Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  Gardiner smiled at his own foolishness. He was capable of engendering an ethnic cliche for any occasion. It was a habit, he told himself, that he needed to break.

  Eventually Gino came back with a pair of huge clodhoppers dangling from one immense hand. To Gardiner’s surprise, and apparently Gino’s, the boots were a perfect fit.

  It was a little before noon when they finally set out. The sun filled half the sky, blazing like a permanent atomic explosion, and the hot, shimmering air was full of madly dancing bugs that sang manic droning songs in his ears. There was a sort of a road at first, but it morphed into a narrow untidy trail after a few hundred yards and then, a little while later, became nothing more than a faint exiguous track through the dry stiff-branched chaparral.

  Despite the heat and the difficulties of the route, long-legged Serafina set a brisk pace. Gardiner kept up with her without much effort, but he was marinating in his own sweat under the jacket that she had insisted he wear. At the bottom of the Monte Saturno side of the gorge they came to a campsite, a flat rock and a fire pit and enough discarded wine bottles to keep future archaeologists amused for centuries, and she said crisply, “We make the lunch here.”

  “Va bene.” He welcomed the break. The climb ahead looked formidable.

  Serafina assembled sandwiches while he opened the wine. As they ate and drank she offered snippets of autobiography. She had lived here until she was sixteen, she told him, and then was taken away to Rome by her uncle, not the same one who owned the trattoria, to be educated. There was a bit of extra spin about the way she said “uncle” and “educated,” and Gardiner flamboyantly hypothesized all manner of sinister iniquities, sone wealthy waxed-mustachioed stranger buying the beautiful girl from her impoverished parents to be put to the most depraved uses in his elegant baroque apartment overlooking the Spanish Stairs. But she talked instead of learning English at a genteel Roman academy whose name meant nothing to Gardiner but sounded quite elite: then a stint in the Roman office of a big British investment bank; an affair, apparently, with a young British bond trader that brought her a transfer to the London office, a dizzying taste of the international high life, and, so she appeared to be saying, the inevitable accidental pregnancy and concomitant mess, letdown, and heartbreak. Her fair-haired bond trader operated out of Prague now and she, having had her fill of banking, worked at the Hertz Rent-a-Car office in Palermo. She was fluent in English, French, Spanish, and German, as well as Italian and the local dialect. So much for her being a simple peasant girl, he thought. He guessed that she was around twenty-nine. He was nine years older. In the thick afternoon warmth the aura of her lean, sleek Mediterranean attractiveness expanded into the hazy air around him, dazzling and mesmerizing him, enveloping him in an unexpected and astonishing explosion of impulsive speculation. How it would startle everyone at the college, Gardiner told himself, if he came back from his summer research trip not only with material for his thesis but with a beautiful and cosmopolitan Italian wife!

  “Andiamo,” she said, the moment the bottle was empty. “Now I show you the fabulous Byzantine church.”

  The hill on the southern side of the gorge was steep, all right, and the heat was unthinkable now, and Serafina moved with jackrabbit energy up the slope, as though deliberately testing his endurance; but, fortified by the good red wine of Monte Saturno and his own implacable curiosity about the ruin ahead and now, also, this absurd but amusing new bit of romantic fancy of his, he matched her step for step, a couple of yards behind her with his gaze fixed steadily on the taut, tantalizing seat of her jeans.

  Suddenly they were in a little scraggly clearing, and the ruined church lay right in front of them.

  “Ecco,” she said. “Behold your heart’s desire.”

  The building was a little one, no bigger than a garage and half concealed in tangles of brush, but it was pure late-Byzantine in form, a squared-off Greek cross of a structure with a squat dome perched atop its four blocky walls. He knew of no other building of this sort in Sicily. It reminded him of nothing so much as the 11th-century church at Daphni, outside Athens. But Daphni was world-famous for its luminous mosaics.

  It was impossible, Gardiner thought, that mosaics like those of Daphni could have gone unnoticed all this time, even in this obscure hilltop village.

  “Let’s go in,” he said hoarsely.

  “Si, si.” She beckoned to him. “Venga di qua.”

