The checked Moon Read online

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.

  T
he 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 d
esert 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