And now. My breath was tremulous, but echoed around the Chapel loudly. The stone angel stared with unseeing eyes, blind but all-knowing. Oh God. I must finish. Finish and go.
...and let her eyes not open...
I took the needle to her left eye, and beginning at the inside edge, I inserted it just under the tear-duct, and through the inside of the upper lid, out, and in through the lower lid again. I made in all seven stitches to seal her eyelids together before beginning on the other eye.
Suddenly it opened.
Like a glistening pearl it shone in the darkness, with the same steely blue as her father’s. But staring, bulging, terrified, darting to and fro.
With a scream wrenched out of my intestines I fell back, spewing the contents of the sewing-box over the tiled floor of the Chapel, needles and cotton-reels and buttons tinkering in all directions.
In an instant I was out of the place, falling against the staircase, using my arms desperately to claw my way up the carpet, rebounding along the walls to the sanctuary of my room. I flung myself on the bed, at once rising to lock the door, and place a chair against it, and for an hour sat on the bed, shivering and gibbering like a lunatic, my eyes never leaving the door-handle.
***
I woke at two in the morning, as if from a nightmare. I prayed it was. A brandy bottle lay upended on the floorboards. My head was throbbing. The chair was propped against the door.
Wearily, I forced myself downstairs, one hand gripping the staircase as if for dear life.
I entered the Chapel of Rest to find that the coffin was empty.
“Dear God!” I said to myself, almost collapsing with horror. Within minutes I was in Pryne Hall, screaming my horror at the perpetrator of the crime himself. “Dear God!” I cried, pacing so that it shook the house. “You are evil as well as perverted! You deceived me! You lied to me! That you wanted to do this—this disgusting ritual—was bad enough, to a dead body! But she was not dead! I saw her, she looked at me! Dear God! May God have mercy on you! She was alive!”
Gaetano Prelati said nothing for a long while. He seemed in a dark reverie, a prisoner in the book-lined library in which we confronted each other. Beside him was a side-table on which a pair of wooden glove-stands sat in an attitude of prayer.
“Your daughter is alive!” I screamed again.
“No,” he said, and for the first time his voice quivered with emotion. “Alba is dead. She died fifty years ago.”
I was overcome with rage and for a second time wished to attack him, but found myself instead uttering a laugh that seemed somehow to come from elsewhere.
“And she is not my daughter,” he pronounced softly. “She is my sister.”
“That’s impossible!” I said angrily.
“There are many impossible things in the world,” he said. “All of them real...”
“I’m leaving. I’ve had enough of madness. I am going to the police.”
“Wait,” he said. I turned back and saw an old man in need of the confessional. “If you go you will never know the truth.”
I took the seat opposite him. The room was lit by gas from the wall-hangings, but darkness separated us like a black river. His voice was a croak, as if his throat protested against the tale he told.
“Before you were born—some half century ago now—when my sister and I were approaching our twentieth year, our father provided us with the means to travel. It was his belief that we should see something of the world, as he had done as a sailor before making his fortune. Alba was a spirited, rebellious child, and I was the quiet, studious one. My thoughts were for a career in the priesthood, hers only for excitement and laughter. You see me trembling? It is because I have not heard that laughter for fifty years! Please...” Prelati fidgeted in his seat, head nodding like a bird towards the side table. “Please, light the hookah. There are substances within to ease my pain.”
I did as I was asked, rapidly, impatient for him to return to his history. He took a deep inhalation of foul, pea-green smoke and spoke with slow modulation:
“In Alexandria, I became incapacitated with severe sunstroke, and was confined to bed. Alba was not a good nurse, and I told her to travel onward, that I would meet her in Ushpur. My fever became worse and I was delayed much longer than I thought—and when I was strong enough to lift a newspaper, I was horrified to find that Khudi brigands, religious fanatics, a devilish horde, had invaded Ushpur, and that all Europeans, together with thousands of innocent women and children, had been flung into the vile pits of Ushpur prison.
“In a state of panic, I accompanied a contingent of English troops, only to find the city in a state of siege.
