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( Sergio Bissoli ITA – 63 RACCONTI SUPERNATURALI - tran. by G. M.)
Short stories on spiritism, witchcraft, the occult,
paganism, animism, the unusual and the mistery.
I did meet quite a few kinds of people in my life. I chanced to meet a guy who thought that mankind and all creatures are nothing but God’s excrement. Another one maintained that life is just a game created for the Gods’ own entertainment.
It has been the events of life that have made these men I’m talking about philosophers, but never will their outlook on the world come into any philosophy books.
But the strangest of all my encounters has been that with a tramp who thought he had been a flower.
It was in the month of June, the road was straight and desert with nobody going along and lined with little clumps of poplars here and there. I should have had to go right down it as my car had stopped at a point in a cloud of thick smoke.
There I am still walking at about noon. The sun is high in the blue sky. A warm breeze makes the corn wave in the fields.
There at the bottom of the road a dark shadow is moving slowly in front of me. As I get closer I realize he is a hippy man wearing a long, black, hem-shredded overcoat. He’s walking barefoot under the sun and as he’s going the same direction as I am, I catch up with him some time later.
Made curious by the queer fellow I cautiously come up by his side. The man is going forward as if he were in a trance, unheeding of my presence. Then I try to ask him :
"Are you going a long way off?"
The man seems to wake up at my voice. He looks at me with his big light eyes. He has got long hair and an unkempt beard covers his thin swarthy face.
"Prague", he answers in a foreign accent.
"And... where are you from?"
No reply from him at all. I ask him once more, but the man does seem thoroughly lost in his state of intense concentration that makes him even forget the world.
I draw a coin out and I offer it to him. But he shakes his head and glares at me. He looks like a seer, a magician, a prophet. Before I leave him, I want to ask him one last question:
"Have you ever meet God?"
The man’s eyes become brighter while staring at me, but he doesn’t say a word. Then he turns and resumes to walk.
The high corn is waving in the fields at the caressing breeze coming from behind us. Suddenly the man seems to awake from his sonnambulism. His face has a radiant look, as though he had recognized someone or something invisible.
My eyes follow him as he’s going down to the cornfield almost at a run. Now he opens his arms, then gets down on his knees...
I stop and watch him from a distance. What is there? What is he seeing?
His face has a tremor of happiness. Tears are streaming down his face, but they are tears of joy. Now he bends till he almost grazes a poppy bush with his lips and remains motionless, enraptured.
I’m still there watching him with interest and I don’t dislike to remain some more time. A few minutes go by, then the man slowly rises to his feet. He looks tired, exhausted, but very happy indeed. He smiles and comes towards me whispering a few words, as if he wanted me to share his own joyousness :
"It always stirs my blood to be able to see again what I have been before".
"What do you mean by those words?", I ask him astonished.
"Perhaps you, too, have got a flower that you like best in particular?"
"Yes, I do have to be sure! I like water-lilies, wistaria, camomile, jasmine, robinia ..."
He interrupts me :
"No, I don’t mean that. What I mean is : can you feel a certain affinity with some vegetable species? I, for instance, "have a deep feeling" for poppies".
"You must like the colour red, I suppose".
"On the contrary, I hate everything red, for I love the colour black. Poppies are the only one exception".
"I don’t quite understand..."
"Try to think of a vegetable or an animal that you deeply fall for. Now, I tell you that you were just that thing in a previous life. Or, you might likewise harbour an aversion, if you had instead suffered in that very living species".
After saying that, he seems to be falling again into his trance state. He is talkless now. He fixes his eyes on a faraway point and is stepping forward like a sleep-walker. My eyes follow him as he’s going away; whereas I make for the village.
It’s almost two p.m. I must find a car-repairer as soon as I can; as usual, I have to solve my material troubles.
The sun above me is illuminating the first houses. I’m thinking over my life and over my encounter with that strange hippy man.
NOVEMBER 1990
The monday morning has already knocked at the door, as sad as a pregnant woman, as a September evening, as a man of sixty.
Early in the new morning there is Vinicius coming almost at a run. He’s always been an odd fellow. When he was young he collected snails, then swords, and now just this morning...
"I’ve come to tell you that we are to meet at four o’clock in the afternoon, in front of the undertaker’s."
"Eh? Why on earth?"
"That’s a surprise. I’ll tell you once at our meeting-point."
"But, why at such a place as at the undertaker’s?"
"At four, remember, the man from Hungary and Marielouise will also be coming".
The coffin repository is an old deconsecrated little church.
The eccentric trio is already there. My friend Vinicius is snorting with impatience. The Hungarian man is combing his very long and dark-brown hair.
Marielouise is with them, a still charming woman, dressed in white and pink, powdered just where wrinkles are supposedly thought to be. She’s a bit debauched paintress, who would feel like making love only to a duke or a sewer-man.
Vinicius goes straight to the point :
"Well, I’ve decided to buy myself a coffin and to place it in the sitting-room to astonish my guests, this goes without saying. Don’t you think it’s a quite original idea?"
"Maybe so... You could use it as a container for your liquor bottles..."
"Certainly not, to be sure, what a silly idea! I haven’t got any intention other than to keep it empty and closed, exactly near the piano."
The undertaker is coming now. He is bent with age, dressed in grey. He is a wishy-washy character, with so wan a face as to look like being covered with dust.
We get to the entrance from a side door and go along a winding, rather long passage, lined with chubby faces of little angels sculptured out of the wall on the right. The warehouse has been made out of the church apse. The rest of the building comprises a joiner’s work-shop.
