Book of Stolen Tales

by D J Mcintosh

  The police had arrested Tye Norris for the murder of Charles Renwick. Norris had told the truth: Renwick’s poor handling of the business and his expenditure of their remaining capital on Basile’s book would likely leave them both bankrupt. What Norris neglected to mention was the provision in their business partnership leaving Renwick’s share of the building to him. With London property values soaring, Norris stood to gain a small fortune. Newhouse related the terms of the business agreement to the police. In a phone tap they caught incriminating discussions between Norris and his wife, giving them enough grounds to conduct a second search of the print shop.

  The book Norris described, intended to be the firm’s crowning achievement and a tribute to Renwick—The Pied Piper—he’d completed in record time. The copies were snapped up because collectors knew it would be the firm’s last book and for that reason its value was greatly enhanced.

  Norris pointed out their paper digester when I visited the shop. Paper digesters employed powerful alkaloids to break down plant material. I remembered his sly reference to wanting to incorporate plants to mimic the natural elements in the meadow the piper led the children through. Along with the vegetation, the alkaloids would liquefy human tissue. Renwick’s bones had been found in the paper digester, the huge copper vat of slurry that provided the base for the paper Norris made. While tests would be run, there was little doubt they’d found Renwick’s skeleton because of its twisted spine.

  So Norris, who seemed the gentlest of men, proved to possess a very macabre turn of mind.

  And Renwick, who loved books, had in the end himself become one.

  Fifty-One

  December 23, 2003

  New York

  No matter how much I enjoyed trips abroad, I was always glad to get home. This time, reaching New York’s terra firma felt like stepping onto hallowed ground. I saw the city with new eyes. The street life and the familiar shops, bars, and restaurants I frequented hummed with vitality. New York was more exciting than ever, almost exotic. I invited my neighbors over for drinks—no heavy conversations, just shooting the breeze. It was heaven.

  To my great surprise a letter from Dina turned up in my mailbox several weeks later.

  John,

  I hope this letter finds you well. I haven’t been able to find out for sure whether you’re even back home. You must wonder what became of me, that is, if you still care to know. What I want to say more than anything is how terribly sorry I am for having misused you. While I cannot excuse my methods, I hope you will agree at least that the reasons for my actions were honorable. I use the plural—reasons—deliberately, for there are two: my children, Luna and Sol.

  You’ll recall I said that some time after the conte began his assaults on me he refused to allow me to attend school. In fact, I couldn’t go back to school because by then I was pregnant, as it turned out with twins. Katharina was barren, which ignited her jealousy. Had I only needed to look after myself I would have tried to leave Lorenzo long ago, but once my children passed the stage of infancy he separated us, allowing me to visit with them only occasionally. He swore that if I tried to leave him I’d never see them again.

  Shortly before I met you, word came to me the children were being cared for in Belgium by Katharina’s housekeeper. This was the final spur I needed. Katharina was planning to take out her vengeance on them. As you know, I sold the book through Ewan volume by volume to raise the money I required. And that’s when chance—or was it destiny?—brought you to my doorstep.

  I could tell you saw through the reason I gave for wanting to recover the books after I’d sold them. I don’t think you guessed why. I planned to use them to bargain with Lorenzo for my freedom and that of my children. A desperate and unrealistic hope, I know, yet I clung to it at the time.

  I’m writing, also, to make a confession. Lying to others does not bother me overmuch, as long as it does no one else harm. Conversely, I think to lie about one’s past plays with fate in a dangerous way. The truth is I have no memory of my early years before I entered the conte’s household. This has preyed on my mind over the years and I can only conclude that he must have administered a drug that curdled my brain and banished my memories. I have much, therefore, in common with elderly people in the grip of senility. And I think rather grimly when my time for that comes, it will seem a natural state of affairs.

  Mancini made one generous gesture, perhaps the only one in his life. He acknowledged his natural children and left his estate to them. In the end, Alessio did not destroy the four volumes of Basile’s anthology he repossessed. I retrieved them, enclosed once more within their golden covers, from that terrible den underneath the palazzo where you found me. As the children’s trustee I am making a gift of them to you. You have earned much more, my friend. I hope you will accept them along with my apologies.

  I write to you from Renard’s home in France, where I now reside with Luna and Sol. When I arrived here I found the estate in disarray. Renard had dismissed his staff ; the house was unkempt, quite unlike the light-filled splendor you and I beheld that first night. He was nowhere to be seen. I finally came upon him in the garden, sick at heart and ailing fearfully, convinced I’d never return.

  I liked you far more than I ever let on and will miss you a great deal. If I had a more adventurous spirit, I’d be by your side now. You live in a different world. In my soul I’m European and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. All my adult life has been spent under the yoke of Mancini’s hard treatment. Renard understands what it is like to live with adversity and he offers us freedom from it. I don’t know how long we’ll stay here. For now, we’re content.

  Forgive me and wish me well …

  Dina

  I folded the letter and slipped it into a compartment in my desk. It made sense to me now, all those times I’d wondered if she was keeping something from me. And what greater motivation could anyone have than protecting her children? I was glad she’d found some peace. I’d harbored the idea of seeking her out and persuading her to come home with me once I was settled back in New York. I felt sad to realize that dream would come to nothing.

