Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  Rathbone was tearing apart. Pieces of him were ripping loose, spinning away to the corner of the room, leaving sooty trails behind them. They smelled, not the healthy scent of flame but the greasy stink of uncooked meat. His voice rose, staggering up through registers of sound until it became something stabbing and toneless—bitter—and Trevelyan had to cover his ears. The flames leapt at his legs and he moved away, watching as their frenetic jig encircled the rim of the bin and blackened the thin metal.

  Still Rathbone sounded as pieces of him, smaller and smaller, whirled away to the walls, old grudges being released and the distant smell of rottenness filling the room. Trevelyan watched the sheets curl, blacken, disintegrate, ashy fragments detaching and swirling up, carried by the breath of the fire. They capered around the last of Rathbone as he broke apart and was dashed away, until only eyes and a mouth remained, and then only a mouth, dwindling, shrieking, the scream falling away to nothing and, at last, it was done.

  *

  The office smelled of burned wood, but there was nothing Trevelyan could do about that. At some point, the flames must have crawled over his hand; there was an ugly pink blister across his knuckles and the hair had been scorched from the skin. The flames had also blackened and charred one leg of the desk, and had buckled the bin into an irregular, ballooning shape like a frozen cloud. Of Rathbone, there was no trace except some darker streaks across the walls and a smell under the burning of something old and decayed.

  One of the scraps of paper that had danced loose during the fire was from Trevelyan’s article, and on it, he saw the printed words the Monster’s greatest purpose. Above them, in Rathbone’s tense writing, were the words terrible fool. Trevelyan crushed the damaged paper to nothing with his uninjured hand and then left the office. Exhausted, he went home.

  He slept badly, and in the early hours Trevelyan rose from his bed and walked away from dreams in which flames licked at figures whose faces swelled and twisted. He went to his office and printed a new copy of the article, placing it in an envelope and addressing it, and then he made himself coffee and waited for sunrise. After it came, he showered and then checked on his article; it was unmarked. He sealed the envelope and wanted to feel happy, but didn’t.

  The drive was long, through heavy morning traffic, and he arrived later than he hoped. He was made to wait in the reception area before being shown through to the manager’s office.

  “Did you know Mr. Rathbone well?” the handsome black woman behind the desk asked.

  “No, not really. We were acquaintances, I suppose you’d say. Can I see him, please? I have some news for him.”

  “Mr. Rathbone didn’t have any family, as far as we know,” the manager continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “If you hadn’t visited him yesterday, I wouldn’t be telling you this, but really, I can’t see the harm. Mr. Rathbone died in his sleep some time during the night.”

  “I see,” said Trevelyan, not wanting to ask if Rathbone had gone peacefully, whether the smell of burning had filled the room. “Thank you for letting me know.”

  “He had some papers, and we think that his will leaves them to the university. May we call you to collect them once the formalities are complete?”

  “No,” said Trevelyan, rising. “Call the faculty office. Call anyone but me.” He left the office and walked back across the foyer, wanting to be gone from there, to leave Rathbone and everything he had created behind. He wanted to go back to his house, to plan boring lectures, to mark essays, to read and think. To get his life back.

  Behind him, Trevelyan’s feet left dusted black marks on the floor.

  <>

  *

  The Church at Monte Saturno

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  ROBERT SILVERBERG is a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004.

  He began submitting stories to science fiction magazines in his early teens, and his first published novel, a children’s book entitled Revolt on Alpha C, appeared 1955. He won his first Hugo Award the following year.

  Always a prolific writer—for the first four years of his career he reportedly wrote a million words a year— his numerous books include such novels as To Open the Sky, To Live Again, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and Lord Valentine’s Castle. The last became the basis for his popular “Majipoor” series, set on the eponymous alien planet, and he is currently putting together Tales of Majipoor, a collection of related stories that he has written over the past ten years.

  About the following tale, Silverberg says, “I wrote it soon after returning from a visit to Sicily, where nothing like this had happened to me.”

