behind the concave lens.
‘You must be very stupid not to open the door, Harry. Just stay there and giggle,’ he said, and from inside he could hear clearly now, as if it were very close, a stifled giggle.
He went downstairs two steps at a time, trying to breathe as little as possible. As he got closer to the ground floor and the smell became stronger, diversifying its nuances and penetrating his clothes and his skin, it inebriated him to such an extent that he nearly fainted. This was a building without pets and old people. He knew almost all of them, for together with the boys in his gang, he had harassed them all in various ways. It was not from the cleaned and scrubbed apartments that the smell came, nor from the stairs that were swept daily and then washed with a rag curled around a wooden stick.
By the time he reached the ground floor, he had figured out where the smell was coming from. Outside, the rain would have hidden the putrid smell, annihilating it. There was only one place left that he would have to inspect, although he wasn’t looking forward to doing so and had little courage left: the basement. On the ground floor, there were two apartments and the door that led to the basement, where the storage rooms were located. It wasn’t a very pleasant place to visit, especially when alone. But it was still raining outside, ceaselessly; it was raining cats and dogs, as Grandmother used to say while looking absentmindedly out the window, and Emi would undoubtedly have to wait. He opened the last door, while at the same moment a horrid stench hit him so violently he staggered and moved a step backward.
‘I’ll be damned…’
An infinite disgust impressed itself upon Sal’s face. He slammed the door wildly, as if someone were rushing at him from beyond the threshold, and remained with his hand on the door handle, seemingly trying to figure out what was to be done. A few long seconds passed.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Sal repeated in a stifled voice. ‘What the hell is this smell?’
He stood with his arms akimbo like a bewildered old man, assessing the danger. Opening the door again, he looked inside to the darkness that lay at his feet. He tried his best to be brave, but the pitch-black inferno of the building had opened its huge mouth and was preparing to swallow him, the way children swallowed pickled autumn tomatoes brought from basement storage rooms by the housewifely mothers who had been careful enough to store supplies for winter.
Sal’s fingers had gone white and he could no longer feel his limbs, but he didn’t understand very clearly if this was because of his sickness or because of the cold that had caught him unaware. The door was open, and the dark was already licking the tips of his shoes. Sal felt dizzy with nausea; his body was numb and his head kept spinning.
He took a step inside. There, with the dark swallowing half of his body, the air no longer seemed so unbearable. He took another step. The dark clung to his face. He should go on, he thought, emboldening himself; he should take another step. So he took another. Suddenly, he rolled down the stairs without feeling any pain. His body seemed wrapped in a sponge and, through the soft fabric, thousands of eyes had popped out. For the first time, he saw everything as if in a huge glass panorama. The horizon lay both in front of him and behind him, bewildering him.
He landed on the cement at the bottom of the stairs. Shaking the dust out of his clothes and checking himself for sore spots, he could feel absolutely no pain. He felt neither the nausea that had strangled him upstairs nor the dizziness; he could breathe at will. For a split second, he thought he was dreaming. He stayed still, trying to come back to his senses.
A small, narrow corridor lay ahead of him, with doors to the storage rooms aligned on each side. Sal stood up and, leaning against the wall, advanced one step at a time. With the tips of his fingers, he felt some kind of strange dampness that caused him to draw back his hand hastily. He rubbed his index finger against his thumb, remaining still. A faint, barely perceptible hum floated now in the darkness.
After a few seconds, Sal’s eyes got used to the lack of light, and he began to discern the space around him. The foul smell was gone, and now he began to smell the odour of plants in the air.
‘Oh, God!’ he said to himself. ‘I think I’ve gone crazy.’ Emi was waiting for him in her cheerful room, clad in her transparent dress through which you could see her thighs and her underpants and, sometimes, when you looked closer, even her nipples, but only when it was cold and Emi was all in a shiver. What on earth was he doing here? Why wasn’t he resting in peace, his head in her lap? Maybe he could even have taken a little nap before seeing the boys.
He came to a door that was ajar, pulled away the broken padlock that hung from two metal loops and pushed the door to the wall. The darkness inside was even thicker than it had been in the corridor, and Sal groped slowly along the wall, searching for a light switch, but couldn’t find one. He stepped into the room cautiously, following the slow, deafening rhythm of his heartbeat, and had the strange feeling that everything had frozen still – no heartbeat, no hum in the air, no muffled sounds from outside, nothing at all. And then the stench rushed upon him in even greater intensity, with a hint of jasmine and anise.
‘Is there anyone here?’ Sal whispered, overcome with excitement.
He took another two steps, and time began to rush. He began repeating in his mind, mechanically: ‘Emi, Emi, Emi.’ Then, when he had somewhat recovered from his fear, when he had measured the distance in the dark with his eyes, when his hands had stopped trembling, only then did he think that everything was a big pile of nonsense. How could a smell scare him?
The voice within him gave a high-pitched shriek, like a hysterical woman. Sal advanced blindly through the room, trying to grab onto something. The smell would come and go as if a draught crossed the room, somehow eluding him. Suddenly, there was the metallic edge of something hip-high. Sal cheered up and measured the cold expanse with the tips of his fingers: it was something that seemed to be a table. He closed his eyes and continued to feel the edges with more caution, advancing along a surface that had changed in consistency now; his fingers slid on an unpolished surface less electrifying than the metal on the sides. And then, suddenly, the terrible softness set off the putrid smell again.
Sal! he heard Emi call with a broken voice. Sal! his mother shrieked at the top of her lungs. Sal! the seemingly friendly basement echoed, bathed in a grey light. He turned his head, a scream stuck in his throat. He made a move to go, to run as far from that terrible place as he could, but the buzz clogged his eardrums and the machinery inside him had lost its will to move. He stood there, with his fingers prodding the soft surface, trying to understand what was under the thin membrane of his terror-rippled skin. But because his eyes couldn’t help him see and his nose couldn’t smell a thing, he pinched the softness under his fingers and felt clearly now that under the skin on his fingers lay another skin.
He cringed in terror. He knew quite well what was on that table. It was someone. A human being, a body, a creature. Maybe Harry himself, wanting to scare him. That would have changed things.
‘Harry,’ he whispered, his voice strangled with excitement. ‘Harry, answer, you son of a bitch…’
He waited for a sign. It wasn’t only his imagination; the tips of his fingers still bore that unexpected touch. He was shaken by a strong shiver. Then he made a decision: to touch again, to see what it was and, if it proved to be Harry, to make that bugger sweat for it. So, with a sudden jerk, he jumped forward as if playing rugby and landed upon the heap of flesh. He flew across the dark room, accompanied by the voices of his mother and Emi as if by two nagging angels; his hands were the first to touch the pane of the table, then his skinny body, his bare knees bruised on the football field, his red and calloused elbows and, with his heart pounding in his flat chest, he ended his flight and landed on a stone-still body. He made a last attempt, gasping in pain and fright: ‘Harry,
