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THOMAS

( Marco Milani ITA - TOMMASO - Translated by Davide Riccio )

 

 

 

I was fifteen when I crossed the threshold of my first haunted house. The meeting with its  occupant was not extraordinary, once overcome the initial trauma of course. To discover Tom, the ghost of an eleven-year-old boy who died four years before in the drawing-room on the ground-floor, gave rise to my lucky career and since then on, of houses inhabited by “particular” tenants, I have seen by hundreds, meeting with them of any kind.

Well, my name is Anthony, I am thirty-five and, so to speak, I’m going to retire on my  pension. Once for all. A cancer of the lung, in fact, should have made me live until three days ago. That’s contrary to my doctor’s expectations, so, according to him, I’m living now some sort of gift. Well, it’s welcome!

Coming back to that house, I have to say there was no more the front door, but only two worm-eaten boards, crossed and scarcely nailed at the outside, so not to keep a little boy,  thin like a broomstick, from threading his way through.

I was a little afraid of it, just a little bit, not because of the ghost the village was talking of, but for I wanted not to be seen entering there, someone calling the Carabineers.

In Occhiobello, a village in the middle Polesine, people, as well as in any other village, concern themselves with other people’s business and interfere, especially when they shouldn’t, and if my father should’ve been in the position to fetch me in a cop station, well, once at home, he could give me a thorough thrashing.

I lived in that village, not too far from the house, and what induced me to ride my bike four kilometres on, to the house going to ruin, was an article of an old newspaper that I had found out in the garage the day before, under my father’s tool-box.

Strange, I did not know nothing about until then.

The little boy should have had my age by now, and in these cases gossips about are normally sent around. But it happened in the same period I was spending my holidays at my aunts’, in Cuneo, and maybe someone forgot to say about that to me on my return, a month later.

The article, at the page number three of a gazette from Rovigo, wrote of him. Thomas, eleven year old, killed in the house of his grandmother Matilde. She had gone to the dance-floor of the “Festival of Unity”, just to dance a couple of mazurkas, while he had preferred to stay home doing his homeworks.

His first parents separated a short time before and, at least that time, they came to an understanding leaving their son sometime by the maternal-grandmother.

His father disappeared temporarily, maybe running after some girl from east Europe or a cuban, while his mother kept on working hard as waitress in a bar restaurant in a hamlet in the near distance from the village.

Violaceous-coloured signs, large ecchymosis on his throat showed a death by strangling awaiting an autopsy. He was found first by his grandmother returning home, to the floor  on his back, with a book of mathematics open by the side of his feet.

I went to my mother, the dusty leave of newspaper in my hands, and so simple-minded as a beardless boy troubled by acme can be, I asked her about Thomas, and whether she knew it was or not detected the culprit by now.

After a while of dismay, she began to explain: nobody knew anymore than that about and the killer was still unknown and free. The father fell under suspicion, yet he had an alibi having spent three days with a “toxic whore”.

My mother, on thinking it over, was disposed to change the terms in “woman of little hopes”. Anyhow, he could have been not the killer for sure. That homicide was still unsolved. 

Coming back home, an afternoon, after having looked well around me, without seeing anyone, I threaded my way in. Dust and cobwebs were lording it everywhere and, in the passage, at the sound of my steps, a couple of black-beetles vanished in fissures in the wall. I entered the first left door and I found myself in a disused kitchen-room, in which were left just a wash-basin and two pensiles, coloured of grey dust of time. At the end of the room, to the right, an arch two metres large led into the parlour, where the murder was accomplished. This reported the news.

Slow steps further, watching around me, I came to the centre of the empty room.

Through the broken shutters of the window filtered enough dim light to see in without straining my eyes.

On the floor I noticed with difficulty the rest of the lines of white chalk traced around the figure of the little corpse. They were near a wall, and I didn’t hope to discover so much.

Nobody else, except the investigation commission, had returned in that house, and the grandmother was gone and lived with a friend of her. She died six months later, maybe heart-broken.

I swallowed for a lump in my throat, but I got nearer and observed closer and closer, till I stooped.