  A few weeks later a small carton arrived. Dina was as good as her word. It contained all four remaining volumes of The Tale of Tales enclosed within their golden covers. Together with the fifth one I already possessed, the book was complete. The authorization Dina provided along with the book also meant I could finally clear my name with Interpol and the London police.

  I believed Dina’s version of Mancini’s abuse. On the subject of her origins, it was a different matter and I was inclined to agree with Katharina. Where Dina really came from was a mystery. Even before her letter arrived I’d reached this conclusion by reflecting on the facts she’d given about her parents: her mother, desperate for a baby, who’d died when her daughter was very young. Her distant father, a trader, bankrupt after losing his ships, had ended up exchanging a luxurious lifestyle to eke out a living on a poor farm. What were these but memories cut and pasted from fairy tales. To hide what? Had she really lost her memory, or was her background too painful for her to face?

  Giambattista Basile’s version of “Sleeping Beauty,” called “The Sun, Moon and Talia,” was the one tale Renwick avidly pursued. I read the story again. Life imitates art far more than art imitates life—wasn’t that the saying? Basile’s tale told of a lord’s daughter, Talia, who had been raped by a nobleman during her long sleep. Twins were born as a result of the rape. When she woke, the king began a long liaison with her. I remembered de Ribera’s illustration, the one of the woman being forced into a fire I’d seen when I first opened the book. In Basile’s story the lord’s angry wife threatened to kill the children and feed their remains to her husband. She was burnt in an oven in retribution. Although earlier versions of the tale influenced Basile, he brought his own rich imagination to it. It began thus:

  There once was a great lord who, on the birth of a daughter—to whom he gave the name Talia—commanded all the
wise men and seers in the kingdom to come and tell him what her future would be. These wise men, after many consultations, came to the conclusion that she would be exposed to great danger from a small splinter in some flax. Thereupon the King, to prevent any unfortunate accident, commanded that no flax or hemp or any similar material should ever come into his house.

  One day when Talia was grown up she was standing by the window and saw an old woman pass who was spinning. Talia had never seen a distaff and spindle, and was therefore delighted with the dancing of the spindle. Prompted by her curiosity, she had the old woman brought up to her, and taking the distaff in her hand, began to draw out the thread; but unfortunately a splinter in the hemp got under her fingernail, and she immediately fell dead upon the ground. At this terrible catastrophe the old woman fled from the room, rushing precipitously down the stairs. The stricken father, after having paid for this bucketful of sour wine with a barrelful of tears, left the dead Talia seated on a velvet chair under an embroidered canopy in the palace, which was in the middle of a wood. Then he locked the door and left forever the house which had brought him such evil fortune, so that he might entirely obliterate the memory of his sorrow and suffering.

  Despite Alessio’s dismay about his story being distorted by later versions, I learned that Basile, too, had based his Sleeping Beauty on a much earlier narrative found in a medieval French anthology: Perceforest, and its story of a knight, Troilus, who raped Zelladine after she fell into a deep sleep.

  The grain of truth in all the tales was clear. A warning about a deadly contagion, a fungus that grew in the moist flax fields of Mesopotamia, was first embedded in a myth by the Mesopotamians. That myth was the legend of Ishtar, who died from disease inflicted upon her by her sister, a metaphor for the experience of a real plague.

  The story of a young, desirable woman struck down through the jealousy of an older woman, her apparent death, and her resurrection at the hands of a male consort had a long history. It traveled through human imagination from the Mesopotamian goddess to Persia and Egypt and on to the Greek legends of Eros and Psyche. The story was transformed again by Europeans: Basile’s Talia, Perrault’s Aurora, and the Grimms’ Briar Rose. It had been duplicated in folk tales around the world. In each epoch the tale changed according to the milieu and imagination of the teller.

  Norris said the four stories that especially interested Renwick could be interpreted as plague tales. I realized they could also be seen as tales of necromancy. In each case, despair over the loss of loved ones ran deep enough to inspire an obsession with their resurrection.

  It hadn’t escaped me that several of those stories mirrored my own experience, as if some unseen force had pulled me inside the pages of Basile’s book. The characters I’d read about since I opened the first pages of that remarkable book seemed to have stepped out of fiction into real life. Alessio believed the tales had been stolen. Not just by the actions of Mancini or Dina, but in a larger metaphorical sense. Perhaps, though, the great tales of other ages circulate through the generations just as our ancestors’ genes swim within our blood.

  I sold the second, third, and fourth volumes to compensate Amy and Naso and Renwick’s estate. I held on to the first and the last volumes—days one and five in Basile’s anthology—along with de Ribera’s brilliant illustrations. I couldn’t part with those.

  Fifty-Two

  Over the last six months I’d been through two nerve-shattering experiences. Because of them, my business was hanging by a thread. I seriously considered leaving the profession altogether. The lure of the East was seductive but it had certainly taken its toll. For as long as I could remember I’d emulated my brother, Samuel. My only thought had been to walk in his footsteps. I knew now it was time to leave his influence behind. Hunting for rare books might be a new horizon for me, one I wanted to continue to pursue.

