The doppelganger giggled while the real Riccardo stared at him in disbelief.

He liked that he was afraid, even if for the occasion he had decided to spare him such an emotion, he enjoyed every bit of his confused anguish, all the good intentions made for the visit had been thrown to the winds. Those unnaturally colored eyes of his shone like the full moon and had a mischievous touch, but never as much as that wide, cheerful devilish smile that already promised anything but positivity.

> Riccardo asked with a faint voice.

He flinched as the impostor came up fluid and light as a soap bubble.

He bent so that he could be closer to his face, just enough so that he could almost touch it with the tip of his nose. Having him so close allowed him to notice certain noteworthy details: he gave off the scent of wet earth and had cracked skin, small crickets stood out in his hair and his hair swayed by itself producing a faint rustle of leaves.

They stared into each other's eyes until he took on a puzzled expression.

> he asked

Riccardo shook his head negatively.

The double was so offended that he exploded into a long monologue of insults all aimed at him. He waved his arms at the air but never lowered them to hit him ... and maybe they couldn't even touch him because they became smoky with the movement, and then he paced back and forth in the small room with the heat of a caged lion but his feet didn't touch in the least the floor, at least 12 centimeters apart.

He no longer had any doubts "that" was actually a ghost ... and if it was not an illusion, then more than ever he believed in the existence of Hell and Heaven.

Finally, after showing off his long, colorful vocabulary of offenses, the individual calmed down with a last resigned sigh. He put his hands on his hips, repeating to himself that he had to calm down and not waste his opportunity, raised his head with a slight snap when he noticed the faint tick of the old plastic alarm clock that was on the bedside table, the hands positioned at 2 o'clock and 15minutes made him grumble.

> he finally said.

The "man" dissolved into a cloud, the thick black vapor spreading quickly through the room like fire smoke, but without fire. In a few minutes Riccardo saw nothing, as if it were not enough the temperature dropped rapidly and not even the two thick warm blankets helped him to warm up.

Suddenly he felt himself being dragged, kicked and punched the air without hitting anyone, the drip at that moment came off his arm with a burning gun.

Slowly he was jerked faster and faster to the point that the sensation he felt was like that of falling from a very high place, even his ears were ringing and he had butterflies in his stomach.

And in all of this the smoke persisted, without letting out any clues as to what was happening around him.

He screamed for help, he wanted to go home.

He finally stopped, "landing" on his back with a faint thud.

He had curled up on himself and was trembling, his hands clinging tightly to his pajamas were tearing him apart. Riccardo kept his eyes closed and wept, so much jaded by that supernatural experience.

He felt his face tickle delicately but did not dare to open his eyes, it was the strong smell of wet earth that made him change his mind.

He took a peek; all around him a vast plain covered by a thin carpet of gray grass was lost to the horizon like the sea; the sky was a veil of cloud that swayed lazily. There was no sun or moon, there was no sound of animal or insect, and no form of human life.

Riccardo sat up, his limbs ached from how much he had stiffened and found with embarrassment that his pants were wet, the grass stung his bare feet and the cold air made him shiver.

Behind him he saw a placid river with brittle banks; he reached it with the desire to drink. The water was dark as oil, inside it, almost touching the surface, unclear figures moved, all swimming in the same direction, indistinguishable from each other.

>

The doppelganger appeared to his right, sitting composed with his legs balanced on the bank and partially submerged in the water.

>

>

>

>

Fear.

This was the first thing he perceived, the most terrible of human emotions.

All mankind is afraid, it's no secret, but for him it was a shame to hide. When it appeared it gave him the impression of being humiliated by those who were braver than him; he would do anything to stop feeling such a sensation.

All the things he did, the dedication to work and his hobbies, were to be able to get stronger to overcome fear.

But it was never enough, it wasn't enough.

Perhaps today he would be a calmer man if, a long time ago, things had gone differently.

In Grosseto, his hometown, everyone in his neighborhood knew that exuberant blond devil who caused disasters with his inseparable friends, the noisy afternoons spent at the bar or in the garden under the house were still alive in the memory of the neighbors.

The parents, on the other hand, would have remembered them for their exploits with "games" that were anything but normal, such as trying to jump from the roof of the garages under construction or climbing the fences of the gardens to perform wrestling stunts, all seasoned with peeling and bruising. repeatedly.