“It was four months before the Khudi were routed by the massed armies of our allies. We found the prison in a condition far beyond our worst nightmares of human degradation. Hundreds upon hundreds of people had been confined in utter darkness—and left to starve. I helped clear the many dead bodies. I sorted the living from the dead. I touched living and dead hands. Black and white. I dug through near-skeletons in the dark. Many had been mutilated as if by pestilential vermin. As for the living—their pitiful eyes looked up at me, but my only thought was for Alba.
“I found her, a withered shadow of her former self, a tiny stick-puppet cowering in the dank dungeons of Ushpur amongst the slime of faeces and decomposition that surrounded her like a bog of inhumanity. She could neither speak nor move.
“I returned with my sister to our home in Paris. She was nursed to health. Or, more correctly, what I believed to be health. It became clear to her family that her mind would never be the same. She stared out of the window, took no joy in the scent of flowers or beautiful music. She ate little, to begin with; then ate nothing. And yet she was no longer losing weight. In fact, she began to show a glow in her cheeks that the Alba before Ushpur never had.
“She slept erratically. More than once I woke from my own fitful slumber to hear an unfamiliar voice echoing throughout our family home—a voice neither Ushpuri nor Khudish, indeed approximating no tongue I had ever heard before. A voice racked with the anguish of sheer physical torment, the voice of a lost soul howling in the dark. One night, I was so agitated I went to her room; but the bed was empty, the bedclothes strewn around, the window open. I found her a street away, walking blindly. When I called her name, she stopped, and, suddenly aware of where she was, began weeping. I carried her home.
“I became curious as to the cause, purpose, or intent of her somnambulation. Perhaps, like the doctor and nurse observing Lady Macbeth, I could perceive some answer to her peculiar malady by a nocturnal vigil. This I decided to do.
“I entered her room, fully dressed, and sat in a corner far from her bed, an oil lamp at my side. For an hour nothing happened. Even the streets were chillingly quiet: no Parisian chatter, no far-off music, no dogs. Just the silent eye of the moon. Finally, my sister began to toss and turn. Her long fingers clutched at the sheets, pawed at her belly and throat; then she rose from the bed and slowly, like a wispish phantasm, drifted to the door and out, into the night.
“I followed.
“She descended the cobbled path towards Montparnasse cemetery, and I watched her scale the locked iron gates like a cat. Once inside, she became ever more like a stalking animal. Her eyes, glazed in half-sleep, fastened upon a small marble tomb in the corner of the graveyard reserved for poets. With a quiet intensity she set to the door, which, even though split, must have been incredibly heavy. Nevertheless the urgency of her task imbued her with supernatural strength, and the slabs were cast aside as if they were cardboard. I...”
Gaetano Prelati took another long suck on the hookah pipe before he could master his emotions. “You can have no idea, no man can have any idea—what I beheld when I looked into that—that ravaged sepulchre. She stood over the open coffin with the hideous substances of the grave staining her chin and breast. The inhabitant of the long box was naked, a man, decomposed, or mutilated, half lifted out, and his head tilted back, his
sagging jaw dropped almost to his chest, no eyes in those dark orbits. Alba had his arm lifted in what I first took to be the act of kissing—of running kisses up the corpse’s festering arm. But the sounds...the sounds, you see! The sounds, they were of crunching, they were of breaking, they were of gnawing, chewing, swallowing...”
My heart was in my throat. I could not believe what I was hearing.
Prelati waited. He moved his eyes in arcs around the room, as if moving us through time—as if passing over the years of pain, murmuring the names of other cemeteries in the city. “Pere Lachaise, Ivry...Paris was in the grip of a defiler of tombs. The staunchest efforts of the police could not apprehend the evil-doer, who seemed to roam with impunity, like a theatre-goer choosing an entertainment. Countless graves—their contents scattered—shrouds torn to the wind...
“There was no vermin in the dungeons of Ushpur,” he intoned with insufferable melancholy. “Or if there was it had two legs, two arms, and the face of a beautiful woman.”
