‘He’ll need shoes,’ Donato said, and his voice was so low and shaky that Ernesto wondered if they were on private property and they were setting him up to steal something. He couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun any longer, and his arms began to quiver with rising goose-pimples. In the distance a dog barked, fell silent for a while and barked again, a heavy-throated sound that brought to the boy’s mind a huge animal both dangerous and bored.
‘I’m not going any closer,’ Donato whispered.
‘I’m not asking you to,’ Antonio answered quickly. ‘You and me are staying here.’
They’d stopped, and Ernesto sensed that the surface beneath his feet was different. As the tee-shirt had loosened a little he was able to look downwards and see his toes. He was standing on large, old square tiles the colour of mud. Just as the dog began its doleful barking once more, Antonio pulled the tee-shirt off Ernesto’s head. They were some forty metres away from a single story dirty white house and in an instant, although he had never seen the front of the place before, hidden as it was in dense undergrowth, Ernesto realised it was the cursed house that the weird man with little black eyes had once lived in—The House of Ghosts.
‘What are we going to do now, Antonio?’ he asked.
‘Donato and me are staying here, and you’re going inside to see if there really is a ghost in there.’
Ernesto was very close to tears now, but if he’d cried, he sensed it could make Antonio even crueller, and so he swallowed hard and tried to keep his breathing calm. ‘Look, Antonio, you can have my pen instead. You can keep it forever.’
‘I don’t want your stupid pen, you idiot.’
‘I’m not going in there.’
‘Oh, yes you are. You’ve got to make the ghost show himself,’ Antonio explained, ‘so you’ll have to taunt him.’
‘What would make a ghost come out?’ Donato whispered.
‘He’s got to say something—something rude,’ Antonio replied.
‘What?’ Ernesto asked, not able to think straight in his terror.
‘I don’t know . . . say come out here you goat, or come out here you tramp. . . . I don’t know; that’s for you to work out.’
‘My great uncle said he walked about in Cefalù looking like a lunatic all kitted out in fancy dressing gowns,’ Donato whispered. ‘You could call him a loony, or maybe a stupid loony, couldn’t you?’
Ernesto studied Donato’s face and he could clearly see his shame at what they were trying to make him do. ‘Will you come inside with me Donato?’ he asked.
‘Hell no! You’re going in to pay your debt. We’ll still be here when you come out, won’t we, Antonio?’
‘Yeah, but not if you’re going to take all day about it.’
As Ernesto stared at the house, he remembered suddenly the man in the dark cloak with the green stick that Sergio had told him about, and as his terror escalated, he looked around for a way to escape. But Antonio, realising his intention, seized hold of his arm once more and gripped him so hard that it hurt.
‘Kids have been in that house before, so it’s no big deal,’ Donato said, and his voice sounded almost kind enough to comfort Ernesto. ‘There’s nothing to it. A family I know got some furniture out of there once, good stuff too. They sold it and made a lot of money.’
‘You mean the Ricci family, Donato?’ Antonio asked.
‘Yeah, that’s them. They never took the stuff inside their own house is what I heard, though people say they did.’
‘But even so, their house did burn down,’ Antonio said.
‘So what, Antonio?’
‘You know what.’
Donato made an exaggerated shrug. ‘Houses burn down all the time!’ he declared.
‘Sure, Donato. I’m not arguing with you,’ Antonio answered.
‘Cursed,’ Ernesto announced, ‘you think the family were cursed. That’s the sort of thing my grandfather would say and he’s ancient. I don’t believe in that kind of rubbish.’
‘Nor do I,’ Donato said.
‘I never said I did either,’ Antonio was quick to tell them.
‘So you’re not afraid to go in there, then?’ Donato asked Ernesto.
‘Of course he’s afraid, look at him, he’s gone dead white. But anyway, he likes buildings and things, so he’s going to like it in there. I heard that one of the rooms is really amazing. You’ll love it, kid.’