Vinicius inspects all the coffins set in a row, by the dim light coming in through the large windows. He resembles a child admiring his own toys. Once in a while he asks in his excited voice :
"What kind of wood is this light coffin made of?"
"Beech-wood" the undertaker answers in his dull voice.
" This darker one?"
"Oak-wood."
"And this one?"
"Elm-wood..."
The Hungarian man on the contrary makes his own magic-imbued remarks :
"Death is the door to the Otherworld. And love is the door from the Otherworld towards this world."
Marielouise makes comments avaling herself of he sharp artist sensitiveness :
"Life is a mere nothing. It is nothing but a necklace with broken, beads-dropping string."
Then she begins to laugh and to undress half-hidden amidst the piles of coffins.
The undertaker gives a cough out of embarrassment.
Marielouise is improvising a kind of macabre and exciting strip-tease amidst the coffins. I catch sight of her body in the middle of the coffins, half-naked and ivory in the shade. Then she steps up and down and peeps out with a swing to show us a couple of eyes tattoed on her backside.
The paintress, still laughing, withdraws to dress again, but her astonished voice suddenly bursts out at a point :
"Look here, this one is awfully nice!"
We also go and look. In a corner there’s a dark dusty coffin, with great red and yellow flowers painted on it.
"And that one? What is it?" Vinicius asks the undertaker.
"Ah, yes! that coffin has been ordered to me by Mr. Ikys the millionaire when still alive. I suppose you also know the curious tale about him . But maybe you don’t, as you are too young. Ikys was an eccentric man and wanted to be buried in that very one, wearing a clown costume. But for the fact that his relatives found a way of escaping his testamentary dispositions by using a coffin covered with real flowers. In this way they managed to get hold of his inheritance all the same."
Vinicius can’t refrain himself any longer, he is very excited so that he ups and shouts out :
"Oh! how much is it? I want to buy it!"
After he is told the price, my friend draws out a big wallet fastened to a small chain. He pays for his purchase quite quickly ; then, unheeding of the bewildered undertaker, turns to us :
"Well then, both of you will carry the coffin by grasping the head side of it, and I will grasp the other end."
We get out of the warehouse wet with perspiration and breathless and walk on along the pavement.
The sulphurous light of the evening closes about the village, while a silvery and quartz-like moon is glittering in the sky.
The rare passers-by are amazed at seeing us carry a coffin. The wood is slippery, the lid bangs, Vinicius cries out worried orders and urges us to pay attention for the edges not to be rubbed against the walls.
We are stepping with great difficulty under the weight. The Hungarian man keeps talking magic and Marielouise is splitting her sides with laughter close to us.
NOVEMBER 1990
In the freezing November twilight the ancient feast which is given yearly in the village of Stellara becomes the final venue for bonbon stalls, chimneys-sweepers, puppet showmen, umbrella-makers...
As to me, I’ve come here to see old Martha and ask her to try to cure me of my chest troubles. I ask a peasant who’s chopping wood for the direction to go to her house.
"Do you know where the widow Martha lives?"
"I do. She lives over there, where sorghum grows, together with those other ones..."
"I perceive a touch of acrimony in your words. What’s she up to?"
"She practises witchcraft. That nice party made up of old Diana, Viviana, Gelsomina, besides Martha of course, have been spending a lifetime to ruin crops, to provoke diseases both in men and livestock and to give rise to storm. It would be advisable to burn all of them! I hope that they will be ill-tossed as much as possible sometime, that’s what they deserve!"
The fog is falling on the village. I knew that old Martha had a reputation for being a witch.
I’m going along the main street which is so narrow that witches would manage to scuffle by simply putting their head out of the window. Then the street continues farther on into the open countryside. Some very old mulberries and willow-trees have such curved and gashed trunks, as if they had been planted by the devil himself.
Her little house is near a patch of dog-rose bushes. A thistle has taken root in front of the door of her house.
Some pots and old lithographs depicting flowers and animals are hanging inside. A gloomy parrot is looking at me from above.
Bent nails, pins and hooks are on the table and the little thin old woman is watering them with a liquid flowing out of a small glass bottle. Her face is pale, her lips and eye-rings are dark violet.
"Come in, I was just waiting for you".
I tell her in short what is wrong with me. She invites me to dip a finger into a cup full of oil and to drop a few drops of it in a pot of water.
"The drops disperse..." she mumbles.
She hands me some wheat grains to be thrown into the pot of water. The grains fall to the bottom and she whispers :
"A spell has been cast over you."
Then she boils a potful of water. She throws some ash and some brown powders in it and starts to mumble murky words. She takes a red handkerchief with a knot on one end that she uses to mark a circle around me by dragging it to the ground.
In the silence of the kitchen only the louder and louder gurgling of the boiling water is heard. The water is briskly muttering like an old gnome.
All of a sudden she takes the pot off the fire helping herself with the holders and overturns it.
I can’t believe my eyes! The water remains inside the pot! Only a few drops squirt out from all sides.
Now she promptly straightens the little pot and exhibits it in front of me with the water boiling loud.
"Put a finger inside it" she orders to me.
"But... it’s going to be scalded" I object.
"No, it’s not, you won’t be harmed."
"But that’s boiling water!"
"Be quick. Put your finger into the water."
She reacts to my indecision by giving an impatient sigh :
"Ah! Now it’s too late" and she throws the water onto the fire.
