The Fourth Door. Maria Tenace

mistakes in life, but if he had found even one good deed, for love of Peter, he would have made her go up. The saint then consulted his mother's book of life and discovered only one good deed: she had given to a poor man the skins of the potatoes she was peeling.

      With those peelings the angels made a rope that was lowered into hell.

      The rope was very fragile, but sufficient for the light transport of a single soul.

      The woman, happy, grabbed it immediately, but at that point other souls of the damned surrounded her to climb up behind her. The woman screamed, warning the others to stay back.

      The rope was just for her and she started kicking to keep the damned away.

      But in doing so, the fragile rope broke.

      The cries of anger, together with the thud of the woman who had fallen back into hell, became the sound of thunder that often accompanies thunderstorms. So you have nothing to fear, it's her own fault."

      How much she wished she was with her at the time. She decided the next day she would have called Alessandra, her best friend.

      - I wonder if she'd like to go to the mall tomorrow. - She wondered.

      Her parents were supposed to be back four days from ski week. They had decided to save their marriage, even though Marta had never believed in "heated soups", especially since she saw her mother with another man.

      From a human point of view, it was really difficult to feel even an ounce of sympathy for her, but not because she was cheating on her father, but because she had lately seen her as an inconstant, sometimes envious and paranoid woman.

      She was sure that she hadn't noticed her a few days earlier when she was in the car.

      She was waiting for him, she realized it when she saw the man arriving a few minutes later, a man she had never seen before.

      In that situation, contrary to what other teenagers angry at their mother would do, she didn't tell anyone, much less her father. "I have to stop now, put everything in order and get into bed."

      They were about to arrive, as they do every night at that hour: twenty-three and three-quarters would suddenly appear, a shadow from the mirror and then immediately afterwards another smaller one. She didn't know what they were, but she was sure they came for her and wanted something from her.

      She never thought to tell anyone, because no one would believe her.

      And then here they came, fast, stealthy, dark, dark.

      A hand came out of the wall, crossed the mirror and then the rest of her body made its way, it lay on the floor, slowly dragging itself towards the footboard of her bed, to go up again, floating lightly on the pink moleskin sheet, until it was on top of her, parallel to her body and only a few centimetres away from the ethereal substance it was made of.

      The creature's eyes glistened as if they were made of liquid metal, black and heavy.

      Marta did not move, paralyzed by terror. She could not make even a small sound, hypnotized and enraptured by the rustling of her clothes.

      She looked around and remembered that she was alone, so she begged that being not to hurt her, whispering bumpy and confused words until, in the same way they had arrived, the shadows disappeared.

      She talked about it only once in her family in the first period, when it all began, a few years before.

      She tried to inflict cuts and wounds on herself, hoping that the pain would take her away from that dark evil.

      Not getting much, she switched to smoking heroin on the corners of the most hidden streets of the neighbourhood with a boy, other times within the walls of the house when her parents were at work.

      The visions stopped for a few months, but her parents considered the drug to be the cause and not the remedy and locked her up for months in a clinic for psychiatric patients.

      Those horrible visions were defined as nocturnal sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucinations, a consequence of the lack of regularity of circadian rhythms.

      They put her on tranquilizers and after a few months of methadone they sent her home.

      As if it was enough just a trivial tablet, a physical numbness, to heal the mortifications and dissatisfactions of the soul.

      The hallucinations resumed on the very evening of her return home, when she saw the ghostly presence across the living room.

      She thought it must be a kind of divine punishment and torment, deserved for having done something of which he was unaware.

      Since then, she decided to stop asking questions.

      "Death or these "things," sooner or later they'll come for me." She repeated her resignation to that discreet and punctual company.

      "Perhaps they will put an end to this torture when I beg them to take me."

      It almost seemed to her that during those temporal fractures they were waiting for a nod, a precise expression of will to death.

      But she wasn't ready to die yet.

      She had her paintings to finish, their music to listen to.

      The next morning she took the bus to the bus stop below her house.

      She waited for him for a few minutes and then saw him coming. The driver closed the door with a smashing noise and the bus moved, roaring deafly, with sudden scrapings and singulars.

      The square was silent at that hour in the greyness of a Saturday morning.

      Flashes of fog enveloped the bell tower of the Matrix, you could only hear the roar of the bus and the voice of a greengrocer in the distance inviting women to buy oranges.

      Her clothes were a little crumpled, but she had hidden them under a long black coat that cleverly made her stand out from the slender figure that Mother Nature had given her.

      That figure, and the haughty-looking poise, had always made her look older than her age.

      If by some women, like those in the alley where her grandmother lived and where she spent most afternoons after school she was admired, by her classmates she was envied and criticized: too tall, too thin or her butt too protruding.

      The truth was that Marta had always been a beautiful girl and certainly did not go unnoticed among teenage girls.

      The latter, humiliated by a sense of impotence to beauty, had such feelings that she was paradoxically inadequate and unworthy compared to the others.

      Except for Alessandra, she was a faithful friend.

      They met in kindergarten and since then they have grown up together: the same elementary school, then in middle school and high school, even in the gym.

      Alessandra's house was four, maybe five kilometres away, but with a long uphill stretch heavy to do on foot.

      When they were little, they often rode their bikes. The bus suddenly nailed to the bus stop.

      -Damn the brakes! - exclaimed the driver.

      Finally, after a long time, she saw her friend again, visibly excited about that ride together at the mall.

      Between the two girls there was affection, constant and industrious, and he was happy to see her standing up and feeling good.

      She pulled out of her closet a black miniskirt that she wore with a turquoise t-shirt with little glitter that made her glow in her clumsiness as an overweight girl.

      - Do you think I've lost weight? How do I look in skirts? You, on the other hand, well... you're damn skinny as a button! Are you eating? –

      Alessandra, among her schoolmates, was famous for her exaggeratedly worn-out speech: she could speak for more than an hour without being interrupted.

      Her need to speak was so great that, in the absence of interlocutors, she was able to speak to herself in the third person.

      She