Seven Strange Stories

by Rebecca Lloyd

  ‘You’ve been in there yourself!’

  ‘Hush, Ernesto, it was necessary. We did not go there to joke around, you know.’

  ‘You went with other people?’

  ‘We went as a group, but we visited the priest before we set foot in that place.’

  ‘Why Nonno, what’s really wrong with it?’

  ‘Quieten down, boy,’ Grandfather murmured. ‘Come and sit here.’

  The old man had really caught Ernesto off guard, but he was thankful for it because the conversation had twisted away in its own direction and was no longer about his disobedience. And now it was as if his grandfather had suddenly flung open a closed door. They sat down on a couple of hay bales against the side wall. ‘So, you trespassed too, didn’t you, Nonno?’ Ernesto whispered.

  ‘Not willingly, Ernesto. Not like you. We had a job to do. About two years or so after the last of those sick people had left Cefalù and the house was empty, I was chosen with five other men to enter the place and whitewash those walls and all the filth that was on them, the vile staring faces, the bodies joined with other bodies, tongues and lips, and goats . . . ah, I should not be telling you this, but I shall never forget it. The mayor at the time paid us to do it and we were poor and young and felt lucky at first that the job was ours. It was only after we got in there, that . . .’

  ‘I saw faces on the walls,’ Ernesto blurted out.

  Grandfather seemed to hunch in on himself as if he wanted to become small and hidden. He didn’t speak for a while and in the silence the voice in the boy’s head returned.

  In the naoom of choroz ondweller in arrbis, mai all you bild up beacon rroooobull.

  ‘Nonno,’ he said, ‘please say something,’ and he reached his hand out and touched the old man’s arm, a thing he had rarely done before.

  ‘There was a man from America who came here in 1955. He lived in that house, Ernesto. He was here for at least three months. He had the time. It will have been him; he undid our work. That bastard revealed the demons again! You boys didn’t go into any of the other rooms did you? There’s a small room in that house that had even worse paintings on the walls. Lewd things, filthy things, horrible ideas.’

  ‘No I didn’t, Nonno. I just ran out. The roof came in and I got frightened by the noise and something near me that seemed to . . .’

  ‘Seemed to what, Ernesto?’

  I-da naum choro ondwel I arrbis, maa all oo beealdup beecom rroobull.

  ‘Get close up.’

  Grandfather frowned and fumbled for his tobacco. ‘What does that mean?’

  Ernesto felt tears coming to his eyes and he bit down on his lip to staunch them. ‘I can’t explain . . . get up close to me.’

  ‘And what about the other boys, did they explore the rest of that place?’ Grandfather asked, pushing his face very close to Ernesto’s, so that he could see right into his eyes—as if careful scrutiny could reveal the lies hidden there.

  ‘No,’ Ernesto answered, and of course that was not a lie.

  ‘What’s the matter with your eyes, they look . . . weak.’

  Ernesto shrugged. ‘They feel okay, Nonno.’

  ‘Not many of us have ventured into the House of Ghosts, you know. Cefalù tried for a while to pretend it didn’t exist after those . . . dirty men, and dirty women and their pathetic children had left Sicily. Perhaps I should think it a miracle that your mother was ever born, because I suspect that the man with little black eyes and tiny hands had tried to curse us. We called him Il Cornacchia grigia. He was evil, Ernesto, really evil, and until you have come across evil, you cannot possibly understand it.’

  Ernesto nodded, but stayed silent and did not fidget with his hands, because here was Grandfather finally giving up his secret; he seemed to have forgotten Ernesto was only ten and the boy didn’t want to remind him of it too sharply, lest he clammed up again. They sat for some minutes in the coolness of the shed while Grandfather flicked his Zippo open and closed repeatedly, and then Ernesto could not resist talking once more. ‘Do you think curses are real?’ he whispered.

  ‘Of course they’re real,’ Grandfather replied. ‘But I think we resisted Il Cornacchia’s curse because your grandmother was devout and went to pray in the Cathedral regularly.’