She orders me to jump out of the circle and adds :
"You must come back to me some other day".
I get out of the kitchen rather distraught. The parrot’s shrill laughter behind me makes me shudder.
The next days at home my illness is worsening.
One morning I happen to see some odd goat traces here and there along the corridor. The bed cushion takes strange shapes even after I’ve beaten and flattened it. And inside the mattress I’ve found ... a feather wreath!
Things get entangled and I must go and see old Martha again.
The sunset : an outburst of colours that isn’t very different from the flames of Hell. The village seems to be burning in reddish colours. The houses made of bricks, the trees, the cats in the farmyard, the barrels, the dried leaves...
The wind is hissing through the mulberry-trees, as if they harboured vegetable beings. I pass near a small garden and two vases overturn, though I do not even graze them; first one, then the other.
I see Martha’s house again, some wasp nests are under the dangling screwed eaves gutters. I get in through the always open door. The parrot starts to flutter.
The old woman is fastening and tightening a stocking to a stool crossbar while mumbling some words. The crossbar seems a neck of a man on the brink of being strangled. On the stool is a photograph and nine black little stones.
"Come in. When girls pray to the moon, men suffer more."
Everything happens exactly the same way as the last time I was there.
She repeats the pot rite. She puts it to the fire to have the water boiled, she overturns it without the water falling down. She hands it to me and orders me to dip a finger into it.
I close my eyes and execute resigning myself to scalding. I’m not harmed. Only pins and needles brought about by the hot water, but nothing more.
I give her some money at last and go away. The fog has fallen upon the village.
The days that follow I feel far better and nothing odd ever happens in my house.
One winter evening I go back to Stellara to thank old Martha, but her house is closed.
Everything is dreary and desert. I hear at times a chorus of faraway lamentations followed by a hissing sound.
From a road-crossing I see at last four old women standing in a circle round a fire. It must be Martha and the others, Viviana, Diana and Gelsomina. A cat is showing its hair standing on end and its back curved, and runs away.
NOVEMBER 1990
I wake up with a start, overstrung and in a sweat.
The wind is howling, it makes the leaves of the trees rustle and the shutter of the dove-cot slam now and then.
In the middle of the roaring storm I hear a distinct irregular tinkling. The barking of a dog is also at times heard in the distance.
The strokes become more deafening. It happens as if a blacksmith hammered upon an anvil. At this time of the night, who might it be? The closest farm, the Millers’ farm, is at least a kilometre far, then there’s the Rokers’ farm beyond the river.
I can’t manage to sleep any longer, thus I step to the window to dispel my nervousness. I open panes and shutters and I am hit by a gust of wind and dust.
The strength of the storm seems to be increasing now. The wind breaks through into the house in very violent gusts that make the farmhouse tremble.
The April storm bends the leafage of the willows, carries away dust all around and leaves as well, pulled by force off the trees. The weathercock is vortically spinning upon the dove-cot.
I shut again and go back to bed. I stay awake for quite a long time and try to listen to the noise I’ve heard before. Now I can hear nothing but the deadened howling of the storm.
The next morning old Sart and I are busy mowing the lawn and loading the grass on the carts. Then we are to push the wheelbarrows full of hay for the cows many a time, up and down.
In the afternoon, as we’re watering the cattle, I ask my fellow quite a few questions about the strange noises of the night.
Sart is short, old, deaf and grey-bearded. As usual, he doesn’t grasp what I’m saying and I have to repeat it to him again and again by shouting into his ears. And this is his comment at last :
"Ah, tonight’s storm, yes, it flooded the stables, and we are going to have more of that in the new moon’s nights."
It’s a warm night of May and the moon is shedding a pale light. I hear the faraway chirping of crickets through the window, echoing through the immensity of a cathedral-like night. From the dark stables comes the bellowing of the restless cattle.
This is not the only one noise to be heard. There is, again, the usual hammering on the anvil coming at irregular intervals. What may it be, for God’s sake, so punctually at this time of the night?
As hours go by, the tinkling grows harder and more nervous and lasts up to daybreak, when the first cocks begin to crow and make their crowing echo from farm to farm, then everything comes to an end soon afterwards.
In the afternoon I’m busy forking heaps of straw off the straw-stack to take it with a wheelbarrow to old Sart to make new litters for the cattle. I take advantage of the spare time what with coming and what with going to speak of the noises to the old man and he, as usual, misinterprets me :
"It’s the pigeons nesting up there".
And he points at the buckets hanging under the high roof of the straw-stack.
"Those two cows will be calving within a week. I remind you of the other work for us to do, wheat-milling."
During the next night the noises change and become louder. Now a furious blacksmith seems to be working in the court-yard here below my windows. Damn, I’m dead tired, but nobody could sleep with all this din. Is it possible that old Sart has started striking the iron at this time of the night? I get up, open the shutters and remain to look, astonished.
The court-yard of the farm is whited by the moon. All things I was familiar with and I believed I knew well don’t seem to be any more the same as before. The outlines of the buildings appear threatening owing to their crooked dark shadows. The cow-sheds, the drinking troughs, the goose-coops, the tools neglected on the threshing-floor seem to belong to another world.
That very loud noise dominates over everything indeed, even if I can’t establish the source from where it comes. I try hard to look over the dark porches and over the dove-cot near the dried pine.
Silence is back now. The hammering has suddenly stopped. From the river the faraway croacking of frogs comes to my ears.
The next evening, as we are watering the cattle, I hear my fellow mutter and utter some strange, incomprehensible words :
"Eh, old Joe has made himself heard tonight!"
"What?" I ask him, astonished.
"He made quite a fine noise! Eh, he did shoe many a horse indeed" he says while pointing at some ruins .
There are rows of low, yellow, half-ruined little houses with tufa arch-doors where the farmhouse ends.
"Certainly, the blacksmith lived here some eighty years ago. I was a boy when I met him first and helped him to blow through the bellows."
We draw near the windows of the little group of houses to have a look inside : there’s darkness, dirt and a mouldy smell.
"The families of the workmen lived here a great deal of time ago and his place was just there in the fourth room. He worked iron during his lifetime and his spirit continues to work even now."
Then he plods away with a limp and starts to pile up the hay scattered all over the threshing-floor with a pitchfork. After a while, I, too, lost in my thoughts, start to walk behind him.
MARCH 1991
I worked at the Caramory’s farm during that year. On coming from the road the farmhouse shows up its gloominess on its northerly side covered with gratings, beyond a ditch and a row of willows.
One afternoon, as I’m working in the fields, I notice that the sky has turned red behind the farmhouse. Reddish flashes are rising behind the stables over there, where the straw-stacks have surely caught fire.
I run and shout out and so do the other labourers, but after going beyond the farmhouse we stop short, dismayed.
There isn’t any fire at all. A halo as red as fire-brand is rising north, behind the row of willows.
We are frightened and stare at the bizarre phenomenon ; we notice that the halo is quickly shrinking. Its colouring is dying away and is getting darker and darker, so as to let the blue sky be seen, although indistinctly.
At daybreak of one day I’m woken up by shouts and noises. Some peasants are walking and crying out under the willows planted all along the ditch that separates the road from the fields. I also run to the place to see what’s going on.
Strange white rings are visible on the grass, around a certain willow in particular. They seem made of mould or cotton.
When I try to touch them I realize their inconsistency and withdraw my fingers wet.
The people around makes comments and ask questions. They speak in a whispering voice and call them ^circles of the fairies^.
The same evening the man sent for the milk tells the peasants that a tree has caught fire.
We go along the bank of the ditch once more. I indistinctly see a light there, among the trees.
When I am nearer I see a tree radiating a faint light, a wan shading light. It’s just a common, half-dried willow-tree that bears a tuft of green, north-orientated branches. We stay there and look till midnight and are enchanted and bewildered.
The next afternoon, at sunset, a little crowd comes on foot, by bicycle, or by cart, to see the shining tree. Besides the country-men of the neighbourhood there are people I’ve never seen before. Even some dressed-out gentlemen have purposely come here from town.
The night closes in upon the countryside little by little and turns all things into dark shadows. The first stars appear in the deep-blue sky. The tree emits a faint luminousness, a halo of light that becomes brighter and brighter as darkness presses harder and harder.
At midnight the place is overcrowded with people. The tree stands in the centre with its magic and unreal light.
Queer talks can be heard in the middle of the buzzing crowd :
"There’s a sulphur mine underground".
"If we dig around here we shall find gold".
"Its roots go as far down as Hell!"
The morning after a large strip of the maize field appears pulled down and trampled upon. Moreover, the ground has been turned around the tree. Someone has digged, perhaps in hope of finding gold.
The next night even more unlikely things happen. At about two, when almost everyone has gone to bed, a small knot of women I’ve never seen before is coming to the spot.
One of the women, about thirty years old, light-brown haired and well-shaped, slips unexpectedly her clothes off and remains completely naked. Now she embraces the trunk of the tree, and rubs her body against it, then sighs and moans.
The other women are standing in a circle round her and hide her from the people’s glances. The few male standers-by whistle, cry out and get nearer at a run.
One August night the sky has grown dark. A shepard dashes as if he had the devil behind his back and terrified shouts out :
"Ghosts are there, that willow is haunted..."
I go and see with the other people.
I see the willow again. Red, tied in knots ribbons and fastened corn stalks are fixed on the trunk of the tree, as signs of wants and wishes.
The leaves move at intervals and rustle as if they were stirred by the wind. But the night is quiet and there is no breath of air. I have a look at the other willows and find that all their leaves are still. Then I turn my eyes to this one again and it happens as if it were tossed by a violent storm.
Sweat is dripping down my forehead. All my body is shivering with cold. What on earth is this new phenomenon? What is happening now in this place?
The next days the people stop working to go and see the tree. The stretch of the trampled maize has visibly widened.
One morning the landowner worried about how things have turned out and in order to avoid more damage to his land under crop gives orders to have the tree cut down. Nobody is willing to do it, but two labourers from outside the village accept to do the job work.
Within short time they manage to unroot the tree by means of spades and pickaxes. The trunk is carried away to the farmyard and cut into firewood pieces.
From the next nights to all September the people continue to come and ask us where the willow has got to. Some people pick up few phosphorescent bark pieces and take them away like charms. Two ladies sink into the mud up to their ankles to pick up small pieces of bark and they need to be helped out.
In the cold winter nights as fog rises from ditches, the old women tell of the strange prodigies that happened around the old willow : a sterile woman had become pregnant by simply rubbing her body against the trunk and the girls who went there at nights, they saw their future bridegroom’s faces.
JULY 1991
I had known Lucy since she was a child. Her brother was a friend of mine, he took me to his house, one day, to show me his stamp collection.
And it was on that very occasion that I met Lucy for the first time. She was a thin girl and her face was colourless. She was dressed in pale-white and looked me in the face very gravely without saying a single word.