An imagine like a flash-light impressed my retina making me start and fall backwards, terrified and surprised. I felt myself little and two big shaggy hands appeared in a while close to my throat, vanishing right after causing my falling to the ground beating bad my sacrum.

I remained this way, the empty room all around, with my bottom aching and a troublesome itch at my nose because of the dust I moved.

With a start I assumed the reins of the situation again and followed my instinct without thinking it over: to go away in a hurry. A sense of terror was rising in my bowels, giving me a sensation of heat in all my adbomen like ready to shoot out.

I run to the kitchen-room and, after a sharp curve bending the arch, touching the partition wall, I had the second accident. The “hands” were so close pressing my throat that I scarcely saw them; I saw nothing but cyclopic arms and a thorax at the back, and everything else in my visual field was covered with blackness complete.

The apparition was in a moment, like the blow with a cudgel on my head. It was as if my head exploded, and ere I went to the whole black of unconsciousness, I became aware I had banged my head against the wall.

I did not manage to calculate how much time passed before I recovered consciousness, but outside it was dark. Moon beams lit up weakly the room, and only after having accustomed, my eyes could penetrate the darkness and see the shape of the window and the main lines of the walls.

Anyhow, it took time to try to arrange my ideas a little, consistently, trying to realize head or tall of what was happened to me, notwithstanding a terrible headache.

My mind quite turned started to rack and cudgel, and terror, anxiety and wish of flying away came burst out, shattering my nerves and muscles as if crossed by high voltage current. My heart was beating like a four-wheel drive car piston.

I stood petrified against the wall. Well, I was still there where I had the blow on my head, when I noticed a smoky rarefied brilliance out of the floor near the end of the room.

I stifled a cry, because I remembered that was the point of the signs traced with the chulk around the corpse: right there the eleven year-old Thomas was dead. I deadened a cry at birth.

Keeping the same density, the white and impalpable cloudy form gradually changed into the shape of a man in miniature, more and more standing out and visible in details.

I was still afraid of it, of course, but the vision was not so scaring at last; nay, it moved from my inside some feeling tending to goodness, curiosity and compassion.

I cannot exactly say whether this was a spontaneous thing or else inspired from the ghost itself. The figure at last was not of half an adult, as looked like before, but of a child one metre tall. It moved kindness. Then, it talked darksome and unreal, remote and still with the voice of a child.

His face looked like the Thomas’ one I saw in the Gazette photograph.

“Hi Anthony, I’m Tom… Thomas, Tom in a friendly way. I was waiting for you”.

- Ha… Ha… Hi! - I hardly said to him and nothing else.

- I know it’s a strange fact to you - replied - but you don’t have to worry. I only beg you to listen to my story, then you will be free of going home and make up your mind”.

- What does it mean to make up my mind? - I said to myself, nodding in assent, and felt something hot and liquid slipping down the groin.

- Thank thee Anthony. Now…

 

"- I go Tom, are you really sure you want not to come with me? -

- Yea, grandma. Tomorrow I’ll be examined in maths and I prefer to study now -. The kid laid the book on the table and smiled amiably. He stood up from the arm-chair and went to her.

- I come back at eleven p.m.  Do you want some sugar - plums? - She took his head in hands and kissed his brow.

- Yea, thank you - he said - something sweet can’t be refused, especially from grandma”.

- Well, I’m going. -

- See you later - He greeted, still smiling, waving to her too, and looked her setting out to the kitchen then the exit.

He had said a lie, at least partly, and he was sorry about. He had to study, but not so much, but surely he hated to spend his time in the bedlam of aged dancers like that.

Firstly, he wanted to read the last strip cartoon of “Mister No”, and only after that a look over the Zwirner, that tome so big, at the chapter of simple equations. The next day class-test wuld have been the last, at a week before the end of the school.

And so it did.

After half an hour he went to the parlour again engaging himself to study the text-book.

A short time passed and Thomas heard the door-bell ringing. Who could be so late in the evening? It was enough to go and see for knowing it. If it was a grandmother’s shefriend, he would have sent her to the right place.

- Who is it? -

- Don Mariano. Hello Tom -

- Good evening. Just a while for I open the door. - He was the last person he ever expected to come looking for his grandmother. He opened the door and Don Mariano appeared in all his big and powerful build, shaded by the light of a street-lamp.

