The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  Denton scowled at Fanning’s enthusiastic face. ‘It’ll be no good to either of us if Fra Geraldo decides to communicate by guitar.’

  ‘If that is what he chooses to do at first, that is what we must let him do!’ Fanning thrust a finger out, seemed to threaten Denton’s great nose with it. ‘The spirits are as delicate as maidens! They come veiled. You must understand: they are as fearful of us as we of them. Don’t you see, don’t you see, the monumental difficulty of sending a single word across the gulf of death?’

  Denton said that he saw it, and he didn’t see how hitting a guitar was any easier; and he said that he doubted such a thing would happen with him there, and he was tired, and he’d been chasing ghost stories for weeks, and he was frankly pretty sick of the gulf of death.

  ‘I hope this doesn’t mean that once again you will fail to sit with Signora Palladino.’

  Denton sighed. ‘No—no. I’m determined to do it now. No matter how—No matter what happens.’ He wasn’t going to tell Fanning about the chapel.

  ‘I shall write to her at once, then. Tomorrow? You can make it tomorrow?’

  ‘I suppose—I work every day—’

  Fanning waved a hand at work. ‘This is preeminent. I shall of course accompany you. She trusts me; it will help if I am there. Did I say she is a peasant? She is—a complete peasant. It is the source of her super-normal energy, I think—unspoiled by reason. She can be difficult. A bit of a prima donna. She’s said she’ll do no more séances, but she’ll do one for me.’ He got up and shook Denton’s hand. ‘You’ve made a wise decision.’

  Denton sent for his hat and coat. While he was waiting, he said, ‘I’ll tell you the truth before we go into this: I want to know how Fra Geraldo died. That’s my interest. And of course the medium, for my book.’

  Fanning said sharply, ‘There’s some doubt about how he died? Mmm. That might sharpen his appetite for communicating.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘We shall see!’

  Denton’s things came, and he said as he pulled on his overcoat, ‘Do you suppose they wear clothes like these on the Other Side, or does everybody stand around in the altogether? I ask because the people who tell me they see ghosts always seem to see them in their Sunday best. Or maybe their burial duds. It’s the way they know they’re from another century—the clothes.’

  Fanning looked disgusted. It was not, he said, a question that could be scientifically answered.

  Back in the Casa Gialla, he straightened things on his desk, glanced at a book, then stood and looked out into the vast courtyard. He felt like a sap for agreeing to go to Signora Palladino—it violated everything he believed about facts, death, the nature of the world. He snorted in disgust.

  A woman was doing something to a grape vine on an arbour made of peeled saplings; she had to stand on tiptoe to reach it, frowning in concentration. Their own unweeded garden was empty, the gate closed; baking was over until the next holiday. He thought how much he would prefer to be writing about the life he saw out this window. It seemed a far more interesting subject than spooks and mediums: intersecting lives, contrasting levels of society—one of the old women who now and then appeared at a balcony, he’d been told, was a countess, living out her days in one room of what had been the family palazzo—love affairs and petty revenges—

  Then he heard a voice say the most ominous words the meditative state can hear: ‘Am I interrupting?’ It was Harriet Guttmann, the comic sidekick of Janet’s Lucy; she was, for once, serious, also unaccountably tentative for a normally boisterous young woman. ‘I’m interrupting something, aren’t I.’ She made two syllables of ‘aren’t’.

  ‘No, no—come in—’ He didn’t mean it, but what else could he say? He hadn’t even known she was in the house. If she was, Lucy was. He was surprised that she had come to his workroom, surprised she even knew he existed away from Janet.

  She more or less collapsed into his one armchair. ‘I need a rest from being cheerful. They’re going to talk. That means Luce will be all weepy and Janet will be Holy Mother.’ She gave him a look that said that she wanted a response: she wanted his approval. Good God, she’s come to make friends. She had a look of conspiracy, of the sort of secret-sharing small boys do with their first dirty jokes. In an instant, he guessed that she disliked Janet and knew that he disliked Lucy; she was looking for somebody to gossip with. She said, ‘Oh, I’m just letting off steam. But those two don’t need me. In fact they don’t want me.’ She grinned at him. ‘Hard lines sometimes, being the homely one.’