  The main entrance was sealed by a dense barrier of interwoven woody shrubs, but a smaller door stood slightly ajar on the northern side, a crudely made wooden one, cracked and crazed, that looked as though it had been tacked on about a hundred years ago by some farmer using this place as a barn. Serafina, with a surprising show of strength, levered it open just far enough to let them slip inside.

  The church was rank, musty, dismal, a claustrophobe’s nightmare. When Gardiner switched on his flashlight he saw that over the centuries enough sandy dirt had blown in through the narrow window-grates and through crevices in the walls to lift the floor level at least eight feet in most places, so that he was standing practically within arm’s reach of the dome. Heaps of ancient mildewed straw were piled everywhere: a barn, yes. The pungent aroma of innumerable copulations hovered in the air. For how many generations had the passionate young of Monte Saturno committed sins of the flesh in this bedraggled former house of God?

  He aimed his beam upward, praying that he would see the stark somber face of Christ the Pantocrator scowling down at him, as at Daphni and other Byzantine churches. No. The dome was bare. He had not really expected anything else. Probably this had been some simple chapel for wayfarers, in use for perhaps fifty years a thousand years ago, then abandoned, forgotten.

  “You are satisfied?” Serafina asked.

  “I suppose.”

  “I myself parted with my virtue here,” she said, in a bold, cool, self-mocking tone. He looked at her, taken aback, angered and repelled by her unsolicited revelation. The idea that Serafina had ever engaged in any sexual event in this grim squalid place was sickening to him. She and some clumsy village Romeo sprawling on a scratchy tick-infested blanket, his shaggy eager body pressing down on hers, her splendid slender legs spraddled wide, toes pointed at the dome: the thrusts, the grunts, the gasps. “I was fifteen. We thought we were being very brave coming here, because of the ghosts. But every young couple in town is brave like that when the time comes. Some things are so urgent that even ghosts are unimportant. The ghosts must be defied.”

  Gardiner shook his head. “Ghosts?” he muttered, roaming the edges of the building, scuffing at the mounded straw. That door into the unknown opening again. This damned island, he thought: level after level of superstition, evil, and madness. You were forever toppling down through the detritus of all its many occupiers to the jolting incomprehensibilities beneath.

  He was no good at dealing with such stuff. It forever amazed him when he came running up against some apparently rational person’s firmly held belief in the irrational, the impossible, the altogether inexplicable. For Gardiner there was nothing inexplicable, only phenomena that had not yet been properly explained; anything that seemed to be truly and eternally inexplicable was, he suspected, something that had either been badly misinterpreted or had simply never in fact occurred.

  He prodded and kicked at the ground along the perimeter of the building with the tip of Gino’s boot. “Who was the lucky boy?” he asked, after a time, amazed at himself for keeping the distasteful subject open.

  “Does it matter?” she said. “His name was Calogero. He is dead now.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Gardiner automatically. He continued to kick and scuff. Then came a surprise. “Hold on. What’s this?”

  A forehead of glistening tile was showing along the wall, just at the debris line. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled at it, hurling handfuls of sand behind him. Other things came into view. Eyebrows. Eyes. A serene face, nearly complete; a halo. He trembled. There was a mosaic here after all.r />
  *

  “It is not easy to believe,” she said, as they made their way wearily back to town at dusk after a long breathless afternoon of clearing away debris. “All those years, and those beautiful things on the wall, and no one ever thought to look under the dirt, until you.”

  Gardiner barely heard her. He was lost in a feverish dream of academic triumph. There would be articles in the journals; there would be a book; he would waltz to his doctorate. The mosaics were not of the first rank, hardly that, but they were undeniably late-Byzantine, a continuous band of them that circled the walls just below the surface of the intrusive fill, saints and pilgrims and Biblical figures in bright, intense reds and greens and golds and blacks. The tesserae, the bits of colored glass out of which the mosaic patterns were fashioned, were large and crude and not always perfectly fitted together—this was not Monreale or Cefalu, not Ravenna’s San Vitale, not the Keriye Djami in Istanbul—and the figures were awkward and often poorly arranged; but there was a purity about them, an innocence, that made them very beautiful in their own less sophisticated manner.