In the end, Ernesto resolved to do it. He’d go in there, shout out his rude remark and then run for it. The place had double doors like most houses do in the older parts of Cefalù, and as he reached them, he looked behind him at Antonio and Donato and was astonished to see admiration on their faces. He had merely to push at one of the doors and it swung inwards onto a dark and strangely glittering interior that had a curious smell about it—a kind of heavy stench of decay and wetness intermingled with mould. It was a room without windows, but there was a large hole in the roof for which the boy was thankful, as the light that came through it was bright enough to illuminate the walls and corners.
The floor was made of the same octagonal brownish tiles that the Cavallero family had in their house, but painted on them was a huge blue star surrounded by a red circle. The walls were a peculiar nasty green colour and all over them were paintings of what seemed to Ernesto to be human heads with staring and bulging eyes and cruel looking curved lips. Some had teeth and tongues, some looked like lunatics. Fresh fear bolted up in him; he would rather have been in the icy water of the old cistern on La Rocca, than in that house. There was a mangled-looking metal chair in one crumbling corner of the room, and as Ernesto stared at it, he could only suppose that it had been crushed by a monster, because it was certain that no human man could’ve made it look like that. He felt horribly sick and looked away from it, trying to glance only briefly at everything else. The place was gloomy and hideous all right, and it had a curious sullen atmosphere about it.
Ernesto clenched his fists and got ready to run for the door. ‘Come out here, you . . . stinky old . . . lunatic,’ he shouted—there, now he was done. But just as he turned to leave, he heard a monstrous crack and then something rumbling, and so unexpected was the noise in that silent eerie place, that the boy found himself rigid with shock. He could not even step backwards as part of the roof close to the original hole came away and crashed inwards in front of him. Heavy tiles fell one after the other to the floor and filled the terrible room with noise and dust. Beneath that noise Ernesto heard something else; a small sibilantly whispered thing close to his ear, but he could make little of it in the din of the falling roof, and he supposed it had come out of his own head. A fragment was all he could pick up. Then, as if his body had an engine that had been switched on, he was suddenly moving with all the speed he could find out of that house and back towards the boys, who were already sprinting in terror for the slope that would take them to the Telecom road and safety. It wasn’t until they’d turned around the curve in the road that led to Ernesto’s house that they stopped to catch breath.
‘A bit of the roof caved in,’ Ernesto said, ‘did you see it?’
Antonio shook his head. ‘We heard something, but it was you coming out of that house, your face all white and your eyes red that spooked us.’ He stared at Ernesto for a minute. ‘You saw him, didn’t you?’
‘Saw who?’ Ernesto asked.
‘The thing in the cloak. The man. The ghost.’
‘No. I didn’t see anything in there.’
‘Your face said you did. What scared you so much then?’
‘The noise of those tiles coming down. It’s like I can still hear them, or hear something anyway,’ Ernesto told them. ‘I have to sit down. I’m feeling all muzzy and there’s something gone wrong with my ears.’
The boys stared at him and curious looks passed between them.
‘Something wrong with your ears?’ Antonio asked. ‘Did you get hurt in there? Your face isn’t . . .’ he trailed off, and Ernesto saw him gaze at Donato. ‘Did you say any
thing to bring him out, Ernesto?’
Donato pointed to a rock ledge close to the side of the road and they settled down onto it.
‘I can’t really remember,’ Ernesto said. ‘It was all so rushed and things.’ He was on the verge of answering Antonio honestly, when some extra and deeper terror halted him. For all his resistance to superstition, he was afraid to repeat what he’d said in that place in case there were consequences.
‘You were really brave to go in there,’ Antonio whispered. ‘I’ve never met any boy who has been in The House of Ghosts before.’
Ernesto should’ve been happy to hear such words from Antonio Puglisi; it was the end of his tortured relationship with the brutal boy, but he could not, at that moment, have cared less. He felt deeply weary, and the idea came to him that very old people must feel this way shortly before they die. ‘Are we straight now?’ he asked. Antonio nodded, and Ernesto would’ve felt truly relieved and so as a consequence bold enough to face his grandfather’s anger calmly, but he was concerned only by his strange weak condition and the suspicion that he was developing some kind of rapid fever. ‘I have to go now,’ he said, staring down the long shadowy road. ‘I’ll be in seriously bad trouble at home.’