  It was the first time he’d been alone with her, the first time in fact he’d ever noticed her except as a rather painful emanation of Lucy. ‘You’re being kind of hard on yourself, aren’t you?’ he said in what he hoped was a kindly voice.

  ‘Every pretty girl has a homely friend to set her off, Mr Denton. Lucy really is my dearest friend and I love her, but I know what I am.’ She gave him the simplest smile he’d yet seen on her plump face. ‘I’m so afraid I’m going to lose her to some Dago lizard. I think her mother’s gone insane.’ She scowled at him. ‘Her mother’s told Lucy she has to marry this marchese so she, Lucy’s mother, I mean, can call herself the mother of an Italian title. Did I say he’s proposed and Mama has accepted?’

  This was news to Denton. ‘Lucy seems young to marry.’

  ‘Lucy’s a child, a sweet, wonderful, loving child! And it isn’t as if it’s just anybody, it’s a young man who looks to me as if he wears corsets and will make her life miserable. He’d shut her up in some horrible palazzo and have mistresses and affairs and be just awful to her!’ Her look of conspiracy got more intense. Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper.

  ‘Maybe he’s a nice young man, regardless.’ Denton wondered if Janet knew, if so what she had said. Janet was badly disposed to marriage on principle.

  ‘He isn’t a nice young man! He’s a money-grubber who looks like Uriah Heep dipped in olive oil. And he’s as poor as a church mouse, Janet says, and she got it from her friends at the university, who say he’s one of the ungilded youth who hang around the pensiones and the theatres hoping to snag an heiress. Lucy told that to her mother, and she said Lucy shouldn’t listen to gossip.’

  ‘Janet doesn’t gossip.’

  ‘She says the marchese’s family are stony broke. They still live in an old palazzo near the Porta Capuana and can’t afford to move to Monte di Dio like the rich ones.’

  ‘Tell Lucy’s mother that.’

  She shook her shoulders and settled her well-padded rump deeper in the chair. ‘I know my Lucy. She’s one of the pampered jades of Asia—she’ll do what her mother says because all her life she’s been swaddled and coddled and taught not to say boo to a goose, and in the end she’ll marry him and she’ll be miserable. She thinks she’s miserable now, but she doesn’t know. She’s just playacting at being miserable. Rather delicious to be the endangered heroine, but she doesn’t know.’

  Denton sat in his desk chair. ‘You’re a smart young woman.’

  ‘I know a hawk from a handsaw. It’s one of the benefits of being homely—what Emerson calls “compensation”—that you develop an eye and an ear.’

  ‘And a brain?’

  ‘Well, don’t tell anybody. If they thought I had a brain, they’d have to get a new me from the factory.’ She sighed. A little later, she left, and he thought, Why aren’t I writing a novel about the living—like Harriet Guttmann? That evening, he asked Janet why she hadn’t told him that Lucy Newcombe was being traded for a title. Janet said she thought he was too busy to care. And anyway, what business was it of his?

  Eusapia Palladino was a short, wide, busty woman with an immense pile of hair on her head and a masculine-looking face with a strong chin. The ghost of a moustache shadowed her upper lip. She looked nothing like Janet’s Assunta, who was almost handsome, but he thought they had the same physicality, the same projection of a body whose physical strength was part sexual force. His late friend Hench-Rose would have called her a jolie laide, even if n
ow a bit over the hill and going to fat.

  Signora Palladino lived in a cluttered apartment near San Domenica Maggiore with a husband who seemed to vanish even as he was introducing himself. Work-worn, conventional looking, he seemed more depressed at having landed in the middle class, thanks to his wife, than pleased.

  She had answered her own door; now, she served them a glass of not very good sweet wine, some bits of fried dough she said she had made herself.

  ‘Ecco.’ She had a harsh voice, almost crow-like. ‘“Texas Jack”.’ She laughed.

  ‘You know who I am.’