  Schemes, plans, were swiftly unfolding now. He would use his meager funds to hire workmen in town; he would clear out all the fill; he would photograph, he would analyze, he would compare and contrast, he would publish, he would publish, he would publish—

  As he and Serafina entered the town’s central piazza Gardiner saw that the entire population had turned out, making the nightly promenade, families moving in clustered groups, old men walking arm in arm, young couples holding hands. Some glanced at them, smiling. It seemed to him that everyone was remarking knowingly on their dusty, sweaty look, speculating vividly, lubriciously, on what they had been up to all afternoon in the church across the gorge. And not one with any idea of the truth.

  Gardiner had been thinking of inviting her into the trattoria for a celebratory dinner, candles and a fine bottle of red Regeleali riserva with the meal, and then, perhaps, a night of glorious celebratory delights upstairs: all the way back, he had seen that as a natural and inevitable sequel to the day’s triumphant events. But here in town he perceived instantly the impossibility of any such thing. Sweep her grandly into the inn with everybody watching, his carnal notions as manifest to all as if he had exposed himself in the street, and she not to be seen again until morning? Hardly. Whatever destiny awaited him with this woman, and Gardiner was convinced now that some sort of destiny did, it would not be consummated in this tiny and hermetic village. Not tonight, at any rate, virtually in public, as it were.

  She appeared to have figured all that out long before him. “Well,” she said, hardly pausing a moment outside the little inn before turning away, “I congratulate you on your good fortune. I am happy to have been of service.” She touched the tips of her fingers to his, and then she was gone, walking in long strides across the piazza to greet a pair of hatchet-faced old women who were clad in the traditional somber costume of an earlier era.

  There was no bath in his room, only a washbasin. Gardiner stripped, quickly splashed himself clean, lay down on the creaking bed to reflect on the day’s achievement and perhaps enjoy a little repose. Instantly he was asleep. When he woke, with a start, it was past ten. He dressed hastily. As he descended the stairs, he met someone coming upward, a sturdy-looking, black-bearded, youngish man in a priest’s black robe, who smiled and saluted him when they passed each other. So the albergo had acquired a new guest during the day. Two guests at once: a booming tourist season for them, Gardiner supposed.

  The padrona was in the dining room, reading a newspaper. She seemed untroubled by his tardiness, and immediately went about putting together dinner for him, pasta with sardines, some roasted pork, a carafe of the red vino di casa. “It was a good day for you?” she asked.

  “Fine. Splendid.” His glow could leave no doubt.

  “You stay here tomorrow?”

  “Certainly. Even past tomorrow.”

  This time, when he settled down on his bed again after dinner, sleep was impossible for a long time. He stared up at the low fly-specked ceiling and saw mosaics on the screen of his wearied mind, stylized mosaic figures, angels, patriarchs, sheep, frolicking dogs. It was too good to be true: much too good. Perhaps he had imagined the whole thing. The heat, the wine, the enchanting proximity of Serafina—

  No. No. No. No. They bad really been there. His discovery, his mosaics. He had touched them with his own hands. Felt their smooth shining surfaces.

  He slept, finally. It was a night of strange frightening dreams, masked figures dancing around him as he lay strapped to a smoldering pyre in the middle of the piazza.

  At nine he awakened, breakfasted downstairs on cheese and figs and rolls, and peered out into the town square, which was utterly empty except for a couple of elderly dogs. He had no idea where Serafina was and felt uncomfortable about asking; and in any case he and she had made no arrangements for today. He equipped himself with his hat, his jacket, and Gino’s ponderous boots, and tucked a bottle of wine from the display on the dining room table into his backpack, along with enough rolls and cheese and fruit to last him through lunch, and, armed with flashlight, notebook, camera, went capering off alone towards the ravine.

