Excerpt from I'm Not Scared by Niccolò Ammaniti, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Next to our room was our parents' room. I could hear papa snoring. The fan blowing. My sister panting. The monotonous hoot of a little owl. The buzz of the fridge. The stench of sewage from the toilet.

I knelt on the bed and leaned on the window sill to get some air.

There was a full moon. It was high and bright. You could see for a long way, as if it were daytime. The fields seemed phosphorescent. The air was still. The houses dark, silent.

Maybe I was the only person awake in Acqua Traverse. It was a good feeling.

The boy was in the hole.

I imagined him dead in the earth. Cockroaches, bugs and millipedes crawling on him, over his bloodless skin, and worms coming out of his blue lips. His eyes were like two hardboiled eggs.

I had never seen a dead body. Except my grandmother Giovanna. On her bed, with her arms crossed, in her black dress and shoes. Her face seemed to be made of rubber. Yellow like wax. Papa had told me I must kiss her. Everyone was crying. Papa was pushing me. I had put my lips on her cold cheek. It had a sickly sweet taste that mingled with the smell of the candles. Afterwards I had washed my lips with soap.

But what if the boy was alive?

If he wanted to get out and was scratching at the walls of the hole with his fingers and calling for help? If he had been caught by an ogre?

I looked out and far away on the plain I saw the hill. It seemed to have appeared out of nothing and stood up, like an island risen from the sea, tall and black, with its secret that was waiting for me.

'Michele, I'm thirsty . . .' Maria woke up. 'Will you get me a glass of water?' She was talking with her eyes closed and running her tongue over her dry lips.

'Just a minute . . .' I got up.

I didn't want to open the door. What if grandmother Giovanna was sitting at the table with the boy? Saying, come, sit down with us, let's eat? And there on the plate was the impaled hen?

There was nobody there. A ray of moonlight fell on the old flower-patterned sofa, on the kitchen cabinet with the white plates, and across the black-and-white tiled floor, and crept into my parents' bedroom, climbing up onto the bed. I saw their feet, intertwined. I opened the fridge and took out the jug of cold water. I took a swig from it, then filled a glass for my sister who drank it in one draught. 'Thank you.'

'Now go to sleep.'

'Why did you do the forfeit instead of Barbara?'

'I don't know . . .'

'Didn't you want her to pull down her knickers?'

'No.'

'What if I'd had to do it?'

'Do what?'

'Pull down my knickers. Would you have done it for

Excerpted from I'm Not Scared by Niccolò Ammaniti. Copyright Niccolò Ammaniti 2002 all rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Canongate Publishing. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt.