The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  A bang like the first crash of a close-by strike of lightning rang through the room. Even Denton jumped. Janet gasped. DiNapoli scrambled upright and said, ‘I told you!’

  The sound came again, now recognisably from the door. The three of them waited, all leaning forward for another crash; when it came, Denton stood. DiNapoli looked at them and then he, too, stood and came to stand between them. The flame of the candles, which had burned down during his story, seemed to bend and attenuate themselves as cold air gusted into the room. Three of the candles went out; the other flames thinned, drawing their light back into themselves, and when the wind abated and they straightened, they were small and cold.

  Denton felt his scalp prickle. He knew better; he told himself that he knew better; but it was a fact that the door was locked and now it was open, and in the dim light of the diminished candles, a woman was standing where the locked door had been. She was wearing a long dress, the skirt bell shaped; her long neck rose from a square-topped bodice that plunged down over flattened breasts into a V below her waist. Denton didn’t know what period the dress came from; he was aware only that the style was old: he had no sense of such things, couldn’t have told Cinquecento from Etruscan, but he thought in the near-darkness that if this was the unhappy wife who had been murdered five centuries before, she looked the part as far as he was concerned.

  CHAPTER

  6

  ‘Oh, dio,’ DiNapoli was whispering. ‘Oh, dio!’ The woman in the doorway said something. Denton couldn’t follow it, but DiNapoli must have got it because he groaned. Then she said, ‘Morto,’ which Denton did understand, and ‘Morto!’ again, and then she raised her arms—puffed sleeves above the elbow, tight as gloves below—and showed them long-fingered hands that dripped dark liquid.

  And then the arms began to lengthen. They were like separate creatures, things obscene. They lengthened and lengthened, reaching for them, coming at their faces—

  And Denton roared and charged the doorway. He ducked under the groping hands and went straight for the woman’s midriff, his own arms out and spread so that he grazed his right knuckles on the doorway. His head was slightly aside to the left so he could drive ahead with his right shoulder. When he made contact, he felt the hardness of what could have been bone, and he heard a grunt and a cry of anger or pain, and he drove on, pushing the thing from the room, crushing it in his arms and feeling the belled skirt collapse. The woman, such as she was, came down on top of him, the arms crashing down on his back and then his legs as he drove on, falling, sprawling almost the whole width of the corridor beyond the doorway.

  He fell full length with his hands and arms full of cloth and things hard and round and long, and under him a squirming something that shouted in Italian and sounded surprisingly like a live male and not a female ghost.

  Janet was laughing.

  DiNapoli was moaning.

  And a pair of feet were pounding away down the corridor.

  Denton tried to wrap the wriggling something in the fabric of the ghost’s dress, pushing his hands together along the stone floor until he could join the fingers, then rolling on his back to grasp it, but there were hard surfaces in the way, long things like insect legs that interfered, and then he felt a blow to the side of his head that made tears come, and then another. The wriggling thing, which smelled like onions, hit him again and struggled and was gone, and Denton, stunned, was holding in his arms an inert armature and a great amount of fabric.

  Somebody was calling to him from somewhere. It was Janet, perhaps in her own garden and calling up to him, her voice shrill and not at all like her. He thought that Atkins should run out and ask her what she wanted, and he tried to shout for Atkins and made a sound like a dog’s being sick.

  ‘Denton!’ she shouted again, closer to him now. He tried to raise his head. ‘Denton, you’re bleeding!’

  ‘Not my fault.’ His voice felt as thick as his tongue did. ‘Where’s Atkins when I need him?’

  ‘Denton, you’re not in London! You’ve been hurt.’

  She was standing over him with a candelabrum, which he saw as two fuzzy balls of light. He tried to move and encountered the dress and things like bones, which proved to be not bones but sticks, and he remembered the ghost. ‘Dammit!’ He kicked the thing off him, pulled the fabric away, finding he was wound up in it and in thin cords like bootlaces. ‘They’ve tied me up!’ he shouted. ‘Help me!’

  She tried and made things worse. Denton tore at the stuff and felt the fabric rip; he kicked and tore and thrashed, and it flew away from him and he was free. ‘He got away,’ he said. ‘Smelled of onions.’

  ‘There were two of them! Down the corridor—to the left—I heard them on the stairs—’

  ‘Two?’

  ‘There were two.’

  He remembered. ‘So there were.’ He tried to stand, swayed, got his weight on one hand on the floor and felt something hard under it. He lifted it, expecting another stick, found a metal rod a couple of feet long. ‘It was a sort of puppet,’ he said. He wielded the rod. ‘Maybe this held it together or something.’

  ‘We should go after them.’

  Denton growled. ‘“We.”’ He had his flash-light out and was shining it down the corridor, the light so thin that it made things visible only a dozen feet ahead before it went to rest its battery. He saw the narrow staircase where the portiere had gone up and, moving closer, a blackness beyond that became a staircase going down. Janet stayed behind him, calling over her shoulder for DiNapoli, whom Denton remembered only when she spoke the name. She said again, ‘You’re bleeding.’

  ‘He hit me with this rod, the little bastard.’ He stopped at the top of the stairs. ‘You go back to the room. Send DiNapoli after me.’

  ‘I’ll do nothing of the kind; I’m coming with you. Mr DiNapoli’s beside himself.’

  ‘You’ve been ill.’

  ‘Oh, and you haven’t been hit in the head and aren’t spurting blood everywhere, I suppose! You’ll probably faint.’

  He growled again and turned away as the first spasm of pain went across his forehead and bored in on the left side. ‘He was right handed,’ he said as if it mattered. ‘Mr DiNapoli, take care of the signora.’ He launched himself down the stairs.

  Later, he would suppose that the stairs had been for servants to go up and down in the middle of the house without offending their betters by being seen. They were hardly wide enough for two people to pass and had no rail. He wanted one to lean on and settled for putting the knuckles of the hand that held the iron rod on one plaster wall; it guided him around the turns where the stairs doubled back on themselves and then plunged down into darkness. He thought of somebody’s waiting for him down there and of traps they could have laid—more of those sticks across the stairs, perhaps, or a wire stretched at one of the turnings. Nonetheless, he went on as if he were tripping down his own stairs at home, his feet fast and whispery on the stones, flashing his light on and off, ignoring his headache and his cut forehead, feeling grit under his shoes, smelling mildew and closed-up air and then coolness and earth, as if a door had been opened.

  The red room was on the first floor—second floor to him, American style (Italians couldn’t count, was his conclusion: first floor for second floor, Cinquecento for sixteenth century)—and so the first door he passed must have opened into the ground floor. He swayed to that side and put his shoulder against the door but nothing happened, and he bounced away and went on down, the smell of cool earth stronger now as, he thought, he was headed for cellars below the house. Would the two men have gone only to the ground floor and then got out of the house from there? If so, they must have had keys. Or the help of the portiere. And if they did, they would be long gone.

  The stairs ended in a few feet of flagstone, like a landing, and then a doorway wider than the stairs themselves. He saw its rectangle, another rectangle of perfect blackness within it, just the edge of the door hinged there, the door open now into the cellarage. He put his hand up o
n the wooden frame. It felt porous, deeply textured, damp. He shone his flash-light where his hand lay. The wood was pitted and ridged with rot.

  Above him, Janet and DiNapoli were coming more slowly, their feet scuffing and clicking. It occurred to him that she hadn’t the sense she’d been born with, still weak from typhus, running about in the middle of the night when she needed to be sleeping. Wisely, it occurred to him not to say so.

  He pushed the flash-light ahead of him through the opening as if he expected it to be resisted—as if a sheet of glass or perhaps cobweb waited there. On the other side, the flash-light showed nothing, not even the dimmest of shapes.

  He followed it. The stone under his feet was smoother. He shone the light down. He was standing on tufa, the soft stone that underlay the city and that many of its buildings were made of. It would be yellow if he could get enough light on it; as it was, it looked grey-brown, perhaps simply less black than his shoes and his trouser cuffs. He was standing on the base rock, then; the cellar had been dug into it.

  He took a few steps in the dark and flashed the light, wiping spider webs from his face. A mass bulked ahead on his left: the base of a chimney. There would be several of those, he thought. Yes, another off to the right. He moved forward again, then far enough to stand close to the left-hand chimney. Where was he? He tried to picture the house, the turns they had taken getting to the red room. Then how many turns had he made coming down the stairs? It didn’t matter; it made no sense that he would be under the carriage courtyard at the front; he must be under the mass of the house, looking towards the back.

  ‘Denton?’

  He swung around and directed the light towards her. Wound up tight, he was glad to know she was there now, the two candles she held mere points of light from, he thought, the doorway; despite himself, he was thinking, How shall I write this part? How shall I describe my relief when I heard her call even though I couldn’t see her, as if it was her voice that gave light? He flashed the light at her and turned back and went ahead and to his left, wanting to find a wall, wondering at himself for thinking about writing and then realising that the writing was the reason he was here: everything was writing.

  And heard a sound. A scraping—furtive, metallic. Not a rat; people make too much of rats, he thought. Rats go where food is—corn cribs, in his experience—not empty cellars of empty houses. And they don’t use metal.

  He moved to the left. He held the iron bar up, one end touching his right shoulder, ready to strike. His left hand found the wall.

  ‘Denton?’ Her voice was farther away. Ghostly. He smiled. Ahead of him, the scraping became a thudding, as if somebody were using a hammer muffled with layers of felt. He went forward, holding the iron bar in front of him now. He realised again that his head ached, the pain coming in waves. He transferred the flash-light to the hand with the iron bar and, keeping one hand on the wall, moved ahead again. Now, he could hear breathing.

  He stopped. Waited. He touched the places on his head where he thought he had been hit; there was a wet swelling in his hair, but no trickle of blood below it. A wound that would look worse than it was.

  Ahead, the breathing had become almost panting. Under it, he could hear a kind of groan, the sound of desperation. He went forward three small steps and turned the light on. The panting stopped.