  ‘But what was the curse, Nonno?’

  ‘For us not to have children. Your mother wasn’t born until we were close to forty, some seven years after that man had left, and if she’d not been born at all, you and Sergio wouldn’t exist of course.’

  ‘Is the man still alive, Nonno?’

  ‘He was about forty-five when he came to Cefalù. He is, thank the Virgin Mary, dead—at least he would be if he was a normal man.’

  ‘Were all the rooms painted with faces?’

  ‘No, just two of them.’

  ‘How do you know that Nonno?’ Ernesto’s grandfather shifted as if suddenly embarrassed. He put his Zippo in his pocket, and stooped to pick up a piece of dry grass so he had something to wind around his fingers. Ernesto could sense he was thinking hard about how much he was going to tell him, so he thought to jog him a little. ‘Nonno,’ he confessed, ‘I went in that house alone.’

  Grandfather turned slowly to look into the boy’s face. At that moment, the relationship between the two changed utterly and Ernesto was never afraid of him again.

  ‘Queer, queer boy. Stone Boy, indeed. I do not know if you yourself are a gift or a curse to this family. So, I will tell you about those days, and you will not talk about it with Sergio, your mother, or anyone else.’ He stared at Ernesto a while longer, and then drew in a breath as if he was about to plunge into water.

  ‘Sometimes, when your Grandmother and I were young, friends would come over to visit us, and on occasions we men would leave the women behind in the kitchen and go up the track to that house. I should tell you that in those days we drank quite a bit, so we were quivering with bravado and confidence. The place and what went on there, fascinated us, you see? They called the house The Abbey of Thelema, and they worshipped the devil and all his demons in there. Il Cornacchia was their leader. We wanted to see what they were up to. We spied on them through the windows, and they were so intent on what they were doing that they never once spotted us.’

  Grandfather glanced at Ernesto, and tried to calculate something. ‘They wore all manner of robes and funny clothing and much of what they did made no sense to us, but we were particularly interested in the women in the house, if only because they were so unlike our own women and we felt that by studying them, we would be less ignorant about the world—more cosmopolitan.’ He rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. ‘We wanted to see them naked,’ he muttered. ‘You’ve seen what happens when Nello brings his billy goat over here? There was one time when those people got hold of a billy goat, but instead of offering him a she-goat, they tried to get him interested in a human woman. That same woman was someone you could come across in the shop or on the beach anytime during the day. The goat was not interested in the woman I am very glad to say since, as you know, I love goats. The woman was like a skeleton, like a . . . like a white creaking stick, flat breasted and ugly, with short red hair, the same as all Il Cornacchia’s women had. Do you understand what I am trying to explain here, Ernesto?’

  ‘A little bit, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, a little is good enough. Another time, we saw them do something to a cat. I think it belonged to Senora Fazio’s mother who lived just over the track in those days. You know, the mother of the woman who runs the tobacconist shop?’

  ‘What did they do to the cat, Nonno?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you that story; it’s too horrible.’

  ‘Do you mean they killed it?’

  ‘Yes, eventually.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone like the priest or the Mayor?’

  Grandfather shook his head slowly. ‘We thought of it, but we decided we couldn’t risk it in case Il Cornacchia found us out and cursed us.’

  ‘But how could he d
o that, Nonno? I don’t understand about curses.’

  ‘Through magic. Magic is what they lived for, you see.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But what I want you to understand is that having those weird people from a different country living amongst us made us very uneasy. There was one day when Il Cornacchia led his followers up La Rocca and they were all dressed in robes, the women wearing blue and the men red. You know Nunzio Corsi who has that old motor bike? He climbed up there after them. They gathered at the Temple of Diana and started wailing and moaning. He said he was itching to throw stones at them. Then they walked back to the cistern and one of them went down into it to collect water. Nunzio kept himself hidden in trees so they never saw him, and the next day, he said he felt very sorry for me and Angelina for living so close to those people. I tell you, boy, there are few left in Cefalù of my age who would willing speak out loud the name Il Cornacchia grigi for fear that his dirty shadow might return even after so long.’

