the following words, in shivering handwriting:

 

THE OLD LADY IS A FUCKING MURDERER!

DON’T TRUST HER!

KILL HER BEFORE SHE KILLS YOU!

 

As he read and wondered who he was, what he was doing there with that delirious piece of paper; the man there with him, a man with olive skin and north-African features, stopped him and pointed to a fork in the hallway. To one side, a dead end. To the other, a door, a white door with ground-glass windows.

In a daze, the men drew closer and noticed some blood on the carpet, on the walls, and frantic handprints. Someone had been dragged into the room. Someone, still alive and clawing at the door with blood-soaked hands, but his resistance had been in vain. And right outside the door, a dirty crumpled piece of paper. The dark-skinned man took it and spread it out. Marco regarded him like an alien. He felt like throwing up. He craned his neck and read, feeling far, far away from everything, feeling lost in a nightmare. He was dreaming. Yes, it had to be that – it was a dream, a nightmare, albeit real, tangible.

The sheet bore these blood-smeared words:

 

WATCH OUT!

THE OLD LADY’S HIDING IN THIS ROOM!

 

And just below, underlined over and over again:

 

KEEP OUT!

 

The two men stared at each other. Marco gestured to keep quiet (did he know him? He thought he did, but who the hell was he?) and pointed toward the room. The man understood and gestured to wait. He hunkered down to peek through the keyhole and see what was hidden on the other side. Marco found this quite smart, despite the hallucinating context.

“See anything?” Marco whispered. “Let me see too!”

The man gestured to him to wait. “Hang on!” he whispered. “I can’t…”

Lotfi! His name was Lotfi! He knew him. Of course he knew him. He was a maintenance team colleague who

Lotfi let out a bestial cry – a cry that shattered the unnatural silence of that nightmare labyrinth – and flew back as if he were being pulled by invisible strings. His hands were over his face. He appeared in front of Marco, who barely managed to scream.

From his right eye – the one at the keyhole – there protruded a long, slim, shiny knitting needle; only half of it visible, because the other half stuck in his face, piercing his brain like a skewer.

The old lady had jabbed her knitting needle through the keyhole and right into his eye. Lotfi cried out and writhing on the carpet that lined the floor, and Marco, who could barely remember his name, tried to help him. The wooden door behind him creaked. Just over Marco’s shoulder he saw the small silhouette of the old house-owner.

“Poor dear, is he hurt?” she asked lovingly as she pointed at Lotfi, who had stopped screaming and crouched in a corner, groaning, his head turned to the wall, his legs twitching.

Marco stumbled over the body and broke into a run along the hallway without ever turning back but knowing, knowing all too well that a dark and evasive form hunted him down, just beyond the barely visible corner, and he ran and ran not even remembering his own surname, not even knowing what he was doing in that sick dream. Each time he tried to turn he saw that little silhouette moving quickly, popping up from around the corner; he could just catch a small detail – an old lady’s smile, a cotton wisp of white hair, a surgical boot; it was the old lady, the old lady who was always right behind him, always

Godless dog, forsworn sodomite, that’s what you are.

right behind him.

At the last turn – and he turned back to look at the umpteenth hallway after the umpteenth turn – he crashed into a wooden door, knocking it down with a resounding bang. He landed on the other side like a human avalanche and he was in a new room. He knew who he was. His name was Marco, he was a plumbing technician, he was twenty-eight years old, he had a life, a girlfriend, friends, and he didn’t want to die like all the others, no way. He glanced around the room. He grabbed hold of a cupboard and tugged until it blocked the doorway. He gave one last look and he saw that dark silhouette bending around the corner and in an instant it was the old house-owner, wearing a grey, worn-out overcoat, her hands crossed in front of her, walking towards him with her little surgical boots, and she smiled at him, she smiled and maybe she would treat him to a cup of black tea and some butter cookies (remember what they’re made with) and he’d forget everything and he’d follow her, and then what would happen? Marco didn’t even want to think about it.

He turned around. The room was long and narrow and there was a small window at eye-level. He ran towards it and looked outside. His spirits fell; the lattice was thick and it was impossible to get out, but someone was passing by out there. Cyclists. Damn cyclists.