  A very small man was standing with his back to Denton, his arms raised and spread in a V as if he might have been hung up there, and his torso leaning so far into the darkness that Denton was looking at the underside of his crotch. He seemed to be trying to lift the wall but was really trying to move an iron bar that held something closed and was jammed in its slots. On each side of him, heavy wooden doors stood open. Timbers a foot thick framed them at sides and bottom; vertical boards filled the openings on their far sides, studded every foot with iron.

  ‘If you move, I’ll kill you.’ Denton didn’t really mean that, and he’d said it in English, anyway. The little man made a sound like a sheep and tried to climb backwards towards Denton; one foot moved down towards the cellar floor, then the other, then his whole body bent forward. Denton grabbed an ankle and twisted him over on his back and shone the flash-light and saw that the man had been partway up an incline that ended half a dozen feet above him at metal double doors with the jammed bar across them—an old means of getting supplies down into the cellar from outside. Denton could imagine barrels rolling down it, or sacks of coal.

  He put the iron bar, not entirely gently, on the top of the little man’s head. The man bleated again. He was on his back now on the tufa. He blinked in the weak glow of the flash-light. Denton shouted, ‘Janet, over here!’ and the man tried to wriggle loose and a dark stain began to spread down his trousers.

  Denton put the centre of the light on his face. It was middle aged, pinched, of a type with that of the portiere at Fra Geraldo’s. Not the one who was in charge of the ghost business, Denton thought. A man on the bottom. A man other men pushed around.

  Denton put the tip of the rod on the man’s larynx. ‘Janet!’

  The man wailed.

  ‘We’re here, here—’ He could hear her well now, off to his right and behind him. ‘Where are you? Oh, there you are. I see you—’

  ‘Do you have DiNapoli?’

  ‘Yes, yes, with me—’

  ‘I need a translator!’

  Seconds later, she was standing next to him, her candles shedding only a little more light than his fading flash. ‘Well, you got one of them, anyway,’ she said. ‘He is one of them, isn’t he?’

  ‘DiNapoli! Ask him what the hell he was doing with that puppet.’

  There was a gabble of Neapolitan, contemptuous from DiNapoli, quivering from the man, and DiNapoli told them that the little man was a puppeteer and he didn’t know why he had made the ‘ghost’, but he had been paid to do it and to come here with another man and work the puppet. His name was Beppe. ‘I know this guy a little,’ DiNapoli said. ‘I seen him sometimes. He goes around, he’s got this t’ing like a the-ayt-er on his back, he does Pulcinella puppets in the street.’

  ‘Ask him how he got in here.’

  ‘He says they come in this gate. Him and another guy.’

  Denton hadn’t been able to understand anything they’d said to each other. He thought he was tired, coming down off the excitement of the ghost. And his head hurt. He said, ‘How did they get in here if that thing he was trying to open was locked?’

  Jabber. ‘The old woman, he says. She leave it open for them.’

  ‘Where’s the other guy?’

  ‘He got away.’

  Denton put his face close to the little man’s. ‘Tell him I know the other man came this way, too. Is he down here someplace or isn’t he?’

  Jabber, jabber. ‘He got away.’

  ‘How?’

  Jabber. Silence. Jabber. Bleat. ‘He says he kill him if he tells.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll kill him if he doesn’t. Tell him I’m Texas Jack.’

  Jabber. ‘He says you ain’t as bad as the other guy.’

  Janet said, ‘I don’t follow. Why would somebody kill him over a haunted house?’

  ‘Or a not haunted house that he wants to seem haunted. Eh, Beppe?’ Denton put the tip of the iron rod on Beppe’s throat again. The little man’s eyes appealed to DiNapoli, who said something and then murmured to Denton, ‘I t’ink he ain’t the bad guy, Mist’ Denton. I t’ink he’s just some poor pescelino picking up a few lire, you know?’ Like me, he meant. Denton had to think about pescelino. Maybe little fish?

  Denton relaxed the pressure on the iron rod. He straightened and tried to stretch his back. ‘Would he tell us anything if I pay him?’

  ‘I t’ink money don’t do it.’

  Denton squatted. His flash-light was fading again; in a few seconds, he thought, he’d have to put the fresh battery into it. He looked into the little man’s eyes. ‘Tell him that the other man didn’t go out this way. Tell him he must have another way out. Where is it?’

/>   Jabber. The little man’s eyes slid off to his left and snapped back to meet Denton’s. ‘He don’t know. The guy was already gone when he got down here.’

  Denton stood. His knees cracked. ‘He’s no good to us.’ He jerked his head at Beppe. ‘Tell him he can go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wherever he wants.’

  ‘He says he don’t know no way out except this one right here, and it don’t work.’

  ‘Tell him to go back up through the house and hide there until morning. The portiere will unlock the door and he can slip out.’

  ‘He says he’s afraid of the ghost.’

  Denton was fumbling with the fresh battery. ‘That takes the pickle dish,’ he said. He dropped the fresh battery into the flashlight, turned it on and then off. ‘Tell him to scoot before I change my mind.’ He walked Janet away from the chute where the little man lay and murmured to her, ‘He looked over this way when DiNapoli asked him how the other one got out.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It matters to me.’ He started into the blackness of the far side of the cellar, then said over his shoulder, ‘This is a funny business. I don’t like funny business.’