  Ernesto could think of nothing more to ask, and as he tried to imagine for himself how it must have been living so close to the white house, the roiling in his head returned like the booming sound the waves make when they slap into the caves along the coast from Cefalù.

  Inaoomofchorozondwellerinarrbismaialyoubilllldupbeaconrroobull.

  ***

  If miracles existed at all, it surely was one that Grandfather allowed Ernesto to go to live with relatives in Palermo when he was sixteen. He had long been telling the old man that the nuns had nothing more to teach him and that he was wasting his time at school. He was very surprised that no attempt was made to bully him into staying on the farm and helping Sergio with the goats and oranges. In fact, he could scarcely believe his luck, and the days leading up to the date of his departure were agony to him in case Grandfather changed his mind—he was close to eighty by this time and his eyesight had all but gone, and he’d become very fickle and difficult and could easily have denied he’d ever agreed to the idea.

  On the morning Ernesto was due to leave, Grandfather bade him walk down to the orange grove with him. As they reached the first trees, he said, ‘Have you got it?’ and the boy placed the beloved pen in the old man’s shaky hand. ‘When you get to Palermo, try to find a good doctor. You never know; perhaps he’ll be able to do something about your hearing, boy.’

  ‘I’ve grown used to it now, Nonno. I can live with it.’

  ‘So you tell me, but your mother says there are times when you seem to be so distracted and absent that she weeps for you inside.’

  ‘If I’m feeling low or tired, it comes at me strongly,’ Ernesto explained. ‘Sometimes these days I can hear single words, but then I doubt myself. It’s not Sicilian, anyway.’

  ‘Of course not; it’s the language of the Devil.’

  ‘Nonno, please don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Rosina prays for you.’

  ‘I know she does.’

  ‘I pray for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Nonno.’

  ‘You know, Ernesto, when we’d finished whitewashing the walls and liming the floor in that house up there, we spent the night in the cathedral, and the priest watched over us. It would be a good thing if you started going to church in Palermo. Get into the habit. I know you don’t care for it much, but perhaps it’s the right path to take.’

  Ernesto didn’t answer him immediately. They’d reached the old bench in the middle of the grove and they sat there together listening to birds singing. In the distance they could hear the goats bleating as Sergio moved them from one field to another.

  ‘I’ll come home as often as I can, Nonno.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t ever come back. Perhaps you could free yourself if you stayed away. I don’t know if I told you this, but our mayor was all set to destroy that house, burn it down and have the stones of the walls dismantled and thrown into the sea. He asked the five of us if we’d do it for him. That was in 1923 when Il Cornacchia had been banished from Sicily by order of Mussolini, but hadn’t yet gone. We were to stand by and wait until those creepy people had left Cefalù, and although we were frightened, we were going to get crazy money for the work so we were all up for it.

  But suddenly the Mayor changed his mind, and by that time, in the way of young men, we’d whipped ourselves up into a state of readiness through anger and piety. Then a couple of years later, a firm of builders were employed to fence the house off—but the Mayor did pay us good money to whitewash over the filthy images on the walls, and so we forgave him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did we forgive him?’

  ‘No, why the fence?’

  ‘So no one would stray onto the property.’

  ‘I mean why didn’t he just let you and your friends knock the house down in the first place, Nonno?’

  ‘I’ve told you before.’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘Well, since you’re leaving us you may as well know, but you don’t tell anybody in Palermo about it; it’s not their business. I heard this part of the story from the old men who used to sit in the square by the cathedral back then. They all witnessed it.’

  ‘They saw something?’