Despite the reproaches and threats of increasingly severe punishment, nothing stopped their desire to test their courage.

Thinking back, as a kid it's easy to be bold when you don't yet know the ugliness of the world.

Life at that age is just a continuous circle of games and fun, waiting for Christmas and for the summer holidays; and where the only real sadness is the obligation to go to school.

He was just a child after all, that was how he saw things.

And then there was the accident.

Although so many years had passed, he still hadn't been able to get that frightening day out of his head.

He was 13 when his greatest fear was born.

It happened on an autumn day, school had just started over a month ago and he was already annoyed about having to go.

In reality, school was not the real problem, Riccardo was simply going through a phase in which anything to do, even the most trivial, sounded like an order or a stretch.

His father, being a cop and used to giving orders; complicated the situation by seeing that attitude in a lack of respect for him. The quarrels between father and son were almost the order of the day and you could hear their screams in the street, disturbing unsuspecting passers-by and neighbors. Only the dear mother, using a much calmer tone and attitude, was able to restore peace between the two males, at least until they started over again.

On the way to school, two of his classmates crossed paths by chance and proposed to skip school.

He liked the idea and he immediately accepted, they didn't even have to insist and so bye bye history, geography and even math! On that beautiful warm morning, colored by the red and gold leaves of the semi-bare trees, it would have been wasted to remain closed in a classroom listening for hours to boring professors who put you in detention even for a simple yawn.

That day, in the face of those who did not want to, he would have fun in the open air.

And so they started loitering first in the nearby countryside competing for who caught the most lizards and crickets, then a quick jump to the new playground to test the swings and the shiny new slide; after which they had wandered to the suburbs undecided about how to commit the time before going home and pretend they had been good children.

And finally there it is, the worst idea that can come to a bored kid, in the form of a building under construction.

Grosseto, although it is a small city; modestly continues to grow.

In those years there was even more countryside than concrete, one step was enough to overcome the boundary between civilization and nature. The new buildings were built frequently, if possible the historical ones were renovated to maintain their historical value and also because that way that essential aesthetics remained that did not ruin the elegant Grosseto urban appearance.

The future house (or perhaps office, who knows) was a three-storey building with the external ground floor characterized by a long gallery formed by stone arches, the roof and windows were partly missing and it was still enclosed in the skeleton of metal balustrades. There were no workers around, only a few tools and buckets of paint, someone had also left their safety helmets.

One of the companions proposed to Riccardo, with a sly smile, to go inside.

While Riccardo liked to be swaggering, he wasn't so foolish as to sneak into obviously dangerous places. Despite this, however, he could not bear the accusation of being a coward.

Among males, you know, being considered "cowards" is almost as serious an offense as insulting their mother and woe betide not defending honor.

And so it was, out of a matter of stupid pride, that he set foot in the whole of a place where a child was not supposed to be.

The door was tightly closed, but a downstairs window with no bars or panes of wood offered itself as an alternative entrance, and a staircase unfortunately left there by a careless worker simplified access.

The yellow painted exterior façade had misled them, inside the state it was far from tidy, revealing that the restoration work had not yet begun: it was all broken, dusty and with rusty things that could fall on your head.

The musty smell was worse than his used socks after hours of playing soccer, the large rooms were piled with heaps of lime that had fallen from the walls, shards of the marble floor and legs belonging to unidentifiable furniture. Mice, spiders and other annoying animals had rented the building for a long time, but there was evidence of the occupation of much larger "tenants" such as bottles and syringes- for those ones Riccardo did not exactly understand the presence, thinking that place was not a hospital.

Riccardo, with his fellow adventurers, wandered cautiously around with his hands in his pockets full of used handkerchiefs and coins to buy sweets.

Getting in there was a bit disappointing, they had hoped to find, except for trouble of course; something worth making sense of the intrusion. Then Riccardo proposed to leave as the dust was not exciting, but the game for the other boys had just begun and an old bedroom was for them. The room was the darkest of all, the only window was bricked up and only through a single hole did the light pass with difficulty.

Get in there and hang out for a while, one of the boys had said.

We lock you in though, so we see if you are really brave; Added the other.

Riccardo approved everything, he was so sure it would be over soon.

They did it quickly: they closed it inside and the game started.

He began to count, they had challenged him to stay inside for up to 100 seconds, that was enough to prove he wasn't a coward, too bad it was so boring to have to do it.