  She looked at DiNapoli, whom he’d brought to translate. Fanning was distressed; he said that she spoke some English and DiNapoli wasn’t needed. However, from the beginning it looked as if she was going to be staunchly Italian today. When DiNapoli had translated what Denton had said, she laughed again, said something that DiNapoli translated as ‘All the mediums know you’. He remembered what Fanning had said about their trading information. Did this mean that she would fabricate messages about Fra Geraldo? He said, ‘But you don’t know me.’

  She shrugged, made a face. At that moment, she seemed rather jolly. ‘I do and I don’t.’

  Fanning said, ‘He would like to have a séance.’

  She looked at him. She shook her head.

  ‘He’s willing to pay, of course.’

  She burst out with something. DiNapoli said, ‘She says she don’t take money no more. She says any medium that takes money is a fake; they’re all fakes, they all cheat. She don’t cheat, so she don’t take money.’

  Denton leaned forward to cut Fanning off. ‘But the “researchers” who have examined you say that—forgive me, signora—sometimes you do cheat.’

  She began to count off on her fingers. ‘Ox-ford! Pa-ris! Un’ isola privata! La Germania. Encora e encora e encora—!’

  DiNapoli murmured, ‘She says all these places—’

  ‘I understood. Those are all places where the investigators have tried to expose her.’

  Palladino turned on Fanning and began to scold.

  ‘She says he held her hands and her feet; he put his hands on her legs and—I ain’t making this up, she said it—he felt her up. He made her undress down to her, um, what you call that? Like a sort of nightgown women wear?’

  ‘A shift? They don’t wear them any more, do they?’

  ‘Somet’ing, anyway. Other guys, they took her here in Napoli to some big hotel, put her in a room she never seen before, made her do her stuff there. She’s sick of them and him and he can…she talks pretty rough, Mist’ Denton. She talks kind of dirty. Anyways, she says never again. She been examined enough for the rest of her life.’

  ‘Ask her how she’s going to live if she isn’t going to take money?’

  ‘She says she got enough now.’

  ‘So being a medium is over?’ Denton felt relieved.

  The woman leaned towards him. Her eyes had almost closed—in anger, he saw now. That harsh voice screamed at him. It was a voice he had heard a hundred times, the loud, hoarse shout of the Naples streets. He understood some of it: ‘mai finite, mai, non è scelto mio, è un’ possessione!’ It never ends; it isn’t my choice; it is a possession! She screamed something more.

  DiNapoli said, ‘A demon, she says she got a demon.’

  ‘Being a medium?’

  She switched to English. ‘You t’ink I choose it? You t’ink is all fake? Yes, I do tricks—I get…what is word—?’ She screeched at DiNapoli, got his answer. ‘Bor-èd! I make my fun at idiote who sit here and piss in their trousers when they cannot comprehend! But it was never all tricks! Some t’ings—’ She waved her hands, wild-eyed now. ‘I no do them. They do themselves! You think I piacermi to lose my own self?’

  ‘You said “possession”. Is this King John?’ King John was the name of her ‘spirit guide’, according to Fanning.

  ‘King-a John!’ She all but spat. ‘A name, so? People they want a name. I say, “King-a-John”. Idiote!’

  ‘But if you are “possessed”, what possesses you?’

  ‘Un demone.’

  He looked at DiNapoli. ‘A demon?’

  She grasped his arm. ‘Si, si, a demon. He take me—he fill me up—’ She grinned, the sexual joke clear.

  ‘In the trance?’

  ‘Si. In the trance, is very naughty sometimes.’ She had shifted violently from the anger of a moment before to a sudden coarse flirtatiousness. ‘I wake, I am—feel it in—’ She looked at DiNapoli. ‘C’è il demone nella fessa.’ She laughed.

  DiNapoli blushed. ‘She says, unh—she gets horny.’

  Denton looked at her. She was smiling now, her head leaned on her left hand, her upper arm stretched along the back of her chair. She raised her other hand and, palm down, twitched a clitoral index finger at him.

  Denton found that he was blushing, too.

  She raised the hand and pointed at Denton and laughed, the laughter now deep and thick with sex. She looked at Fanning and put her tongue out, then at DiNapoli and muttered something that Denton couldn’t follow.

  ‘She says, send me and the other guy away, she show you. Dio mio.’