I happened to see her quite a few times ever since. Her mother died as an alcoholic. Her brother got married and moved away.
Lucy chose to remain and now lives on her own. It is rumoured that she prostitutes herself and that she’s endowed with the second sight and that she practices conjurations.
As I am getting near her house, I am all trembling with fear. The house made of bricks gets reddish shades in the October sunlight. A jujube tree on my left is nearly bare. In the threshing-floor are cats, barrels, dead leaves. I get to the door and call out :
"Lucy, it’s me..."
"Come in. I was just waiting for you..."
In the kitchen she treats me to water and beet-root. The tricks of bad fortune both of us went through in the course of our lives allow us to share mutual sympathy at once. I tell her of the events of my life I went through, of the difficulties I had to face during the last few years, of the wretched decisions I took, and while I am telling her all these things, it is apparent that I am looking for an explanation of all life’s misfortunes.
Lucy looks at me with her green, icy eyes. She goes and gets a mirror, lays it down on the table and comes back to sit down close to me.
In the semi-illuminated room Lucy begins to look at herself in the mirror. Her face is pale and sunken. Her hair is down on her shoulders like driving rain.
"I see a grey smoke...images... A lifetime... An old woman... A house..."
She gives a deep sigh and turns her eyes to me :
"That’s all for now. Next time bring me something intimately belonging to your house."
The autumn night is damp and cold and the moon looks like crystal. I’ve removed a piece of plaster from the wall and I have it in my pocket now, wrapped up in a paper sheet. I am going to pay Lucy a visit again, but I don’t know what to think about the words she told me last time. Perhaps it’s nothing but unreality and nonsense. A party of drunkards are singing a meaningless song in the thin fog.
I arrive at my date with her quite excited and my heart is beating stronger. I push the half-open door. I know she’s already perceived my presence as I gently call her in a almost whispering voice : "Lucy..."
She’s wearing a black, tight dress laying her shoulders bare. Her face is pale and hollow.
Just to dispel the strained atmosphere in which our encounter takes place, I immediately show her the piece of plaster I’ve brought with me. It’s of a grey colour and friable. She takes it, touches it accurately and lays it down on the table.
She, as usual, sits down close to me, in front of the mirror. She lays her hand upon my shoulder and half-opens her eyes. I feel the touch of her soft little hand, I smell her delicate perfumed hair.
Her eyes look far, as if she wanted to melt into the mirror. Her breath becomes more difficult and deeper. Now her breathing becomes more frequent and almost violent. Her words are but hoarse whisper and hiccup :
"I see... an old woman and a curse... It is intended for your home and will hit... but the men only... the women are in safety..."
Later on, when she comes round, she looks tired and weary. The former strained atmosphere is now over and we begin talking.
"How long have you been living in this house?" she asks me.
"For about two years."
"And when did your misfortunes begin?"
"Now that you bring it to my notice, just since I moved to live in that house."
"Whose house was that?"
" The proprietors were dead, the house had been on sale for so long time. I made an arrangement with a real estate agency."
"How was the house?"
"It was very old, that’s why it didn’t cost me very much. But I had to restore it completely...".
"Did you also demolish its perimetrical walls?"
"No, it’s the only thing I didn’t knocked down not to lose my rights."
It’s late and she silently sees me off, but stops by the door.
"You can’t know what happens within the walls of a house... Can’t understand the secret tragedies taking place... That’s why you’ll have to come back to me once again..."
"That’s all right... I’ll do as you like."
Our voices have got a different sound, they are shriller, almost desperate in the Autumn night.
Two evenings later, there I am walking on the dewy grass and making for Lucy’s. Thoughts are whirling in my mind and I seem to be living a nightmare. I enter the little dark room.
"Lucy, are you in?"
Dead silence. On moving forward hesitatingly, I open the door of the kitchen. Lucy is seated there with her back turned to me. I start at the sound of her low voice :
"Tonight the moon has risen with a blood-red halo. Dogs are howling. Tonight the moon scares me..."
Upon a little round table near there, are a candle, a long pin, a handful of salt, black ribbons, little glass pearls and the piece of plaster I had brought. Lucy is sing-songing a few rhymed words in her low, guttural voice, beating her hands, at the same time, on top of the table like a drum-player. She turns her eyes to me :
"It was mum who was a lady-doctor to teach me and she learnt from grand-mum in her turn."
Then she goes back into her state of a sleep-walker.
At a point Lucy gets something with her long fingers! It’s a little cloth doll endowed with both breasts and female genitals. She gets near the fireplace and throws it into a little pot full of boiling water, then intones the same old, repeating, dull, obsessing sing-song.
The little doll seems for a while to be alive and writhes in pain. Lucy stops whispering and is trembling. From the cowl of the chimney there comes a piercing lamentation ending in a roar that makes me shudder. I turn quite scared. The scale pans are swingling by themselves on top of the old cupboard.
Then I catch Lucy by the shoulders and draw her back for fear of something. We remain like that, embracing each other. Only the mumbling of the boiling water can be heard in the silence now.
After a while, Lucy drives me back with a smile and I am off, lonely in the night.
OCTOBER 1991
"My uncle Ernest is dead. He was buried last week."
"Oh, I feel sorry. I thought very highly of him..."
"I have inherited his house. Come and see and tell me how you like it. I’ve made up my mind to go and live there as soon as my apartment lease expires."
The February evening is carrying away gusts and sleet and after this encounter there we are walking together towards the house near here. After crossing the square we take a by-way faintly illuminated and lined with trees.