  *

  He dug all morning, using as his shovel a slab of grey slate that was lying in the clearing outside the church. As the layer of loose fill retreated, and he laid bare more and wore of the band of mosaic ornament that rimmed the walls, Gardiner grew increasingly excited by his find. The work was on the crude side, yes, but it had a raw power that marked it as an important stylistic mode in its own right. The background in particular was an intense bluish white, giving the newly exposed parts of the wall a fierce brilliance that flamed wondrously as the sun came slanting occasionally in through the narrow windows and the cracks in the dome, fading when it moved along. Each moment of brightness was the occasion for a hasty flurry of photographs, and soon all his film was gone. It was a giddy, magical few hours.

  He postulated some 10th or 11th-century craftsman traveling down from Palermo, perhaps to do a job of interior decoration at some baron’s palazzo along the island’s south shore, being inveigled en route into spending a few weeks touching up this little chapel. And really getting into it, seeing it as an opportunity to experiment with an individual style of work, perhaps slipping into a little romantic entanglement with one of the town girls that gave him motivation to linger a little while longer, now a real labor of love, so that months went by, maybe even a year or two of solitary toil, preparing the little colored cubes and painstakingly mortaring them into place, his own private masterpiece. All too soon to be forgotten, the building allowed to go derelict, a habitation for donkeys, the brilliant mosaics covered in time by an accretion of windblown rubble many feet deep.

  There was more than a thesis to be had here. There was an entire scholarly reputation.

  At midday, unable to move another molecule of dirt, Gardiner slipped outside into the stupefying heat for his wine and cheese. As soon as he had finished, sleep came over him, in an instant, as though a thick velvet curtain had been dropped on him.

  Awakening just as instantly some ninety minutes later, he went back into the church and beheld something so bewildering that his mind could not at first encompass it, and he thought he might still be dreaming. But he knew that he had to be awake. The evidence of physical sensation was compelling. The heavy, shimmering, almost tangible air, the penetrating heat, the myriad musty pungent smells left behind by vanished centuries: all of that was too vividly real.

  And the mosaics had undergone a bizarre transformation. The saints had grown leering faces with forked tongues, and their haloes glowed and pulsated with a neon fury. The peasants tending their flocks had been rearranged into obscene configurations, and looked back jeeringly over their shoulders at him while buggering bat-winged monstrosities. Placid sheep and bounding dogs had been replaced by grotesque reptilian horrors. Colors everywhere clashed garishly.

  Impos
sible.

  Impossible.

  There was no conceivable explanation for this. Gardiner was shaken, stunned. He felt physically ill. A wild vertigo assailed him. Numbed, half dazed, his heart racing wildly, he backed out of the building, cautiously returned, looked again. Monsters, nightmares, abominations. Frightful sights, all. But what frightened him more than the ghastliness on the walls was the feeling of utter destabilization that whirled through him, the sense that his mind had lost its moorings. He had never experienced any kind of dislocation like this. Never.

  He fought himself into calmness. It must be the heat, Gardiner told himself carefully. He had to be hallucinating. His photographs would show the truth.

  With unsteady hands he lifted his camera, remembering only after the shutter’s first click that he had used up all his film. He shrugged. For a long moment he stood staring at the hideous things on the walls.

  All I need now, he thought, is for one of them to wink at me.

  All I need—

  Abruptly all his hard-won calmness dissolved and something close to panic overcame him.

  Turning, he fled down the side of the gorge, ran with superhuman energy up the far side into town, arriving panting and dizzied, and found Serafina on the porch of her grandparents’ decrepit old stone house behind the post office. “Come with me,” he said. “The mosaics—I was just there, and they looked all changed. You’ve got to come and tell me it isn’t so.”

  “Changed?”

  “Into something horrible. Monsters and demons all over the wall. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Ah,” she said, smiling amiably, a calm knowing smile as old as Zeus. “So the ghosts are at work.”

  Gardiner felt a shiver run along his back. The ghosts, again.

  “It was the ghosts, yes,” he said harshly. “Or the heat making me crazy. Or something I ate. Whatever it is, you’ve got to go back there with me. To check those mosaics out with your own eyes. I need to prove to myself that I didn’t actually see what I saw. Will you come? Right now?”