  Then, as abruptly as she had plunged into the mood, she was out of it again. She stood suddenly and walked to a door, yanked it open. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Come.’ When Fanning stood, she said, ‘Not you! You go fuck!’ She waved Denton on, didn’t object when he waved DiNapoli forward. She murmured something to DiNapoli and laughed. Fanning was still protesting when they walked out.

  Beyond was an almost bare room. Several straight chairs and a small table were the only furniture. One corner had been curtained off with black cashmere.

  The door closed behind DiNapoli. She had not come in with them. Denton heard her coarse shout top Fanning’s murmurs, then footsteps. A door slammed. ‘What’s she up to?’

  ‘She’s crazy.’

  ‘Well—strange, anyway—’ He went to the black curtain. It was split in the middle, enclosed a triangle of space no more than three feet on a side. He parted the halves, looked in to see a round table hardly big enough to hold a good-sized vase, and, on the floor, a mandolin and a child’s toy trumpet. ‘The usual crap.’

  DiNapoli looked in. ‘This is the magic stuff?’

  ‘It isn’t magic. Or so says the authority.’

  He heard the door open and turned. Signora Palladino came in. She had done something with her hair, otherwise looked the same. He caught a hint of powerful perfume. She said, ‘Sit.’

  They pulled two of the chairs up to the table. She told them where to sit, then put a chair for herself at the end of the table with her back to the curtain. Denton sat on her left, DiNapoli on her right. She grasped a hand of each—tight in Denton’s case—and put a foot under the feet of each. ‘Control!’ she said, and cackled. It was the word the psychic researchers used when they thought they had the medium’s hands and feet neutralised.

  ‘You’re going to do a séance?’ Denton said. ‘You said you’d given them up.’

  ‘Shhhhh!’

  The room wasn’t even dark: curtains had been pulled across the only window, but light spilled in at top and bottom, and Denton could clearly see both DiNapoli and Signora Palladino. When he leaned sideways to look under the table, there was plenty of light down there to see their feet, big male shoes with her smaller female ones on top of the toecaps.

  ‘Ascolta!’ Listen.

  They waited. Two muffled knocks sounded, apparently from the table. Denton opened his mouth to speak; she shook her head. Three more knocks came. Then another. Then she laughed. ‘Trick!’ She cackled. ‘Fake!’ She took her hand away from his and raised it. ‘Guarda!’ Look. She moved her hand slowly in the air, and the black curtain billowed towards her as if a wind had blown it from behind.

  She snickered. ‘Trick. All tricks!’ She took his hand again. ‘Now—no trick—’ She stared into the space between them. Her fingers moved within his hand. Her foot moved on his. A spasm pass
ed over her shoulders, then another. She grunted. Her breathing got slower, then faster again, almost panting, with a hoarse vocalisation under it. Then it slowed again; her hands jerked; her foot pressed down on his almost painfully, as if she were becoming heavier, and then she groaned loudly and, her breathing now slower than a sleeper’s, her head lolled to her right as she sank back in the chair.

  Denton looked at DiNapoli. He was, probably unconsciously, drawing back from her as he might have done if she had been having an epileptic seizure; his face showed distaste and concern at the same time.

  Her mouth opened. A deep male voice came from it. ‘Fredo.’

  Denton knew the word: cold.

  ‘Fredo. Inverno.’ Cold. Winter.

  Then there was a silence of, he thought, at least two minutes. The time seemed long in the silent, rather stuffy room, long enough for him to become bored. He heard horses’ hooves from outside and the distant sound of a bell. A fly buzzed against the window and stopped. It was as if they had been there all day, would have to stay there forever.

  ‘Mi dispiace.’ I am displeased.

  Then, after a silence of perhaps another minute, the deep voice said, ‘L’amore non c ’è.’ Love—love what?

  He waited. DiNapoli met his eyes, looked away; his face now seemed resentful, as if he had been made to watch something offensive. Suddenly, the deep voice from Palladino’s mouth said severely, as if reprimanding them, ‘ll poliziotto fa la commedia!’ Denton made nothing of it—somebody was making a comedy?