I tried to comprehend the horror he was trying to force on to me. My mouth gaped, unable to respond. His mind seemed to wander uncontrollably.
“In the age of Plutarch, the daughters of King Orcommenu of Boetia were imprisoned in his palace. Soon they were overcome, unable to resist an insatiable urge, falling upon the young Ippasus and devouring him. You look dumb! Do you still not see? Do you still not know?
“Perhaps you have read the Arabian Nights? The ‘Story of Sidi-Nouman’ in the ‘Encounters of Haroun-AI-Raschid on the bridge of Baghdad?’” I shook my head. “Amina, the wife of Sidi-Nouman, nightly deserted the marital bed to feed upon the dead!” Gaetano Prelati looked to the book-lined shelves. “Each of these books contains the legend! Hoffmann told the same tale to his Serapion Club in the form of ‘Aurelia: Vampirismus.’ Same story. Same creature. It comes from the Slavic word ogoljen, you know—meaning ‘mortal remains.’”
I stared at him, dumbfounded and more perplexed by the minute. He saw the mystification in my face, and leaned forward.
“Ghoul,” he said precisely. “Eater of the Dead! Vessel of Demons! Being of the Night! You see? You understand? In the dungeons of Ushpur, those who survived did so by one means alone—by cannibalism.
“I see your visage grow pale. I am beyond the horror now. But I have learned, to my pain, that such a thing is not beyond human endeavour—or taste. The Scythians and Bretons devoured their dead. The Carthaginians, ancient Gauls, and Sioux Indians of North America consumed the blood and flesh of their enemies as a way of assimilating their courage into their own bodies. The Brahmins and Estonians began the practice of draining blood from meat before eating it. In hot countries this became the norm, until final vindication came from the voice of the Hebrew God: ‘Be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life...’ In Ushpuri legend, a cannibal in life will become a ghoul in death—and be condemned to eternal purgatory on Earth. You see! I have done a lot of reading! I have learned many things!”
I decided to humour the old man.
“What happened after you found your sister in the cemetery?”
“I need not tell you the thoughts that raced through my mind as I followed the necrophage that was my sibling back to our home. I did not sleep, but in the morning resolved that my family would not be made to endure further horrors. The bespoilings of the graveyards were already public knowledge, and for them to be linked to our noble house would destroy my parents, I was sure.
“Instead, I said I wanted to take over a wine importing enterprise in England, and I wanted to take Alba with me. I imprisoned her here, this was to be her tomb—and mine. For the first years, I was dominant and she was the prisoner, but then gradually as I became older, she began to inflict her horrifying will. I began to see her waste away with apparent consumption, and, unable to withstand that, I began to give her offerings—God help me, I became the grave robber!
“But she demanded more and more. It became like the addiction of a drug. Alba could derive pleasure from nothing but the consumption of human flesh. The Demon within her tormented me as it did her. I felt that I might lose my sanity unless I found her some escape. I read, I read...Filippo Raimondi’s Dissertazione, Horapollon’s Magie, Dom Calmet, De Daemonialitate et Incubis et Succubis of Liseux, Juan de Lobkowitz Garaamuel’s Teologia Fondamentale—everything; searching, desperately, in some old grimoire, in some folk-tale, for any recipe to rid me of my hideous tyrant.
“I found it in Stefan Hock’s Die Vampyr sage und ihre Verivertung in der deutchen Litteratur: the destruction of the ogoljen, the ghoul. And the instructions therein were precisely those which I specified to you in such detail—to be administered whilst the monster was in satiated slumber. For the ghoul, like the vampire of legend, once it has outgrown normal human age and attained its preternatural maturity, reverses the biology of life, sleeping during the day and hunting, scavenging by night...” He took again to the hookah, and its copious smoke enveloped him like a ghastly fog of unreason.
“There is a question I must ask,” I said. “If you believe all this...”
“Believe? What is there to believe? I believe in nothing without the evidence of my own two eyes. And I have it. The evidence of my own two eyes!”