The house we are going to is one the last houses at the bottom of the street. It’s quite apparent that the house is abandoned. Not even a single ray of light filters out of the closed shutters.
My friend Gregor takes some keys out and I hear him in the dark bustle about with the door.
"How funny... The lock must have jammed..." I hear him mumble.
I’m doing my best to wrap up myself in my mackintosh as I’m waiting to get in.
A click and a creaking. We step inside the dark house. As soon as Gregor turns the switch on two bulbs give a faint light on both sides of the room. In a small icy room are a few wicker chairs, a hat hanging on a wooden coat-rack, a flower wall-paper torn into pieces. A window is banging upstairs.
Stepping upon the disconnected tiles of the flooring we get to the kitchen first. There’s an old cupboard with half a bottle of whisky and some dried bread crumbs upon it. From the extinguished hearth comes the smell of soot.
"When he retired from work, he was a cattle-breeder, my uncle devoted himself to gardening. His boots, his pipe..."
There’s also a small cellar ; inside it are some baskets full of firewood and a block with an axe.
After leaving those rooms we get into what was his study, impregnated with an intense smell of tobacco. On the shelves and in the glass cupboard are many black-covered books, the subject of which being spiritualism. On the table is a spiritualist board, a small ouija board, piles of scribbled registers, a candlestick, a pair of spectacles...
"My uncle would lead a very retired life"-
Then he starts climbing the stairs to let me have a look at the top-storey, and I slowly follow him. The house is really icy. The freezing inside is immersed in a dead silence and smells damp.
There is a corridor upstairs lined with a few doors, some open, some closed. We hear a metal-like noise coming from behind one of them. Gregor stops on the spot. Then he opens the door leading to the lavatory.
The little iron window is slamming.
"I am convinced I had already closed it last time I was here" he mumbles as he presses the handle. Then he gently hoods an open-blade razor.
"My uncle was against modern times".
I stay motionless by the threshold. I’m looking at the rusty iron tub wet at bottom, at a comb with some hair wound around. Cold and sewer stench are pervading in here.
In the bedroom dominates Ernest Navarros’s oval photograph showing a thin, long-black-bearded face and a hard look. On the opposite wall are hanging some oleographs depicting countryside panoramas. Their colours clashing with the gloomy room seem unnatural.
"My uncle would live like a misanthrope of late..."
The house is impregnated with the presence of the old man, as if he were still among us. My friend is inadvertently speaking in a low voice as though he were somehow afraid of disturbing. The planks of the flooring are creaking under our stepping and we move more carefully because we are afraid of making ourselves noticed.
The silence in the house is overwhelming.
A dog outdoors suddenly barks lively. My friend give a start :
"It’s my uncle’s dog here in the back court-yard ; he must have heard something..."
I draw near a window and a cobweb sticks to my face. As I clean up I hear my friend run and cry out : "Over there! There! Look!"
A reddish light is coming down the stairs, a dreadful brick-red glare, like flames.
"Let’s go downstairs, quickly! The house is catching fire!" Gregor shouts out.
I follow him jumping over the steps and run to the kitchen to see if it’s just there that the danger comes, while Gregor himself rushes to the study room.
Here the light is off. We shudder at the thought that something threatening may come from the open door of the dark cellar. Silence is overbearing again. It’s bitterly cold.
Then I hear a choked shriek as if somebody were vomiting. I run to my friend.
Gregor is standing by the entrance of the study. Pale with fright he’s staring at me. He’s trembling and seems to feel like telling me something but he can’t get a word out of himself.
"What’s the matter with you? Are you all right?"
I cheer him up as I’m getting near him. Then I peep into the study room and am stunned at the surprise.
Old round-shoulders Ernest wearing his own boots and pipe is just seated in front of his table.
A plague on me! That’s really him. Him, or maybe his own ghost. He’s not made of flesh and blood because he’s semitransparent...
My friend is staggering like a drunkman and is quickening to the entrance, then rushes outside. I follow him trying hard not to have any more looks inside the study room. I switch off the light and pull the door after me.
I stay with Gregor walking by his side and both don’t say a single word on our way to his apartment.
Some days later I meet my friend again who tells me of so many things, but doesn’t mention at all the facts that happened.
One day, it was in the month of March, I chance to call at the house he has inherited and notice a sign hanging crosswise on the door. It says :
"Furnished house for sale.
MARCH 1992
It’s late in the night when I arrive at home. I lean my bicycle against the wall under the penthouse and step towards the farmhouse.
It’s a damp August night. A moon high in the sky illuminates the empty court-yard and outlines some crooked toothed shadows on the ground. On my right, beyond the hen-house and the lilac bushes, stretches the vineyard undulating under the moon. Everything is still and silent.
But something over there makes a quick movement. I stop and go back.
I indistinctly see a vague whitish shape in the distance. What might it be? A reflection given by the leaves of the trees? Or by a bare branch?...
I’m really tired and all I want to do is going to bed. I open the narrow iron door and get into the small room. I go upstairs without making a noise, I undress and put myself to bed.
All my evening memories are coming across my mind. The music played by guitars, the dances with the girl, the long kisses... And the white flashing shape in the vineyard, what may it have just been?
I feel restless. I keep turning over in my bed without being able to fall asleep. I was wrong in not going there and not checking it up. I get up shortly after, dress again and go downstairs.
I watch the deserted courtyard flooded with the moon light. Summer nights seem to have become cooler.