‘Of course. You should go. Stop staring at the kid, Donato.’
‘Look at him, one of his eyes is bleeding,’ Donato whispered, nudging Antonio just as Ernesto turned away from them and set out for home.
His dinner was waiting for him on the kitchen table and only Rosina was in the house; Sergio and Grandfather were over at the goat pens. Ernesto told her he’d fallen ill while waiting for the vegetable van and had been taken into a nearby house so he could rest for a while. His mother believed him because she could see how pale he was. She made him sit at the kitchen table. ‘And what’s wrong with your eyes?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. What?’
‘They look like they’re full of blood.’
‘They feel like they’re burning, and there’s a noise in my head,’ the boy replied—and as he gazed at his mother, he felt his fever rising and waves of weakness overcoming him. He closed his eyes and heard a long drawn-out sound that droned on from syllable to syllable—einnaameoochoorozond-wellaaeindabeeez-maiaallubooilldupbeycomrooble.
‘Go straight away to your bed,’ Rosina said. ‘Look at you! Tears of blood are running down your face, Ernesto.’
She crossed herself twice and frowned at her son hard, and when he wiped his hands over his cheeks they came away smeared with thin blood. He wondered if it was possible to become so frightened that the blood vessels in your eyes burst of their own accord, but he dared not talk to his mother about it. He was thankful he could spend the rest of Sunday in bed and that he wouldn’t be facing his grandfather’s anger when he came back to the house.
He couldn’t sleep. He lay with his eyes closed and his blanket pulled around him until he was cocooned tightly within it. The whining noise would not go away no matter how hard he tried to think of other things, and so instead he gave it all his attention and soon came to realise that it was a badly distorted human voice, and if he’d had the strength to call his mother to his side he’d have abandoned his boyish pride and done so in an instant. So jumbled and faded were the sounds of that voice that it didn’t occur to him it was in a different language and he couldn’t have understood it anyway.
As the light dropped that evening, he still lay tightly cocooned, and Sergio came to see him. ‘Are you feeling better, Ernesto? Mamma is really worried about you. She wants to send a message to the doctor, but Nonno says we should wait until morning and see how you are.’
The boy turned over and opened his eyes cautiously. ‘Are my eyes bloody?’ he whispered.
Sergio peered down at his face and frowned. ‘I don’t know. They’re weird anyway; bigger . . . like you’re startled, and lighter than they were. Mamma said you came home today looking like you’d been to Hell. What happened to you?’
The truth would’ve caused Sergio’s hatred of Antonio to flare up once more, and Ernesto just wanted to forget about that hideous boy if he could. And although he didn’t admit it to himself, he was really afraid that if the war between Sergio and the Puglisi kid took on a new phase, his grandfather’s growing interest in him would lessen as his older brother started to describe his fights in detail at the kitchen table once more.
The following morning Ernesto still felt weak and when he called out for his mother, she came instantly. He knew Grandfather and Sergio would be out milking the goats and so they’d be alone for a while. She put her hand on his forehead. ‘If you had a fever, it’s left you now, Ernesto. That is lucky. Your grandfather doesn’t want to pay for a doctor. Your eyes look strange though, they’re lighter than they were. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Can you see alright?’
‘Yes, fine Mamma, but my head feels wrong and I’m really tired.’
She unwound him from the blanket and looked at his legs and arms and made him turn over so she could inspect his back. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your skin,’ she said.
‘What does choro-dondwel mean, Mamma?’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s just something I heard.’
She smiled at him. ‘Another of your strange questions, Ernesto; so you can’t be that sick. Stay here today, but tomorrow you must get up. It’ll annoy your grandfather if you don’t, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?’
‘No, Mamma.’