“Yes, I know,” I said, hesitating. “But—why did you come to me to begin with? Why could you not carry out the instructions yourself?”
Prelati sat back in his chair so far I thought he might melt into the shadows. From the dark I heard a whining laugh that had no humour in it. It stopped as abruptly as it started. He said: “Oh but I did. I did. I took the equipment in hand, I visited her bed. I stood over her. I took the needle towards her eyes. I hesitated, you see, and I was lost. I could never do it again. She made sure of that.”
I felt a lump in my throat. “She—made sure of that?” I queried in a whisper, almost too afraid to hear his reply.
He lifted his arms from beneath the shawl that covered his knees, and I saw that they ended in blunted knobs, severed at the wrists. The glove-stands were not glove-stands, but wooden hands.
“Yes,” he breathed. “She ate my hands.”
I ran from the house with the madman’s insane and pitiful cries in my ears. He implored me to stay, not to leave him, but I ran without looking back, like a child running from a haunted house.
***
My conviction that Gaetano Prelati was quite mad did not diminish with the passing of time. My conclusion was that I had been cruelly duped by a sadistic creature who wished to exact an awful torment—of being both disfigured and buried alive—upon his innocent sister. The thought of having been a pawn in such a bizarre and insidious game filled me with self-loathing, not least because it made me see in myself aspects of personality more odious than I would have imagined I possessed. Whether I would recover from having been a participant in such a horrifying enterprise, I did not know.
But I did tear up the man’s cheque, and burn it. Financial stability is not worth the price of one’s humanity—or soul.
However, within the week, I was visited by Sergeant Opie. It was not unusual for our paths to cross, since the constabulary are often amongst the first on the scene of a death. But the body that he delivered to the Chapel of Rest that day was more of a surprise.
“Suicide,” said Sergeant Opie before I turned back the sheet. “We received a letter telling us when and where to find the body. Poison, it was, Dr. Frith says. Some exotic stuff. In a room with a locked door. Locked windows, too. Don’t make much sense. And he had a letter on the table addressed to you, in person.”
The body was Gaetano Prelati, and the face, remarkably unaltered, showed an expression of aching peace.
When Sergeant Opie had gone, I opened the letter to find that it contained a note with three words written upon it: BURY ME DEEP. I stared at the cadaver in stunned, wordless dialogue. Prelati’s tale went through my head—that mad tale—and I listened to his voice and those final, pleading screams as I had run away. Pleading wit
h me to finish my uncompleted task.
I set about cosmeticising the body, without delay.
With my thumbs I forced his staring blue eyes closed. I combed his cotton-hair. I used mortician’s putty to fill the sunken cheeks, and fixed the jaw closed. With foundation, rouge, and cochineal, I worked to give his pale visage a mask of health it never had in life.
The funeral was arranged for Monday, and I was pleased to be able to give his body three days’ solace in the Chapel of Rest before going to its final resting place. Each morning and evening I visited it and paid my own respects, and gave my own prayers, to a man who, I now believed, was not mad after all.
The funeral was attended only by me, and a boy apprentice I had taken on the week before. He was the son of my new partner. Now there were two names above the door, and the debtors were on the retreat. Why did I not feel more at ease with the world?
Walking back from the cemetery, the boy seemed concerned that we had been the only ones to pay respects. I mumbled an explanation, not too far from the truth: that Mr. Prelati was a foreigner, and as such had no friends here, and that he shouldn’t worry on such account.
“Was he never married?” said the boy.
“Not that I know of,” I replied.
“Then who was the woman?” said the boy.
“Woman?” said I.
“The woman who came yesterday. She was all in black, and skinny. I thought she must be a relative, in her widow’s weeds and that. She didn’t say nothing, even when I asked, like she was a dumb tit, but I supposed she’d come to pay respects. You were out, so I showed her into the Chapel of Rest. I stayed and waited, because she was strange. She just stood there, didn’t pray or nothing. Just stood as still as anything, never saying a word. Then she raised her veil to kiss the body on the cheek and...”
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