  SERAFINA SAID, “You are English, no?”

  “American, actually,” Gardiner told her.

  “I would say English. The studious look. The glasses. The bad haircut. The way you dress. Like you have money but don’t think it’s nice to spend it. Very English, I think.”

  True enough. Only he wasn’t. And he had taken her at first glance for a simple Sicilian peasant girl, but obviously that was wrong also. There was nothing simple about her. Both of them, it seemed, had instantly invented imaginary identities for each other and were working their way backward now to the actual ones.

  “I’m a professor. An associate professor, actually. History of art.” Who had taught at three different universities in fourteen years, and still was only an associate professor. Who did not even have his doctorate. And now was roaming the edges of the classical world peering at Byzantine mosaics in the hope they would somehow rescue him. “Associate professors often tend to seem a little English. I dress like this because it’s what I can afford. It’s also very comfortable.”

  They were sitting under a gnarled old oak on a summer-parched brown hillside at the edge of the little town of Monte Saturno in central Sicily, looking southward into a steep gorge densely covered on both slopes with tough, leathery-looking grey-green shrubs. The sky was a hot iron dome, painted a pale blue. Even at this early hour of the day the air was stifling. Gardiner felt a little dizzy. This was a dizzying place, Sicily. The air, rich with lemon and herbs. The heat. The dark fissures of decay everywhere. The beauty. The taint of antiquity, the unfathomable mysteries lurking in every narrow alleyway, behind every crumbling façade.

  He had arrived in town late the night before, driving down from Palermo, and had known her for less than half an hour. He was just finishing breakfast at the little albergo where he was staying when she came in to chat with the proprietor, her uncle. Gardiner had lured her out for a stroll: past the low lopsided cathedral, the scruffy and padlocked municipal museum, the ancient windowless building that was the post office. Almost at once they were in the open countryside, staring out into the island’s immense empty hinterland. She was long and lean, nearly as tall as he was, with prominent cheekbones, a long sharp nose, dark penetrating eyes. She had been born in this village, she told him, but lived in Palermo and had spent considerable time in Rome; she had come here a few days before to visit her grandfather, who was ninety. Gardiner found her attractive, and also oddly forward, flirtatious. But of course he knew better than to indulge in any fantasies. This was Sicily, after all.

  “The history of art? You come to Sicily to study Italian art? There is some confusion here, I think. You should be in Florence, Venice, Rome.”

  “Not Italian art, especially. Byzantine. I’m writing a doctoral thesis on the transition from the Roman style of mosaic work to the Byzantine.” How tidy that sounded! But he hardly wanted to tell her that he had come to Italy seeking something that he could not define, that his life, though satisfying in some ways, seemed fundamentally static and insubstantial: that he yearned for a coup, a grand achievement that would establish him before the world. Serafina sat leaning towards him, listening intently, with her long legs crossed, her hands outstretched on her knees. “You understand what that is, a doctoral thesis?” he asked.

 
“Capisco, si.” She was speaking mostly in English, which she handled well, though she dropped into Italian now and then for emphasis. Gardiner, fairly fluent in Italian, had begun the conversation in that language but something about her expression made him think that she found that condescending, and he had cut it out. She could be, he suspected, a prickly, difficult woman. “You write your thesis, they make you a dottore della filosofia, and then you become a real professor, that is how it works, no?”

  “A full professor.”

  “Ah. Si. So you are here to see our mosaics. Already you have seen the mosaics in Palermo? The Capella Palatina, the church of La Martorana, the cathedral at Monreale?”

  “All of them. Plus the one at Cefalu. They’re all later than the ones I’m studying, really, but how could I pass them up?” Gardiner loved mosaics with a powerful passion. Not for the religious scenes they depicted, which had no real importance or significance to him beyond an esthetic one. He was in no way a religious man. The holy saints and martyrs of the Christian mosaics and the gods and goddesses of the older, pagan ones were simply just so much mythology for him, quaint, mildly amusing. But the mosaics themselves—their plasticity of design, their glinting surfaces, their inner light—that was what excited him. It was nearly impossible for him to put his feelings into words: an almost sexual yearning, focused on bits of colored tile glued to walls. He was possessed, and he knew it.

