must have been formed by such high and low points, his personality shaped by extremes. I remembered his propensity for long hikes in the Catskills, the cold of his farmhouse in the winter, and skating on the pond in our bare feet, and I understood that these traits had to have been carried with him from the Alps.
I flipped through the pages until I came to a map of the region, a splotch of land with Mont Blanc at the northern extremity and the Gran Paradiso National Park to the south. I searched the map, looking for the village of my ancestors, but Nevenero wasn’t anywhere to be found. It must have been too small and insignificant. I tried to remember what I’d found online on the drive to the airport the day before: that Nevenero existed somewhere in the northwest corner of the Aosta Valley, hidden in a fold of alpine granite south of Mont Blanc and north of the commune of La Thuile, one of the least populous communes in the least populous region of Italy.
I closed the book and was on my way out the door when the bookseller stopped me. “I found another book about the Valle d’Aoste. You want to see it?”
I didn’t have time to answer before he walked ahead, to the opposite side of the store, to a shelf labeled Occulto.
“This can’t be right,” I said, studying the books with pictures of pentagrams and reverse crosses, the tree of life and the ouroboros. “Nevenero is a town.”
“Here,” he said, pulling down a book, checking it against his notecard, then handing it to me. The title read: Mostri delle Alpi. Monsters of the Alps.
I thanked him and fell into a chair in the corner. It may have been the fight with Luca, or perhaps the events of the past few days were starting to get to me, but my throat was dry and my hands trembled as I turned the pages. The book was filled with pictures of the greatest hits of Alpine monsters—a half goat, half devil called Krampus that supposedly terrorized mountain villages each Christmas and dwarfs called cretins. I later learned that, in the nineteenth century, explorers to the region found entire communities of cretins tucked away in the mountains. These small beings were not monsters at all, but people afflicted with an iodine deficiency. When iodized salt was introduced, the disease disappeared.
I had never heard of Krampus or cretins, had never seen the twisting, serpentine dragons drawn by the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer in the seventeenth century. I had never imagined a gryphon, with its lion body and eagle head, or any of the devilish hybrids I found in the book that evening. But even if I had, none of the bizarre life-forms that allegedly existed in the icy crevices of the Alps could have prepared me for an image near the end of the book. It was a black-and-white photograph of a man—at least, I thought it was a man—his skin unnaturally pale, white hair long and tangled over his shoulders, a coat of fine fur covering his chest. He stared out from the photograph, his enormous eyes boring into me, as if daring me to turn my gaze away.
I puzzled over him, finding him both monstrous and fascinating. It was as though I knew him already, those haunting, predatory blue eyes living in a corner of my mind, submerged and half visible as a creature of a nightmare. But it wasn’t until I read the words typed below the photo that I went cold with recognition: La Bestia di Nevenero. The Beast of Nevenero, the very creature Nonna Sophia had warned me about.
I was a block from the bookstore before I realized that I was running. I had reacted in a rush of blind movement, propelled by fear, the mechanism of thought catching. When it clicked into motion, I remembered my reaction to the picture and the startled call of the bookseller—Va tutto bene?—as I threw a twenty-euro bill on the counter and ran out of the store, book in hand. I was so unnerved I could barely see two feet in front of me. It wasn’t until sometime later, when the cold night air left me shivering, that I came back to my senses.
I pulled my coat tight against the wind and walked into the night, oblivious to where I was headed. I moved through the streets quickly, without stopping, hoping to exhaust the anxiety thrumming