  While I grappled with my future, my sleep was frequently disturbed. The episodes of immobility continued. Awakening at night with a rush of panic, I couldn’t move a muscle for several long minutes. This occurred more and more often. It was as if I’d internalized the terrible violence I’d witnessed over a few short weeks and the war was still going on inside me. While I hoped this would dissipate over time, my fears finally drove me back to the doctors.

  Months of blood tests to identify the anomaly followed. I finally called a halt to them when a specialist in internal medicine tried to coax me into a formal clinical study. After all that effort they hadn’t been able to provide a diagnosis of any more merit than the one the trauma doctor in Baghdad gave me. If I wanted answers about my genetic heritage I’d have to begin my own exploration.

  Just before Christmas I took Evelyn on an outing to a location in Central Park we loved to visit when I was young. We’d come from viewing the Fifth Avenue Christmas store windows, which always delighted her. Entering through the Lehman Gates I looked back and saw them superimposed black against a sapphire December sky, the immortal wild boy dancing beside his goats on the curled briar. Snowflakes sparkled like winter diamonds, reviving the feeling I’d always had as a youngster of entering a magical realm.

  Evelyn sat in her wheelchair wrapped with a comfy blanket. She wore the down coat and warm gloves I’d given her last Christmas. Her arthritis, always worse in winter, bothered her less that day. At the children’s zoo we watched a handler reach into his pouch and throw some fish into the air. Two seals, their bodies wriggling like shiny black rubber tubes, leapt out of their pool. Fish flashed silver and disappeared down their throats. The seals barked their approval. Children pressed against the pool’s railing, laughing and clapping, their breath clouding in the frosty air.

  My past experience at Nineveh and the recent one at Kutha taught me things are never what they seem on the surface. Friends became enemies and fate turned them into friends once more. Alessio and Shaheen were antagonists who became allies. Evelyn had been different, steadfast from the time I was a boy. I felt immeasurably grateful and lucky to have her in my life. And as to the future, I was certain of only one thing—I would discover the true story of my origins, no matter what the consequences.

  As Evelyn and I sat in companionable silence enjoying the winter park, my thoughts slipped back to what had gone before. Rational explanations existed for everything. I was convinced Alessio was a descendant of Giambattista Basile and also a skilled illusionist. He’d likely suffered from mental delusions and talked himself into believing he was the long-dead author. I’d also put the terrors of Nergal and Ereshkigal’s underworld domain behind me, believing what occurred to be the result of a toxic gas unleashed when Mancini burst open the doors.

  Only one thing bothered me that I couldn’t explain. If a poisonous vapor felled three men, two of whom were fit and used to the rigors of war, why not me? As we fled the underworld chamber, I sensed Shaheen being consumed while he was unconscious, somehow taken over. Yet he recovered quickly. Had it really been Shaheen who was attacked—or me?

  I’d locked away at the back of my mind the memory of the look in the viper’s eyes right before I dragged Shaheen away. I’d done so because to confront the truth was too disturbing. The viper’s look now came flooding back with a vengeance. Not the cruel gaze of a hunter, nor the cold fixed stare of an animal closing in for a kill. No. More like an unspoken communication between two souls deeply entwined. It was a look of recognition.

  Notes

  To set the record straight, no printer’s copy of Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales exists, to my knowledge. Nor is there any evidence I know of to suggest that José de Ribera illustrated Basile’s book.

  Part One Opener

  Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival.

  Opening quotation by Algernon Blackwood in “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P. Lovecraft, first published in Weird Tales, February 1928.

  Chapter Six

  No life could be more unstable or fuller of anxiety.

  N.M. Penzer, editor, introduction to
The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, translated by Benedetto Croce (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1932), xxvi.

  You serve now, you serve later … and get out!

  Giambattista Basile, in the introduction to Giambattista Basile’s Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for the Little Ones, translated by Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 6.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the year 1284, on the days of John and Paul … Koppen Mountain.

  From the Lueneburg Manuscript, 1430–1450, as shown on the website The Legend and the History of the Pied Piper of Hameln, www.triune.de/legend

  Externally the body was not very hot to the touch … than stark naked.

  Thucydides’ (455–411 B.C.) account of the Plague of Athens from the website Thucydides 2.47-55: The Plague, www.perseus.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/GreekScience/Thuc.+2.47-55.html

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ah! My beautiful Naples, behold I am leaving you … windows sugar cakes. N.M. Penzer, editor, introduction to The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, translated by Benedetto Croce (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1932), xxii.

  Chapter Twenty

  There was once upon a time … the rose-leaf that she had swallowed.

  Giambattista Basile, “The Young Slave” (Day 2, Tale 8), N.M. Penzer, editor, The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, translated by Benedetto Croce (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1932), 192.

  Heaven rains favors on us when we least expect it.

  Giambattista Basile, “The Young Slave” (Day 2, Tale 8), N.M. Penzer, editor, The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, translated by Benedetto Croce (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1932), 195.