This happened a few years ago, on a cloudy afternoon. I was on my phone, waiting for my father to print some documents, when I suddenly looked up and saw him. I was bit scared at first because he didn’t seem very friendly, and he looked like the serial killer from Lovely Bones. So naturally, I was bit apprehensive at first, but then I started to watch him. He was old—maybe in his mid-seventies, and he had something sinister and disconcerting about him. I knew almost instantly that he was hiding some terrible secret. I could see behind his pale blue eyes that maybe he wasn’t as normal as he appeared to be, and my 12-year-old brain soon associated his image with that cold-blooded killer from the movie whose manners very much resembled his.

It was his eyes that conveyed a dark image of what was passing through his mind, and I felt as if I was looking upon a ghost, and maybe he was a ghost because he certainly wasn’t what once he had been—whatever is it he had been. When he noticed my staring I soon diverted my gaze, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was a killer like the one in the film, but he couldn’t be, it was so very unlikely, there hadn’t been any reports of serial murders in the town I live in, and yet…That cold gaze sent a shiver up my spine, and I remember feeling so scared, I was just sure he was killer. He seemed very quiet and observing, although he wasn’t looking anywhere in particular, I just knew that he felt my curiosity, and that he was perfectly aware of his surroundings, like a predator quietly waiting to catch its prey, monitoring its every move. Only there wasn’t anything to catch in that room, no one there fit his pattern, and I could see his tiredness, he hadn’t been in the active for quite some time. Maybe he had been married, that is very common for people like him, to try to appear normal, to have a family to cover up his true cold self. Now that I think of it, I cannot be so sure that he had someone once because he looked so lonely, but he wasn’t bothered by it, he looked as if he found comfort in his solitude.

When I first looked at him I thought of ice, and I felt cold and scared, but strangely, as the minutes passed and I studied him, I felt more understanding toward him, I was fascinated by this mysterious, and as most people are tend to think, evil personality. I like to think of him as a creature of the dark, doomed to walk the world alone. Even when surrounded by people, he is isolated in his own mind, he is never able to connect with the outside world—he sees no point in it, he doesn’t want to either. He cannot feel affection, or empathy, but even so, he is not the first to strike during a fight, and he doesn’t lash out at people out of ignorance. He is not good, but he certainly isn’t evil. He is what he is, he does what he does, he has what Satan calls in the book Paradise Lost “a mind that cannot be changed by place or time,” because he will always have that same obsession. He knows that, he learned that a while ago, and now observing him, I know it, too. When he was about to leave he caught my gaze once more, and I tried to indicate that I knew what he was, and that his secret was safe with me. I knew that for a long time I would never share with anyone the knowledge that I had gained that afternoon, from watching that peculiar old man.

—Carolina A., 17, Brazil