For a while it went well, but here the unexpected came to punish him, as the elves in fairy tales often do towards those who do not behave well.

At the second 62 he stopped, interrupted by a low rumbling similar to the roar of an airplane, peering through the hole in the window he saw that the sky had become dark outside and a faint smell of damp earth had peeped into the room. He realized it was going to rain soon and that meant his mother would pick him up from school instead of letting him come back on his own as usual, which would expose his little escape.

Riccardo had no intention of being punished. Not so much because they would forbid him to go out with friends or play Nintendo, but to avoid having to take a long reproach from his father. Faced with such a prospect, he headed for the exit.

The door was locked, he knocked and yelled at his friends to get him out. But his companions were no longer there waiting for him. He would never have known that these, to make a joke, had left him alone on purpose to go around for a while 'until he would have wanted to let him out. But the rain, along with other unforeseen events, would have prevented him from returning to the house. Riccardo had repeatedly asserted that he was an adult by now and that he knew how to get by on his own ... none of this was true, they were just the deluded beliefs of an arrogant child, and now that "adult child" didn't know what to do.

In a panic he did everything to open the door: he pulled the handle many times, kicked the wooden surface as he had seen it done in the movies, hoping it would give way. He continued like this without restraint until finally he gave in exhausted to fatigue.

How much time passed Riccardo did not remember exactly, but it was a lot without any doubt.

The exit was there behind him but blocked, he had leaned on it so as not to lose sight of it. From time to time, he would cry out for help, at least as long as his voice allowed. Nobody heard it from inside, also because the rain had started to fall hard imitating the roar of a waterfall.

The hovel soon became cold, in its current state there was no way it could prevent moisture from getting inside. Riccardo heard the sighs of the wind blowing through the holes of the house, it was as if there were someone who was whistling on purpose in a discordant way to annoy him. Thunder burst from time to time, the last one falling so close that it shook from head to toe.

The storm and the wind weren't a big problem after all… darkness was the real enemy.

The darkened domestic prison slowly began to frighten. He heard noises of things moving and was sure he saw strange shapes moving all around. He repeated himself several times that he was alone in there ... there could not be "presences" ... but the certainties wavered with the increase of fatigue, hunger and despair ... several times his mind created fantasies and illusions of disturbing creatures that jumped him on.

Closing my eyes didn't help because the hallucinations didn't stop.

One day and one night he remained a prisoner in that shack, they found him the afternoon of the next day, when the other boys had found the courage to tell their day of adventures to the cops who were looking for him far and wide.

Riccardo was lucky that their conscience gave them the strength to speak, because otherwise, due to a series of unfortunate events that happened to the construction company that had long been faltering towards bankruptcy; that old house would become his grave.

He did not hear the sirens of the cars or the shouting of the people who gathered under the old building, only when the bricklayers broke down the door the world come back alive for him with its colors, its smells, its sounds and above all its light.

Getting back free was like being reborn, finding mom and dad was a more beautiful event than Christmas.

He ended up in hospital without serious injuries, relatives and friends of relatives came to see him bringing gifts and wishes for healing ... but despite the reassurances he remained there for two weeks in the grip of the most terrible nightmares. He took plenty of medicines and he met two psychologists at a time; the darkness had left a deep wound in his psyche and time, which meanwhile passed in the form of years, would have struggled to heal it.

After that astral journey into the past Riccardo, with his eyes full of tears, returned to the present.

> he said to the creature, still in his company.

He exulted with great joy, his cries echoed in that strange empty world and were so loud that everything seemed to tremble. He grabbed her hair and began to pull until it tore, taking everything it was attached to, including his skin and clothes.

At last he revealed the true appearance, sinister like the ancient medieval effigy of a devil, emerging from that cocoon of skin like a butterfly that was anything but splendid.

In his human physiognomy many things did not add up and this made him much more frightening: his real skin was black as ink, the outlines of muscles and joints were hardly noticeable, he was like a sentient mass of infinite emptiness, in contrast. He had a dazzling white smile of sharp teeth that shone with their own light. He had no eyes but it was clear that he could see very well, on his head he had a sort of hood like that of the Cobra but which faded from black to blue, the legs were so hollow as to form a half moon. Another peculiar thing was that he had no genitals: from under the transparent silver skirt you could see very well what he barely wanted to hide and there was no trace of a penis or a vagina.

The being was tall, standing on the tips of his legs and straight back he seemed to be trying to gain even more centimeters, he liked to tower over Riccardo who looked at him annihilated.

>

>

>

>

>

It did not take Riccardo long to choose the answer, since he knew well what he hated well:

>

>

Riccardo felt teased again, not feeling fear was impossible. It was easier for mankind to break the happiness of others and whatever else was good and positive in the world, but to erase the fear? What nonsense.

The dark made Riccardo approach the river bank, ordering him to observe the creatures there: these interrupted the journey towards the unknown, approaching the shore. The surface of the water gurgled, from there hundreds of eyes appeared.

> millions of voices asked in chorus.

> the Fear replied to those things that shifted their gaze on him.

The creatures made noises of wonder, their eyes sparkled with curiosity.

Fear entered the water and let itself be enveloped by beings; their voices became whispers that hinted at excitement from the tonality. Shortly after, at the end of the private chatter, all the creatures returned to focus on Riccardo.

We exist only because of the terror your race feels for us, which turns into nourishment. >>

>

>

>

>

A deal? To Riccardo it didn't sound right, it was so clear that behind that offer there was a scam. Who knows what kind of pretensions those monsters had, certainly they would not have asked him to mow the lawn of the house. On the other hand though… if they really could definitely resolve his Achilles heel… that would have been the best gift they'd ever offered him.

What to do?

What to choose?

Despite the knowledge of being in a dangerous situation, the temptation to have his wish fulfilled was greater than reason, and even if this eventually prevailed would he come out alive? Would he have endured the guilt of having missed a more unique than rare opportunity?

No, he would not have succeeded.

> he finally answered.

Suddenly the river began to boil and the sky became stormy, an arid wind rose which prevented the man from breathing normally.

His head began to spin heavily, it seemed to him that everything around him was making a quick circle that mixed shapes and colors making them indistinguishable, he barely tried to remain lucid while Fear, illuminated by the eyes of his companions, approached the shore with a smile who knew more of danger than happiness. He grabbed him by the arm trying to throw him into the river, Riccardo opposed him by clinging to the grass and the damp earth.

> while he spoke, the being was melting like candle wax, but the drops instead of gravitating downwards slid along his body without an end.

>

>

Struck by the incredibility of those words, he forgot to resist and was pulled down. The Fear of the Dark dissolved when Riccardo fell on him, the other beings hidden in the water disappeared, mingling among the muddy waves of the river, but he felt them crawling on him like so many hands rubbing the skin. Then he was yanked underwater, no matter how hard he tried he was unable to stay afloat and the worst was feeling that "something" was biting his back.

Fierce bites that went deeper and deeper into the flesh.

Bites that burned like salt on an open wound.

And then his chest felt as if they were opening it, tearing away the bones and tendons that protected that area and the delicate organs that were inside.

He screamed for help until he was able to stay afloat, when he disappeared among the black waves the last cry remained in his throat.

****

A bang ended it all.

It was not a real explosion, it was more like the faint "bop" of an air bubble, of the kind one gets the impression of hearing when a dream is interrupted in the moment of a rude awakening.

The annoying smell of smog, the barking of dogs, the voices of man and woman panting while making love ... Riccardo was able to hear all these things that made him wake up.

The eyes finally decided to open despite the lids were heavy, but many bright dots covered the view making it difficult to see what was in front of him. With a little difficulty he managed to sit up, cracking his back: he felt limited in moving and also attached, it happened that the limbs snapped like springs, briefly causing him that sensation of pinching of needles under the skin.

In stroking his face he realized that something was missing: his nose and mouth were gone, his hair didn't get caught in his fingers and he worried when he couldn't find his ears. It was supposed to be just an impression, right?

Things that happen when you wake up from sleep.

Yet he was wide awake now, conscious of his own body.

He staggered up in search of a mirror, his vision blurred constantly stumbling against things that were on the ground. He fell, he was so stunned that he did not dare to get back on his feet, so he crawled cautiously until he touched something cold, two yellow spheres sparkling under him enclosed in a tall and slender shape.

He moved an arm forward and this copied it, with the same time and the same click.

He raised the shiny glass, a light source behind him definitively lit up the view: a completely black shadow with blue reflections observed him with eyes without iris and pupils, the only details of the face. The whole body was a dark mass with no clothes on because there was no intimacy to cover, a perfect male silhouette in short.

That "thing" was Riccardo.