  ‘After the Mayor had offered us money to destroy the house, Il Cornacchia came to know of it, and as it was impossible to imagine anyone in Cefalù had told him, we decided he’d found out through magic. He walked into town in a robe made of different coloured stripes and with a huge turban on his head, and as he came into the square he had a green stick in his hand that he held up in the air like this. The Mayor lived in that grand house on the left of the cathedral in those days and came outside just as Il Cornacchia began a complicated little dance which made some of those who were watching, laugh just a little. They said he looked absurd, he was bald, huge and with tiny little hands and his robe was billowing out behind him in the wind. When he saw the Mayor he stopped his dance, swayed on the spot for a moment, then spat on the ground and cursed him.’

  ‘So the Mayor was afraid of the curse?’

  ‘Naturally, Ernesto, just as Angelina and I were when I refused to let him rent our old goat shed.’

  ‘Is that why he shot your dog?’

  ‘Oh, I told you about that, did I? No. He shot any dog that strayed onto his land, any animal in fact. He killed a cat once that belonged to Senora Fazio’s mother, a big orange one. I’m going to tell you a secret now, Ernesto, one that only a few people know; we used to sneak over to that house sometimes to spy on them when we got the courage up.’

  ‘You told me that before, Nonno.’

  ‘You know the room with no windows you went into when you were a kid?’

  ‘Yes of course. How could I ever forget that, or how angry you were about it?’

  ‘Well, there used to be a brazier in one corner with a funny old chair next to it and that’s where Il Cornacchia grigia used to sit with a sword in his hand. His women and a couple of young men sat on some coloured boxes that were facing in towards the middle of whatever they’d painted on the floor—a red circle with a blue star in it. In the middle of that, they had something like a church altar. On the night they killed the cat, the altar was covered in fancy-looking scarlet cloth.’ Grandfather fell silent and dropped his head suddenly onto his chest.

  ‘Nonno, what about the cat?’

  ‘I dream about Il Cornacchia grigia, Ernesto. I dream that I find him in a café in town and I shoot him in the head, and his turban unrolls by itself and slips off the table along with the blood from his wound. You know, those women in the house were always crying and sometimes they ran away. Mind you, I heard that he used to punish them by making them go up La Rocca and they’d spend the night there and not be allowed back in the house until he flashed a mirror to bring them back.’

  ‘You were saying about a cat.’

  ‘Yes. I was. Well, they had that cat in a bag and when they took it out, you can imagine that it was wild to escape. They tried to cut its throat with a knife, but they only half manag
ed it before it sprang away squirting blood everywhere. The knife must have been blunt. There were three of us watching that night, and to this day, I still feel ashamed that we were too frightened to burst into the house and stop them. They caught it eventually and finished the job.’

  ‘That’s hideous, Nonno. No wonder you didn’t tell me when I was little.’

  ‘But that isn’t the worst of it. There was a young Englishman there and he had a funny wife who used to cook for the household. We came across her a couple of times, she wasn’t like the other women, and I must say we liked her. Well, it was her husband who drank the blood of the cat—from a metal cup, what was left of the blood, anyway.’

  Ernesto gazed at his grandfather and for the first time began to understand what it must have been like for a simple guy like him who’d only ever known farming, to be living so close to an endless stream of debauchery of one sort or another carried out by people who knew nothing of the Sicilian way of living, and who could not speak the language and maybe didn’t even want to.

  One of the stories that had the boy most fascinated was about the wife of the man who drank the blood. Grandfather told him that once he and his friend, Enzu De Ponte, found her wandering about in the hills close to La Rocca. They’d been visiting friends and it was very late when they came across her. The air was cold and she was shivering, so Grandfather gave her his jacket. They tried to talk to her, although neither of them could speak English. Grandfather said she was a strange beauty with strong features and the greenest of green eyes, but her face was grimy and tear-streaked. They wanted to escort her back to the white house, as it was pitch-dark out there, but she made it clear she wouldn’t go. They realised she was terrified and by gestures she told them that Il Cornacchia was intent on killing her.

  They stumbled across her a second time when they had a young man called Nello with them who could speak some English. This time she’d been thrown out of the house by Il Cornacchia and although they were not surprised, as by then they’d heard many stories about the Englishman’s brutality, they were alarmed when she told them she thought her husband was very sick.