  “And now?”

  “Today I’ll head down to Piazza Armerina, the Villa Romana, the palace of the Roman emperor. With absolutely wonderful mosaics.”

  “I have never been there,” she said.

  Never? That was odd. Piazza Armerina was, he calculated, no more than an hour’s drive away. But New Yorkers never went to the Statue of Liberty or Parisians to the Eiffel Tower, either. Gardiner toyed with the idea of inviting Serafina to accompany him.

  “From Piazza Armerina I’ll continue on south to Agrigento for a look at the Greek temples, and then up along the coast to Trapani, where I can catch the ferry for Tunis. The Bardo Museum in Tunis has one of the finest collections of mosaics in the world.” Into his mind now there sprang the wild notion of asking her to join him for the Tunisian expedition too, and he was startled by the sudden throbbing beneath his breastbone at the idea. On half an hour’s acquaintance, though? At best she would laugh; she might spit in his face. The old days of impenetrably guarded chastity might be gone here, but at the outset she would want him at least to pretend that he thought of her as a respectable woman. He looked guiltily away, as if fearing that his intentions were visible on his face.

  I should ask her now, he thought, about herself: where she went to school, what she does, how it happens that she speaks English so well. But he hesitated, momentarily unwilling to plod through the standard conversational gambits. A sharp silence fell between them. Gardiner heard the buzz and click of insects all around, and a peculiar ticking coming from a nearby tree, as though the heat were shrinking its bark. The sudden tension sharpened his senses, and he became aware of a tumult of Mediterranean scents assailing him on all sides, lavender, maybe, rosemary, the fragrance of prickly-pear blossoms and lemon leaves.

  A hawk drifted diagonally across the sky. Gardiner, idly following its path with his eyes, watched it descend abruptly into the gorge as if diving to seize a rabbit. His gaze traveled downward with the plunging hawk and he noticed for the first time what appeared to be a small isolated building on the far side of the valley, all but hidden in the scrubby brush. Not much more than the curving arc of its low white dome was visible. Something about the shape of that dome aroused his attention. He had seen buildings like that before. But not in Sicily.

  “What is that across the way?” he asked her, pointing.

  She knew what he meant. “A ruin. Not important.”

  His guidebook had said nothing about ruins in Monte Saturno. So far as he knew there was nothing of that sort here, neither Greek, Roman, Byzantine, nor Norman, none of the multitudinous layers upon layers of superimposed realities out of which this island was built. He had stopped here last night simply because he had had a late start out of Palermo and decided en route not to risk driving on into Piazza Armerina after dark on this rough country road. It had been pure luck that the town’s one trattoria maintained a few upstairs rooms for tourists passing through.

  “A church of some sort, is it?”

  “Of some sort, yes. Not Catholic. A Greek church, the Orthodox faith. Empty a long time. Not a holy place any more.”

  “Empty how long?”

  A shrug. “A long time?”

  “Five hundred years? A thousand?”

  “Who knows? But a long time. It is very ruined. Nobody goes there except goats. And young innamorati. You know, lovers looking for a place to be alone.”

  Gardiner felt a slow stirring of excitement.

  “A Greek church,” he said slowly. “Byzantine, you mean?”

  “That may be.” Serafina laughed. “Ah, you think there are mosaics there? You think you have made a great artistic discovery? There is nothing. Dirt. Ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “It is very haunted there. Yes.”

  She sounded almost serious. He had, for a moment, a sense that a door had opened into a dark place forever inaccessible to him and Serafina was standing on the far side of the threshold. He knew that many of the villagers here lived on the interface between modern civilization and that shadowy realm of antiquity that was beyond his understanding; but Serafina, he had thought, was entirely of his world. He saw now that he might have been wrong about that. But then she grinned and was a contemporary woman again.

