I'm Not Scared (18 page)

One, two, three, breath …

The tyres crackled on the grit. The wind stuck to my face like a warm cloth.

The screech of a little owl, the bark of a distant dog. There was silence. But I could still hear their whispers in the darkness.

I imagined them at each side of the road, little creatures, with foxes' ears and red eyes, watching me and talking among themselves.

‘Look! Look, a boy!'

‘What's he doing here at night?'

‘Let's get him!'

‘Yes, yes, yes, he looks tasty … Let's get him!'

And behind me were the lords of the hills, the earthy wheat-covered giants following me, just waiting for me to go off the road so that they could roll over me and bury me. I could hear them breathing. They made the same noise as the wind in the wheat.

The secret was to keep in the middle of the road, but I must be ready for danger.

Lazarus wasn't scared of anything.

You'll see, I said to myself.

In the night Lazarus was luminous. He winked on and off like the sign outside the La Perla bar in Lucignano. And when he lit up you could see the ants crawling in his veins. He didn't move fast, I was sure of that, if he started running he would fall to pieces. The important thing was to go past him, without stopping, without slowing down.

‘Filippo … I'm coming … Filippo … I'm coming …' I repeated, panting with the effort.

As I drew nearer to the farm a new, even more suffocating terror grew inside me. On the back of my head the hair stood up as straight as needles.

Melichetti's pigs.

The lords of the hills and all the other monsters terrified me, but I knew that they didn't exist, that I imagined them, that I couldn't talk about them to anyone else because they would have laughed at me, but the pigs I certainly could talk about because they really existed and they were hungry.

For living flesh.

‘The dachshund tried to get away, but the pigs didn't give
him a chance. Torn to shreds in two seconds.' That's what Skull had said.

Maybe Melichetti let them out at night. They prowled around the farm, huge and vicious, with sharp fangs and noses in the air.

The further I kept away from those brutes the better.

In the distance a dim light appeared in the gloom.

The farm.

I was almost there.

I braked. The wind had dropped. The air was still and calm. The sound of crickets came from the nearby gravina. I got off the bike and dumped it among the brambles, beside the road.

You couldn't see a thing.

I moved swiftly, hardly breathing, and kept looking over my shoulder. I was afraid the sharp claw of a monster would sink into my neck. Now I was on foot there were a lot of noises, rustles, bumps, strange sounds. All around me was a thick black mass that pressed against the road. I wet my dry lips, I had a bitter taste in my mouth. My heart was pounding in my throat.

I put the sole of my sandal on something slimy, I jumped, gave a muffled cry and fell over, grazing my knee.

‘Who is it? Who is it?' I stammered and curled up in a ball, expecting to be enveloped by the squelchy stinging tentacles of a jellyfish.

Two dull thuds and a ‘Bwaa bwaa bwaa.'

A toad! I had trodden on a wheatfield toad. The stupid thing had been sitting in the middle of the road.

I got to my feet and limped on towards the dim light.

I hadn't even brought a torch. I could have taken the one in papa's truck.

When I reached the edge of the farmyard, I hid behind a tree.

The house was about a hundred metres away. The windows were dark. There was just a little lamp hanging beside the door, lighting up a bit of flaky wall and the rusty rocking chair.

Just beyond, in the darkness, were the pigsties. Even from there I could smell the revolting stench of their excrement.

Where could Filippo be?

Down in the gravina, Salvatore had said. I had been down in that long gully a couple of times in wintertime with papa, looking for mushrooms. It was all crags, holes and rock faces.

If I went across the fields I would come out on the edge of the gravina and from there I could get down to the bottom without having to go too near the house.

It was a good plan.

I ran across the fields. The wheat had been cut. In the daytime, without the crops, I would have been seen, but now, without the moon, I was safe.

I stopped at the top of the gorge. Below it was so black I couldn't make out how steep the rock was, whether it was smooth or whether there were footholds.

I kept cursing myself for not bringing the torch. I couldn't go down that way. I might get hurt.