As soon as I get to the border of the vineyard, I realize that the thing is still there. It’s a white and black shape standing just at the forking of two rows of vines. It looks like a man wearing a cloak.
Caught by nervousness I quicken my steps forward. The ground slightly undulates with ups and downs. The high dew-wet herbage slackens my steps. I was wrong in not taking the dogs with me. Where might the two dogs be right now? Why is it that they didn’t turn up towards me just as they usually do? Maybe they are hunting a mole in the fields.
When I have already gone half the patch I hear an odd sound coming from the other end of the vineyard. It just seems a faint and off and on lamentation.
I stop and try to understand what’s going on. I notice there is a handle of an old hoe leaning against the pill-box of the waterworks. I grasp it fast and resume to move forward. Now I have something at least to count on to defend myself.
There’s a strange sort of strain all around. Life seems suspended. Everything is still and motionless. In the dead silence I hear but the dull beats of my heart and a troublesome whistle into my ears.
The white shape looks like a sheet waving in the air. Now it’s too late to go back. I must find out what’s going on there!
As I’m drawing nearer I recognize the thing better and better in what its features are and I see a bigger and bigger figure : white, very mobile and run through by dark shadows.
My astonishment increases and I begin to be afraid again. Only my taking courage in both hands makes me step forward. I finally stop as if I were in front of an abyss.
It’s not the kind of things belonging to this world. Now I’m sure it’s not.
The thing moves leftward, waves a little in my direction, goes past the crooked trunks of the vine-shoots... I stay and watch with my eyes wide open. It moves forward a few metres and suddenly... there it is disappering.
I’ve got my nerves on edge, my look staring at that spot where I saw the thing. I’m trembling and sweat is dripping down my body. I’m breathing as if I were suffocating.
Nature resumes to revive little by little. The crickets begin to chirp again. A nocturnal bird is screeching. Then the barking and rushing of my dogs draw my attention.
Not without effort do I manage to move my legs. I drop the hoe and run away faster and faster, followed by the dogs and I take finally shelter inside the house, completely out of breath.
Only some time later, won by weariness, do I manage to fall asleep.
The morning after, still dazed, I go downstairs and see Gaspar sweeping the courtyard.
"Ehi, Gaspar, what kind of manure did you spread in the fields of late at the border of the vineyard?"
"Hum... the very kind commonly taken from the stables, before sowingtime."
"I’ve had a sort of hallucination last night... I’ve seen a white shape and, when I tried to draw near, it disappeared... It must be the gases caused by dung, the ignes fatui..."
The man abruptly stops and looks at me with a grave and hard face :
"What you saw is the family ghost. The very kind of ghost heralding a bad-luck. That’s what you’ve seen".
"But what are you talking about?"
"The last time the ghost showed, the old landlord died. Maybe the same thing is now going to happen to this one".
Two months later the landlord of the farm died of infarct, in his bed, at the age of 79. There’s his son now, not aged forty yet, who has taken his place.
It will presumebly be needed as many as forty more years for us to be able to see the family ghost again. Who knows whether I also am among the living people by that time.
MAY 1992
Old Kostia is dead. She was a witch and we are going to slip over to the house where she lived."
With these words my friend George receives me in his office one August afternoon.
"But isn’t it going to be risky? Suppose somebody sights us?" I object.
"The proprietors live far away, her heirs are not in town. No risk at all. Nobody will come and give us trouble."
Then there I am seated at a table, a glass in my hand, listening to what my unmarried friend, who is a student of occultism, is telling me.
"I have been studying psychokinetics for the last few years, i.e. the capacity of human mind to influence matter. I am going to write a report for the Society for the Psychic Researches".
Some odd paraphernalia are on the shelf: a hook with a thread and a little cork ball at the end of it. A thin horizontal plate is inserted in the middle of a pin, so that it can rotate...
"It is used for studying psychokinetics. It’s a faint energy that is involved in the beginning" my friend is saying.
"And what has this got to do with our making a reconnaissance in that house?"
"In that house there lived old Kostia who practised witchcraft up to age of 96. Now witchcraft makes use of psychokinetics both for good... and for evil goals..."
He shows me some photos pierced through by pins and shredded by blades.
"It is not unusual for some girls to do such kind of things when they are abandoned by their fiancés..."
Then he puts on the table a little doll made out of a piece of fabric rolled up like a cigar. A stylized face is drawn on it: two dots for the eyes, a vertical line for the nose and an upside-down V for the mouth. A heart and male genitals are also drawn. The doll is showed strangled with a black ribbon and pierced through by a big pin. There is a name and a surname written on the back.
I sense an old hatred crystallized on this piece of fabric; hatred rendered visible, rendered material!
"What do you hope you’ll find out in that house?"
"Everything. And nothing. Witchcraft has got deep roots in our countryside. It’s an obscure tradition handed down from old women to young daughters, in the course of milleniums. A secret tradition whispered by the fireplace in the foggy winter nights..."
He pauses a while before rising to his feet:
"It’s time to go now."
I slip my jacket on and we go out. We are walking along a little country road and skirting fields of dried maize and not long after we catch sight of our destination.
A gloomy isolated house made of bricks, with dark windows wide open like eye-sockets of a skull. The sunset sun gives a reddish colouring to it. Some bats are coming out of a Gothic arch.
"That is the place?"
“That’s it, it’s an once-convent dating back to the sixteenth century used as rural houses. The last family who lived there died at least sixty years ago. But old Kostia, nobody has been living there ever since."