  He said, forcing a grin of his own, “I’d be interested in seeing it, haunted or not. Is there any way of getting to it?”

  “A road. Very bad, very rough.”

  “Could you take me there? I very much would like to have a look at it.

  Anger flashed like summer lightning in her eyes. “Ah, you are so subtle, you inglesi!”

  “American,” he said. And then, comprehending: “And you misunderstand me, if you think I’m trying in some roundabout fashion to engineer a rendezvous with you. Lei capisce, ‘rendezvous’?” She nodded. “But as long as I’m here—a Byzantine church that isn’t even in the guidebook—”

  Another eyeflash, this one more mischievous. She still seemed angry, but in a different way now.

  “Truly, Professore, you are interested only in the architecture of this dirty abandoned church? You take me to this rendezvous for lovers merely to see stone walls? Ah, I think I misjudge the kind of man you are. A beautiful woman means nothing to you, I think.”

  Gardiner sighed. He was caught in a no-win situation. Bluntness seemed the best tactic.

  “They mean a great deal. And you are extremely beautiful. But I know better than to proposition a Siciliana five minutes after I’ve met her, and in any case there’s a bed in my hotel room, if that’s what I was after. I don’t need to take you to an abandoned building full of goat shit and straw. But I would like to see the church. Honestly.”

  Serafina’s expression softened. She looked merely amused now.

  “You want to go?” she said. “Really? Allora. We go, then.”

  She snapped her fingers under his nose. “Come! Up! We get ready, we go, at once, subito!”

  *

  But of course they didn’t go subito. Nothing ever happened subito in Sicily. They had to prepare themselves properly for the expedition, sturdy boots, jackets to ward off brambles, and wide-brimmed hats for the sun, plus a bottle of wine, some bread and cheese and salami and fruit, as if they were going on a long journey, not just down the side of one nearby hill and up another. The preparations mysteriously stretched on for hours. He had a suitable jacket and even a hat but no hiking boots, only sneakers, which Serafina glanced at with contempt. Her cousin Gino would lend him a pair of boots.

  Cousin Gino was twenty-three or so, sullenly handsome, a swarthy, bull-necked bushy-haired ma
n with enormous forearms and bright, fierce eyes, unexpectedly blue in this land of dark-eyed people. Though Gardiner was a big man himself, broad-shouldered and ruggedly athletic of build, who looked more like a football coach than an assistant professor of the history of art, it appeared likely to him that in any kind of fight Gino would twirl him around his wrist like spaghetti. And just now Gino was glowering at Gardiner with what looked very much like unconcealed hostility, bringing to mind all of Gardiner’s stereotyped notions of the way the men of this island defended their women’s chastity. Serafina said something to him in the transmogrified and deformed dialect of Italian, both clipped and slurred, that was Sicilian—a patois which Gardiner found utterly opaque. Gino, replying with an equally unintelligible stream of brusque, sputtering words, gave them both a furious glare and went whirling away from them.

  “What’s bothering him?” Gardiner asked, still inventing Gino’s proprietary rage, imagining dire warnings, threats of vendetta.

  “He says your feet are too big, they will stretch his boots.”

  “That’s all?” Gardiner felt something close to disappointment. “Well, tell him not to worry. If anything, his feet look bigger than mine.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. He will get the boots anyway, he said. As a special favor for me. We are very good friends, Gino and I.”

  The image came unbidden to Gardiner’s mind of Serafina and her brutish cousin, over there across the gorge one languid summer night seven or eight years ago, lying naked in each other’s arms, ferociously entwined in the incestuous embraces that he assumed were altogether customary among the rural adolescents of this backward country. He doubted that any such thing had ever happened between them; but if it had, no wonder Gino was pissed off over her taking this straniero to their special place, and in his own best boots, yet.