“Hello! Help! Hey!” He banged his fists against the glass. He looked around, seized a piece of wood from the broken door and struck the glass. It didn’t break. Marco was shattered. Devastated by anguish, he slumped down on the dusty floor, thinking it was over. He wanted to let go, to lie down and wait for the old lady to come in.

Here I come, you stale little sperm.

“Come with me!” yelled a voice. A man called from the opposite end of the narrow room. He wore a dark coat and had a long beard and moustache. His hair was black and also very long. “Come. She won’t stay out there forever. She’ll figure out a way in. She always does.”

“What… what…”

“Come on, man. If you want to live.”

Marco got up and, in a fever, followed the man to the other exit, the other wooden door. He didn’t understand why but he knew he had to do it. “Who are you?” he asked as they moved through new, old shadowy hallways, over dark carpets, drenched with a stench of sour soup. Wood and chalk frames gave a nice touch to that nightmarish place.

“Can you hear her? She’s above us now,” he said, ignoring him. Marco looked up and heard a slight creak from the floorboards above. “She always knows where I am but she can’t get at me everywhere. I know the way. I know how to move around without being caught. At first she always found me. She found me and tried to bite me.”

“Who? Who the fuck are you talking about?”

“The old lady. The house-owner. The one that killed your friends. I know the way. I know how to get to the places she can’t get into. There are rules. I don’t know who made them, man, but there are rules. There’s the greenhouse and then there’s the bedroom. There it is,” he said and they went around a corner, reaching a dark door. The man went in and showed Marco the small, cramped room, a cubicle full of tiny, dark and lugubrious pieces of furniture, a sofa with a floral pattern in one corner, and a round window.

“Can we get out? Can we get out from there?” yelled Marco, running to that slit that looked out onto the outside world. Dark stains of dampness ate away at the ceiling. Desperation reigned in that place.

The man guffawed. “Don’t you see? There is no way out of this place. I spent the first months banging on the windows. They won’t break and nobody out there can hear you. Cyclists pass by during the day and gypsies during the night but nobody can hear your cries. Sometimes some kids play soccer in that field over there, but in here we’re alone. We’re on our own with her.”

Marco held his head. “No, no no…” he said, dismayed. He slumped into the sofa, mumbling incoherently.

“I sleep there. In that sofa. It’s not so bad. I mean, you get used to it.”

“How long… how long have you…”

“No idea. Years, I’d reckon.”

“And how… how did you survive so…”

The long-haired, long-bearded man banged his fist against the wall. Marco started. As if to reply through mimicry, the man looked at where his fist had landed – he had just squished a huge spider with extraordinarily long legs. He took its body between two fingers and popped it into his mouth. He swallowed it in one gulp. Marco stared at him mouth agape. He was so disgusted that he felt like throwing up.

“You get used to everything. If you want to live, that is.” The man leaned against the wall and slipped down on the floor into a sitting position.

“Who is she?” Marco asked his new, unexpected companion.

The man shrugged. “Who knows? Sometimes, even at night, even though day and night are the same thing, I can hear her walking upstairs, I can feel her sniffing me out, because she wants me, she wants to catch me, but she can’t…” he explained, his eyes wild, red all around, as he stared at the black stain on the wall where he had squished the spider. “… so I cling to that sofa, that sofa that reeks of death, I clench my eyes and I imagine that she’s just an animal, a very hungry animal. That’s all,” he said and turned to look at the round window and its lattice, beyond which flowed life and the Martesana. Exhausted, Marco looked towards the round window too and saw a group of cyclists passing by. He didn’t even have the strength to cry out.

“Someone’s going to come looking for us eventually.” The man stared blankly at the round window. Marco couldn’t even answer, as he focused on the cyclists passing just a few feet from them. He simply opened his mouth and moved his lips, soundlessly. They wouldn’t have heard him anyway.

From above them came a furtive shuffle. It was the old lady. She could smell them.

She couldn’t get to them, but she could wait.

 

 

THE END