Both of them looked at the beautiful pen lying on the small table by Ernesto’s bed.
***
Over the following days, the boy improved slowly, although a curious feeling of being slightly outside his own body did not leave him for a long time, and he battled mightily with the droning voice. He tried to concentrate on his schoolwork and his drawings, but it was hard. He scarcely heard anything in school and went bewildered from one lesson to another.
If he used all his willpower, he was sometimes able to get the horrible voice out of his head. But it was like tinnitus; it was always there in the background of his thinking and if ever he were to imagine that it had finally gone, it would flood straight back into the foreground of his mind, a whining chant, long drawn out and inexplicable—In-da naum choroz ondwel I aabis, may all you beealdup becom rroobull—over time, every nuance and syllable of that repulsive voice became known to him and he could call it to himself at will, and in moments of quietness, it came by itself anyway, and often in a slightly changed form as if the sounds themselves were sentient and could evolve or combine together or fade away just to trick him.
At school, he did see Antonio from time to time, but as if they had agreed to it, they avoided each other’s eyes. It should’ve occurred to Ernesto that one of the other boys, Salvatore or Donato, would not be able to resist telling someone what they’d planned, and sure enough when he got home from school one day, Grandfather was waiting for him in the garden. He seized hold of Ernesto’s schoolbag and flung it into the bushes at the side of the small path that led to the front door, and marched him to the goat shed.
‘If you lie to me, I will whip you,’ the old man whispered. His face was gaunt and almost grey-looking. ‘You and two other boys trespassed in that white house. The roof began to collapse, and you all ran out. What I want to know is why you did that when your mother sent you to the vegetable van that morning. Why would any decent boy do that?’
If Ernesto had cried, he knew he would’ve been slapped him for it, and so he clenched his teeth and thought as hard as he could about what to say. He did not turn his eyes away from his grandfather’s face, but took a step backwards and tried to find some calmness within himself. ‘I wanted to draw the rooms of the house,’ he said. ‘I am truly sorry I disobeyed Mamma, but those boys were on their way to that place and I could not resist joining them . . . I could not, Nonno. I would never have gone there by myself, you see, and they said I could go along with them.’ He knew he sounded pathetic and had he not felt so peculiar, he’d have th
ought of something better to say.
For a while, Grandfather did not speak, but stared down at the boy, perplexed and somehow saddened. ‘I should have known,’ he whispered.
In the naum of choroz ondweller in aabis, may all you beealdup becon rroobull
‘I will never go near that place again,’ Ernesto told him.
‘I should’ve known,’ Grandfather repeated. ‘When I refused to rent him the old goat shed that used to be here, he spat right in front of me on the ground. I should’ve realised it wouldn’t end so easily.’
‘Nonno, you’re frightening me,’ Ernesto said. ‘What’re you saying?’
‘The drawing you did, boy, you are to bring it to me and we will burn it.’
‘But I didn’t draw. I was only in there for a few minutes, and I ran out.’
‘Yet, somehow you had drawing paper and your pen with you, even to go down to the vegetable van?’ Ernesto could do nothing but shrug and shake his head for he’d been truly caught out in his lie. ‘Which rooms did you boys go into? And do not dare lie to me again.’
‘Only the first one. We. . . . Only the first one.’
‘The big one?’
‘Yes, Nonno. It was big.’
‘And painted white?’ Ernesto shook his head. It was dark in the shed and he was straining to read his grandfather’s expressions. ‘Was the floor covered in lime, Ernesto?’
‘No, Nonno.’
‘You opened the front door and stepped right into the room?’
‘Yes, Nonno.’
‘That room has white walls and lime on the floor,’ Grandfather said.
‘The walls were green and there were tiles on the floor like ours with thick painted lines on them in different colours,’ Ernesto told him. ‘Blue, I think, and red.’
‘I whitewashed those walls myself in 1926 about two years after that scabby bunch had gone, and we poured lime over the floor to cover up whatever was painted on it.’
Seven Strange Stories Page 19