The only thing for it was to get closer to the house. At that point the gravina was shallower, and there was a little track that went down between the rocks. But that was also where the pigs were.

I was covered in sweat.

‘Pigs have a better sense of smell than any other animal, hounds are nothing like as good,' Skull's father, who was a hunter, used to say.

I couldn't go that way. They would smell me.

What would Tiger Jack do in my place?

He would face them. He would mow them down with his
Winchester and make them into sausages to roast on the fire with Tex and Silver Hair.

No. That wasn't his style.

What would he do?

Think, I told myself. Try.

He would try to get the human smell off himself, that's what he would do.

The Indians, when they went buffalo hunting, smeared themselves with grease and put furs on their backs. That was what I must do: smear myself with earth. Not earth, shit. Much better. If I smelled of shit they wouldn't notice me.

I got as close as possible to the house, keeping in the dark.

The stink got worse.

As well as the crickets I could hear something else. Music. The sound of a piano and a hoarse voice singing: ‘The water's icy cold, nobody will save me. I fell into the foaming brine while the dancers danced in line. Wave on wave …'

Was Melichetti a singer?

Someone was sitting on the rocking chair. On the ground, next to it, there was a radio. It was either Melichetti or his lame daughter.

I watched for a while, crouching behind the old tractor tyres.

The person looked dead.

I moved closer.

It was Melichetti.

His wizened head lolling on a filthy cushion, his mouth open and his double-barrelled shotgun on his knees. He was snoring so loud I could hear him from there.

The coast was clear.

I came out into the open, took a few steps and the shrill barks of a dog shattered the silence. For a moment the crickets stopped singing.

The dog! I had forgotten the dog.

Two red eyes ran in the darkness. He was pulling the chain behind him and emitting strangled barks.

I dived head first into the stubble.

‘What is it? What's up? What's got into you?' Melichetti said with a start. He sat on the rocking chair and rotated his head like an owl. ‘Tiberius! Quiet! Be quiet, Tiberius!'

But the brute just wouldn't stop barking, so Melichetti stretched, put on his orthopaedic collar and got up, turned off the radio and switched on his torch.

‘Who's there? Who's there? Is anyone there?' he shouted into the darkness and made a couple of listless circuits of the farmyard with his shotgun under his arm, pointing the band of light around. He went back grumbling. ‘Stop making that row. There's nobody there.'

The dog squashed down on the ground and started growling between his teeth.

Melichetti went into the house slamming the door.

I kept as far away as possible from the dog and approached the pig enclosure. I could see, in the darkness, the square silhouettes of the sties. The pungent smell increased and burned my throat.

I must camouflage myself. I took off my T-shirt and shorts. Dressed only in pants I dipped my hands in the piss-soaked earth and screwing up my face I spread that foul muck over my chest, my arms, my legs and my face.

‘Go, Tiger. Go and don't stop,' I whispered and started crawling forward on all fours. It was a struggle. My hands and knees sank into the mud.

The dog started barking again.

I found myself between two pigsties. In front of me was a passageway less than a metre wide that disappeared into the gloom.

I could hear them. They were there. They made deep low noises that resembled the roar of a lion. I could sense their strength in the darkness, they were moving in a herd and trampling with their trotters, and the bars shook under their shoves.

Keep going and don't turn round, I ordered myself.

I prayed that my armour of shit would work. If one of those beasts put its snout through the bars it could tear my leg off with one bite.

I could see the end of the pen when there was a sudden scuffling and some grunts, as if they were quarrelling.

I couldn't help looking.

A metre away, two vicious yellow eyes were watching me. Behind those little headlamps there must be hundreds of kilos of muscles, flesh and bristles and claws and fangs and hunger.

We stared at each other for an endless moment, then the creature gave a sudden jerk and I was certain he was going to knock down the fence.