As we are getting nearer, the house seems to be growing gigantic and we notice that there are some cracks, walled up doors, falling shutters.
While crossing an unkempt court-yard we trample on some bushes of solanum nigrum which come up to our faces. At the bottom there’s a little wooden door eaten away by the weather inclemency, the inferior part of it being rotten. George inserts a little lever in it and the door is opened slantwise on one side at a single blow.
Grey light, humidity and dust all over the ground-floor. Some scraps of furniture, a dilapidated kitchen cupboard, piles of smashed chairs, a rounded-leg table, cases of big bottles. We get to a wooden steep staircase.
On the first floor there are so many little rooms with little square windows. An iron bed and other cast-off furniture. Some round holes are carved in the big chimney-tube to which the occupants of the house evidently used to attach the pipes of their stoves. We climb up another flight of wooden stairs and get to the last floor.
"This was the room of the witch" my friend whispers.
A small low little room that is lit by a little window on one side. The main wall shows a conspicuous crack. A pot and a besom are by the fireplace. On the floor full of dirt a few glass splinters of glass are dangerously sparkling...
On the wall northwards there are some strange signs drawn with charcoal. They represent spirals, concentric circles, concentric ellipses. My friend copies them on a note-book and comments :
"It’s probably here that old Kostia would sit down and sing-song her nonsense rhymes..."
Then he examines the things that are on a shelf covered with dust: tiny pots, a little naked statue of a Goddess, a short string bearing nine double knots, a spoon, a ring, a little round mirror...
George has a look inside some boxes and I hear him mumble:
"hen feathers... stramonium leaves... hyoscyamus nigrum… bryonia... this one I don’t know..."
A dark red light has appeared on the wall under the beams. It looks like a blood-stain but, as I’m looking to understand what it might be, it fades out and disappears. I feel a cold draught blowing against my face.
George is going on with his researches. Inside a bundle of rags he has found an old copy-book and he’s reading it by candlelight. Its yellowed sheets are written with a large and sharp hand-writing.
Some noises are coming from downstairs: creakings, blows given on wood, noises of something dripping. I raise my head and am bewildered. A grey smoke slowly comes down the chimney-cap. The smoke thickens to a twisted shape while the flame of our candle is getting red. Then it goes out at a blow.
"It’s materializing! It is taking energy from us. Out of here at once!" George shouts with fear.
We sprang to our feet and run away through a little door.
Blackened and ill-squared beams support the roof smashed in one point. On the right wall there is a walled up door. We are in a dead-end room and I, on instinct, turn to go back. There I am casting my eyes through the cleft of the door, when I am paralyzed with fright.
In the moonlight coming in through the window I see a few motionless and grouped together shades. Dead silence in the room. I realize that my friend has come close to me, he has also been witnessing the extraordinary apparition and is holding his breath.
A few minutes go by, as slow as ages.
Now a slow, hoarse, very low voice is heard in the silence...
"...With the first knot power begins..."
The mumbling of a hardly perceptible chorus follows.
The voice goes on very low and dull:
"With the second knot it’ll be uniting... with the third one it’ll be bringing forth..."
Again, the same mumbling as before.
"With the fourth one it’ll be expanding... With the fifth one it will be living..."
My friend and I are confined motionless by the door and dare not move a single muscle.
"With the sixth one it’ll be sprouting. With the seventh one it will be fermenting..."
I hear rustling noises, noises of things that are dragged across the floor. Through the semi-open door I see lines of violet light in the room.
"With the eight knot it’ll be growing... With the ninth one it’ll be hitting!"
The mumbling increases, becomes louder, then weaker until silence is back again.
Now we hear a chorus of sepulchral voices, syllabized by violent strokes of sticks beating one against the other. A moanful sing-song, made of drawling and guttural sounds:
"Hiii-ala... Shiii-ala... Shìta! Hiii-ala... Shiii-ala... Shìta!"
The sing-song goes on over and over again, monotonous and haunting:
"Hiii-ala... Shiii-ala... Shìta! Hiii-ala... Shiii-ala... Shìta!"
In the little room of the witch a cone of violet light appears but suddenly vanishes. They are so faint visions that I’m not sure I’m seeing them at all.
At every passage the rhythm of the sing-song becomes a little faster. I see a few shades in the room, then, again, the cone of violet light rotating and rising.
George takes me by the arm and says something in my ear. His voice is so excited that I hardly recognize it :
"Now we must get out of here. We’ll shave the wall and go down the stairs. But taking care not to look inside the room..."
"But..."
"Now! Otherwise it’s too late!"
Without letting my arm go he pulls me to the door and goes out.
As I set foot in the room of the witch I perceive a heavy atmosphere made of gleams and smells. A gang of dark shades are crouching down in the middle of the room. Out of the corner of my eye I manage to catch a glimpse of deformed old women, of faces of dead people with their features corroded, of witches...
The scene becomes every second more and more vivid. George is grasping my arm in such a way that it aches and he whispers in a rage:
"Just don’t mind them. Don’t think of them now..."
The steep little staircase is a well of darkness. I am going on mechanically, being pulled by George, and it seems to me that ages are going by in that house.
Then we get outdoors to the court-yard at last. I deeply breathe the humid air of the night. I feel weak and very tired.
While going past the small window of the room of the witch, below in the court-yard I raise my head to see how the Sabbath is proceeding. There’s but the silence and the loneliness of an old deserted house.
JULY 1992
Copyright by Bissoli Sergio