He looked bigger than usual because Tom had forgotten to turn on the light in the entrance. The shadow of the parish priest was throughly hanging over him.

- Can I? -

- Sure, come in! But my grandmother is not at home. -

- It doesn’t matter… - said the God-Man kindly - nevertheless I can talk to you, for now. To your grandmother I can talk another time. -

In the meanwhile he entered and advancing into the lighted kitchen-room.

- What were you doing? -

- I was over my books -

- Right - Speaking so he noted the book open on the small-table of the parlour and directed his steps towards it interested. Thomas tripped after him, eager to receive the message for his grandmother so that the priest went away as soon as possible.

Notwithstanding the kind manners, that man always dressed in black never liked to him. He looked, how to say, false and pretended.

The priest examined the book two seconds - Mathematics - he mumbled displeased and, in the meantime, Thomas took notice of a change in him, his smile became a straight serious line and his eyes looked bigger than before.

- This is one of the things living down God on high to mankind - and his tone looked like the one of charlatans tv showmen.

- Do you hear? - he pointed his finger and pricked up his ears coarsely. - They call it a feast, yet it’s only a nest of sins, one of many. - He stared at Thomas throwing a warning to him, and his face was scarlet by now. 

- Is your grandmother there, isn’t she? -

Thomas stood still, he was scared. Much scared. That man in front of him seemed a mad.

- And what about the matrimony? What has become the marriage? - now he shouted and moaned. - From forge of lives to God to filthiness and foulness of living beings more animals than humans, and you! …You are a son of sin! Where are your mother and father, where? -

He seized his little thin arms and started to shake him.

- What a fine example of family are you! And what will you do growing up? Evil causes evil, on and on! What to do to stop it? It must be broken off! -

His hold was hurting indeed, but he had not the courage of screaming. He was terrified. The eyes of the priest were red hot, too close to hims. An acid stench of poor wine was breathing out from his mouth. Tom felt sick.

Suddenly, the man representing God on earth loosened his hold, now clutching his hands round the neck of Thomas. Tom was too surprised by the swiftness of the action, that he had no time to react.

- You are the evil. You have no right to live. You are the outcome of evil! You are… the outcome… of evil… -

He felt he was suffocating, the hold was choking. Thomas kicked out lifted as if he was a feather; a kick on the small-table and the book of mathematics fell down on the floor.

His sight was more and more dim, his tongue was bursting out of his mouth and his eyes were blowing out as if they would explode. He saw, at last, the hands holding his neck as if they were two clear shadows and a dark mass before, more and more black. Then, nothing more, nothing else."

 

- I thank you for you have listened to me. - Tom, his ghost, smiled kindly and vanished. I had an immediate and somewhat brusque return to reality. The dim moonlight lightened through the broken window and my head began to ache again, with piercing pangs.

My fear was over by now and a sense of rage toward the assassin and crazy priest made me explode in a long scream, mighty and bad.

I cried, and saw a little puddle under my left foot. I never cried so much before. I was crying for Tom and that sad story and I thought about how many others like him, innocent ones.

I came out to return home. There I had nothing else to do, and on the way I made up my mind and took the decision that changed my life. I traced the priest and killer, meantime transferred to another place, I investigated a lot about the affair and, at last, I succeeded  in charging him with that murder, and other four crimes.

That day was the fifth of may and my birthday too: I was eighteen. The rest of my life I spent trying to find a remedy for all the souls that suffered wrongs and, dying a violent death, they couldn’t leave the earthly spot of their end for resting in peace eternally.

Evidently, in the “Beyond” the rumour was spread and to every new unseizable friend I was known ironically as “menbuster”. The movie titled “Ghostbusters” appeared years after.

Of course I couldn’t live from hand to mouth for ever and when my bank account were almost exhausted, Tom began to come to me in my dreams giving me numbers and results to play before horce-races and football matches. And I always won, never exceeding.

Now that my end has come, I hope I will see my immaterial friends of mine, one by one, everyone. I have to say I’m glad of leaving this world having done at least something useful.