I shouted and jumped to my feet and ran and slipped in the dung and got up again, I started running again, open-mouthed, in the blackness, clenching my fists as tight as could be and suddenly I was in the air, I was flying, my heart was in my mouth and my guts closed in a fist of pain.

I had gone over the edge of the gravina.

I was plunging into the void.

I fell, a metre below, into the branches of an olive that grew out at an angle among the sheer rocks and spread its foliage over the drop.

I clung onto a branch. If that blessed tree hadn't been there to break my fall I would have been smashed to a pulp on the rocks. Like Francesco.

A segment of moon had opened a gap through the bluish
clouds and I could see, below me, that long gash in the countryside.

I tried to turn round but the trunk was rocking like a bowsprit. Now it's going to break, I said to myself. I'll take the whole tree down with me.

My hands and legs were shaking and at every moment I felt I was going to slip down. When at last I gripped the rock between my fingers I breathed again. I climbed back up onto the edge of the gravina.

It was deep and stretched right and left for several hundred metres. Inside, it was all holes, gullies and trees.

Filippo could be anywhere.

To my right was the beginning of a path that wound steeply down between the white rocks. There was a pole fixed in the ground, and tied to it was a worn rope which Melichetti evidently used to help him get down. I grabbed hold of it and went down the precipitous track. After a few metres I came to a terrace covered in dung. It was surrounded by a fence made of branches tied together. Some clothes, ropes and scythes were hanging on a projecting rock. A little further on there was a pile of wooden stakes. Three small goats and a larger one were tethered to a root that protruded from the earth. They stared at me.

I said to them: ‘Don't just gawp at me like idiots, tell me where Filippo is.'

A silent black shadow dropped down on me from the sky, passed over me, I shielded my head with my hands.

A little owl.

It rose again, dissolved in the blackness, then swooped towards the terrace again and went back up into the sky.

Strange, they were friendly birds.

Why was it attacking me?

‘I'm going, I'm going,' I whispered.

The track continued and I went on down holding the rope. I had to walk crouching down and feel with my hands the obstacles that appeared in front of me, as blind people do. When I reached the bottom of the gully I was astonished. The holly bushes, the thistles, the arbutuses, the moss and the rocks were covered with luminous dots that pulsed like tiny lighthouses in the night. Fireflies.

The clouds had thinned and a half-moon tinged the gravina with yellow. The crickets were singing. Melichetti's dog had stopped barking. There was peace.

In front of me was an olive grove and behind, on the other slope of the gully, a narrow cleft in the rock.

From inside there came an acid smell, of dung. I went in just a little way and heard movements and bleating. A carpet of sheep. They had been shut inside the cave with wire netting. They were crammed in like sardines. No room there for Filippo.

I went back to the other slope, but I couldn't find any holes, any dens to hide a boy in.

When I had jumped out of the window it hadn't even crossed my mind that I might not succeed in finding him. All I would have to do was go through the dark and not get eaten by the pigs and there he would be.

It wasn't like that.

The gravina was very long and they might have put Filippo somewhere else.

I was disheartened. ‘Filippo, where are you?' I shouted. But very quietly. Melichetti might hear me. ‘Answer me! Where are you? Answer me!'

Nothing.

Only a little owl replied. It made a strange noise, it seemed to be saying: ‘All for me, all for me, all for me.' It might be the same one that had attacked me before.

It wasn't fair. I had come all that way, I had risked my life
for him and he was nowhere to be found. I started running backwards and forwards between the rocks and the olives, at random, as desperation gripped me.

I felt so angry I seized a branch from the ground and started banging it against a rock, till my hands were sore. Then I sat down. I shook my head and tried to banish the thought that it had all been useless.

I had run away from home like a fool.

Papa must be furious. He would give me a thrashing.

They must have noticed I wasn't in my bedroom. And even if they hadn't, they would soon be arriving there to kill Filippo.

Papa and the old man in front, Felice and the barber behind. At top speed, in the dark, in the grey car with the gunsight on its bonnet, squashing the toads with its wheels.